these arts are
cultivated. Many of those who had already contracted a taste for the
fine arts are impoverished: on the other hand, many of those who are not
yet rich begin to conceive that taste, at least by imitation; and the
number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious consumers
become more scarce. Something analogous to what I have already
pointed out in the useful arts then takes place in the fine arts;
the productions of artists are more numerous, but the merit of each
production is diminished. No longer able to soar to what is great, they
cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and appearance is more attended
to than reality. In aristocracies a few great pictures are produced;
in democratic countries, a vast number of insignificant ones. In the
former, statues are raised of bronze; in the latter, they are modelled
in plaster.

When I arrived for the first time at New York, by that part of the
Atlantic Ocean which is called the Narrows, I was surprised to perceive
along the shore, at some distance from the city, a considerable number
of little palaces of white marble, several of which were built after the
models of ancient architecture. When I went the next day to inspect more
closely the building which had particularly attracted my notice, I found
that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of painted
wood. All the edifices which I had admired the night before were of the
same kind.

The social condition and the institutions of democracy impart, moreover,
certain peculiar tendencies to all the imitative arts, which it is easy
to point out. They frequently withdraw them from the delineation of the
soul to fix them exclusively on that of the body: and they substitute
the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and
thought: in a word, they put the real in the place of the ideal. I doubt
whether Raphael studied the minutest intricacies of the mechanism of the
human body as thoroughly as the draughtsmen of our own time. He did not
attach the same importance to rigorous accuracy on this point as they
do, because he aspired to surpass nature. He sought to make of man
something which should be superior to man, and to embellish beauty's
self. David and his scholars were, on the contrary, as good anatomists
as they were good painters. They wonderfully depicted the models which
they had before their eyes, but they rarely imagined anything beyond
them: they followed nature with