DEMOCRATIC ART 263 



is an emphatic reassertion of the principle that 

 1 dominion strong is the body's ; dominion stronger is the 

 mind's.' Not for an age or nation, but for all humanity and 

 all time, abides the truth that material strength and greatness 

 are but bone, and thew, and sinew ; literature and art 

 constitute the soul. Therefore the prophets, poets, thinkers, 

 builders, sculptors, painters, musicians of past ages and of 

 foreign lands, abide imperishable, shining like suns and stars 

 fixed in the firmament of man's immortal mind. Stupendous 

 are they indeed, but distant, unfamiliar ; appealing indirectly 

 to modern hearts and brains. Our admiration for them, the 

 use we make of them, the lessons we learn from them, must 

 not degrade us into the frivolity of imitative culture. We 

 have to bear steadfastly in mind that it is our duty to 

 emulate them by creating corresponding monuments of our 

 own spirit, suns and stars which shall shine with them ' in 

 the spaces of that other heaven, the Kosmic intellect, the 

 soul.' 



Ye powerful and resplendent ones ! ye were, in your atmospheres, 

 grown not for America, but rather for her foes, the feudal and the old 

 while our genius is Democratic and modern. Yet could ye, indeed, but 

 breathe your breath of life into our New World's nostrils not to enslave 

 us, as now, but, for our needs, to breed a spirit like your own perhaps 

 (dare we say it ?) to dominate, even destroy, what yourselves have left ! 

 On your plane, and no less, but even higher and wider, will I mete and 

 measure for our wants to-day and here. I demand races of orbic bards, 

 with unconditional, uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet demo- 

 cratic despots of the west ! 



IX 



Thus, the upshot of Walt Whitman's message is that the 

 people, substantial as they are, and full of all the qualities 

 which might inspire a world-literature, have up to the present 

 time found no representative in poetry and art. The sacer 

 vates of Democracy has not appeared. 'The fruition of 

 Democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in 

 the future.' 



This is not the place to inquire how far Whitman has 



