DEMOCRATIC ART 267 



classes. The sovereign, peers spiritual and temporal, clerks 

 and clergy, untitled gentry, lawyers in their several degrees, 

 yeomen, merchants, artisans, and peasants, build up society. 

 Each class has its own duties, its own privileges, and enjoys 

 that self-respect which proceeds from the sense of an assured 

 immutable position in the commonwealth. There is, there- 

 fore, nothing really democratic in the manliness, the freedom, 

 and the joyousness of Elizabethan poetry. Even the realistic 

 dramas of Hey wood and Dekker, which so delightfully set 

 forth the beauty of humble lives and the virtues of the 

 people, are not democratic. Whitman is right in saying that 

 ' Shakespeare is incarnated, uncompromising Feudalism in 

 literature ' ; nor is the truth of this remark affected by the 

 fact that when Shakespeare lived, the feudal order he so 

 vividly portrayed had practically become a thing of the past. 

 Its vigour and utility decayed during the Wars of the Roses. 

 But time's mutations are slowly effected in Great Britain ; and 

 three centuries since Shakespeare's entrance upon his career 

 as dramatist have not sufficed to purge the English mind of 

 feudal notions. They survive, amid all changes of society, in 

 the form of snobbery, class prejudice, lord worship, and stupid 

 talk about the lower orders. 



This being the case, it is not easy to indicate anything in 

 our literature and art which bears the democratic hall-mark. 

 Other European nations present the same general features of 

 decayed, yet still pervasive feudalism. Switzerland, where 

 democracy has been achieved in practice, has developed no 

 genius for art creation. 



Yet a few examples may be selected, which seem in part 

 at least to yield the quality desired. Blake's lyrics, George 

 Sand's village stories, Gotthelf's 'Ulrich,' George Eliot's 

 ' Silas Marner,' Pierre Loti's ' Mon Frere Yves,' Rudyard 

 Kipling's ' Soldiers Three,' Clough's ' Bothie,' some of 

 Thomas Hardy's Wessex Novels, in literature, are on the 

 right track. So is the great work of the Russian novelists, 

 Turgeneff, Tolstoi, Dostoieffsky. 



In art we may speak of Millet, so profound in feeling, 

 so dumbly eloquent, so tragic ; of Mason, who, in spite of 



