ch authors.

We are now slowly outgrowing the extravagances of Puritanism. It has
given us an earnestness and sobriety of character, to which much of our
real greatness is owing, both here and in the mother country. It has
made us stronger and steadier, but it has at the same time narrowed
us in many respects, and rendered our lives incomplete. This
incompleteness, entailed by Puritanism, we are gradually getting rid
of; and we are learning to admire and respect many things upon which
Puritanism set its mark of contempt. We are beginning, for instance, to
recognize the transcendent merits of that great civilizing agency, the
drama; we no longer think it necessary that our temples for worshipping
God should be constructed like hideous barracks; we are gradually
permitting our choirs to discard the droning and sentimental modern
"psalm-tune" for the inspiring harmonies of Beethoven and Mozart; and we
admit the classical picture and the undraped statue to a high place
in our esteem. Yet with all this it will probably be some time before
genuine art ceases to be an exotic among us, and becomes a plant of
unhindered native growth. It will be some time before we cease to regard
pictures and statues as a higher species of upholstery, and place them
in the same category with poems and dramas, duly reverencing them as
authentic revelations of the beauty which is to be found in nature. It
will be some time before we realize that art is a thing to be studied,
as well as literature, and before we can be quite reconciled to the
familiar way in which a Frenchman quotes a picture as we would quote a
poem or novel.

Artistic genius, as M. Taine has shown, is something which will develop
itself only under peculiar social circumstances; and, therefore, if we
have not art, we can perhaps only wait for it, trusting that when the
time comes it will arise among us. But without originating, we may at
least intelligently appreciate. The nature of a work of art, and the
mode in which it is produced, are subjects well worthy of careful study.
Architecture and music, poetry, painting and sculpture, have in times
past constituted a vast portion of human activity; and without knowing
something of the philosophy of art, we need not hope to understand
thoroughly the philosophy of history.

In entering upon the study of art in general, one may find many
suggestive hints in the little books of M. Taine, reprinted from the
lectures which he has been