The changing order; a study of democracy

Front matter

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Table Of Contents

The Esoteric Tendency in Literature : Browning . . .52

Subjective Landscape Art: George Inness ... 78

The New Doctrine of Labor ....... 195

Introduction

I am to make constant use of the word democracy in the following studies yet I am unable to give it precise definition. I understand, however, that the term is indicative of a new order of ideas. Broadly speaking it represents an attitude of mind that is opposed to the monarchic and aristocratic. As yet the foundations of the social order are largely aristocratic. The new ideas are obscured and their effects destroyed by the stream of traditionary tendency. My purpose, then, is to separate the new order from the old, to gather materials for a definition from the more subtle fields of distinction, leaving the final formulation to those who shall live within the new world. I have in view certain phenomena that seem to me to be the effects of the new spirit of life which we call democracy. Democracy signifies the uprise of the people, the "masses," their complete utterance and exercise in politics, art, education, religion, and all other forms of human activity. Probably the first result of the denial of the feudal relation was felt in the sphere of government. The American Revolutionists discarded at the first political inequality which was exemplified in arbitrary taxation, though they continued to maintain nearly every other feudal condition. Washington might well have been proclaimed King at the time of his election to the presidency and in the states of the South a genuine aristocracy was upheld until the civil war. The principle of popular control was, however, acknowledged and in Lincoln, the peasant president, the man of common fibre, unlettered in the European sense of culture, yet the accredited prophet of the new social order, truly called by Lowell "the First American," the advent of the people was fully justified.

But to describe democratic polity in the sphere of government is no part of my motive. I have in mind the more subtle effects of democracy, its radiation in art, industry, education, and religion. Now one of the new ideas is the doctrine of labor as distinguished from the aristocratic doctrine of leisure. "Blessed is he who has found his work" spoke out Carlyle. But what is the nature of that work from which the ancient curse has been removed — work which is a tangible blessing in itself, a pleasure even as sleep and food ? In truth a new industrialism is forming. Moreover a new sense of life itself is shaping among those whose perceptions are not obscured by power and luxury and a Maeterlinck is born to become the prophet of the humble. "There are about us," says Maeterlinck, in one of his recent essays, "thousands of poor creatures who have nothing of beauty in their lives; they come and go in obscurity, and we believe all is dead within them ; and no one pays any heed. And then one day a simple word, an unexpected silence, a little tear that springs from the source of beauty itself, tells us they have found the means of raising aloft, in the shadow of their soul, an ideal a thousand times more beautiful than the most beautiful things their ears have ever heard or their eyes ever seen. O, noble and pallid ideals of silence and shadow! It is you, above all, who soar direct to God!" Where this thing is true, where the speech inclines to silence, where life is esoteric, of what avail is the old ideal of external authority?

A marked transformation is taking place likewise in the field of art, both in respect of theory and of subject matter. Tolstoi would define art in terms of experience and William Morris in terms of pleasurable activity. "One day," Morris said, "we shall win back art to our daily labor: win back art, that is to say, the pleasure of life, to the people." And that was a profound saying of his when denied the laureateship at Tennyson's death: "If I can't be the laureate of writing men, I'll be the laureate of sweating men." So the people are finding inclusion in the books. One recalls now with a new sense of their significance the innovations begun by Euripides in the direction of the realistic drama, the new spirit of Chaucer who gave the miller and plowman a place among his pilgrims, the greatheartedness of Burns who sang the glories of the home and field, the wide sympathies of Wordsworth who depicted with all sincerity the dignity of the commonplace. For these are among the historic tokens of democracy. Changes, springing from the same impulses are taking place in education. Nearly every school building is the arena today of a conflict between the old and the new. Every teacher and pupil feels, in some degree, the turmoil of transition. The ideal of a special culture is yielding. The scholar, once revered as holding the keys of that knowledge which was power, is losing place and function — receding into the past like the vanishing forms of nobles and priests. But life is becoming itself educative. Schools are being established with methods based on the principle of self-government. And for the discipline of the intellect there is being substituted the culture of personality. So into all realms of thought the spirit of democracy is penetrating. Religion is perhaps the last to suffer change. For long ages the Christian world has been taught to observe the judgments that arise within the "Kingdom of God" — how God is a king, who has established a kingdom, who compels service upon subjects whose duty is to obey. But these conceptions, king, kingdom, subject, duty, obedience, find little response among men who as to all other affairs are living in federation and under republican forms. And at length prophets are arising upon whose lips the word king is never heard, and in whose minds the conception of kingship is never formed — prophets, that is, of cosmic democracy. The doctrine of immortality was once aristocratic ; it is now inclusive and democratic. These, then, are the type of phenomena that I have in mind to describe. It should be understood that from the very nature of the subject the discussion can not always be elaborated but must be conducted largely by the method of suggestion.

