Morning journal and courier., 1881-04-12
Ordinary People.

Their Flace in Life and in Literature,
 tFrom the London spectatorl
 As rule literature is thoroughly impatient
 of ordinary people. Clever people who are
 not people of genius are always trying to re-
 deem their books from the discredit, as they
 think 1t, Of ordinariness, and to make them
 what they call original" by inventing incl
 dents or combinations of character at once
 unnatural and impressive They do not see
 that literature, like life, should really aim
 rather at making lnterestingness more ordi-
 nary-or to put it in a still truer way. at
 making ordinariness more interestine-thap
 at extraordinary inventions What great
 phllaHthroplsts desire is to raise the level of
 average life, whether that can be done by the
 help of few examples whose careers shall inspire the masses with hope and emulation. or by larger causes operating more powerful ly on the mass of the people. And what phil. anthropists aim at in one direction the higher literature should aim at in another If it paints singular careers, it should paint them chiefly for the light they shed on ordinary careers. Delineations of exceptional characters may be indispensable as guides. as examples, as magnets either attractive or repulsive, as lights, as beacons; but as mere dellneations of purely exceptional char acter, as curiosities without relation to their effect on the average character to which they form the exception, they are hardly part of true literature at all. Even Sir Walter Scott when he gives us mere oddity, like his or Fenella, is felt to be fal- ling below himself. And yet really clever writers often aim at clothing all their concep- tions in the form which shall have the least possible relation to the average men, which shall make them seem in the highest possible degree unfamiliar or gigantesque. That 8 thing is common place. is indeed, in the minds Of many writers, almost 8 sufficient condemnation, and, of couse. 1t is quite true that one does not want to have the multiplied tlon table continually dinned into one's weary ears: but still less does one want to have studies of what neither has, nor can have any interest for common place people studies which simply bewilder sssuch crea- lures as we are, in such a world as the pres ent." Ordinary people, whether in life or lit erature, are the people we really want to un- derstand better, and by understanding to help. Without ordinary people the constitutional statesman would be simply helpless Unless he had a large body of common thought and feeling to rely on-and no large body of con- mon thought and feeling is possible unless nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of ev- cry thousand resembled each other in most of their thoughts ano feelings gs-government in conformity with popular opinion would be sheer lmpossibility. In self governed State the great benefactor is he who either has the talent to make ordinary opinion little wiser, DIT Wnat IS oIten the same th1ng, to make wlse opinion little better fitted to take hold of the feelings of ordinary people. But what ever is done to improve self-governed State is done by virtue of enhancing the mass of good opinion, .. c. of making good opinion 8 little more ordinary. Select opinion has ab- ,olutely no significance for such State, ex- ,ept so far as it may promise either to become popular or to make popular opinion still more hostile to it. It is by the assimilation of feel ngs and opinions throughout large numbers ,f men that all civilization goes forward.