DEMOCRATIC AET 247 



industries have been only partially developed. It is the 

 business of Democratic Art to unfold them fully. The time 

 has come when the noble and beautiful qualities of the people 

 demand a prominent place among worthy artistic motives. 



An arduous task lies before the arts, if they are to bring 

 themselves into proper relation with the people ; not, as is 

 vulgarly supposed, because the people will debase their 

 standard, but because it will be hard for them to express the 

 real dignity, and to satisfy the keen perceptions and the pure 

 taste of the people. 



There is a danger lest the solution of this problem should 

 suffer from being approached too consciously. What we want 

 is simplicity, emotional directness, open-mindedness, intelligent 

 sympathy, keen and yet reverent curiosity, the scientific com- 

 bined with the religious attitude toward fact. It will not do 

 to be doctrinaire or didactic. Patronage and condescension 

 are the worst of evils here. The spirit of Count Tolstoi, if 

 that could descend in some new Pentecost, would prepare the 

 world for Democratic Art. 



Above all things, the middle-class conception of life must 

 be transcended. Decency, comfort, sobriety, maintenance of 

 appearances, gradual progression up a social ladder which is 

 scaled by tenths of inches, the chapel or the church, the gig 

 or the barouche, the growing balance at one's banker's, the 

 addition of esquire to our name or of a red rosette to our 

 button-hole, the firm resolve to keep well abreast with next- 

 door neighbours, if not ahead of them, in business and respect- 

 ability all these things, which characterise the middle-class 

 man wherever he appears, are good in their way. It were 

 well that the people should incorporate these virtues. But 

 there are corresponding defects in the bourgeoisie which have 

 to be steadily rejected an unwillingness to fraternise, an 

 incapacity for comradeship, a habit of looking down on so- 

 called inferiors, a contempt for hand-labour, a confusion of 

 morality with prejudice and formula, a tendency to stifle 

 religion in the gas of dogmas and dissenting shibboleths, an 

 obstinate insensibility to ideas. Snobbery and Pharisaism, 

 in one form or another, taint the middle-class to its core. 



