This generalization applies to the whole range of the arts. The greater part of the creative dreaming and planning which constitutes literature and art has had very little bearing upon the community in which we live, and has done little to equip us with patterns, with images and ideals, by means of which we might react creatively upon our environment. Yet it should be obvious that if the inspiration for the good life is to come from anywhere, it must come from no other people than the great artists. An intense social life, as Gabriel Tarde pointed out in his fine utopian fantasy, Underground Man, has “for its indispensable condition the esthetic life and the universal propagation of the religion of truth and beauty.” The common man, when he is in love, has a little glimpse of the way in which the drudgery of the daily world may be transmuted through emotional stimulus; it is the business of the artist to make the transmutation permanent, for the only difference between the artist and the common man is that the artist is, so to say, in love all the while. It is out of the vivid patterns of the artist’s ecstasy that he draws men together and gives them the vision to shape their lives and the destiny of their community anew. 8 No matter how the modern artist may use or fritter away his abilities, it is plain that he has an enormous reservoir of power at his disposal. What, for instance, has made America so wholly devoted to the conquest of material things? Why are we so given over to collecting those vast miscellanies of goods which are temptingly displayed in the advertising sections of our illustrated weeklies and monthly magazines? The necessity for ameliorating the hard, crude life of the pioneer has indeed been an important influence; but the traditions of this life in turn produced all the minor “artists” or “artlings” who write and draw for the popular papers, who create the plots of plays and motion picture scenarios; and since most of these poor wretches have never been educated in the humanist sense to any degree--since they know no other environment than New York or Los Angeles or Gopher Prairie, since they are acquainted with the achievements of no other age than their own, they have devoted themselves wholeheartedly to idealizing a great many of the things that are crude or ugly or stupid in their beloved community. So the idola of business have been perpetuated by “artlings” who themselves know only the standards of the business man.