her it is for better or worse,
the world has staked all that it is and has been, and all that it is
capable of being, on the one supreme issue, "How can the crowd be made
beautiful?"

The answer to this question involves two difficulties: (1) A crowd
cannot make itself beautiful. (2) A crowd will not let any one else make
it beautiful.

The men who have been on the whole the most eager democrats of
history--the real-idealists--the men who love the crowd and the
beautiful too, and who can have no honest or human pleasure in either of
them except as they are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that
living in a democratic country, a country where politics and aesthetics
can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be faced a large
part of the time with heavy hearts. We are obliged to admit that it is a
country where paintings have little but the Constitution of the United
States wrought into them; where sculpture is voted and paid for by the
common people; where music is composed for majorities; where poetry is
sung to a circulation; where literature itself is scaled to
subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful
and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the
average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man,
plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man's
forgetfulness. And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same
average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are
forgotten, that the world remembers only those who have been his
masters.

On the other hand, the literature of finding fault with the average man
(which is what the larger part of our more ambitious literature really
is) is not a kind of literature that can do anything to mend matters.
The art of finding fault with the average man, with the fact that the
world is made convenient for him, is inferior art because it is helpless
art. The world is made convenient for the average man because it has to
be, to get him to live in it; and if the world were not made convenient
for him, the man of genius would find living with him a great deal more
uncomfortable than he does. He would not even be allowed the comfort of
saying how uncomfortable. The world belongs to the average man, and,
excepting the stars and other things that are too big to belong to him,
the moment the average man deserves anything better in it or more
beautiful in i