jectifying his emotions, but in communicating them intelligibly. To find that not only technic, but emotions and ideas, must be affected by the implied respondent is to learn, as men in other fields of human activity inevitably learn, that restraints and inspiration come from the same source that an art with no object outside itself is no more thinkable than a love or a pity with no object outside itself. Art that does not say something be concerned not only in mentally obmay have the ruminative satisfactions inherent in whittling a stick or the practice importance of musical scales, but it is no part of a work of art. I resort to the obvious by way of emphasizing the less trite, though no longer new, contention that art is essentially communication. Expression may need no audience to give pure joy to one who expresses. Expression is elementally natural. Functionally the artist is separated and distinguished by the fact that consciously and by devoted preparation he expresses to communicate his joy. Only communication, only the exultation of sharing, can give a work of art its occasion; and if communication is basic, the value of the thing said comes under consideration with the value of the way of saying it. Thus the offense of a theory that ignores all but the art element is to be measured by the circumstance that all works of art imply audience or spectators. A work of art may be created without social thought, yet the mind of the artist and all other elements entering into his work are social products; from which we must deduce that every art medium is a product not only of use, but of response. To say that a responding recognition is implicit in the language of every art is answer enough to any pose of indifference. It is quite easy to understand a savage contempt for the conduct of audiences, to be appalled by profundities of ignorance, to feel humiliation in watching flippancies of choice, to be amazed by complacent insensibility to beauty, but the sculptor must go on with the estimate of the angle from which his statue is to be seen, the musician and the actor must be interested in the acoustics, the writer must continue to It is not at all likely that any artist's decision not to bother about humanity has ever been responsible in any discernible degree for humanity's habit of not bothering about art. But doctrines of special privilege, esthetic fanaticisms, and a general effect of inaccessibility must have had some influence. These must on occasion have resulted in decisions to let art go on with its own dervish dance. It is the instinct of the mass to permit a withdrawing priesthood to flock as it will. A better doctrine of art's responsibility to life might, despite despairing theories of a common stupidity and inertia, have a real influence upon humanity. When we say of a work of art, in printed pages or on canvas, that it "endures," we can mean nothing more than that it continues to be recognized. However it may be born, art "lives" by response. Great art, like other great deeds, may be obliterated. The highest greatness in any deed disregards this hazard, yet the potential in recognition never can be ignored. The appreciation of art and all that it carries is so vital to a civilization that ever is to deserve the name that we cannot afford to dismiss any truculence or peevishness or pride that may work against it. § 3 regard the art as a mitigation. We may find personality transcending either. An artist with real greatness of personality may remain to the end of his days a poor artist. We may regret that individual greatness lacks communicatory power, that its artist side is inferior, but we should not be tricked by any interest in art or in works of art into measuring personality by art power alone. On the other hand, a person with art power may not choose or be able to offer for embodiment an idea-essence at all commensurate with either the bigness of his personality or the beauty in his expression. He may be original or merely be different. He may see originally and express tritely. The thing he sees may be insignificant, and he may have a genius for showing us how beautiful an insignificant thing may be made when he expresses it, how beautiful anything is that he does. Whatever the situation, we shall be better off, either in forming a judgment or in transmitting a judgment, if we have escaped the delusion that the single element, art, can possibly characterize all that a work of art leaves us to feel or to consider. Art may dominate the impression,-that is the glory of its privilege, These contentions might seem merely academic if we overlooked their possible service in reducing a common confusion. If before a poem or a picture or any other work of art, we accept our privilege to consider the distinct elements of personality, of ideas, of expression as likely to be of varying significance, we may escape a bewilderment that specialists as well as laymen often seem to feel when they try to think of the total or talk of the total as a singleness. We may, for example, thereby be able more frequently to see that a thing beautifully done is not always a beautiful thing, as in the cracking of a safe. Keeping the integrity of our sense of art will leave us freer to judge that idea-essence with which art makes its bargain. The interplay of impulses originating in character, temperament, situation, art instinct, is too complicated to be summed up in diagram. Imagination rides like a king among all the other factors. We do not know what happens when the artist "listens in," whether the illumination may rightly be said to come from within or without. We stand before an eternal mystery. But a right formula is help--but we cannot wholly estimate the ful for the same reason that a wrong one is hurtful. A formula that tries to make a work of art fit into an "art" measure is doomed to failure. Of course we should not need a formula. Beauty is more important than any logic about it, but recognizing the duality of art and idea does no injustice to either; it may do better justice to both. Recognizing the beauty of an idea may make us tolerant of a deficiency in the expression. If the idea fails for us, we may have reason to king by his clothes. The need for a term that will less clumsily cover "work of art" is stressed by the need to leave art itself free, by the fact that art will stay free whether we will or no. Shakspere was always an artist; Leonardo we cannot rightly estimate in the same terms. "The Gettysburg Address" had beautiful art. We must remain free to appreciate the art of one who is always an artist, of one who is more than an artist, of one not an artist who has the gift for using an art. We can complete no equation without such clearness. We cannot ignore the man, the idea, the occasion, in explaining an emotion. On the other hand, sheer art beauty is a reality however it may be hurt by the company it keeps. An illicit idealike preaching where it does not belong -may invalidate a work of art without invalidating the art. If we ever come to forget the propaganda, we may again think of the total as a work of art. A work of art sold, even as an afterthought, to the purposes of salesmanship, loses its work of art significance, though it cannot thereby lose its art. Much of the best art craftsmanship of to-day is used in advertising. This may be heartbreaking to lovers of art, even if it is a great boon to salesmanship. It may be wickeder to paint a flattering picture of a corporation's product for the