II

Nothing betrays the force of tradition more than the persistency with which democracy in America has been construed in terms of a system of politics. Our forefathers were political revolutionists, and when the principles of free government were formulated and political equality was secured for all, it was supposed that the citizens of the new republic were safe in their pursuit of happiness. The social ground work which the Colonists actually laid was industrial democracy, which requires for its well being not a government of laws, but a copartnership of men. Notwithstanding this condition, our national difficulties have been adjusted by political instruments, and the deposit of a ballot and the enactment of a law have been regarded as the chief duty of man. What these instruments really recorded were industrial changes. The American Revolution was fundamentally a war undertaken for the independency of labor. The Civil War was the occasion of a conflict between two opposing ideals of life — that attendant upon labor and leisure. The principles of representative government in the one case, and of state and national sovereignty in the other, were secondary matters. Our fathers gained certain industrial rights by the one struggle and their sons abolished one form of industrial slavery by the other. The result of confusing the issues so completely has been to place excellent sets of laws upon the statute books, but to leave the community in unregulated turmoil. Our actual democracy is crude in the extreme; the first lines of relationship proper for an industrial community having hardly been drawn, the first principles of justice having hardly been considered. As Morris once said succinctly: "The industrial situation is bad. I wish it would better."

It is seen that political equality does not mean industrial equality and that manhood suffrage does not bring manly independence. And save for the professional politicians no one engages very seriously today in government. We look back upon our political declarations very much as we read the XXXIX Articles, or the Book of Homilies, surprised at the disputes they occasioned : "As certain Anabaptists do falsely boast," "As the Palagians do vainly talk" — how little "understanded of the people" are these differences now ! The political issues of the so-called political parties are equally obsolete and outworn. Men belong to parties by tradition, accident, or according to locality, no longer by conviction — because there are no longer political questions at issue. The real problems of life in America are neither ecclesiastical nor governmental: they are industrial. What men are struggling for today is industrial freedom. We have still to make any genuine Declaration of Independence, or to write a Constitution adapted to the needs of a non-political community. Doubtless it has been well that those who were publicly inclined have had the bauble of government to play with. They have toyed eloquently with the surface of things and left the deeper forces opportunity to become conscious "and gather for emergence. In the year 1899 more than fourteen thousand laws were enacted by legislative bodies in the United States, not that laws were needed, but that legislatures might have occupation. If, in the revolution now upon us, our political institutions should be greatly changed or even swept away, it would not much matter. Administration is practically the only vital function left in any state ; for the most part our legislation is simply for the sake of legislation. If government had much significance today, it would point to the vast degeneracy of peoples. For, as Tacitus penned, "When the state is corrupt then the laws are most multiplied. ,, As it is with us today a corrupt government may be the sign of a healthy popular condition, an indication of the fact that men are attending to the vital issues of life. What is needed at this hour is not to establish free government but to develop free men — "not," as William Morris once said, "to establish socialism, but to educate socialists."

DEMOCRATIC ART.

I.

