voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They
are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is
the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is
impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and
monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the
creation of man and nature is its end. A man should find in it an outlet
for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he can do
that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance
on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal
relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest
effect is to make new artists.

Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance
of particular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any
real effect. It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a
savage's record of gratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed
of a wonderful perception of form this childish carving was refined to
the utmost splendor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and youthful
people, and not the manly labor of a wise and spiritual nation. Under an
oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes,
I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our plastic arts and
especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a corner. I cannot hide
from myself that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys
and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature transcends all our
moods of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But the gallery
stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it becomes
frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an attention habitually
engaged on the paths of planets and suns, should have wondered what the
Earl of Pembroke found to admire in "stone dolls." Sculpture may serve
to teach the pupil how deep is the secret of form, how purely the spirit
can translate its meanings into that eloquent dialect. But the statue
will look cold and false before that new activity which needs to roll
through all things, and is impatient of counterfeits and things not
alive. Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of
form. But true art is never fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest
music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from
its instant life tones of tendern