The answer to this question involves two difficulties:  (1) A crowd cannot make itself beautiful. (2) A crowd will not let any one else make it beautiful.

The men who have been on the whole the most eager democrats of history—­the real-idealists—­the men who love the crowd and the beautiful too, and who can have no honest or human pleasure in either of them except as they are being drawn together, are obliged to admit that living in a democratic country, a country where politics and aesthetics can no longer be kept apart, is an ordeal that can only be faced a large part of the time with heavy hearts.  We are obliged to admit that it is a country where paintings have little but the Constitution of the United States wrought into them; where sculpture is voted and paid for by the common people; where music is composed for majorities; where poetry is sung to a circulation; where literature itself is scaled to subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man, plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man’s forgetfulness.  And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are forgotten, that the world remembers only those who have been his masters.

On the other hand, the literature of finding fault with the average man (which is what the larger part of our more ambitious literature really is) is not a kind of literature that can do anything to mend matters.  The art of finding fault with the average man, with the fact that the world is made convenient for him, is inferior art because it is helpless art.  The world is made convenient for the average man because it has to be, to get him to live in it; and if the world were not made convenient for him, the man of genius would find living with him a great deal more uncomfortable than he does.  He would not even be allowed the comfort of saying how uncomfortable.  The world belongs to the average man, and, excepting the stars and other things that are too big to belong to him, the moment the average man deserves anything better in it or more beautiful in it than he is getting, some man of genius rises by his side, in spite of him, and claims it for him.  Then he slowly claims it for himself.  The last thing to do, to make the world a good place for the average man, would be to make it a world with nothing but average men in it.  If it is the ideal of democracy that there shall be a slow massive lifting, a grading up of all things at once; that whatever is highest in the true and the beautiful, and whatever is lowest in them shall be graded down and graded up to the middle height of human life, where the greatest numbers shall make their home and live upon it; if the ideal of democracy is tableland—­that is—­mountains for everybody—­a few mountains must be kept on hand to make tableland out of.