DEMOCRATIC ART 239 



material and observed rules supplied from Greece and Rome 

 through scholarship, The romantic schools reverted to the 

 literature and the architecture of feudalism. Classicism was 

 essentially aristocratic. Romanticism was revolutionary ; but 

 it drew its inspiration from sources no less aristocratic. 

 Neither mode possessed finality, because neither corresponded 

 to the cardinal phenomenon of the nineteenth century, which 

 is the advent of the people. The point to which we have 

 been brought by their conflict in the sphere of art and letters 

 is that a new mode of utterance, which may be termed the 

 Democratic, has been rendered possible. The shams of the 

 classicists, the spasms of the romanticists, have alike to be 

 abandoned. Neither on a mock Parnassus nor on a paste- 

 board Blocksberg can the poets of the age now worship. The 

 artist walks the world at large beneath the light of natural 

 day. Despising nothing which the past can teach, rejecting 

 nothing which the present offers, he aims at manifesting what 

 he finds of beautiful and striking in the outer and the inner 

 worlds : secure the while that if he feels sincerely and labours 

 conscientiously, his work will be of sterling value, no matter 

 what the style may be or what kind of subject has attracted 

 him. 



II 



This, speaking broadly, is the initial condition of Demo- 

 cratic Art : an art free in its choice of style, free in its choice 

 of subject ; an art which has recovered sobriety after the 

 delirium of romantic revolution ; but which retains from that 

 reactionary movement one precious principle that nothing in 

 nature or in man is unpoetical, if treated by a mind which 

 feels its poetry and can interpret it. 



This however, is only the beginning, the attitude, the 

 opportunity of Democratic Art. There remains a graver 

 question to be considered. How shall the poet and the artist 

 adjust themselves to what I have called the cardinal fact of 

 our epoch, to the advent of the people ? Classical and feudal 

 art were essentially aristocratic. Modern classicism and 

 romanticism were in a derivative sense aristocratic also. The 



