we try to measure for others the first weary steps of progress with sometimes sad, often disappointing, and yet never wholly joyless, mile-stones. So shall wisdom, from its unselfish use, be largely meted out to you again by the great Giver!

CHAPTER V.

Primary Relation of Art to Religion. - Priestcraft appropriates Art. Origin of Sculpture. - Painting at first Subordinate. - Primary Significance of Color.-The Rainbow as a Symbol.-Object of Art in Egypt, - India, China. -Definition of Spirit and Spiritual. - Want of Art among the Hebrews. Its Development in Greece. - Gradual Divorce from Sacerdotalism. - Final Freedom of the Artist. - Result.

R

IGHTLY to understand art, we must ascertain its governing notions, in its several phases of national or individual development. So intimately associated is it with religion, in all incipient civilization, that it becomes difficult to speak of it otherwise than under that head. Both sentiments are innate in the human mind, and each, in its beginning, develops itself chiefly through feeling. But the latter, being the more powerful and comprehensive, makes at first of the former a mere instrument to express its ideas, in the form either of symbols, or images of the celestial powers that the untutored imagination conceives as presiding over the destinies of men. Hence early art is always found subordinate to the religious sentiment, which it seeks to typify with but little regard to the asthetic principle of its own being. Only as it

RELATION OF ART TO RELIGION.

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escapes from vassalage to priestcraft does it assert its proper dignity and beauty.

By priestcraft we refer to those crude notions of divinity which obtain among all men in their first essays to comprehend God, and which become more obscure or material through the mistaken and selfish policy of priests, in invariably clothing their superior knowledge in the guise of sacred mysteries. To perpetuate their influence, they deem it necessary to present to the people some visible embodiment of their doctrines. Among the first symbols of Deity were the most common natural objects, such as trees and stones. A desire to personify in material form the unseen life or intelligence which governs the world, combined with the feeling for the beautiful, undoubtedly gave rise to sculpture. Painting was at first a mere accessory to it. Indeed, color had for ages a greater typical than ornamental significance; and even now, in many minds, it finds noblest appreciation from a lovely chord of symbolism of the glories and virtues of the celestial world, and its letting down for finite enjoyment a portion of the infinite, subdued to the standard of our feeling and comprehension, which, as in the rainbow, remains to earth in all time a living hope and joy.

In those earliest seats of civilization, Egypt and India, the sacerdotal influence was long the governing one. Consequently, the artistic feeling was overborne by the theological, and their art was soon petrified into a rigid and fixed expression of metaphysical ideas, giving to their

24 ART A REVELATION OF SPIRIT.

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idols forms as unchangeable and enigmatical as their enigmatical conceptions of nature. India still retains her elaborate, symbolical art, personification of her religious philosophy to the initiated, but to the masses presenting a worship scarcely one degree removed from gross fetichism. In China the spiritual life is still more absorbed in the material. In these countries, embracing nearly one half the human race, art, having been made a slave, has avenged its degradation by presenting falsehood for truth, perpetuating error, and barring progress. The art of a

nation is at once its creed and catechism. We need no other literature to reveal its mental condition than the objects of its religious belief or sensuous delight. With this key to the soul in hand, the comparative intelligence and progress of races are easily unlocked. Without the aid of a false and immovable art, as the easily understood substitute of printing, it is scarcely conceivable that the popular mind should have remained as immovable as it has in the East. Wherever art is thus circumscribed we find a similar result. The object itself takes precedence of the idea, and becomes an idol. Worship is replaced by superstition, so that art is presented either as a mummified dogma, or in grotesque, mystical, and unnatural shapes, and barbarous displays of color, corresponding to the false and sensual theology which inspires it.

The Hebrew legislators fell into the opposite extreme to the Hindoos, and, from their reluctance to attempt to embody their notions of divine

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things, quenched the artistic spirit of their people so completely that even for the decorations and symbols of the temple Solomon was obliged to apply to the Tyrians, who were themselves

by no means an artistic people, — as did, later, Herod to the Greeks, when he adorned it to its utmost magnificence. Yet the Jews allowed a certain scope for art in their religious architecture, and the objects used in their ritual, which was in later times wholly repudiated by the fanatical excess to which the Puritans and Quakers carried the proscription of idolatry by Moses, making it to apply to all art.

By them life itself was deprived of half its legitimate happiness, while among the idolatrous Orientals art became a perverter of the soul on account of its divorce from intellectual freedom.

It is to Greece that we must look for the first development of true art. That country was, indeed, not without its symbolical creations which resembled nothing on the earth, whatever the theological imagination might conceive as existing in the heavens, or as necessary to represent metaphysical mysteries. Many of its figures were as strange and graceless as the extraordinary emblematic art of India. Diana of Ephesus was a female monster. Grecian chimeras, and threeeyed, double-headed, and hundred-armed statues, were analogous to Oriental image - mysticism. But in its fauns, satyrs, nereids, and kindred imaginative beings, originating out of the pantheistic element of its faith, we find the growing ascendency of the natural and beautiful holding