man or a woman with unclouded vision, who is able to see in the
flounderings of untrained amateurs the stirrings of _demos_ from his
age-long sleep. These, often forsaking paths more profitable, lend
their skilled assistance, not seeking to impose the ancient outworn
forms upon the Newness, but by a transfusion of consciousness
permitting it to create forms of its own. Such a one, in architecture,
Louis Sullivan has proved himself; in music Harry Barnhart, who evokes
the very spirit of song from any random crowd. The _demos_ found voice
first in the poetry of Walt Whitman who has a successor in Vachel
Lindsay, the man who walked through Kansas, trading poetry for food
and lodging, teaching the farmers' sons and daughters to intone
his stirring odes to Pocahontas, General Booth, and Old John Brown.
Isadora Duncan, Gordon Craig, Maeterlinck, Scriabine are perhaps
too remote from the spirit of democracy, too tinged with old-world
aestheticism, to be included in this particular category, but all
are image-breakers, liberators, and have played their part in the
preparation of the field for an art of democracy.

To the architect falls the task, in the new dispensation, of providing
the appropriate material environment for its new life. If he holds the
old ideas and cherishes the old convictions current before the war
he can do nothing but reproduce their forms and fashions; for
architecture, in the last analysis, is only the handwriting of
consciousness on space, and materialism has written there already all
that it has to tell of its failure to satisfy the mind and heart of
man. However beautiful old forms may seem to him they will declare
their inadequacy to generations free of that mist of familiarity which
now makes life obscure. If, on the other hand, submitting himself
to the inspiration of the _demos_ he experiences a change of
consciousness, he will become truly and newly creative.

His problem, in other words, is not to interpret democracy in terms
of existing idioms, be they classic or romantic, but to experience
democracy in his heart and let it create and determine its new forms
through him. It is not for him to _impose_, it is for him to be
_imposed upon_.

"The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned"

says Emerson in _The Problem_, a poem, which seems particularly
addressed to architects, and which every one of them would do well to
learn by heart.

If he is at a loss