46 The Study of Poetry
which that flower grew, or the fuel consumed to give the
ruling class sustenance, ease, and material force ready to its
hand. The public conscience now demands that there shall
be no ruling class, but that all shall be fitted to rule. The
aristocracy of intellect is subject to the same vices, and falls
under the same condemnation, as the old aristocracy of
birth, or the cruder modern aristocracy of riches. The ideal
of democracy—far, indeed, yet from being realised, but felt
everywhere, alike by its opponents and its followers, as a
pressure steadily moving mankind in a particular direction—
is that culture, like wealth and leisure, should be diffused
through the whole nation. It abolishes the distinction be-
tween active and passive citizens, between a governing caste
and a governed people. That is its political aspect. But its
larger and nobler ideal is that of a community in which not
only the task and responsibility of setting its own house in
order and swaying its own destinies, but the whole conduct
and development of its own culture, shall be universally
shared; in which not only government, but life in its full
compass, shall be conducted by the people for the people; in
which the human race shall be joint inheritors of the fruits
of the human spirit.
Only once, and among a single people, has this ideal been
partially realised in the past. The democracy of Athens set
no less an aim before itself, and for a brilliant moment
seemed to have attained it. Poetry and art reached their
climax there together with democratic government. It was
the boast of Athens that culture no less than political power
was shared by all her citizens. Poets and artists drew from
that national atmosphere the creative and imaginative
power which they embodied in their work, and returned to
the nation in visible and immortal shapes the patterns of life
with which the nation had inspired them. But the Athenian