264 DEMOCRATIC ART 



himself fulfilled the conditions of writing for the people. 

 Judged by his acceptance in America, he can hardly be said 

 to have succeeded in his own lifetime. The many-headed 

 beast there, if it has not literally 'trampled him in gore,' 

 turns a deaf ear to his voice, and treats him with indifference. 

 Hitherto he has won more respect from persons of culture 

 in Great Britain than from the divine average of The States. 



After reading the foregoing pages, some one will perhaps 

 object that Democratic Art is nothing new, and that the thing 

 itself called for the invention of no such name to designate 

 it. ' Have not the eyes of all but pedants and precisians 

 been open to the poetry of common objects and of humble 

 people ? ' He will then point to Theocritus and Longus ; cite 

 Virgil's Georgics and Bucolics ; enlarge upon Dutch painting ; 

 run through the list of Defoe, Hogarth, Smollett, Morland, 

 Wilkie, Crabbe ; and wind up with special references to certain 

 passages of the Elizabethan Drama. 



Such reasoning does not meet the arguments advanced by 

 Whitman ; nor does it satisfy the claims which those who 

 comprehend the word Democracy put forward. Yet it is 

 worthy of consideration, if only for the sake of defining what 

 is meant by Democratic Art. 



The faculty for seeing beauty in the simplest people and 

 the commonest things has, indeed, been granted to all poets 

 and all artists worthy of the name. But this faculty, in the 

 age on which we now have entered, will need to be exercised 

 in a very different way and with far other earnestness. 



When we consider Greek pastorals in verse and prose, or 

 Latin didactic poems upon rural life, we detect a note of con- 

 descension, a scrupulous avoidance of bare fact, a studious 

 selection of details agreeable to the cultivated sense. The 

 rustics pose, or are transfigured. Their humanity is toned 

 down to elegance, and the landscape is sketched in accordance 

 with the literary ideal of Arcadia. This way of treatment 

 implies a suppression of the true and a suggestion of the 



