Genius and Taste are the Eros and Anteros of
art. Without his brother, the first would remain ever a child. Taste is
that innate and God-given faculty which at once perceives and hails as
true, ideas, which it, however, has not the power to discover for
itself. It should be educated and carefully fostered; but no amount of
cultivation will give it where not already in existence, for it is as
truly innate as genius itself.

In its lowest form, it is the comprehension of the scientific principles
of art, and the judging of artistic works in accordance with scientific
rules.

What is known as tact, is a curious social development of the same
faculty. Taste is the child of the mind and soul; tact, of the soul and
heart. Both are incommunicable.

The word taste is frequently misapplied. Thus a man, with what is
blunderingly called a classical taste, is incapable of aught but the
classic; that is to say, he recognizes in a new work that which makes
the charm of an old one, and pronounces it worthy of admiration. Put the
right foot of an Apollo forward, instead of the left, and call it Philip
of Pokanoket, and he will fall into ecstasies over a work at once so
truly national and classic. He would have stood dumb and with an
untouched heart, before the Apollo, fresh from the chisel of the
sculptor. Such men have graduated at Vanity Fair, and are the
old-clothesmen of art.

Thus the men of talent are almost invariably recognized and crowned in
their own days; because they always deal with ideas in a measure already
familiar to the multitude. But, alas for the sensitive child of genius!
The bold explorer of untrodden paths must cut away the underbrush that
others may follow him; he must himself create the taste in the masses,
by which he is afterward to be judged. His bold, daring, and original
conceptions serve only to dazzle, confuse, and blind the multitude; and
as it requires time to understand them, to read their living characters
of glowing light, the laurel wreaths of appreciation and sympathy, which
should have graced his brow and cheered his heart, too often trail their
deathless green in vain luxuriance round the chill marble covering the
early grave of a broken heart. Ah, friends! Genius demands sympathy in
its impassioned creations; loving and laboring for humanity, it exacts
comprehension, at least, in return. Yet how very difficult it is for an
artist to win such comprehension! And, by a strange fatality, the mo