s aspiration built on a bog of
toil-soddened minds. The piles beneath the castle of our near-democratic
arts were rotting for lack of folk-imagination. The Man with the Hoe had
no spark in his brain. But now a light is blazing. We can build the
American soul broad-based from the foundations. We can begin with dreams
the veriest stone-club warrior can understand, and as far as an appeal to
the eye can do it, lead him in fancy through every phase of life to the
apocalyptic splendors.

This progress, according to the metaphor of this chapter, will be led by
prophet-wizards. These were the people that dominated the cave-men of
old. But what, more specifically, are prophet-wizards?

Let us consider two kinds of present-day people: scientific inventors, on
the one hand, and makers of art and poetry and the like, on the other.
The especial producers of art and poetry that we are concerned with in
this chapter we will call prophet-wizards: men like Albert Duerer,
Rembrandt, Blake, Elihu Vedder, Watts, Rossetti, Tennyson, Coleridge,
Poe, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Francis Thompson.

They have a certain unearthly fascination in some one or many of their
works. A few other men might be added to the list. Most great names are
better described under other categories, though as much beloved in their
own way. But these are especially adapted to being set in opposition to a
list of mechanical inventors that might be called realists by contrast:
the Wright brothers, and H. Pierpont Langley, Thomas A. Edison, Charles
Steinmetz, John Hays Hammond, Hudson Maxim, Graham Bell.

The prophet-wizards are of various schools. But they have a common
tendency and character in bringing forth a type of art peculiarly at war
with the realistic civilization science has evolved. It is one object of
this chapter to show that, when it comes to a clash between the two
forces, the wizards should rule, and the realists should serve them.

The two functions go back through history, sometimes at war, other days
in alliance. The poet and the scientist were brethren in the centuries of
alchemy. Tennyson, bearing in mind such a period, took the title of
Merlin in his veiled autobiography, Merlin and the Gleam.

Wizards and astronomers were one when the angels sang in Bethlehem,
"Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men." There came magicians, saying, "Where
is he that is born king of the Jews, for we have seen his star in the
east and have come to worship him?" The modern