he sort, one overstates it. Nothing
could be more untrue to its reality than the accentuation of traits
which in the arrivals of society elsewhere and elsewhen have marked the
ultimation of the bourgeois spirit. Say that the Puritan, the Pilgrim,
the Cavalier, and the Merchant Adventurer have come and gone; say that
the Revolutionist Patriot, the Pioneer and the Backwoodsman and the
Noble Savage have come and gone; say that the Slaveholder and the Slave
and the Abolitionist and the Civil Warrior have come and gone; say that
the Miner, the Rancher, the Cowboy, and the sardonically humorous
Frontiersman have come and gone; say that the simple-hearted,
hard-working, modest, genial Homemakers have come and gone; say that the
Captain of Industry has come and gone, and the world-wide Financier is
going: what remains for actuality-loving art to mould into shapes of
perdurable beauty? Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity
sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved by
desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather it is a
reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not more than
once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the significance of
Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, art must
refine and re-refine upon itself; it must use methods of unapproached
delicacy, of unimagined subtlety and celerity. It is easy enough to
catch the look of the patrician in the upper air, of the plebeian
underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bourgeoisie, compacted in
characters of undeniable verisimilitude, that will be difficult, but it
will be possible, and the success will be of an effulgence such as has
never yet taken the eyes of wonder.

We should not be disposed to deny the artist, dedicated to this high
achievement by his love of the material not less than by his peculiar
gift, the range of a liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by
any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see
his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we
should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any _genre_
result. We ourselves have been evolving here the notion of some large
allegory which should bear the relation to all other allegories that
Bartholdi's colossus of Liberty bears to all other statues, and which
should carry forward the story and the hero, or the heroine, to some
such supreme mom