Page:Clarence S. Darrow - Realism in Literature and Art (1899).djvu/6

 6 lords and ladies, should act like men and women, else what difference between the ruler and the ruled? The marvelous powers that romance and myth had given to gods and angels were transferred to those of royal blood, The wonderful achievements of these kings and princes could be equaled only by the gods, and the poor dependents of the world, who lived for the glory of the great, were fed with legends and with tales that sung the praises of the strong.

Literature, sculpture, painting, music, and architecture, indeed all forms of art, were the exclusive property of the great, and the artist then like most of those to-day, was retained to serve the strong and maintain the status of the weak. No one dreamed that there was any beauty in a common human life or any romance in a fact. The greatest of the earth had not as yet learned to know that every life is a mystery and every death a tragedy; that the spark of the infinite, which alone transforms clay to life, animates alike the breast of the peasant and the soul of the prince. The world had not yet learned that the ant hill is as great as Mont Blanc, and the blade of grass as mysterious as the oak. It is only now that the world is growing so delicate and refined that it can see the beauty of a fact; that it is developing a taste so rare as to distinguish between the false and the true; that it