unseen spirit of the many in one—­is the sublimest expression yet attained of the crowd music, which is, and must be, the supreme music of this modern day, the symphony.  Richard Wagner comes to his triumph because his music is the voice of multitudes.  The opera, a crowd of sounds accompanied by a crowd of sights, presented by one crowd of people on the stage to another crowd of people in the galleries, stands for the same tendency in art that the syndicate stands for in commerce.  It is syndicate music; and in proportion as a musical composition in this present day is an aggregation of multitudinous moods, in proportion as it is suggestive, complex, paradoxical, the way a crowd is complex, suggestive, and paradoxical—­provided it be wrought at the same time into some vast and splendid unity—­just in this proportion is it modern music.  It gives itself to the counterpoints of the spirit, the passion of variety in modern life.  The legacy of all the ages, is it not descended upon us?—­the spirit of a thousand nations?  All our arts are thousand-nation arts, shadows and echoes of dead worlds playing upon our own.  Italian music, out of its feudal kingdoms, comes to us as essentially solo music—­melody; and the civilization of Greece, being a civilization of heroes, individuals, comes to us in its noble array with its solo arts, its striding heroes everywhere in front of all, and with nothing nearer to the people in it than the Greek Chorus, which, out of limbo, pale and featureless across all ages, sounds to us as the first far faint coming of the crowd to the arts of this groping world.  Modern art, inheriting each of these and each of all things, is revealed to us as the struggle to express all things at once.  Democracy is democracy for this very reason, and for no other:  that all things may be expressed at once in it, and that all things may be given a chance to be expressed at once in it.  Being a race of hero-worshippers, the Greeks said the best, perhaps, what could be said in sculpture; but the marbles and bronzes of a democracy, having average men for subjects, and being done by average men, are average marbles and bronzes.  We express what we have.  We are in a transition stage.  It is not without its significance, however, that we have perfected the plaster cast—­the establishment of democracy among statues, and mobs of Greek gods mingling with the people can be seen almost any day in every considerable city of the world.  The same principle is working itself out in our architecture.  It is idle to contend against the principle.  The way out is the way through.  However eagerly we gaze at Parthenons on their ruined hills, if thirty-one-story blocks are in our souls thirty-one-story blocks will be our masterpieces, whether we like it or not.  They will be our masterpieces because they tell the truth about us; and while truth may not be beautiful, it is the thing that must be told first before beauty can begin.  The beauty we are to have shall only be worked out from the truth we have.  Living as we do in a new era, not to see that the thirty-one-story block is the expression of a new truth is to turn ourselves away from the one way that beauty can ever be found by men, in this era or in any other.