Page:Revolution and Other Essays.djvu/236

 really thought, not what they thought they ought to do, but what they really did do, then a certain man, Kipling, will be read — and read with understanding. "They thought they read him with understanding, those people of the nineteenth century," the future centuries will say; "and then they thought there was no understanding in him, and after that they did not know what they thought."

But this is over-severe. It applies only to that class which serves a function somewhat similar to that served by the populace of old time in Rome. This is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on the fence, ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber back again; which puts a Democratic administration into office one election, and a Republican the next; which discovers and lifts up a prophet to-day that it may stone him tomorrow; which clamors for the book everybody else is reading, for no reason under the sun save that everybody else is reading it. This is the class of whim and caprice, of fad and vogue, the unstable, incoherent, mob-mouthed, mob-minded mass, the "monkey-folk," if you please, of these latter days. Now it may be reading "The Eternal City."