This is no mere circumstance of democracy.  It is its manifest destiny that it shall produce art for crowded conditions, that it shall have crowd art.  The kind of beauty that can be indefinitely multiplied is the kind of beauty in which, in the nature of things, we have made our most characteristic and most important progress.  Our most considerable success in pictures could not be otherwise than in black and white.  Black-and-white art is printing-press art; and art that can be produced in endless copies, that can be subscribed for by crowds, finds an extraordinary demand, and artists have applied themselves to supplying it.  All the improvements, moving on through the use of wood and steel and copper, and the process of etching, to the photogravure, the lithograph, the moving picture, and the latest photograph in colour, whatever else may be said of them from the point of view of Titian or Michael Angelo, constitute a most amazing and triumphant advance from the point of view of making art a democracy, of making the rare and the beautiful minister day and night to crowds.  The fact that the mechanical arts are so prominent in their relation to the fine arts may not seem to argue a high ideal amongst us; but as the mechanical arts are the body of beauty, and the fine arts are the soul of it, it is a necessary part of the ideal to keep body and soul together until we can do better.  Mourning with Ruskin is not so much to the point as going to work with William Morris.  If we have deeper feelings about wall-papers than we have about other things, it is going to the root of the matter to begin with wall-papers, to make machinery say something as beautiful as possible, inasmuch as it is bound to have, for a long time at least, about all the say there is.  The photograph does not go about the world doing Murillos everywhere by pressing a button, but the camera habit is doing more in the way of steady daily hydraulic lifting of great masses of men to where they enjoy beauty in the world than Leonardo da Vinci would have dared to dream in his far-off day; and Leonardo’s pictures, thanks to the same photograph, and everybody’s pictures, films of paper, countless spirits of themselves, pass around the world to every home in Christendom.  The printing press made literature a democracy, and machinery is making all the arts democracies.  The symphony piano, an invention for making vast numbers of people who can play only a few very poor things play very poorly a great many good ones, is a consummate instance both of the limitation and the value of our contemporary tendency in the arts.  The pipe organ, though on a much higher plane, is an equally characteristic contrivance making it possible for a man to be a complete orchestra and a conductor all by himself, playing on a crowd of instruments, to a crowd of people, with two hands and one pair of feet.  It is a crowd invention.  The orchestra—­a most distinctively modern institution, a kind of republic of sound, the