Since the public has supplanted the patron, a man of letters has least of all to hope or fear from the rich—if he accepts the opinion of Mr. Howells that the latter can do nothing toward making or marring a new book.
The power of wealth over public sentiment is exercised partly through sway over the educated classes and the press, but also by the more direct channel of prestige. Minds of no great insight, that is to say the majority, mould their ideals from the spectacle of visible and tangible success. In a commercial epoch this pertains to the rich; who consequently add to the other sources of their influence power over the imagination. Millions accept the money-making ideal who are unsuited to attain it, and run themselves out of breath and courage in a race they should never have entered; it is as if the thin-legged and flat-chested people of the land should seek glory in foot-ball. The money-game is mere foolishness and mortification for most of us, and there is a madness of the crowd in the way we enter into it. Even those who most abuse the rich commonly show mental subservience in that they assume that the rich have, in fact, gotten what is best worth having.
As hinted above, there is such a thing as an upper-class atmosphere, in the sense of a state of mind regarding social questions, initiated by the more successful money-winners and consciously or unconsciously imposed upon business and professional people at large. Most of us exist in this atmosphere and are so pervaded by it that it is not easy for us to understand or fairly judge the sentiment of the hand-working classes. The spokesmen of radical doctrines are, in this regard, doing good service to the public mind by setting in motion counterbalancing, if not more trustworthy, currents of opinion.
If any one of business or professional antecedents doubts that he breathes a class atmosphere, let him live for a time at a social settlement in the industrial part of one of our cities—not a real escape but as near it as most of us have the resolution to achieve—reading working-class literature (he will be surprised to find how well worth reading it is), talking with hand-working people, attending meetings, and in general opening his mind as wide as possible to the influences about him. He will presently become aware of being in a new medium of thought and feeling; which may or may not be congenial but cannot fail to be instructive.
FOOTNOTES:
[119] The Spirit of Laws, book v, chap. 6.
[120] Henry D. Lloyd, Man the Social Creator, 255.
[121] Idem, 246. Lloyd was rather a prophet than a man of science, but there is a shrewd sense of fact back of his visions.
[122] Such a one
“Lässt jeden ganz das bleiben was er ist;