Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/695

 MUNICIPAL ART 68 1

a people existed which regarded the perpetuation of high ideals through forms of beauty as greater than conquest, attaching a penalty to the use for purposes of war of any money appropriated to the making of their goddess of wisdom. But one feature in the production of the arch is encouraging ; as someone has said, it shows what can be done when the people's interest is aroused. And right here is surely a leading for America ; for through the people must come any greatness it may attain. It has been "through the appreciation of this divine truth," through a belief in the people, so points out Mr. Frederick S. Lamb, that Belgium has won her great distinction and made herself the "leader of the world at this time in matters aesthetic." Her famous sign contest illustrates her method and its results. Any person could try designing. Her free schools of design became "more attractive to the common people than vaudeville or tumbling show." The work of a large number of designers was utilized ; and growing out of this came such a demand for artistic signs that the merchants could not draw trade without them. This is an art of the people ; this is the way to develop an art worth having. As Mr. Lamb says: "Art as a charity is not wanted ; art as an aristocratic adjunct is not needed ; art as an educator will be welcomed on all sides, and no longer regarded with suspicion by the 'lower half ;'" and, he might have said, by many of the upper half, for a certain ungenuine- ness and valuelessness in much of it now is felt by all.

Shall not America, partly through the people being followed, partly led, by the art-seers, develop an art like that of the past, which, "by the very fact that it must speak to the soul of multi- tudes in a language prescribed by precise relations," thus having "its technical merits exalted, reached the lofty expression which reveals itself in fragments, the immortal footprints of bygone civilizations"? Shall she not by being true to her traditions and her destiny, her "manifest destiny," a democracy grand and great, develop an art such as the world has not yet seen ?

ELMA GRAVES. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.