674 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
tyrants, kings, monks, aristocrats not of the people. Is this the case in any real sense ? Whose, let us ask ourselves, was the creative thought that worked out the wonderful design and each marvelous feature of temple and cathedral, mausoleum and monument, statue, arch, and aqueduct ? Whose money con- tributed largely to the making of these ? And whose was the greatest pleasure and pride in them ? William Morris suggests whose this art in reality was when he says : " History (so-called) has remembered the kings and warriors because they destroyed ; art has remembered the people because they created. And Miss Starr shows how art has grown : " If art has reached higher than the common life, it has done so only by rising through it, never by springing up outside and apart from it." The classic story of the making of the statue of Pallas Athene how, when the people were asked whether it should be of bronze and silver or ivory and gold, they cried with one voice, " Ivory and gold" shows whose was the art in Athens ; and what was so striking a feature of the life there was true to a great degree in many less democratic times and places.
Do we need to have stated in specific terms what such art is good for ? What to those who produce it, and what to all who have shared its beauty ? Can it be summed up in words what to the peoples of the past has been the embodying and the embodi- ment, in forms of beauty, of some of their highest hopes, joys, and aspirations ? That the expression and the interpretation of such expression of the inner life shown through these art-forms constituted much of the real living of these people, who can doubt ? Then what has all of this been to the rest of the world ? The mind cannot form a picture of the earth without the beauty, aside from the utility, of these creations of man. The charm of foreign travel, and the general satisfaction and enjoyment of life can we think how different these would be without such beauty and our varied inheritances from it ? Then, besides the delight, how much of what is of value in our knowledge of a people is found in the manifestations of their real life and their ideal conceptions through sculpture, architecture, painting, music, even leaving out poetry and eloquence ; and what has been