Democracy, to repeat, is not merely a political term : it is a universal idea, whose entertainment determines _ 1- duct in every one of the spheres of human activity It will not prove itself established until its principles have permeated society in every part. Its function is to bring to growth out of the social soil strictly cutocbthonic education, religion, philosophy, and arts, which shall be uniform with progress; corroborating in the fullest degree the immediate land and contemporary life.

The progress of transformation and adjustment which the fine arts are undergoing, in passing from an aristocratic to a democratic basis, is one of the most important and significant, though generally unrecognized, movements of the modern world. Although the subject is beset with difficulties, I propose, in this first study, to examine with some care the nature and extent of the specific changes, compelled in art by the Time-Spirit, in the midst of the general results flowing from universal emancipation. The movement is, of course, incomplete in its operation. The present period is one of transition. An adequately representative art does not exist today in any democratic community, not even in any portion of America, which is still the most perfect and consistent embodiment of the democratic idea, and in whose bounds, therefore, we should expect the evidences of artistic freedom.

If a reason be sought for the insufficiency of American art, two facts will be found to have a bearing upon the question. One is the commonly recognized truth that the actual scenery of the American land and the events of its population are themselves transcendent in their poetic quality. As the French Revolution, by transferring the drama of life from the stage to the streets, ruined the theatres of Paris, so the very variety and intensity of our own dramatic life make us content to forego the simulation of the play and the poem. At the time of the Spanish-American war it was complained that the struggle brought forth no poetry commensurate with the occasion. But would not the events themselves, brought close to us through the medium of the daily press, recorded there vividly and dramatically, render the poetic celebration of deeds comparatively uninteresting? This is the moment of being and doing. Our "Iliad" is still in the making.

Another fact connects the foregoing with this discussion, namely, that our art, however potential in its subjectquality, is still formed, to a considerable degree, under the guidance of the traditions of feudal Europe. To this day Paris is the Mecca of painters. The foreign melodrama, false to our notions of heroism, remains the accepted model of playwrights, rather than native plays of the type of Heme's "Shore Acres" or Thomas's "In Mizzoura." Dvorak's "American Symphony" contains nothing distinctively American ; Damrosch's "Scarlet Letter" is Germanic in everything but subject And not only is our creative art formed under direction, but the accepted principles of criticism are traditional ; and we look at even the art that is modern through the eyes of foreign courts. Emerson's "American Scholar" was called "the scholar's Declaration of Independence" : that revolution is completed. But the declaration of artistic and critical independence has yet to be formulated and written. It must be understood, therefore, that any conclusion respecting either the descriptive or the speculative phases of democratic art and criticism is but tentative. The event awaits the completion of the democratic movement. Enough, however, has been accomplished, and tendencies are clearly enough defined, to enable us to understand, in part by speculation, in part by observation, the characteristics of democratic art.

These characteristics may first be formulated by drawing a contrast between aristocracy and democracy in their political and social aspects. As pointed out by Professor Santayana, such preliminary scrutiny and definition of political distinctions will be found to be valuable because of the aesthetic ingredient that all social ideas contain, inasmuch as this or that idea is generally entertained on account of its appeal to the imagination as well as to the reason ; and a final selection of any idea is made as much on the grounds of its propriety as of its service. When the members of any society prize the political form they have achieved as having value in itself, as somewhat intrinsically and eternally right and beautiful, — when, that is, the subjects of a king consecrate the law and order of their society as something inherently beautiful, and the citizens of the republic are pleased to contemplate their structureless, but practical, democracy as something divinely just and righteous, — the social imagination receives a coloring that may be called aesthetic; and the artistic product, in its turn, is consciously or unconsciously made to conform to the general principle. It is historically, as philosophically, true that the fine arts correspond, in general aspects at least, often in the minutest detail, to the modes of thought and feeling that characterize social conditions.

