Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/80

 66 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

, have put breath into the common past and joined men in love of

it. It is they who have discovered the common character and enamored the people of its type. And they are still at work keeping all parts of the nation en rapport. The yoke of enforced cooperation galls fellow citizens, and it needs art to allay the irritation. Not slavery alone but the narrow sympathies of a provincial literature caused the South to drift away. East and West become alienated through clash of interests, but the story writers and playwrights come in and help the people of each section to understand the other.

This service of art is most signal in a vast democratic state embracing many kinds of life and many interests. Here, where only imperial ideas and grand policy can give success, comes the sternest test of popular government, for the mass of men are necessarily of few contacts and narrow experience. Unless the flagging imagination of the common man be stimulated to divine the multifarious life of his country, his will be no fit hands to hold the reins. Hence Greek and Italian and Swiss democracies were local, while empires had to be committed to leisured aristocracies or bred princes. An imperial democracy like ours is an experiment, and succeeds only because the press and a national literature inspire broad sympathies.

The man of genius, with his clairvoyant gift of seeing into all kinds of life and his power to make us feel that life as our very own, wins his most brilliant triumphs in modifying the rela- tions of classes. The emancipation of negro slaves or Russian serfs is hastened because a Stowe or a Turgenieff makes them comprehended. A Dickens or a Reade is formidable to social abuses because he has the power to make us yokefellows of their victims. A Tolstoi or a Millet, by making the peasant understood, gives him a new social weight. Slaves, serfs, convicts, exiles, outcasts, sufferers of every sort gain strength the moment genius gives them a voice. Social struggles turn not wholly on the relative strength of classes, but in a measure on the degree to which a suffering class can convict the rest of common clay. What once was done by revolt is now often done by the mild