254 DEMOCRATIC ART 



was appreciated by the people. No abrupt division separated 

 the nation from the poets who gave a voice to the nation. 

 The case is altered now. On the one hand we have huge 

 uncultivated populations, trained to mechanical industries and 

 money-making, aggregated in unwieldy cities or distributed 

 over vast tracts of imperfectly subdued territory, composed of 

 heterogeneous racial elements, the colluvies omnium gentium, 

 reduced by commerce and science and politics to a complex 

 of shrewdly-acting, keenly- trafficking, dumbly- thinking per- 

 sonalities, bound together by superficial education in the 

 commonest rudiments of knowledge, without strong national 

 notes of difference, and without any specific bias toward a 

 particular form of self-expression. On the other hand we 

 have cosmopolitan men of letters, poets, painters, sculptors, 

 architects, living for the most part upon the traditions of the 

 past, working these up into new shapes of beauty with power 

 and subtlety, but taking no direct hold on the masses, of 

 whom they are contentedly ignorant, manifesting in no region 

 of the world a marked national type of utterance, embodying 

 no religion in their work, destined apparently to bequeath to 

 the future an image of the nineteenth century in its confused 

 Titanic energy, diffused culture, and mental chaos. 



Is Democratic Art possible in these circumstances ? Can 

 we hope that the men who write poems, paint pictures, carve 

 statues, shall enter once again into vital rapport with the 

 people who compose the nations the people who are now 

 so far more puissant and important than they ever were 

 before in the world's history ? Is there to be any place for 

 art in the real life of the future ? Or are we about to realise 

 the dream of Dupont in De Musset's .satirical dialogue ? 



Sur deux rayons de fer un chemin magnifique 

 De Paris & Peking ceindra ma rSpublique. 

 La, cent peuples divers, confondant leur jargon, 

 Feront une Babel d'un colossal wagon. 

 La, de sa roue en feu le coche humanitaire 

 Usera jusqu'aux os les muscles de la terre. 

 Du haut de ce vaisseau les hommes stupefaits 

 Ne verront qu'une rner de choux et de navets. 



