DEMOCRATIC ART 241 



caste, the ecclesiastic traditions, though palpably retreating 

 from political institutions, still hold essentially by their spirit, 

 even in this country, entire possession of the most important 

 fields, indeed the very subsoil of education and of social 

 standards and literature.' From this proposition he advances 

 to the assertion that 'Democracy can never prove itself 

 beyond cavil until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own 

 forms of arts, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that 

 exists or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under 

 opposite influences.' 



The claims here advanced for the art demanded by America 

 and Democracy are perhaps excessive. Yet Walt Whitman 

 has to be attended to when he writes upon this subject. ' He 

 is Democracy,' said Thoreau, speaking of him. And his 

 opinions, although audacious in the extreme, are those of a 

 powerful thinker as well as a sagacious observer. 



In the Old World we shall possibly find them only in part 

 valuable ; since they are specially uttered for the instruction 

 of the United States. England, France, Spain, Germany, 

 Italy, cannot be expected to break with their historical tra- 

 ditions, and to discard all ' that has been produced anywhere 

 in the past, under opposite conditions.' Whatever may be 

 the triumph of Democracy in Europe, this is requiring too 

 much of nations born in the purple, and adorned with so 

 many illustrious monuments of ancestral genius. It may 

 also be doubted whether Whitman is wise in exhorting the 

 miscellaneous population of North America to found a new 

 culture which shall ' displace all that exists.' 



The mental progress of humanity is not effected by abrupt 

 divisions and sudden dislocations. Every process of change 

 implies absorption, blending, compromise, recombination. As 

 in the case of a glacier, if movement implies fracture, it also 

 involves regelation. The spirit of an age or race yields to 

 that of its successor, but abides within it still as an essential 

 ingredient assumed, transformed, and carried forward. 

 Modern forces evolve themselves inside the sphere of men and 

 manners, which have been shaped by influences derived from 

 remote antiquity. We are the complex outcome of a tenfold 



