Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1885-10-29
No Art for Poor Columbia.

In connection with a monument to
Grant. some unnamed cynic writes
about art in the November North Amer
lean Review. He tells good deal of
queer il not bitter truth, but in so vivid
and picturesque style that he is evil
IDENTIFY some sold master Of English,
whatever else he may be. Hear him
sstake on.
The fist great achievement of the
American people was the Declaration
of Independence. and this solemn, mo-
mentous act of national manhood has
been celebrated for more than CEN
tury. There were hundred ways.
graceful and grave. in which Independ-
ence day might have been commemor-
ated and rendered sacred in the minds
of our rather pert and unrespecting
youth. Did we devise manner of cele-
bration noble and appropriate? Did we
even invent something strictly Ameri-
cam No! We went To the terrestrial
and intellectual antipodes and imported
a Chinese joliifcation By fre-crackers.
deliberately choosing to offer as our
tribute to Independence senseless
pandemonium of petty snappings, and
the incense of evil smell.
''Then we took hundred years to
build monument for the great SOL
der and statesman whom we delight to
call the Father of his Country And at
last, produced-what ? Something
whose Utmost significance is essentially
appropriate? On the contrary, we have
dedicated to Washington an obelisk-
that symbol which pious worshipers of
bulls and tomcats' upon the Nile had
consecrated as the special emblem of
Generation, and the particular privilege
of certain errotic potcntates. 1t is idle
to say that the obelisk has been habili-
tated and purged by its associations
with respectable graveyards. for its
misuse there does not in the least save
it from what Mr.. Gladstone calls the
fragrant symbolism made perpetual to
tho dedication to Osiris
This writer says @'there may be a
dozen good drawing-rooms in Amer
ica." Think, o daughters of the land
But here, perhaps, is the cynic's
choicest morsel of criticism.
Lately statue of the Puritan was
unveiled in Central Park, with the ordi-
nary amount of eloquence and cere-
mony, which, from time to time, marks
the conversion of that sylvan retreat in
to sort of Madame Toussauds. This
particular work seems 10 the writer to
be well up to Mr.. Wards high mark of
excellence, even to possess some very
unusual merits; but the ceremony of
unwilling would have thrown the whole
'Mayflowcr' into fits. The solemn
Puritan quenched, within his English,
home-loving heart, that fire of local at
tachment which is afiame in every true
Briton, and came sad and weary pill
grim to the inhospitable shore of a
bowling wilderness. To free himself
from the English church on one hand,
and the free-thinkers of his day on the
other. he turned his back on all the
charm of England. and accepted, what,
even now, can hardly be called gay, a
life in Massachusetts,. At last, here in the
very capital of our dear bourgeois civil-
cation, we erect statue of this austere
parsonage of two hundred years ago
We are not given to self-denals our
selves; we don't particularly care to
make even small sacrifices for religion,
we have changed all that. But. one zine
day, we find ourselves ready with a fine
work of art, appropriately swathed in
its so called veil. and then what do we
do? We commit the ceremonies to an
Episcopal Bishop and an Agnostic!-th
very two characters the poor Puritan
went into Punishment to get rid of If
we were to set up a statue of St. Thorn
as Aquinas tomorrow, ten to one we
should ask Bob Ingersoll to make the
GRAFTON, and invite Aimee to sing I'm
mari sage