Beyond this general function of disengaging the ideal, art has, more particularly, that of defining and animating our ideals of human progress. While the severest solitary thought is necessary in understanding society and in framing plans for its improvement, we must look to the drama and the novel, also to poetry, music, painting, sculpture and architecture, to put flesh and blood upon these abstractions and give them a real hold on the minds of the people. I cannot imagine any broad and rich growth of democracy without a corresponding development of popular art, and one of many indications that our democracy is as yet immature and superficial is its failure to achieve such a development. Our vision of our country is loyal, no doubt, but not deep, mellow, many-colored. The flavor of our civilization is like that of the thin maple-sap just from the tree, not much condensed or deposited in saccharine crystals. Again, nothing has more power than art to enlarge human sympathy and unite the individual to his fellows. We feel this strongly now and then, as when a multitude rises to sing a patriotic song, but it belongs to all art whose material is drawn from the general human life. And it is in the nature of the higher kinds of art to draw from this general life, where alone idealism has any secure resting-place. So all great art makes us feel our oneness with mankind, and the grandeur of the common lot: the tragedy of King Lear, say, or the Book of Job, or the mediæval churches, or the figures of Michelangelo, or the great symphonies. It is full of noble reminiscence, and of “touches of things human till they rise to touch the spheres.” Beethoven said that “the purpose of music is to bring about a oneness of emotion, and thus suggest to our minds the coming time of a universal brotherhood,” and certainly nothing can do more than popular art to make such a time possible. As music can melt us into a oneness of emotion, so drama and fiction can arouse and enlarge our social imaginations until we feel the common nature in people who before seemed strange or hostile to us. In this way, for example, Americans learn to find interest and value in the many-colored life of immigrants from Europe. For much the same reason any high kind of social organization, one that lives in the spirit of the people and is not a mere mechanism, must exist largely through the medium of art, which chiefly has power to animate collective ideals. Those nations whose national aspirations are incarnated and glorified by poetry and painting may justly claim, in this respect, a higher civilization than those whose achievements are merely political, scientific, and industrial. If democracy is to do for the world all it hopes to do, it must develop greatly on this side; especially since a system that is to be worked by the masses is peculiarly dependent upon the diffusion of its ideals.