t rush of the elevator are
making themselves felt in the ideal world. They are proclaiming to the
ideal world that the real world is outstripping it. The twelve thousand
horsepower steamer does not find itself accurately expressed in iambics
on the leisurely fleet of Ulysses. It is seeking new expression. The
command has gone forth over all the beauty and over all the art of the
present world, crowded for time and crowded for space. "Telegraph!" To
the nine Muses the order flies. One can hear it on every side.
"Telegraph!" The result is symbolism, the Morse alphabet of art and
"types," the epigrams of human nature, crowding us all into ten or
twelve people. The epic is telescoped into the sonnet, and the sonnet is
compressed into quatrains or Tabbs of poetry, and couplets are signed as
masterpieces. The novel has come into being--several hundred pages of
crowded people in crowded sentences, jostling each other to oblivion;
and now the novel, jostled into oblivion by the next novel, is becoming
the short story. Kipling's short stories sum the situation up. So far as
skeleton or plot is concerned, they are built up out of a bit of nothing
put with an infinity of Kipling; so far as meat is concerned, they are
the Liebig Beef Extract of fiction. A single jar of Kipling contains a
whole herd of old-time novels lowing on a hundred hills.

The classic of any given world is a work of art that has passed through
the same process in being a work of art that that world has passed
through in being a world. Mr. Kipling represents a crowd age, because he
is crowded with it; because, above all others, he is the man who
produces art in the way the age he lives in is producing everything
else.

This is no mere circumstance of democracy. It is its manifest destiny
that it shall produce art for crowded conditions, that it shall have
crowd art. The kind of beauty that can be indefinitely multiplied is the
kind of beauty in which, in the nature of things, we have made our most
characteristic and most important progress. Our most considerable
success in pictures could not be otherwise than in black and white.
Black-and-white art is printing-press art; and art that can be produced
in endless copies, that can be subscribed for by crowds, finds an
extraordinary demand, and artists have applied themselves to supplying
it. All the improvements, moving on through the use of wood and steel
and copper, and the process of etching, to the photogravur