DEMOCRACY AND LITEKATUEE 155 



in all other times, there never has been and probably 

 never wUl be enough good taste to go around. 



Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, litera- 

 ture, no more means a lowering of the standard of 

 excellence than it means a lowering of the standards 

 in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering 

 or ship-building, or in the art of living itself. It 

 means a lifting up of the average, with the great 

 prizes, the high ideals, as attractive and as difficult 

 as ever. Because the people are crude and run for 

 the moment after the cheap and meretricious, we are 

 not therefore to infer that the cheap and meretricious 

 will permanently content them. Democracy in litera- 

 ture, as exemplified by the two great modern demo- 

 crats in letters. Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new 

 and more deeply religious way of looking at man- 

 kind, as well as at all the facts and objects of the 

 visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding 

 of new artistic motives and values in the people, in 

 science and the modem spirit, in liberty, fraternity, 

 equality, in the materialism and industrialism of 

 man's life as we know it in our day and land, — the 

 ^carrying into imaginative fields the quality of com- 

 mon humanity, that which it shares with real things 

 and with all open-air nature, with hunters, farmers, 

 sailors, and real workers in all fields. 



The typical democratic poet will hold and wield 

 his literary and artistic endowment as a common, 

 everyday man, the brother and equal of all, and 

 never for a moment as the man of exceptional parts 

 and advantages, exclusive and aloof. His poems 



