acy is a
literature like themselves; not literature at all, but journalism,
gross, shrieking, sensational, base. So with the drama, so with
architecture, so with every art. Substitute the mass for the patron,
and you eliminate taste. The artist perishes; the charlatan survives
and flourishes. Only in science have you still an aristocracy. For
the crowd sees that there is profit in science, and lets it go its way.
Because of the accident that it can be applied, it may be
disinterestedly pursued. And democracy hitherto, though impatiently,
endures an ideal aim in the hope of degrading its achievement to its
own uses.

"Such being my view of democratic society I look naturally for elements
that promise not to foster, but to counteract it. I look for the germs
of a new aristocracy. They are hard to discover, and perhaps my
desires override my judgment. But I fancy that it will be the very
land that has suffered most acutely from the disease that will be the
first to discover the remedy. I endorse Ellis's view of American
civilization; but I allow myself to hope that the reaction is already
beginning. I have met in Italy young Americans with a finer sense of
beauty, distinction, and form, than I have been able to find among
Englishmen, still less among Italians. And once there is cast into
that fresh and unencumbered soil the seed of the ideal that made Greece
great, who can prophecy into what forms of beauty and thought it may
not flower? The Plutocracy of the West may yet be transformed into an
Aristocracy; and Europe re-discover from America the secret of its past
greatness. Such, at least, appears to me to be the best hope of the
world; and to the realization of that hope I would have all men of
culture all the world over unite their efforts. For the kingdom of
this earth, like that of heaven, is taken by violence. We must work
not with, but against tendencies, if we would realize anything great;
and the men who are fit to rule must have the courage to assume power,
if ever there is to be once more a civilization. Therefore it is that
I, the last of an old aristocracy, look across the Atlantic for the
first of the new. And beyond socialism, beyond anarchy, across that
weltering sea, I strain my eyes to see, pearl-grey against the dawn,
the new and stately citadel of Power. For Power is the centre of
crystallization for all good; given that, you have morals, art,
religion; without it, you have nothing