266 DEMOCRATIC ART 



wants more than this. It does not merely look for humorous, 

 or comic, or sensual suggestions from the people. 



Hogarth and the painters of his kind, who have addicted 

 themselves to satire, need not detain us long. In ' The Idle 

 Apprentice,' as in ' Marriage a la Mode,' Hogarth exposed the 

 vices of society. His touch was impartial ; and, in so far, 

 he deserves to be called democratic. But the true note of 

 Democratic Art, its interpretation of the people to themselves, 

 its creation of a popular ideal, its vindication of the loveliness 

 and dignity of human life apart from class distinctions, its 

 recognition of the beauty which is inseparable from certain 

 crafts and occupations, its perception of the divine in average 

 human beings, cannot be demanded from Hogarth and his 

 school. They, as satirists, show us chiefly that men can be 

 bad alike in palaces and hovels. 



We find more sterling quality in Crabbe : if only Crabbe 

 were not so grim, so weighed down with the prosaic misery 

 of existence. Crabbe has the democratic sympathy; but 

 circumstances prevented him from ascending to the democratic 

 exultation. And here, too, Wordsworth, who might be 

 claimed as a pioneer of Democratic Art in England, fails to 

 strike the right note. He has much of the needful feeling, 

 but too much of the interdicted condescension. In all his 

 work there remains a certain aloofness from the subject, and 

 a tendency to improve it for moral purpose. Born in an 

 aristocratic age, he preaches to the people, or ostentatiously 

 takes lessons from them, or shows obtrusively that he is 

 studying them. There is in Wordsworth little of frank 

 comradeship or hearty faith, an excessive amount of what 

 Whitman calls ' copious dribble ' about men and forces 

 discerned by him in a complacent, purblind fashion. 



It is hardly worth while pausing to consider whether 

 Elizabethan poetry is Democratic. The whole body of 

 literature belonging to that age was produced under the 

 influence of monarchical and feudal ideas, and is therefore 

 representative of an order which Democracy displaces. Its 

 true greatness consists in a burning national enthusiasm ; but 

 the nation is still regarded as a hierarchy of well-defined 



