The Indiana State sentinel. [volume] (Indianapolis) 1868-1895, 1891-05-27

in it. Remember that dew-drop glisten-
ing in the sun is just as beautiful as
rainbow. n. Pdrkhurst..
Truth is the most precious of blessings;
without it man is blind; It's the eye OF
reason .-ROUSseau.
The worthiest people are the most in
jured by SANDER. as we usually find that
TO be the best fruit which the birds have
been pecking at.-Dean SlCih.
It's not the greatness or number of my
sins that will ruin me, but my obstinate
impenitence and unbelieL-Fletcber Of
Sdhoun.
1t is far more easy to acquire fortune
like a knave than to expend it like
Christian.-ColtOn.
In the Art amateur for May the editor
makes the following remarks, called forth
by the recent protest of certain Philadel-
phia ladies against the nude in art:
There is the nude which is necessary
in the study of art and the nude that is
pure in the exhibition OF, art and nobody
knows better than artists and amateurs of
art that there is the nude that is neither
the one nor the other. 1t is well enough
to laugh at the laundering theory of the
Philadelphia matrons that the nude in
art is in itself indecent. That these we'll
meaning women could not discriminate
between the chaste 'Ariadne,' the beauti-
full pastoral painting of Van
derlyn, and tine naked female
studies which have no proper
place in picture exhibition, betrays de-
iective education. But this cannot affect
the truth that certain artists are much to
blame in thrusting gratuitously before the
public the forms of ugly and unidealized
mOdels-mere acadamic studies, whose
proper place is in tine artists portfolio, or
the wall of the studio. Should reaction
set in, as the recent demonstrations in
Philadelphia and in Boston would almost
forecast, a few of our professional painters
of the nude will have to bear the odium of
having set back, for a century, perhaps, the
national progress in aesthetic culture. Let
the managers of picture exhibitions con-
slider this matter seriously.
Literature and art occupy an essential
place in civilization. They are part and
parcel of a liberal education. Yet they
do not necessarily tend to promote
morality This is fact familiar 10 every
scholar. There should seem to be some
truth in Landor's sueer that there is a
spice of scoundrelism in most literary
men. We all know, or, know OF, artists
and literati who are more heathenish
than the heather, more Phllistine than
Goliath OF Gath. In Athens, the artistic
and literary period was precisely that
of the grossest moral degeneracy De-
mosthenes Numbered, but the people
quailed and surrendered to Philip. They
wOrshiped pictures and statues. poems and
orations and despised men and women.
What is true of classic Greece is
equally true of the middle ages.
The dreariest midnight OF immortality
occurred when art and letters were most
flourishing under the patronage of the
FlOrentine Medici.
Take Paris today. 'Tis beautiful body
without a soul-like Hawtorn's hero IN
the Marble Faun." Art and literature
are there as lofty as Mont Blanc, while
morality is as low down as the vale of
Chamouni. Art labors TO decorate vice.
Literature exists to pen bon mots against
virture
For such reasons as these moral teach
ers, while recognizing the ministry OF
letters to intellectualism, and the services
OF art to taste. nevertheless deny the
capacity of either or both TO replace the
church as manufacturers OF virtue. The
studio and the school must lean on the
pulpit. Culture is not morality.