ABSTRACT
The nobodies have come greatly to the front in literature oflate years. In life they remain nobodies, in literature they are somebodies with a following. By the nobodies we mean the people who are nobody in the ordinary sense of the word: the crowd, the suburbs-or, say, ninetenths of the population ofLondon. Ofcourse there are as many ranks among the nobodies as among the somebodies, and there is no need to seek close distinctions. Nor need a man be a nobody because he lives among and after the manner of nobodies. Whatever defInition you adopt, whatever degrees of insignificance you recognise, the fact remains that the world is mainly peopled by nobodies-by men and women who can be lumped together by the hundred thousand. It cannot be otherwise. It is the nobodies who make the world and whose condition is the real condition ofsociety. They bear that relation to the somebodies which the soil bears to the trees. The men who have moved the w<?rld have done it by applying themselves to this central estate of humanity. Below it the volcanic fires sleep. Narrow this to our own day and its literature, and what do we find? Ibsen, Zola, Sudermann, Gorki, and to a large extent Tolstoy, have applied themselves to the study of the common person. Their characters are chiefly, nay almost wholly, drawn from the nobodies. This is because no other ranks would have served their purpose. Their whole business was with the common clay ofhumanity, not with its infrequent gems. But the restriction is a testimony.