Socially an aristocratic society exhibits three special features ; viz., conventionality as to form, exclusiveness as to content, conservatism in matters of progress. A democracy, on the other hand, is unconventional, almost structureless in its forms, inclusive in its content, progressive in its ideals.

An examination of artistic production with respect to form, content, and general attitude toward life and thought, in a manner suggested by Professor Dowden and John Addington Symonds in their essays upon the subject, will give the definition of the two classes of art in question.

In its forms aristocratic art will first be dignified: it must wear the dress prescribed by custom, and defer to the proprieties that hedge the throne. Composition is determined by the standard of "good form," which has been established by the critical class, and is maintained in force by tradition. Aristocratic art is largely external, but perfect within the limits of the "grand manner," and fixed in its "classic" perfection by authoritative conventions.

As a patrician shuns the vulgar phrase in the interest of culture, so it seeks to preserve its refinement by avoiding the vulgar person. Its art, accordingly, is exclusive in its subject-matter; only those characters and themes having admission which, by their nobility and dignity, are thought to be susceptible of artistic treatment. The passions that run from lord to lady inspire the lyric song; while "knights' and ladies' gentle deeds" constitute the scope of epic or dramatic action. In pastorals shepherds and shepherdesses of the field appear; but the dainty Corydons and Chloes that play at keeping sheep never see a pasture ; and the sheep that play at being kept never enter a fold. A really common person may enter upon the stage to play buffoonery or point a biting satire, but never to maintain an independent interest or destiny. On Shakespeare's stage fates were given only to kings and nobles. It was doubtless his own amibtion to have

"A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene."

Hen. V. L, 1.

Toward life aristocracy ever maintains the conservative attitude. It exists by gifts of the past. Its power and privileges, private and public, are derived by inheritance. The will of the father governs the career of the child: the experience of age restrains the creative impulses of youth. An aristocracy resists the encroachment of new ideas : it doubts nothing, desires nothing, holds permanently to beliefs, is content with metes and bounds. Its art pictures in the past the Golden Age. The virtues it extols are those that belong to feudalism, loyalty to the king, obedience to inherited authority.

The popularization of art results in forms that are fluid and varied, in subjects fully comprehensive in their scope, in ideals that freely enlarge and advance. The one word comprehending these features, the word which justifies the use of the term "democratic" in characterizing them, is "freedom" — the freedom to choose without restraint forms and subjects, making possible a sincere expression of personality, which is the fundamental content of all true art ; the freedom to experiment and prophesy, rendering easy a progression to higher and sincerer modes of expression.

As the leading principle of a democracy is individualism, the art that arises from among the people has for its chief characteristic infinite variety of form. The one effort of democratic art being to exploit individuals, diverse from each other, the modes of utterance change to correspond to the nature of the man. Every artist becomes a law unto himself, and learns to follow an impressionistic method to the full license of egotism. The acceptance of all the facts of life involves a primitive directness of method in exhibiting such facts. All true realism contains the personal quality, the individualization of sight and interpretation. Styles, therefore, in realistic art, are simple, fluid, and various. Instead of a single standard of established "good form," a hundred plebian modes of significance arise. The canon of order in variety is supplanted by that of significance with variety. The symmetrical unity of aristocratic art gives place to multiple meaning.

Now, irregularity of form is the very genius of an art that is controlled by an inner principle. Ruskin said of a Gothic building : "If one part always answers to another part, it is sure to be a bad building ; and the greater and more conspicuous the irregularities, the greater the chances are that it is a good one." Imperfections of form in painting, discordant notes in music, vulgar phrases in poetry, are artistically permissible so long as these are significant of character. Individual sincerity governs manner, rather than the conventions of a dictatorial artistic class.

