have no cause to be doubtful of our power to make our lives beautiful with art. But we have work to do, and bad tendencies to escape or resist, if we would have it so.

Our national evil genius is mediocrity. And the form it takes with us is the undue respect we have for commonplace work. The criticism of the first stage, which we have said is passed, consisted entirely of praise for the commonplace. But there is still praise of the commonplace. The whole spirit of ordinary journalism, ordinary schooling, ordinary preaching, ordinary writing on science, philology, metaphysics, is simple mediocrity. But little profound learning exists in America. That is not the worst: shallow learning thinks itself profound, and tries to teach and decide. But little patient thought is in America. That could be borne: but crude speculations and hasty conclusions are supposed to be worth preserving and publishing, and old things are rediscovered with great triumph to the discoverer. In nothing is this mediocrity more marked or more injurious than in the fine arts.

The great cause of this satisfaction with the mediocre is, of course, ignorance that there is anything better, or at least ignorance of the nature of the better thing. The criticism of false praise, of which we have spoken, is only possible because of this ignorance. The writer of current criticism is generally a friend of many of the painters whose work he criticises; he desires to please them, and has no suspicion that by his foolish flattery he is retarding, as far as he can, the whole progress of art and the civilization of his country; moreover, he cannot but believe that the work of So-and-so, who talks so intelligently, and who so well understands all the principles of art, is good and valuable. Now, if he were taught what good and valuable art really is, and what good criticism is, he could no longer, unless a knave, go on in his evil course. Who, for instance, would praise a feeble landscape, the hasty work of a popular artist, telling the spectator nothing about nature more profound than an observing glance out of a car-window would show, if he had ever learned what a great landscape might be? A sure remedy for too easy praising would be familiarity with a good landscape or two, or, if one cannot get to see them on canvas, familiarity with the plates of "The Rivers of France," or even with the

mountain drawings engraved in the fourth volume of " Modern Painters," not the American edition. The mischievous indifference which deprecates as narrow and bigoted every attempt to call bad art by the name it deserves, and to give to feeble art its true status, would disappear, if people could be made to see the nature and feel the use of really good art.

Although not invincible, but even easily destroyed if attacked in the right way, mediocrity is our worst enemy, because not attacked in the right way. It will be found very hard to weaken it or diminish its influence, because very hard to bring any large class of the people to understand it.

We have had better than clever and good things in literature. We have not been entirely ruled by mediocrity in our poetry and our meditative writing, for instance. There is nothing mediocre about our best writers' work: it is all good, and much of it great. And this is, first, because our poets and prose-writers speak a language understood by their readers; and, second, because they deal with things cared for by their readers, with real things. If we can put painting, for instance, on this same footing, we shall be able to emancipate it also from the rule of mediocrity. For, as we have seen, the artist or poet must be helped and cheered by the sympathy and urged by the demands of the public, that he may do the best work of which he is capable.

The singular revival of art in Europe, during the past forty years, has been a revolution in the interest of "naturalism" and "realism." It will be well to define these two words, for they are often used as if synonymous. Naturalism is defined by its chiefest apostle to be "the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artificial law." This definition is given of the naturalism of the Gothic architects. This is also the most exact use of the word, when used in connection with modern art in general, including all the arts that cluster around the central art of architecture. When used in connection with representative art only, that is, the art which has for its object the direct representation of nature, it may be with

* Stones of Venice, Vol. II. p. 181.

greater accuracy defined as careful study of nature, and representation of nature with reference to accuracy and completeness of portraiture.

Realism has to do with naturalism, and is akin to it, but is not at all the same thing. It is the desire and effort to see everything visible as it truly and essentially is, and to conceive of everything not visible as it might be and probably would be. It is the effort to avoid affectation, academical laws, and prescribed formulas, and to work from the disciplined natural sense of right alone.

It will be seen that realism can exist without naturalism. That design for a house is realistic, according to which the stone and wood and iron are used each in strict accordance with its nature and properties as a building material; and according to which the outside accommodates itself to and displays the internal arrangement. But no naturalism is present where there is no representation of natural forms. In a poem or picture representative of human character or emotion, it is realism that considers and decides upon the appropriate gesture and expression of the figures; it is naturalism that paints directly from nature, or from recollection of nature, the colors and shadows of flesh, drapery, and foliage. There is a false use of the word "naturalism," as the contrary of idealism, in that vicious popular art-slang which separates painters into two classes as naturalists and idealists. The utter inaccuracy of this use of the word is easily seen, for there are no truer idealists than the great naturalistic painters, whether in the past or in the present, and indeed no other true idealists than they.

