The Tower of Ivory: an Argument.

It is not strange that there should be, among the "toilers of the mind," a compact majority which is essentially conservative. Here amid the glimmerings of modern intellectual life, people perceive the renewal of an age-old fact. "Literature" was ever a fashionable form of slavery. Particularly in the "great epochs," when political success touched the peaks, the function of writers, thinkers, and artists was one of ornamentation and publicity. They served to bring forms of rule, consecrated institutions, into a popular esteem equal to that felt for accepted customs and, ways of thought. Doubtless this role of the flatterer, which most famous writers so brilliantly understood, was in large part inflicted upon them by the very limitations of their professional destiny. There were other, more primitive reasons for this bent of theirs. Art has an instinctive tendency to go over to conservatism.