corporation's dollars than to paint a flattering portrait of the duke's mistress for the duke's florins. It may be that men used to paint more madonnas not because they were more religious, but because there was a better market for madonnas. Evidently men who practise art without recompense should cast the first stone. Some day we shall find the true dividing-line that separates the "commercial," that defines the work of art difference and the ethical difference between painting an exhibition portrait of the millionaire's stupid wife for money and painting a sales convention portrait of the millionaire's patented mowing-machine for money; between the situation of the writer who thinks of a large audience in terms of work-ofart influence and one who thinks of a large audience in terms of profit only. However the sordidness of the world may weigh upon those who cherish dreams of a perfected expression, an unhampered truth, an undefiled beauty, there is a consolation affecting, if not our immediate distresses, at least our sense of destination, that time eliminates every quibble as to the circumstances of production. The real work of art (it will ultimately get a name)-the work blending in its total the spirit of the artist, the vitality of the idea, and the essential art-may rear itself at last from the ruck, may come to the judgment of answering emotions, without its chains. It is a pity that we should heap so many obscurations about to-day's madonnas while agreeing, for example, to forget why Dr. Johnson hurried with "Rasselas." Probably we will never have clearness of thinking in these matters until there is a wider and deeper recognition of the truth that all arts, fine and other, are subsidiary to the supreme art of living. At the white peak of the art of living is the essence of essences. Any theory that sets up a super-art, especially one that affects to despise life, is essentially evasive and dishonest. Logically it should begin with suicide. It is "striking on the job," an intellectual sabotage. In a creed acknowledging the art of living there is no place for brotherhoods of irresponsible ecstasy, but there is room, there is demand, for the uttermost triumphs of expression, for every individual thought or emotion which the common heritage of art language may carry to mankind, and for the artist as a full participator in the common struggle, though he be necessarily aloof, like other of his lifebrothers, for the creative hours. The indifference of the world has no greater burden for the artist than for the la borer, the inventor, or the preacher. The artist, as life's spokesman, has indeed certain gentlemanly obligations, among these that of not talking too much about himself. Too much art is about art. Too much history is about history rather than about life. Whatever may be figured as the impulsions of art in the past, art consciousness in the future will draw closer to life. Havelock Ellis has been speaking of dancing as "the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself." No right to esthetic joy is withheld or diminished in significance by the insistence, as by Mr. Ellis, that the esthetic sense is a social necessity. It is a social necessity for reasons resting in its social origin. That beauty needs That beauty needs life is part of the imperative that life needs beauty. Life and the artist need each other desperately. Life is still appallingly ugly. Art still has selfish futilities. Like formulated religion, like coördinated government, it will learn that keeping close to life is a condition of survival. Life's blunders in trying to get along without its committees because government has been bad, without religion because churches have been ineffectual, without art because certain artists have wanted a separate god, lifts no responsibility from the shoulders of men and women capable of a devoted leadership. I have said art "consciousness." Let my postscript make it plain that I have no faith looking to an enduring value for works of art in any conscious appeal to the general. I am no such optimist as to either art or the general. But a great art may begin with an artist consciousness of humanity, with a sharing sense of life's ironies, without truckling on the way. Though art be addressed, no theory of dread duty can force the artist to address the great group. He may reach it. Whispers of individual expression have, by a miracle in which there is more of what we call chance than most of us find it ethical to admit, reverberated to the ends of the earth. An artist may attain his best art in thinking of a wide audience. He may attain it in thinking simply of another self. It may be wrung from him in moments of lonesome exasperation. Certainly we cannot hope that it will germinate in a philosophy of irresponsibility or of contempt. History seems to show that while little men sometimes have big expression gifts, really great works of art are made by great men of the world, and great men-well they are great men. ends of the earth. Can We Save the Democratic Party? As One Democratic Editor Sees It BY GEORGE F. MILTON F no American institution has prediction been so sterile, and the application of remorseless logic so bewilderingly unsatisfactory, as of the Democratic party, which has housed beneath its single rooftree such diverse characters as Woodrow Wilson and Charles F. Murphy, Thomas Jefferson and George E. Brennan. The present effort of its leaders to arrive at a formula for its renaissance makes an analysis of its elements of strength and weakness pertinent and timely. To-day we really have three Democratic parties bearing identic name, but antagonistic in several basic doctrines, programs, and ideals. To unify all three is apparently impossible; to join any two of them difficult, but practicable. Failure to secure a satisfactory synthesis of two of the three spells party disaster; discovery of a highest common denominator offers opportunity of victory. The three parties are those of the South, the West, and the East. Economic interests, social conditions, racial prejudices, differing religious faiths, the clash of altruist and materialist, tend to separate them. In the "solid South" the Democratic party is traditional, racial, and, to a degree, beset with a creedal com plex. By fortuitous accident, the climate and soil of our Southern States supplied a willing realm for King Cotton. New England England skippers brought negro slaves to the cottonfields, after which the South championed involuntary servitude. The Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment wrenched human slavery from America, but neither solved the negro problem nor altered our basic cotton agronomy. So long as the colored brethren retain their solidarity for a party, which sixty years ago freed them and ever since has been swindling and swash-buckling them, just so long will the cotton commonwealths remain inflexible in their party fealty. The party in Dixie has been deeply conservative-often reactionary as to economic advances and as to governmental attention to distressed units of our complex social organism. Childlabor legislation encounters stern vetoes by Southern textile magnates; modern labor laws, chilled in the rural regions by the apathy of the highly individual farmer, in the cities meet determined opposition from dominant finance and commerce. Woman suffrage was fought vigorously, often viciously, as a state's rights invasion. By a geographic anomaly Tennessee was the "perfect thirty-six" to ratify |