The ornamental arts are still more significant in reference to the diffusion and increase of human happiness. The beauty of a work is more than half the joy of its production. Moreover, few persons can give much time to music, painting, and the like, while all are continually surrounded with that universal art which is civilization itself, in its materiality. Rising up and sitting down, at home or abroad, in the street or in the cultivated country, we can hardly see or touch anything that is not a piece of human art, and as such either truly or falsely designed, and well or ill finished. They whose life is mostly within doors are especially shut up to human work as their constant visible object of contemplation, entering largely into the formative influences that mould their character and the daily elements that make up their happiness, be they producers, as the most are, or only observers. Everything that pertains to a household, for example, is a work of art, not wonderful only because familiar. The princes of the Japanese embassy, while in New York, examined a large stock of hardware, and purchased nothing but a quantity of tin plates; had they been savages, they would even have decorated themselves with these plates. A tin cup is one of the humblest things that concern us; yet it is as truly an instance of ornamental design as a golden goblet; it has the fundamental elements of beauty; it exhibits the straight line, the circle, angles, the cylinder or cone, proportion, graduated light and shade, surface finish, and perhaps in its handle the infinite curves and infinite shadings which are the secret of most perfect beauty. The goblet has little more. A Scotch writer well remarks: "We are beginning to understand that art is not painting, is not sculpture, merely, but a much larger matter, embracing, with architecture as the mistress, every department of technic production, on the results of which æsthetic meaning may be impressed." For the sake of daily human enjoyment, therefore, we should educate ourselves rightly to produce, select, and enjoy that workmanship which is common. Not many can so much as see, still fewer can possess, the great works of man's hand, pictorial or sculptural; all may be environed with the beautiful.

The highest argument for the arts of design is more dis

tinctly Christian. One of the grandest features of Christian civilization is an expansion of the former luxuries of the few into the comfort and blessing of the many. In nothing more strikingly than in this is the elevating and equalizing power of the Gospel shown. Imprudence and extravagance, into which the comparatively poor sometimes run, is but an incidental evil, that may well be overlooked in a most pious thankfulness at seeing a mechanic's home better carpeted and as well furnished in every way as were once the rooms of princes, and little less luxuriously than are now the houses of the rich. The silks and velvets of an industrious Irish girl, exchanged for the squalor of a Galway hut, or the rags of an immigrant's American shanty, and as costly as the dress of her mistress, are among the most manifest tokens of the kingdom come and coming. He who can see their bright hues fluttering along the street on a Sunday, and not feel like singing a metre of the seventy-second Psalm, is blind to the signs of "the latter-day glory." Furthermore, it is peculiarly Christian to find nobility and dignity in that which is common, such as the most ordinary appliances of civilized life, even as it is in the same spirit to love and exalt the poor and the outcast. One of the Prophets does not consider it beneath his theme to close his long, sublime message with an allusion to the commonest ornaments and utensils; he crowns his Messianic vision by saying, "In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses Holiness to the Lord, and the pots of the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar," in other words, the least things shall not only be consecrated by the spirit of piety, but also (may we not add?) by the spirit of Divine beauty, investing the very pots of the kitchen with something of the grace that shapes the golden bowls of the altar, and harmonizing all external life with the moral glory of a reformed world,- symbolizing, too, the spirit of the Gospel, which magnifies the humble, and lifts up the degraded.

As already hinted, we have to rid ourselves of the thought that ornament is some gewgaw, some frippery, pinned on or nailed on something else, and which might as well be put off as put on. Many individuals, thus poorly apprehending it, despise the whole matter, except as it may connect itself with VOL. XCV. NO. 196.

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trade. Ornament, and its intense derivative word adorn, originally mean to beautify, and embrace not only adjuncts, but all which exceeds the primary purpose and necessity of a thing, and is adapted to produce a pleasurable effect, especially of a relative sort. Throw together a mass of discolored materials, without order; if they be made to enclose a habitable space, protected from wind and rain, you have a house. But if the materials be put together with but the slightest reference to form, hue, or to appearance as involved in situation, the structure at once begins to partake of the ornamental. This quality attaches itself to whatever may be properly said to have shape, color, or place. Color and curve adorn a carved leaf; the leaf, a moulding; the moulding, a cornice; the cornice, a house; the house, a landscape; the landscape, a world; the world, a universe; yea, the whole universe is but a jewel on the finger of God. We grant that a distinction is to be made when form is thought of simply in respect to mechanical and scientific exigencies; but this distinction may be dropped, since there is such a thing as "functional beauty," and since all beauty springs from the root of use. All that rightly adorns, as will yet be shown, is a blossoming forth of essential nature, an outflash of essential being. In popular language, the distinction may also be dropped which limits the term decoration to adjuncts, and embellishment to finish.

