The Evolution of Art. 303 



getting power of the cottou-gin had given way to the moral 

 power of righting a great wrong. 



While such a contest was raging in a new land with lives 

 to preserve and fortunes to gain and maintain, is it any 

 wonder that the fields of the highest arts were sterile, the 

 fountains of beauty ran dry, and the deep-thinking man of 

 the present can find no phenomenal greatness in its artists ? 

 Even now we are sustaining, by the wisdom of our national 

 legislature, the Chinese wall against foreign paintings and 

 sculpture which our fathers timidly reared. Let us not be 

 deceived. We must look for our great artists in heaven. 



The prevailing tendency in our country to-day is one of 

 practical betterment in goods and estates. It is the fame of 

 the soldier, the wealth of the millionaire, and the power of 

 the politician that captivates the eye of our growing youth. 

 The press and the pulpit are disputing supremacy, not in 

 the realms of classic art, but in the arena of commanding 

 results, and the results to be commanded are safety in gov- 

 ernment, safety hereafter, economy in the management of 

 public affairs, and such a development and extension of the 

 facilities of money-getting as will most largely benefit the 

 common people. The daily aim and object of the average 

 citizen of the world in this present year 1891 is to get above 

 his fellows in power, and power with a vast majority means 

 money. The overburdened tax-payer cares not who is 

 mayor of his city so long as his tax-rate is lowered. Four 

 centuries before Christ the citizens of Cnidus were offered 

 by Nicomedes the discharge of their entire debt in exchange 

 for a statue which Praxiteles had created, but they kept the 

 statue. What works of art in any of our great cities would 

 weigh for a moment in value, taken together, against its 

 debt, in the opinion of its suffrage-brokers ? 



To this end the thrifty arts are those which obtain a 

 market the useful arts, as the authorities classify them. 

 The man who can invent the liveliest egg-beater rides in his 

 carriage, while the artist, from the soft eyes of whose crea- 

 tion the soul of centuries shines, walks afoot, content if he 

 be allowed his modest share of the king's highway. A 

 patent car-coupler, a talking-machine, increasing a hundred- 

 fold the contact of man with man, putting vast continents 

 in touch with one another across intervening oceans, carries 

 with it the capital prizes of wealth and honor, and the 

 mean soul who has nothing to offer but the perpetuation of 

 some phase of natural beauty on his canvas sits hungering 



