In our American art there is little evidence, as yet, of a feeling for true sculpture such as one finds in the Hermes of Praxiteles, or the earlier Lemnia by Phidias. The disposition of our schools is to teach anatomy instead of forms, to exact details instead of masses. Herein one may fancy is our chief fault to-day, dwelling too much on what the eye can see with the outer mechanical mind, and too little on what the deeper intellect can feel. The full, round modeling in the Hermes does not indicate loss of planes, but the edges of these planes are so beautifully modeled that they have the round, full appearance of the divine form, the outer skin covering the work of the sculptor; whereas, a good deal of Anglo Saxon modeling is only the hard, tense muscles, or sinewed construction without feeling or one thought of that mysterious outer development known as the human skin. The Greeks knew how to clothe their nudes with this provision of nature, so that the machinery of the human construction played only a secondary part, as it does in reality. We gaze long into a beautiful face, but we do not think of muscle or flesh, we think only of the soul shining from the eyes, that radiant something we call the individual self, transfixing us by its own power. We see this and feel it in Greek sculpture; we feel the soul of Hermes in the statue by this great Greek genius. No god could sit without his outer skin and be contemplated with any kind of satisfaction by intelligent humanity. Art produces the godlike, not the absurd.

Healthy progress in American art can be made only when individual minds gather the great truths, the wonderful forms of beauty in line laid down by classic art.

In a certain sense there is no such thing as modern art; true art is ever ancient in feeling, dignified, calm, and godlike. Our noisy attempts at violent action is but a symbol of enfeebled intellect. A great mind never resorts to flamboyant and dramatic display; great genius seeks rather to impress other minds with the solemnity of dignified beauty, of splendid repose, and of masterful silence.

These horrible attempts to reproduce a Muybridge instantaneous photograph in sculpture are a sad commentary on our ideas.

The range of sculpture is limited only so far as human intellect is devoid of refinement of thought. As wealth digs itself out of the caves of commercial greed, it will find the artistic genius waiting in the sunlight, to show the way to a higher earthly appreciation of beauty.

AMERICAN LITERATURE.

BY WILLIAM S. WALSH.

[William Shepard Walsh, author and editor; born Paris, France, February 1, 1854; during all of his business life he has been engaged in literary work and in 1885 he became editor of Lippincott's magazine, which position he resigned to become connected with the New York Herald, of which he has been literary editor for the past ten years. Author of Faust, the Legend and the Poem, Paradoxes of a Philistine, Handy Book of Literary Curiosities, Curiosities of Popular Antiquities, and many articles in periodicals.]

It is a commonplace with modern science that everything extant presumes an ancestor. Nobody ever believes that Pallas Athene sprang full grown from the forehead of Jupiter. Even if Dr. Burke, over in England, succeeds in producing life by mechanical means it will be shown immediately that he has only expedited the natural processes of parenthood.

So it need not disturb us if American literature exhibits traces of descent from European, and especially from English literature, just as all modern literatures derive from antiquity. England and the Teutons, France and the Celts, Spain and the Latins are in our blood and in our brains. Rich and strange, indeed, is the sea change they have suffered.

Nor need the twin accusation, that American literature was of slow development, detain us long. America was not America until after the revolution. The national spirit was born with the national constitution. For generations the territory now known as the United States was a mere aggregation of colonies, English, French and Spanish.

And if these colonies produced few books it is because they were settled by the sort of Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards who devoted their energies to the production. of other things than books. They were mostly adventurers in the good old heroic sense. There were comparatively few scholars among them. They uttered themselves in action, or at most in the spoken as against the written word. They had to live their Odyssey, not to sing it. Yet the love of the beautiful survived in them and in their descendants, and was stimulated into expression as later adventurers of

a gentler sort invaded the fields and pastures which the pioneers had established in the wilderness.

Even from the first, indeed, this gentler element was not all lacking. It has been the fashion to describe the roundheads of New England as middle and lower class Englishmen, while the cavaliers of the Old Dominion are enrolled in the courtlier ranks. In actual fact, both bodies of settlers possessed members known alike to the college of arms and to the universities, although both were largely recruited from the tradesmen and the yeomanry. Further, however, it is a fact that the dominant social and mental element in the north was the Puritanic, which despite Milton and Bunyan has contributed little to literature, while in the south it was that of the fox hunting squire, which, despite Somerville, has contributed even less. So it is not surprising that neither in quality nor in quantity was the early output of either section at all notable.

The first American contribution to English belles-lettres was George Sandys' scholarly translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, done on the banks of the James river, and issued in London in 1626. The first book printed in British America was the notorious Bay Psalm Book, a doggerel version of the psalms issued at Cambridge in 1610.

Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, "the tenth muse lately sprung up in America," as the English title page to her poems described her, sprung up in Massachusetts, of which province her husband was governor, but she was intellectually a sister to the cavalier poets and a transatlantic exponent of the flowery conceited age of Charles I. Of the other literary remains of the seventeenth century it is sufficient to recall those historically valuable documents, John Smith's True Relation and General History, John Winthrop's History of New England and the misnamed Mourt's Relation, written by William Bradford and Edward Winslow and to allude in passing to the now seldom read, yet not yet quite unreadable verses of Benjamin Thompson, and that curious medley of mockery and philosophy, The Simple Cobbler of Aggensam by Nathaniel Ward.

It has been remarked that the earlier Americans dealt with the spoken rather than the written word. Perhaps that is the reason why their descendants are and have been so notably proficient as public speakers. A common saying abroad credits every American with being a born orator. Americans have always distinguished themselves on the hustings, at the bar, and in the pulpit.

Massachusetts, eminent in polemics from its foundation, rose to pre-eminence when Jonathan Edwards (170358) became the most commanding ecclesiastical figure in Christendom. In poetical imagination Edwards has been likened to Shakespeare and to Dante. Lord Kames and Sir James Mackintosh ranked him among the most original of the world's metaphysicians. He is the typical representative of Calvinism in that first half of the eighteenth century, when Calvinism was at its apogee. On the other hand his mental antipodes, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), is probably the most perfect summary of the latter half of the eighteenth century, its skepticism, its utilitarianism, its shrewdness, its sagacity, its scientific curiosity. Franklin's homely common sense possessed all the surprising quality of the most audacious genius. His life is the very romance of the unromantic. From the time when his quaint exterior as he munched a penny roll in the Philadelphia streets attracted the amused attention of the young girl who afterwards became his wife, to that when as minister plenipotentiary from a baker's dozen of revolted states he appeared in homespun garb at the most splendid of European courts to receive the homage of princes, poets, philosophers and potentates, he remains an impressive mixture of the whimsical and the magnificent. His scientific discoveries were all the more startling for the simple and lucid manner in which he announced them. Because he dared to be himself he was the greatest literary force that America had yet presented to the world. Yet, in the Autobiography which must remain for all time a model in this form of literary composition, he does not scruple to inform us how he had learned the elements of his trade from Addison and Steele.