It is evident, then, that ornament, in its worthiest sense, includes all beauty, namely, as regarded in certain relations; that it enters into the very idea of civilization, and of any cosmos, as opposed to chaos; that it is not this or that piece of superfluous finery stuck upon something and as well slipped off, but is a light and character in which all things may be considered. Manifestly the idea embraces all the art of nature and of man. We speak of ornature, and we think only of a rose-petal, or gold-leaf, or a marble tassel; but the greatest art-critic has wisely said, (we condense his language,) that "the only essential distinction between decorative and other art is the being fitted for a place, and in that place related to the effect of other pieces of art. The best sculpture yet produced has been the decoration of a temple-front, the best painting the decoration of a room. Raphael's best doing

is merely the wall-coloring of a suite of apartments, and his cartoons were made for tapestries. Titian and Veronese threw out their noblest thoughts, not even on the inside, but on the outside of the common brick and plaster walls of Venice."

We are partly prepared now to reply to certain objections and fallacies, — partly, inasmuch as the whole subject, as it often happens, is the full answer.

The most respectable prejudice against the ornamental arts is the would-be Biblical, — a strange one, for it runs counter to the economy of the Old Testament, and to the silence and the true spirit of the New. The most common temptation to excess of ornament is offered in dress, no doubt; and it is in this connection that the Bible utters an express caution. Yet we are encouraged to believe that God will much more clothe us than the martagon lily, the royally scarlet petals of which are so reflexed into an Oriental turban, or the arches of a modern crown, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as splendidly. It may be urged that all decoration is none the less enfiladed by the apostolic warning, to wit, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with sobriety; not with broidered hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array. We reply, that it is a precept to adorn, not the contrary, and that it regulates only the spirit of adornment. Taken, as all Scripture should be taken, not narrowly in the letter, but broadly in the spirit, it is aimed, not at nature's own gold and pearls, but at extravagance, vanity, frivolity; the precious substances named being rather the glowing imagery than the object of the Apostle's thought, and perhaps the Asiatic imagination creating both the peculiar need and the language of the caution. If here, as elsewhere, the Apostle's diction was richly broidered, even when he was discoursing of temperance in dress, much more would the "weaker vessels" be tempted to magnificence of attire. The most abject literalist must at last confess that long hair is as obviously fit to be plaited as silk is to be woven, and that pearls and gold were meant to be ornamental; and that these are no more to be wholly cut off and discarded, than the right hand is literally to be cut off, or the coat formally surrendered when the cloak is taken away.

It is very significant that the New Testament simply restrains one class of persons, and that in respect only to personal use of the arts of decoration.

Another victim of the same prejudice is the religious temple. But if the truths, that God is to be worshipped in spirit and everywhere, and that man is the true temple, forbid the costly and beautiful in Christian architecture, with equal force these truths prohibit the plainest house of prayer. The spirituality of Christianity is the antithesis simply of evil passions, and heartless religion, and a low morality; its simplicity is not opposed to complexity of art and of thought, but to guile and false philosophy. The high qualities mentioned are, in fact, antagonistic to this mole-eyed interpretation, which would belittle and materialize the Scriptures into teaching a gospel, not of Christian life, but of architecture poor in spirit, of humble steeples, of meek carpets, of mournful coats, of penitent bonnets, and, if possible, of faded roses, and songless birds. The final reign of Christianity is rather pictured in all the magnificence of a city walled with jewels; and "they shall bring the glory and honor of the nations into it," not exclude that glory and honor.

In the name of religion or morality, still other objections are brought, such as, that life is too brief and solemn for the arts of beauty, and that works of duty and charity demand all our time and resources. But is life too short and serious, are duty and charity too exacting, for the great multitude of laborers to earn their bread by work that is and must be decorative in no small degree?-to earn it, too, in the spirit of a dull, mechanical task, producing false and lifeless art, whereas, if they and others were to give thought and heart to the subject, their toil might be education and joy to them, to all? True seriousness, true benevolence, should not overlook considerations so palpable and weighty. To a like plausible fallacy, that the arts of embellishment lead to corruption of manners and of faith, we reserve a reply, only remarking that Christianity inspires to high civilization, and its ecclesiastical annals point to enough clear causes of its debasement without numbering the arts among them, only repeating, also, the sentiment of the great reformer of corrupt faith, that Satan should not have all the good music.