is the
voice of multitudes. The opera, a crowd of sounds accompanied by a crowd
of sights, presented by one crowd of people on the stage to another
crowd of people in the galleries, stands for the same tendency in art
that the syndicate stands for in commerce. It is syndicate music; and in
proportion as a musical composition in this present day is an
aggregation of multitudinous moods, in proportion as it is suggestive,
complex, paradoxical, the way a crowd is complex, suggestive, and
paradoxical--provided it be wrought at the same time into some vast and
splendid unity--just in this proportion is it modern music. It gives
itself to the counterpoints of the spirit, the passion of variety in
modern life. The legacy of all the ages, is it not descended upon
us?--the spirit of a thousand nations? All our arts are thousand-nation
arts, shadows and echoes of dead worlds playing upon our own. Italian
music, out of its feudal kingdoms, comes to us as essentially solo
music--melody; and the civilization of Greece, being a civilization of
heroes, individuals, comes to us in its noble array with its solo arts,
its striding heroes everywhere in front of all, and with nothing nearer
to the people in it than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and
featureless across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming
of the crowd to the arts of this groping world. Modern art, inheriting
each of these and each of all things, is revealed to us as the struggle
to express all things at once. Democracy is democracy for this very
reason, and for no other: that all things may be expressed at once in
it, and that all things may be given a chance to be expressed at once in
it. Being a race of hero-worshippers, the Greeks said the best, perhaps,
what could be said in sculpture; but the marbles and bronzes of a
democracy, having average men for subjects, and being done by average
men, are average marbles and bronzes. We express what we have. We are in
a transition stage. It is not without its significance, however, that we
have perfected the plaster cast--the establishment of democracy among
statues, and mobs of Greek gods mingling with the people can be seen
almost any day in every considerable city of the world. The same
principle is working itself out in our architecture. It is idle to
contend against the principle. The way out is the way through. However
eagerly we gaze at Parthenons on their ruined hills, if thirty-one-story
block