A MODERN SYMPOSIUM
or understood art. The case of Athens is wrongly adduced; for Athens was an aristocracy under the influence of an aristocrat at the time the Parthenon was built. At all times Art has been fostered by patrons, never by the people. How should they foster it? Instinctively they hate it, as they hate all superiorities. It was not Florence but the Medici and the Pope that employed Michelangelo; not Milan but Ludovic the Moor that valued Leonardo. It was the English nobles that patronized Reynolds and Gainsborough; the darlings of our middle class are Herkomer and Collier. There have been poets, it is true, who have been born of the people and loved of them; and I do not despise poetry of that kind. But it is not the great thing. The great thing is Sophocles and Virgil, a fine culture wedded to a rich nature. And such a marriage is not accomplished in the fields or the market-place. The literature loved by democracy is a literature like themselves; not literature at all, but journalism, gross, shrieking, sensational, base. So with the drama, so with architecture, so with every art. Substitute the mass for the patron, and you eliminate taste. The artist perishes; the charlatan
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