DEMOCRATIC ART 245 



hood, with passion fit for tragedy, with beauty shedding light 

 from heaven on human habitations. They were thought to 

 dwell far off in antique fable or dim mediaeval legend. They 

 appeared to our fancy clad in glittering armour, plumed and 

 spurred, surrounded with the aureole of noble birth. We 

 now behold them at our house-doors, in the streets and fields 

 around us. Conversely, our eyes are no longer shut to the 

 sordidness and baseness which royal palaces and princely 

 hearts may harbour to the meanness of the Court of the 

 Valois, to the vulgarity of the Court of Charles II., to the vile 

 tone of a Prince Regent, to the dishonour, dishonesty, and 

 disloyalty toward women which have always, more or less, 

 prevailed in so-called good society. 



This extended recognition of the noble and the lovely 

 qualities in human life, the qualities upon which pure art must 

 seize, is due partially to what we call democracy. But it 

 implies something more than that word is commonly supposed 

 to denote a new and more deeply religious way of looking 

 at mankind, a gradual triumph after so many centuries of the 

 spirit which is Christ's, an enlarged faculty for piercing below 

 externals and appearances to the truth and essence of things. 

 God, the divine, is recognised as immanent in nature, and in 

 the soul and body of humanity ; not external to these things, 

 not conceived of as creative from outside, or as incarnated 

 in any sinele personage, but as all-pervasive, all-constitutive, 

 everywhere and in all. That is the democratic philosophy ; 

 and science has contributed in no small measure to pro- 

 duce it. 



Meanwhile, we need not preach the abandonment of high 

 time-honoured themes. Why should we seek to break the 

 links which bind us to the best of that far past from which 

 we came ? Achilles has not ceased to be a fit subject for 

 poem or statue because we discern heroism in an engine- 

 driver. Lovely knights and Flora Macdonald, Peirithous 

 and Pylades, King Cophetua and Burd Helen, abide with all 

 the lustre of their strength, and grace, and charm. They 

 have lost nothing because others have gained because we 

 now acknowledge that the chivalry, the loyalty, the comrade- 



