136 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



by their origin and by their general directive principles, that 

 the best art is that which conies closet to nature, and the best 

 artist is he who remains most natural. No one waxes more 

 eloquent than Ruskin in placing at the head of all creative 

 geniuses those who feel the stars, sky, storms, mountains, 

 flowers, animals, seasons, sunrises and all the varying phe- 

 nomena of night, day, climate, etc. Professor Vachon, who 

 has just finished the most comprehensive report, in several 

 quarto volumes, of the condition of art in various countries 

 in Europe, and the unknown author of one of the most 

 popular books of recent years, "Rembrandt als Erzieher," 

 agree in two conclusions : first, that the best artists are those 

 who conserve most completely into maturity and old age the 

 sentiments and ideas of youth at its prime ; and, secondly, 

 that most of those who approach the top of the ladder of fame 

 in all lines of art are those who have been inspired by the en- 

 vironment in which the most susceptible years of youth were 

 passed, and who have succeeded in expressing most com- 

 pletely its natural responses to the experiences thus sug- 

 gested. 



III. The same law holds in literature, provided we con- 

 sider only those lands in which it has had an indigenous ori- 

 gin. The contents and substance of the old Aryan literature, 

 as Max Miiller has spent his life in showing, are largely 

 faded metaphors, describing dawn, clouds, storm, lightning, 

 personified, and their common phenomena made into allego- 

 ries of human life. .Hercules and William Tell were, as the 

 world knows, simply solar heroes, as the etymology of their 

 names and their achievements show. Diana is the moon, 

 Ahayhu the storm, Vulcan is fire, Jove the sky, etc. The 

 same is true in early Teutonic literature. Brunhilde, Thor, 

 Hagen, are also nature deities. Early French literature 

 shows us primitive animal tales, like Reynard the fox, said 

 to have had no less than a thousand forms and editions, and 

 to have been wrought over in symbolic form and made into 

 material of warfare in long controversies between Catholics 

 and Protestants. iEsop shows another older cycle of similar 

 origin and purport. Animals are said to reflect human life. 

 Take any collection of totems, stories or comparative study 

 of cosmology, and we find the same rule. Among the 