A second great principle of democracy is equality. Equality opposes comprehensiveness to exclusiveness. Democratic philosophy asserts that the most common subjects of nature, and the most common events of life, are instinct with latent principles which, when detected, approve themselves divine. So long as the all-inclusive light falls round the objects of the universe, so long will love and sympathy comprehend the divinity that appears universally in objects. Nothing in man or in nature is unpoetical, if treated sincerely by a poet who has the largeness and the insight to penetrate below externals to the heart and essence of things. There is nothing profane save profane eyes and minds. The acceptance of the universal and unseen is rendered imperative ; for only, I believe, by the transcendent idea can each fact and person be given place and significance in the scheme of the world. The democratic principle springs from faith — a faith becoming more and more absolute as man rises in the scale of being. In every individual the prophetic eye perceives the revelation in outlines, however dim, of gods and heroes. By virtue of faith the note of popular art is inclusiveness. Love casts out scorn and denial. High life and low life contribute their characteristic themes.

Goethe defined good society as that which furnished no materials for poetry; and Mr. Symonds says: "How hardly shall they who wear evening clothes and ball dresses enter into the kingdom of art." But democratic art does not exclude good society. Society, bending and gliding at the dance, has a specific note of grace no less to be admired and cherished than that attending the superb poise of the reaper as he swings his sickle, or the strong flex of the blacksmith's muscles as he strikes the glowing iron. The older themes of aristocracy are not to be neglected. Why should they be? Heroism remains heroic still. The youth of a Western village may hearken to the shout of Achilles as it rings out on the plains of Troy ; he may shudder at the heroic suffering of Prometheus undergoing chastening like a god; he may spring up at the sound of Roland's or Oliver's trumpet to recover a lost field ; but while not failing to recognize the noble heroism of god-like action, he is, as a member of the common mass, more concerned about the lovely qualities that attach to all human life. The hero at the plow or the forge, the heroine at the loom or in the kitchen, may be dignified beyond our means of expressing by patiently enduring the edicts of fate, and by suffering with hardihood all tragic woe. "Lads a-hold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me," said the bard of democracy, "than the gods of the antique wars." "We owe to genius," says Emerson, "always the same debt of lifting the curtain of the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting in the seeming gang of gypsies and peddlers."

It is a feature of democracy that it looks to the future for its justification. As yet the social ideal of democracy is unrealized. The New World is destined to vast growths and unparalleled achievements. Whitman announces for America "splendors and majesties to make all previous politics of the earth insignificant." He apostrophizes the New World in his most optimistic strain : "Thou mental, moral orb — thou New, indeed new, Spiritual World!

The Present holds thee not — for such vast growth as thine, For such unparallel'd flight as thine, such brood as thine, The Future only holds thee and can hold thee."

Bold in this promise, the pioneer of progress, accepting what accrues to him from the past not as an obligation, but as a free inheritance, moves gladly forward toward an ideal goal ; believing he is marching toward something great and fortunate. The Golden Age lies somewhere in the twentieth century — always beyond, a "Flying Perfect." The poet is given to celebrate not the advance that has been made, but the progress that shall be ; and if he look to the past at all, it is to gain ground for prophecy. Shelley, despairing over the past, restless in the present, constructing an ideal world in a far-distant future, fully incarnated the democratic spirit. William Morris, though he dreamt of the past, yet had eyes ever fixed on ideal landscapes, ideal social systems, ideal fellowships. With characteristic optimism, Whitman announced : "All that the past was not the future will be ;" and to that future the poet trusted his ideas, never doubting that an audience would be raised up to justify him. Such usage is significant of democratic procedure. "Nothing conceivable," said De Tocqueville, "is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with petty interests, in one word so unpoetic, as the life of a man in the United States; but amongst the thoughts it suggests there is always one which is full of poetry, and this is the hidden nerve which gives vigor to the whole frame." This thought, so vital and poetic, De Tocqueville goes on to say, is the perfectibility of human nature. To each in some degree comes the splendid vision of the not distant future when personal independence, good-will, charity, comradeship, shall be the rule and practice, the joy and independence of the race. The attitude of hope and expectancy encourages the formulation of new ideals, and experimentation with respect to new art forms.

