Moreover the art spirit, accustomed to cherish individuality, tends to make us impatient of social conditions that are hostile to it. It hates repression and demands democracy as the basis of tolerable living. If we find that our fellow citizens lack self-expression our own life participates in their degradation. It is hardly imaginable that a real artist should be a formalist or a snob. The fact that we are so largely content with products that have no art or individuality in them really indicates a lack of higher freedom in ourselves, a low sense of personality and a domination by lifeless conventions.
If artists and lovers of art are often conservative as regards projects of social improvement, this may perhaps be ascribed to the need of sensitive natures for tranquillity, or to their sense of the value of conventions as a foundation for perfected works.
It is true that art culture requires leisure, but not more than we all ought to have, or than the majority, even now, do have. And idleness is hostile to it, because spiritually unhealthy. A man who is in the habit of doing an honest day’s work, manual or intellectual, will be in a better state to appreciate music or painting, other things equal, than one who is not. His whole being is more normal, more ethical, better prepared for a higher life. And so private wealth is often more a hindrance than a help.
If there be truth in the idea that only a minority can share the life of art, which is questionable, at any rate this minority, in a democratic society, will be one not of wealth or exceptional leisure, or even of education, but of intrinsic sensibility.
There are those who think that something wholly new is to be looked for in an art of democracy, and I suppose that in fact a larger human spirit will be found in the ideals it expresses or implies, just as every social product must reflect the spirit of the age. I do not see, however, that the general conceptions and methods of art, as the great tradition brings them to us, require any change.
Certainly art will never be commonplace or uniform, but always select, distinctive, and as various as life—even as democracy itself is a larger expression of human nature, and not the vulgarizing thing that its opponents have tried to make it out.
Nor will art ever be cheap, in a spiritual sense, and if it is so in a material sense it will be because it is supported and diffused by the community. Devotion to an ideal, material sacrifice, and the higher self-reliance, will always belong to the career of a real artist, as they always have. And as to the appreciator, he must earn his joy by attention, self-culture, and virtue. The only way that masses, under a democratic or any other order, can rise into a higher life, is by becoming worthy of it. A best seller or a motion-picture show appealing to the superficial and undisciplined sentiment of a million people is not the art we look for, though it may be better than none at all. I take it that we should try for a real culture and self-expression without concerning ourselves primarily with numbers, beyond providing for the diffusion of opportunity. Walt Whitman’s verse, so far as it is a noble expression of freedom and brotherhood, is good democratic art, though it has never been popular; but there is nothing especially democratic about the crudity which impairs it; and our New England poets are in no respect more truly American and democratic than in a moral refinement scarcely matched in any other school. If we are to have a form of art that is good in itself and also popular, this will come about, I suppose, by the mutual influence of a line of artists and an appreciating public, each educating and stimulating the other, until the movement penetrates the mass of the people, as has been the case with certain forms of art in Renaissance Italy, or in contemporary France.
We must not forget that democracy is itself one of the arts of a free people. I mean that the common man may find expression in a varied, intelligent, and joyous participation in the community life, outside of working-hours; in the conduct of towns, churches, schools, and other popular institutions, and in communal sports and recreations. There is a great deal of this now, and the possibilities are infinite.
And along with this we need a real art of democratic intercourse, disciplined and considerate, which shall give all of us the joy of self-expression and of feeling that others are expressing themselves in like freedom.
There are many who doubt whether self-expression, and therefore an art spirit, is possible along with the specialization of modern work. But it is not clear that specialization as such can destroy this spirit, even in the task itself, provided one is conscious of working for a worthy whole. The mediæval cathedrals were built by groups of masons, each of whom, no doubt, had his own special and for the most part humble task. If all shared the productive joy, as it is thought they did, it must have been because the work as a whole appealed nobly to the imagination, because there was fellowship and esprit de corps among the members of the group, and because each man felt free to use his intelligence and taste within his own sphere. If your work is suited to you, and you delight in the whole to which it contributes, the chief conditions of an art spirit are present.