e, the
lithograph, the moving picture, and the latest photograph in colour,
whatever else may be said of them from the point of view of Titian or
Michael Angelo, constitute a most amazing and triumphant advance from
the point of view of making art a democracy, of making the rare and the
beautiful minister day and night to crowds. The fact that the mechanical
arts are so prominent in their relation to the fine arts may not seem to
argue a high ideal amongst us; but as the mechanical arts are the body
of beauty, and the fine arts are the soul of it, it is a necessary part
of the ideal to keep body and soul together until we can do better.
Mourning with Ruskin is not so much to the point as going to work with
William Morris. If we have deeper feelings about wall-papers than we
have about other things, it is going to the root of the matter to begin
with wall-papers, to make machinery say something as beautiful as
possible, inasmuch as it is bound to have, for a long time at least,
about all the say there is. The photograph does not go about the world
doing Murillos everywhere by pressing a button, but the camera habit is
doing more in the way of steady daily hydraulic lifting of great masses
of men to where they enjoy beauty in the world than Leonardo da Vinci
would have dared to dream in his far-off day; and Leonardo's pictures,
thanks to the same photograph, and everybody's pictures, films of paper,
countless spirits of themselves, pass around the world to every home in
Christendom. The printing press made literature a democracy, and
machinery is making all the arts democracies. The symphony piano, an
invention for making vast numbers of people who can play only a few very
poor things play very poorly a great many good ones, is a consummate
instance both of the limitation and the value of our contemporary
tendency in the arts. The pipe organ, though on a much higher plane, is
an equally characteristic contrivance making it possible for a man to be
a complete orchestra and a conductor all by himself, playing on a crowd
of instruments, to a crowd of people, with two hands and one pair of
feet. It is a crowd invention. The orchestra--a most distinctively
modern institution, a kind of republic of sound, the unseen spirit of
the many in one--is the sublimest expression yet attained of the crowd
music, which is, and must be, the supreme music of this modern day, the
symphony. Richard Wagner comes to his triumph because his music