SCIENCE AND FINE ART. 753 



The investigator can also be comforted witli the knowledge 

 that a thoughtless multitude enjoying the benefits conferred upon 

 it by him, hardly knows to whom it owes them ; that while the 

 name of every musical virtuoso is in all mouths, and is certain 

 of immortality in the Conversations-Lexicons of the fashionable 

 classes, the name is substantially unknown among us of him who 

 achieved that supreme triumph of inventive genius of making 

 perceptible, through a copper wire stretched over wide regions and 

 over mountain and valley, the sound of a voice as though it was 

 speaking into our ears. " Knowledge is earnest, art is happy," we 

 might paraphrase the poet's expression, without lessening its ap- 

 plicability. Art is the empire of the beautiful ; of the creation of 

 that which inspires in us a semi-sensational, semi-spiritual pleas- 

 ure ; and saying this we also say that it is in its widest scope an 

 empire of freedom. In it rule no stiff laws ; no strict causality 

 binds the events of the present to those of the past and of the fu- 

 ture ; no standard unconditionally warrants success. The chang- 

 ing taste of times, peoples, and men assumes to praise and blame, 

 as when the magnificence of Gothic church architecture became 

 the sport of the eighteenth century. Here the definition of genius 

 as the talent for patience goes to the ground ; its happy inspira- 

 tion produces a picture that seizes us and lifts us up with an ele- 

 mentary power which seems to mock the profound interpretation 

 subsequently imposed upon it by art criticism ; and the favored 

 hand which perfects it is also a benefactor of care-laden manhood. 

 It unfortunately lies in the nature of things that such force is not 

 developed in every age. Here at one time the highest development 

 is attained in some one direction, in trying to reach which again 

 generation after generation despondently exhausts itself. The 

 finest art theories can neither lift the individual over the limits of 

 his natural ability; nor in the great whole prepare a better destiny 

 for a declining art period. Of what profit is the discussion con- 

 cerning idealism and realism which has divided the art world 

 for a considerable time ? Has it protected us against the hardly 

 tolerable excesses of the latter? Seek for something new; the 

 bold raising of a standard which the untaught multitude blindly 

 follows, will bear the victory, till the antiquated is in some way 

 supplemented by the fresh, or till a personality of commanding 

 altitude unquestionably achieves the mastery. 



Still less can pure science help art; and thus, intrinsically 

 alien to one another, without either materially influencing the 

 other, they go each its own way — the one steadily rising, some- 

 times more rapidly, sometimes more slowly, the other rising and 

 falling in majestic waves. To desire to stamp one of the two, art 

 alone, as the mark of the highest development of the power of the 

 human mind, as not rarely occurs to persons unfamiliar with 



TOL. XL. — 51 



