the efforts of men of
specialized tastes and talents to get together and form dramatic
organizations, glee clubs, and orchestras; and more generally by the
disposition of the soldiers to sing together at work and play and on
the march. The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion
against the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a
protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial
stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire
to escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situation
has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form of
an unorganized, but wide-spread reaction against the cheap and ugly
commercialism which has dominated house construction and decoration of
the more unpretentious class. This became articulate a few years ago
in the large number of books and magazines devoted to house-planning,
construction, decoration, furnishing, and garden-craft. The success
which has attended these publications, and their marked influence,
give some measure of the magnitude of this revolt.

But now attention must be called to a significant, and somewhat
sinister fact. The professional in these various fields of aesthetic
endeavour, has shown either indifference or active hostility toward
all manner of amateur efforts at self-expression. Free verse aroused
the ridicule of the professors of metrics; the Little Theatre movement
was solemnly banned by such pundits as Belasco and Mrs. Fiske; the
Community Chorus movement has invariably met with opposition and
misunderstanding from professional musicians; and with few exceptions
the more influential architects have remained aloof from the effort
to give skilled architectural assistance to those who cannot afford to
pay them ten per cent.

Thus everywhere do we discover a deadening hand laid upon the
self-expression of the democratic spirit through beauty. Its enemies
are of its own household; those who by nature and training should
be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their
fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they
themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they
recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions--conventions
so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to
incarnate at all it must of necessity sweep them aside.

But in every field of aesthetic endeavour appears here and there a