prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire to escape a narrow professionalism in music.  A similar situation has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form of an unorganized, but wide-spread reaction against the cheap and ugly commercialism which has dominated house construction and decoration of the more unpretentious class.  This became articulate a few years ago in the large number of books and magazines devoted to house-planning, construction, decoration, furnishing, and garden-craft.  The success which has attended these publications, and their marked influence, give some measure of the magnitude of this revolt.

But now attention must be called to a significant, and somewhat sinister fact.  The professional in these various fields of aesthetic endeavour, has shown either indifference or active hostility toward all manner of amateur efforts at self-expression.  Free verse aroused the ridicule of the professors of metrics; the Little Theatre movement was solemnly banned by such pundits as Belasco and Mrs. Fiske; the Community Chorus movement has invariably met with opposition and misunderstanding from professional musicians; and with few exceptions the more influential architects have remained aloof from the effort to give skilled architectural assistance to those who cannot afford to pay them ten per cent.

Thus everywhere do we discover a deadening hand laid upon the self-expression of the democratic spirit through beauty.  Its enemies are of its own household; those who by nature and training should be its helpers hinder it instead.  Why do they do this?  Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—­conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to incarnate at all it must of necessity sweep them aside.

But in every field of aesthetic endeavour appears here and there a man or a woman with unclouded vision, who is able to see in the flounderings of untrained amateurs the stirrings of demos from his age-long sleep.  These, often forsaking paths more profitable, lend their skilled assistance, not seeking to impose the ancient outworn forms upon the Newness, but by a transfusion of consciousness permitting it to create forms of its own.  Such a one, in architecture, Louis Sullivan has proved himself; in music Harry Barnhart, who evokes the very spirit of song from any random crowd.  The demos found voice first in the poetry of Walt Whitman who has a successor in Vachel Lindsay, the man who walked through Kansas, trading poetry for food and lodging, teaching the farmers’ sons and daughters to intone his stirring odes to Pocahontas, General Booth, and Old John Brown.  Isadora Duncan, Gordon Craig, Maeterlinck, Scriabine are perhaps too remote from the spirit of democracy, too tinged with old-world aestheticism, to be included in this particular category, but all are image-breakers, liberators, and have played their part in the preparation of the field for an art of democracy.