An Inquiry into the Art-Conditions and Prospects of America.-Art-Criticism. - Press, People, and Clergy. - Needs of Artists and Public. - American Knownothingism in Art. -Eclecticism.-The True Path.

E have now succinctly traced the art-idea in its historical progress and æsthetic development in the civilizations of the Old World to the period of its advent in the New, showing, as we proceeded, that, though the love of beauty is a fundamental quality of the human mind, yet its manifestations in the form of art are checked, stimulated, or modified by the influences of climate, habits, and traditions of race, relative pressure of utilitarian or æsthetic ideas, the character of creeds and tone of religious feeling, and above all by the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments.

American soil, but half rescued from the wild embrace of the wilderness, is a virgin field of art. By America we mean that agglomerate of European civilizations welded by Anglo-Saxon institutions into the Federal Union. The other portions of the continent are simply offshoots of their parent countries, without national life in art or lit

erature. Consequently, our inquiries belong to that people which, in virtue of their power and progress, have taken to themselves the designation of Americans, sanctioned by the tacit consent of the world, prophetically foreshadowing a period in their destiny, when, by the noble con-quest of ideas, the entire continent shall of right be theirs.

An inquiry of this nature, under the circumstances of newness and inexperience which everywhere present themselves, is, in many respects, embarrassing. At the same time, it is interesting, involving as it does not only the previous points of our investigations, whether by inheritance, transmission, or imitation, but new forms, rooted in novel conditions of national being; in short, the future of the art of the intermingling races of a new world, fused into a democracy which is now passing through its gravest struggle for existence, to reissue, as we believe, the most powerful because the most enlightened, the most peaceful because the most free, and the most influential people of the globe, because having sacrificed the most for justice and liberty.

But the dark cloud of civil strife still lowers over us. The timid quake; skeptics jeer. We have scarcely begun to sow the fields of art. The critic has more difficulties in his way than even the artist. A harvest is to be reaped, however, and that sooner than many think. Let us carefully sift the seed as it is sown, and not wait until the tares are big and strong before trying to uproot them. A bright vision of national growth in

art does indeed come before our mental sight, but that must not tempt us to overlook the fallow Now. He who would hasten the realization of that vision is under bonds to apply to the art of to-day those strict rules by which alone it may be sped joyfully on its way. It is a duty to vindicate art, not to foster national conceit, stimulate personal vanity, or pander to individual interests. "More Light," says Goethe; "MORE LIGHT." Precisely our public and private want! Those readers who have kept us company thus far, know that the æsthetic taste advocated is based upon pure examples; and that the principles which underlie it are drawn from deep and lofty aspirations,so far as long and conscientious study has enabled us to detect them. Believing, therefore, that the BEST is none too good for America to aspire to, we shall speak plainly of our deficiencies, and cheeringly of whatever justifies hope or praise. And the more emphatically at this particular juncture of our national affairs, because the experience of the world shows that great artists and a corresponding advance in art are almost always contemporaneous with the cessation of great wars and decisive crises in historical periods.

For the present, America, like England, prefers the knowledge which makes her rich and strong, to the art that implies cultivation as well as feeling rightly to enjoy it. In either country, climate, race, and religion are adverse, as compared with Southern lands, to its spontaneous and general growth. Americans calculate, interrogate, accumulate, debate. They yet find their chief

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success in getting, rather than enjoying; in having, rather than being: hence, material wealth is the great prize of life. Their character tends to thrift, comfort, and means, rather than final aims. It clings earthward, from faith in the substantial advantages of things of sense. We are laying up a capital for great achievements by and by. Our world is still of the flesh, with bounteous loyalty to the devil. Religion, on the side either of heaven or hell, has but little of the fervid, poetical, affectionate sentiment of the Roman creed and ritual. In divorcing it from the supersensuous and superstitious, Protestantism has gone to the other extreme, making it too much a dogma. Franklin most rules the common mind. He was eminently great and wise. But his greatness and wisdom was unspiritual, exhibiting the advantages that spring from intellectual foresight and homely virtue; in short, the practical craft of the scientist, politician, and merchant. His maxims have fallen upon understandings but too well disposed by will and temperament to go beyond his meaning, so that we need the counteracting element which is to be found in the art-sentiment.

What progress has it made in America?

To get at this there are three points of view: the individual, national, and universal. American art must be submitted to each, to get a correct idea of it as a whole. Yet it can scarcely be said to have fairly begun its existence, because, in addition to the disadvantages art is subjected to in America in common with England, it has others more distinctively its own.

WHAT ART LACKS.

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The popular faith is more rigidly puritanical in tone. This not only deprives art of the lofty stimulus of religious feeling, but subjects it to suspicion, as of doubtful morality.

Art also is choked by the stern cares and homely necessities of an incipient civilization. Men must work to live, before they can live to enjoy the beautiful.

It has no antecedent art: no abbeys in pictu-resque ruins; no stately cathedrals, the legacies of another faith and generation; no mediæval architecture, rich in crimson and gold, eloquent with sculpture and color, and venerable with age; no aristocratic mansions, in which art enshrines itself in a selfish and unappreciating era, to come forth to the people in more auspicious times; no state collections to guide a growing taste; no caste of persons of whom fashion demands encouragement to art-growth; no ancestral homes, replete with a storied portraiture of the past; no legendary lore more dignified than forest or savage life; no history more poetical or fabulous than the deeds of men almost of our own generation, too like ourselves in virtues and vices to seem heroic, men noble, good, and wise, but not yet arrived to be gods; and, the greatest loss of all, no lofty and sublime poetry.

Involuntarily, the European public is trained to love and know art. The most stolid brain cannot wholly evade or be insensible to the subtile influences of so many means constantly about it calculated to attract the senses into sympathy with the Beautiful. The eye of the laborer is