in by the ruck of men. So long as this unfortunate
misconception prevails, Art must remain a dead
letter to the workaday world, instead of being, as it
ought to be, a living power to enlarge and ennoble
our lives.
We as a nation have too much neglected Art. Engrossed in our scientific researches and in our marvellous developments of mechanical powers, we have taken too little heed to grow in other needful directions. Nor lias our feverish quest for material wealth been without its hurtful consequences to ourselves. But the love of the beautiful is part of our very being ; it cannot be crushed out ; it will live while human nature lives. And our surround- ings, and our life as a people, are rich in countless influences to nurture it. We dwell in a land glorious with the majesty of the silent and ever- lasting hills ; ricli with happy breadths of fertile valley ; watered plenteously with limpid stream and noble river, beamed on with the ever-changeful glory of heaven's liglit, and all set in the silver sea. Our sons go down to that sea in ships ; they go forth upon the great deep ; we make for all men of the earth all material things that handicraftsmen can devise ; our ships carry them to foreign lands ; we come and go in every corner of the earth ; our flag is everywhere. In our myriad labours here, in this workshop of the world, with the pathetic undertone — ' The still sad music of humanity ' — that the pensive ear hears ever, even amid the deafening roar of our factories ; in the exploits of our brave, strong sons, who, over all our wide empire, hold the races of men in awe ; in the sweet loveliness and majestic grandeur of our island-home — in all these we have an exhaustless store for the nurture of that love of the sublime and the beautiful which is an imperishable instinct of the human soul.
There is hardly a man who is not, at times, touched by thouglits like these. And there are men among us who are so touched, and so stirred, by an ever-present sense of the beauty and glory of the natural world, and of the great pathetic drama of human life, that they must give utterance to the things their souls feel with such passionate intensity. Art is the language by which alone such things can be expressed — Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, and Literature, its various forms. Art, therefore, is, to man's higher nature, nothing- less than one of the primary necessaries of life^an absolute essential to the growth and prosperity of all that finer life of the soul for which mere material pro- sperity is, at best, but the preparation and the basis. For Art is the language through which alone much of what is highest and deepest in the human soul can find expression. Moved by what the common consent of men calls inspiration, the artist is irresistibly compelled to seek expression for the divine feeling with which he contemplates all life and nature, that he may share that feeling with his fellow-men. As speecli for communication between mind and mind proves man an intellectual being, in nature far above the brutes. Art, the language of the soul, proves that his nature is divine. The artist presses material things into their highest service, caring for them not for their own sakes, but glad to have them that he may, by moulding them to forms of beauty, stamp indefeasibly upon the grosser world of matter his spirit's exultant joy in its own divinity.
Man, made in God's image, delights to exercise the divine privilege oi thinking — of projecting ideas. When these ideas are truly related to physical things they are Science; wjien truly related to mental things they are Philosophy ; and when they are truly related to spiritual things they are Religion. But one comes who, with a rare instinct that includes them all, looks on the beauteous order of the world, and, telling what he sees, re-expresses them in a more perfect form, revivified by love and clothed in love- liness. His work is Art — Art which divinely shows truth so clothed in vesture of visible beauty that men are irresistibly drawn to it in love. Thus Art is the perfect flower of human thought. It is believed, and even insisted on by some, that while this may be true of the Art of Literature — and especially of Poetry — it is not true of those arts such as Painting and Sculpture, which deal with a more material basis than words. Human thought in Painting and Sculpture must depend for its expres- sion on the successful manipulation of materials taken crude from the inanimate world — pigments,inarble,or clay ; wliile words, the basis of Literature, are already divested of material, being, indeed, a sublimated and selected product of vital thought. It is there- fore contended that for the expression of the highest aspirations and the purest and farthest-reaching thoughts, man must refuse to be trammelled and clogged by anything more material than words ; in short, that Poetry, pure and simple, can express thoughts and feelings and aspirations diviner far than can ever be embodied in Painting or in Sculp- ture.
This belief is not only prevalent, it is all but uni- versal in our day. The language of words is at present far more intelligible to Western civilisation than is the language of the painter's or the sculptor's art. There are reasons why it may always remain so, one alone being enough to account for it — from infancy we are all accustomed to use words as the vehicle of ideas. Most people for half a life-
