lities of painting.

Are such works as those of Canova and Thorwaldsen no longer created?

Can it be that art is no longer of national importance? In our own
country vast appropriations are made for internal improvements of all
kinds, while art that kindles and re-enforces life is almost ignored.
Our government--the government of the richest country in the
world--appropriated $200,000 for a memorial monument to General Grant to
be placed in Washington, while Italy--whose resources are so slender in
comparison--appropriates seven million dollars--thirty-five times the
amount--for her great monument to Victor Emmanuel which is now being
erected in Rome to stand near the Capitol and the Palace of the
Quirinale. Great art has always been closely associated with great
devotion to religious ideals. The artist was the servant of the Lord,
and it was his supreme purpose to embody the aspirations of the age and
render his works a full and complete symbol of those true realities of
life which have their being in the spiritual universe rather than in the
changing temporal world of the outer universe. The so-called realism of
the day is based on a false interpretation. "The things that are seen
are temporal, while the things that are not seen are eternal." True
realism is in spiritual qualities, not in physical attributes. True
realism is found in such works as Canova's sublime group, where the
figures of Religion and of Death forever impress all who stand before
this magnificent monument; it is found in Thorwaldsen's "Christ;" in
Franklin Simmons's "Angel of the Resurrection,"--in such works as those
that have a language for the soul, rather than in a "Saturnalia."

Again, another fatal rock on which art must inevitably make shipwreck is
the theory that it is good to perpetuate ugliness, in either painting or
in sculpture. The permanent reality of life is beauty. So far as any
person or object departs from this enduring reality, so far it is the
result of distortion and deformity, and these, being the temporary, the
accidental, the deficient, should not be perpetuated in ideal creation.
It is an Apollo who embodies the permanent ideal of manhood--not a
cripple or a hunchback. Still further: art should not only refuse to
embody the defective, which is a mere negative; it should not only give
form to the utmost perfection it beholds in nature or in humanity, but
beyond this the responsibility is upon the artist to penetrate into
l