JOACHIM ELMEITDOKF. 19 



which he calls art ; but common sense suggests that 

 subjects vary endlessly, and that even genius cannot 

 make anything more of a subject than is naturally in it. 

 And unsophisticated reason asks why appointed and ac- 

 cepted teachers cannot oftener talk and write about art 

 and nature in words that mean something to ordinary in- 

 telligence, rather than in stilted technicalities and iter 

 ated, tiresome platitudes, which so often amount to vox 

 etpreteria nihil and much disappointment? 



Nature in its relation to art, must be the great, divine, 

 universal system of things in which we live, soliciting 

 the student of nature, according to the penetration and 

 range of his own insight, to discern their beauties, and 

 interpret their meaning in words or tones or forms or col- 

 ors, to the apprehension of the common mind. 



And that the common mind may be readier to receive 

 and appreciate and realize the uplifting power of true 

 beauty, its misty impressions of art need to be cleared 

 by specific, adapted instruction as to its nature, princi- 

 ples and aims ; its restricted idea of art needs to be ex- 

 panded, so that the word shall bring to the thought po- 

 etry, music, architecture, as quickly as it now suggests 

 painting and sculpture, and shall rouse the expectations 

 of fresh revelations of beauty by the former, equally as 

 by the latter. 



The often pained modesty of the common mind may 

 also need to be told that, in the early periods of Greek 

 art, and in its most brilliant epochs, draped figures, es- 

 pecially female figures, outnumbered those that were 

 nude "fifty to one;" and it may also be assured that, no 

 true art-interests, through the growth and dominance of 

 true art principles and aims, can now or ever demand the 

 creations of chisel or pencil, which shall wound the most 

 refined sensibility ; or can make that delicate and proper 

 which is essentially indelicate or nude. 



It is very pleasing to believe that this Institute, by the 



