The San Francisco call., 1895-05-22

ter who translates the divine word of beauty
into a human and comprehensive language
by which we are enabled to understand it our
selves and to convey it to others. Art .holds
up its mirror to nature" and reflects therein
such phases and moods of beauty especially
appeal to mans imagination and minister to
his inner craving for the harmonious and per
feet. Whatever is lovely, or picturesque, or
sublime or awful in the landscape, whatever is
pleasing or ennobling in human history, what
ever visions of beauty and bliss come
to the soul kindled by the higher
emotions, art seeks to embody and pre-
serve for US. She speaks her message to
mankind in many different tones. Sometimes
she chooses poetry as the vehicle OF her reve-
lation. The poets OF the race. Isaiah, Homer
and Virgil. Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe and
Tennyson, are SO many artists who use the
flexible medium Of language in which to re-
produce for us their conceptions of nature and
human life. Sometimes the message comes
through the scuptors and painters whose
glorious creations adorn and ennoble the
world. Such were Phidias and Michael An
| immortal company. 1t is the beautiful which
architecture seeks to represent to us. In
early ages, on the plains of Egypt
and palace. the artist sought for the
colossal as the highest form of beauty. Under
the sunshine of Greece the builders OF the Par
while the religious enthusiasm of medieval
Christianity reared those grand cathedrals,
whose heaven-soaring spires and pinnacles are
| the symbol of an infinite longing after the
beauty of holiness
| Last OF all the arts to be developed is music
| the greatest and divinest OF all. For she COM
| bines In herself what is most characteristic in
| all the others. She has the delicacy and pre-
| cision of the poets art, the warmth and full
| ness OF painting and the chasteness and har-
mony of sculpture and architecture. SYM
| phony of Beethoven is the sublimated language
| OF beauty-it is the TRANSPORTATION of art.
| Such, then, are the various arts which COM
| mend the gospel of beauty to the human SOUL
| Their mission is to lift man above the drudgery
and care of material life, to win him from bsser
pleasures and pursuits, to fill his eyes with
| beauty and his heart with gladness. Art thus
| becomes high means of culture to mankind,
| a leading instrumentality in the divine educa-
| ton of the race.
| We know that this was esteemed the function
of art in times gone by and among the most
| cultivated nations of antiquity.
Such, however, is not the esteem it enjoys in
| our own day and generation. Our young Ma
ton, thus far in Its history, has been too much
absorbed in the tolls and cares for daily bread
| to enable it to devote much thought to the
| cerned mis- personal freedom and social and po-
| litical rights.
| For the refining pursuits of art we have as
| yet little taste or leisure We leave them to be
| them it is as occasional amusement rather
/ than as a continued and serious study.
| This, however, is great mistake on our part,
| and one for which we pay dearly both IN the
| character and scope OF our American life. Art
is not an amusement merely-iti is high and
is not to be confined to the few-it is for all, as
| science is for all, as virtue is for all.
| One OF the greatest of English writers laid
down Miltou's "Paradise Lost" with the re-
mark what does it prove?" Another, Sir
Isaac Newton, spoke contemptuously of the
marbles in o neighboring art gallery as s'stone
| dolls" Such men may have possessed pro-
digious reasoning power and exceled in the