The signification of the word "idealism," used in modern talk about art, is modern. We need not go to the dictionaries to pronounce it a false signification. Idealism is the doctrine that nothing exists in reality, but that all things supposed perceptible to the senses are but ideas of the mind. Ideality is the word nearest in meaning to the meaning given in art-slang to idealism. But we have no choice. We use, for the nonce, the word "idealism" to mean the power and disposition to form and express ideas, particularly ideas of perfection. If a landscape painting, for instance, represents, not one particular scene, but the idea which the artist has formed from the contemplaVOL. CII. NO. 210.

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tion of many scenes, as when a painter wishes to represent on one canvas the characteristic peculiarities of a large tract of country, the united power and desire to form those ideas and express them we call idealism. Whether it be good idealism or not depends entirely upon the answers to these two questions: Is the idea a true and noble one? Is the expression of it just and adequate? So that idealism in art has no existence without the pre-existence of realism, at least; nor, generally, without the pre-existence of naturalism also.

These words should be used only to avoid circumlocutory phrases, which would otherwise be necessary. If we use these three words strictly in this way, naturalism, in art, would be the depicting what the body's eye has seen; idealism would be the depicting what the mind's eye has seen; realism would signify clear-sightedness and faithfulness of record in either.

The work of our best authors is good, and much of it is great, and it is useful to the people, all because the public mind sustains the writers in their work. And the public mind sustains them because they speak a language understood by the people, and deal with things cared for by the people, with real things. Does this phrase "real things" exclude ideal things, ideas? By no means. Ideas are as real as visible existences. They exist none the less because they are invisible, just as heat and light exist none the less because they are imponderable. The things cared for by the people may be visible, may be mental, may be moral. And the phrase "cared for by the people" does not exclude things which the public ought to care more for than it does, nor things which only a part of the people care for. We say that the best American writers deal with things which Americans are interested in and about. We say that they treat of these things in a language which addresses itself to, and is clearly understood by, Americans.

The artists must do the same; they must speak a language understood by the people, and deal with things cared for by the people,— with real things. guage understood by the people. wrong way of stating the necessity. the people must understand the language of the artists? Not

They must speak a lanThis seems, at first, the Should it not rather be,

so. The artists have this matter in their power, the people have not. It is true that some knowledge of drawing is good for everybody; modelling in wax or cutting heads in alabaster is good play for boys; drafting plans and elevations of buildings is good study for the junior year in college; sketching architecture, where good architecture can be had, is a delightful way to study drawing. But the knowledge that can thus be gained of the artists' language is but slight, and even this cannot be gained by many. The large majority of those who look at a picture, a building, or a statue, can have no more knowledge of the artists' language than the artists themselves have given them.

The artists' language is form and color, and it is essential to the prosperity and usefulness of art that this language should be so used by the artists that the people can understand it. If a painter, for instance, paint a human face exactly as it looks, in shadow, color, contour, or a tree as it looks on a summer day, in twinkling light, flickering shadow, outline of varying sharpness against the sky, such language the people can understand; they can "go to nature" if they doubt the truthfulness of the painter's statement, and be satisfied one way or the other. But if a painter paint trees or faces or waves as the looker has never seen them, as he cannot see them in nature, as perhaps the looker knows they never are in nature, and assumes that so, and not as in nature, ought they to be, such language the people cannot understand. Whatever power is in the people to understand the painters' language can be developed by the painters, if these latter choose to show the people only careful and firm painting of things as they are. They must not limit themselves to the common and every-dayseen phenomena of nature. If there are strange effects of light or color, they should be painted, carefully and thoroughly painted, every differing manifestation of the strange phenomenon. But the every-day effects must be painted too. In a few years every person who has by nature any love for beauty should be made familiar with good representations on canvas of all the more ordinary aspects of nature, the look of ordinary midday sunlight on grass, of the shadows at the same time and place, of still blue water, of a surf on a rock-bound