A COMMUNICATION
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we are committed to the banal; we all know the absurdities and indig–
nities of democracy, we could all be brilliant reactionaries; but it is
natural also quickly to accept what is necessary. We have got to learn
how to make real democracy work, with all its disadvantages. This
real democracy is not a matter of getting more votes or organizing more
trade unions; the task ahead is to shape a democratic mind, in which
the assent and interest of the millions has been gained for what must
be the work of the few: the creation of beauty, the achievement of life.
Hitherto the interest of the millions has been only in projects to pro–
vide more money, more food, more films, or in war. Most of the
great achievements of civilization, particularly contemporary ones, have
left them indifferent or hostile. In America-in England too-there
is a real self-righteous hostility to distinction of mind or manner, to
intensity of thought or feeling, to criticism, to many kinds of greatness.
The spread of education in the last fifty years has probably increased
that hostility rather than creating understanding.
If
a democratic mind
is to be born, the hierarchy of values will have to be maintained and
fed from different sources from those of the past.
The basic problem is, after all, the transmission of the knowledge
of the few down to the many quickly enough for society to remain
vitally homogeneous. One man, let us say, can read and understand
Dante in terms of his peculiar significance for this generation; ten
men know enough to distinguish his work from that of others who
claim the same; fifty men are sure about the ten, and can understand
what they point out; a thousand men-and so on. The great work of
a society's mind is to insure that knowledge and influence follow these
channels and not others.
This works well enough in science today. Even the highly edu–
cated ones among us may not have the remotest idea of why Einstein
was right, or what modern physics is about, but we know that he
was right. We know that he was a brilliant scientist, that he deserves
our respect, that the people who are presented to us as scientists really
are what they claim to be, and so on. And not only we ; the man in
the street, too. That is as it should be. But what a different story in
the arts. In nineteenth-century England everybody who read, however
philistine, knew that Tennyson and Browning were great poets, and
that great poets were great men. They knew in the same way that we
know about science today. But the machinery by which that knowledge
was transmitted will not do for us today, because it was not democratic.
A gentleman recognized another gentleman and knew how far to trust
him; literature and publicity limited themselves instinctively to the
