It is but a short step from the offhand opinions of scientific or literary men to the offhand opinions of the crowd. When the novelists had finished telling us, in the newspapers and magazines, what they thought about one another, and especially what _they_ thought about themselves, it then became the turn of novel-readers to tell us what they thought about fiction. This sudden invasion of the Vandals left to the novelists but one resource, but one undisputed privilege. They could permit us to know and they have permitted us to know just how they came to write their books; in what moments of inspiration, under what benign influences, they gave to the world those priceless pages.
“Sing, God of Love, and tell me in what dearth Thrice-gifted Snevellicci came on earth!”
After which, unless the unsilenced public comes forward to say just how and when and where they read the volumes, they must acknowledge themselves routed from the field.
_La vie de parade_ has reached its utmost license when a Prime Minister of England is asked to tell the world--after the manner of old Father William--how he has kept so hale; when the Prince of Wales is requested to furnish a list of readable books; when an eminent clergyman is bidden to reveal to us why he has never been ill; when the wife of the President of the United States is questioned as to how she cooks her Thanksgiving dinner; when married women in private life draw aside the domestic veil to tell us how they have brought up their daughters, and unmarried women betray to us the secret of their social success. Add to these sources of information the opinions of poets upon education, and of educators upon poetry; of churchmen upon politics, and of politicians upon the church; of journalists upon art, and of artists upon journalism; and we must in all sincerity acknowledge that this is an enlightened age. “The voice of the great multitude,” to quote from a popular agitator, “rings in our startled ears;” and its eloquence is many-sided and discursive. Albertus Magnus, it is said, once made a head which talked. That was an exceedingly clever thing for him to do. But the head was so delighted with its accomplishment that it talked all the time. Whereupon, tradition holds, St. Thomas Aquinas grew impatient, and broke it into pieces. St. Thomas was a scholar, a philosopher, and a saint.