THE EVOLUTION OF ART. 



BY JOHN A. TAYLOR. 



THE continuing wonder of mankind is man. What he 

 has achieved in the past is at once the inspiration and the 

 harbinger of what he shall achieve in the future. 



The history of human effort is briefer than we are wont 

 to realize. Speaking within the chronicles of recorded his- 

 tory, more has been produced by man during the past five 

 centuries of the hundreds of thousands of years during 

 which he has walked upright upon the earth than during 

 all the previous period. Indeed, it might be possible to 

 demonstrate that the century now entering upon its last 

 decade has witnessed the creation of more potent instru- 

 ments of human advancement than all its predecessors com- 

 bined. And, in the broadest sense in which it is permitted 

 to speak of art, it may be safely asserted that at no age of 

 the world has human effort been more abundantly crowned 

 with success than in the present. 



Art is the consummate product of the human being. It 

 presents itself as the result of all the knowledge of the 

 past, of all the opportunities of the present, and its possi- 

 bilities for the future constitute one of the chiefest motives 

 for human effort. 



Nature is the great laboratory in which stands man, the 

 chemist. Her laws are all about him, her substances are 

 his to mold and combine, her glorious skies bend over him 

 to thrill his soul with images of beauty, her abundant har- 

 vests sustain his waning strength, her violent catastrophes 

 set limitations to his ambition. What he shall do with 

 these supplies at hand has measured, and will forever meas- 

 ure, his own creative skill. And yet all the grandeur and 

 beauty of Nature are, in a sense, subservient to the adaptive 

 skill of man. Mr. Chadwick, in an off-hand speech, not 

 long since, said : " Not what he can get out of it, but what 

 he puts into it, is what makes a good artist." And is it not 

 this creative power which has had most to do with the 

 evolution of the race ? 



Was there not much truth in the enthusiastic outburst of 

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