Aristocratic art is typical : it lays aside the common atr tributes and seeks the type-forms. Democratic art is individual and real : it accepts the personal view, and invests common attributes with meaning. The one gives unity to the beautiful ; the other expands and diversifies it. The one, being reminiscent, is static ; the other, being prospective, is dynamic. The one harmonizes what is given: the other suggests what is to be. The note of the one is despair: that of the other is triumph and joy. The one is bound : the other is free.

II.

All the fine arts, with the exception perhaps of sculpture, which has never undergone romantic revival, might be drawn upon to illustrate the various effects of the democratization of art. Architecture was the first of the arts to be popularized. We should expect such an event, inasmuch as architecture is the most intimate of the arts, the most closely related to our daily life ; for though we may not be able to write a poem, or to paint, we are most of us called upon at some time to build something, a home at least. As a matter of fact, architecture, up to the time of the invention of printing, was the chief register of human thought; and its forms corresponded most closely with the dominant ideas of history. The whole series of structural changes which freedom accomplishes is exhibited in the history of architecture from the time of the Hindu and Egyptian temples, the forms of which answered to the conditions of a theocracy, to the period of the Middle Ages, when the Gothic cathedral took shape under conditions of greater freedom.

The general character of ancient architecture is immobility. Conventionality covered the temples like another petrifaction. Primitive types were consecrated to the embodiment of a fixed and most rigorous dogma. Traditional lines were retained from century to century without variation. As the stone embodied an obscure symbolism, the interpretation of a special priestly class was required, the directive functions of whom have been performed by the critics of culture and good taste in every aristocratic age. Victor Hugo, in the Fifth Book of his "Notre Dame," relates the story of the escape of the mediaeval cathedral from the authoritative absolutism of the priest, and how, for the first time since the Greek, the religious temple fell into the hands of the artist, and became the property of the imagination, of poetry, of the people. Thought, it appears, was free in the Middle Ages in the one direction of architecture. The modern freedom of the press is scarcely greater. The creative genius of the people, repressed from political and social activity by feudalism, and from religious constructiveness by ecclesiastical absolutism, emerged in the one way left open — the way of architecture. The cathedral of Roman and Byzantine traditions furnished the conventional ground ; but, when the mobility and spiritual expressiveness of stone were once discovered, forms tractable to thought and capable of infinite variation were rapidly developed. If a genius was born he became a builder. The other arts, being more restricted in their expressiveness, were subordinated to this one achievement. Architecture became a co-operative art, the art of the arts, the art of the whole people. The sculptor must fill the niches and cap the pinnacles with appropriate figures; the painter must decorate the walls with scenic frescoes, and design forms and select colors for the windows ; the musician must raise the lofty organ to complete the mystery of vaulted roof with vanishing sound ; the poet must exercise his genius in the composition of canticle and responsions. A sublime unity of the arts was thus accomplished to enhance the glory of the one free art.

The effect of the popularization of architecture may be seen in the very enthusiasm for structure that was engendered in the free cities of Europe. During the period of emancipatory process so many cathedrals arose in every part of Christendom, that we can hardly believe the report of their number. With invention unhindered, rapid and innumerable changes took place in styles. In three centuries the aspect of the standard cathedral was completely transformed. Upon the nature of the changes, William Morris, in his essay on "Gothic Architecture," makes the

following comment :

"If some abbot or monk of the eleventh century could have been brought back to his rebuilt church of the thirteenth, he might almost have thought some miracle had taken place: the huge cylindrical or square piers transformed into clusters of slim, elegant shafts; the narrow, round-headed windows supplanted by tall, wide lancets, elegantly glazed with pattern and subject; the bold vault spanning the wide nave instead of the flat wooden ceiling of past days; the extreme richness of the mouldings with which every member is treated; the elegance and order of the floral sculpture, the grace and good drawing of the imagery." (Pp. 38, 39.)