ART. III.-THE MINISTRY OF ART.

ART is not merely to rejoice and adorn man's being, but is necessary to his just balance and crowning. The true artistbe his language architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, or music-is ordained for the enrichment of human life. He reveals the scenes, invisible to so many, where heaven and earth meet and celestial glory mingles with commonplace realities. A great teacher of our day--one of its prophetshas said, "To the discernment of truth and beauty, to the arousing of man's imagination, to the widening of the span of this celestial region art is mainly dedicated, and this most truly is its mission." "I am convinced," writes Delaroche, a great French painter, "that painting, as much as literature, may act upon public opinion." Painting, art in all its forms, is literature for those who can read it.

That art has a religious mission is evident alike from its nature, history, and subjects. Dante declared that "art is God's grandchild." What did he mean by this aphorism? Probably, like many seers, he saw in the universe the expression of God's thought, and in man the crowning creation of the infinite Artist, the most significant manifestation of his glory. This was a part of Paul's thought in the passage, "The invisible things of Him. . . are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead." Shakespeare also says, "What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!" And man, in apprehension like a god, has a similar longing to create, to express his thoughts and desires in sensuous forms. When he does thus create, Dante would call his work "art," or "God's grandchild." As in the creation of the world, "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," when "the earth was without form, and void," fashioned it into order and beauty, and peopled it with myriads of living forms, so this selfsame creative Spirit, inspiring some veritable son of God, bodies forth in the works of art.

In all ages, among all peoples, the influence of the divine Spirit has been termed "inspiration" or "illumination;" it has been regarded as a fructifying afflatus of the creative Spirit, giving ideas and desires, quickening human insight to discern in the manifold and illusory appearances of nature a universal order and an eternal significance. Albrecht Dürer says, "The mind of the artist is filled with images; God gives much power to the man who is rich in artistic perception, for God alone knows how a beautiful picture ought to be made, and he to whom God reveals it knows it also." When Haydn perceived the tones by which he represents the breaking forth of the light at creation, he exclaimed, with outstretched arms and a loud voice, "This is not of me, it comes from above." Now this inspiration or illumination may be direct-the shining of the Infinite into the soul of the artist. Such was the inspiration of Fra Angelico. Raphael's letter to Castiglione is significant in this connection: "Since good judges and beautiful women are rare, I make use of a certain ideal that hovers before me; if this now has anything good in art, I know not, but I take much pains thereabout." Or the inspiration of the artist may be indirect; it may be kindled by sense impressions from the world without, the creative in man corresponding to the creative in nature and re-creating the world of appearances into an ideal world of general conceptions. The inspiration of Wordsworth was of this indirect character. He indicates its source in a poem written a few miles above Tintern Abbey:

In another

poem

Wordsworth also says:

My voice proclaims

How exquisitely the individual mind
to the external world

Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too,
The external world is fitted to the mind

And the creation (for by no lower name

Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish.

Herder felt the same influence, when, addressing a harp, he asks, “What sings in you, ye strings, what sounds in your tones?" and answers, "The world-spirit steps forth into the harmony in whose hands our soul itself becomes a harp string."

The feeling that the external world awakens passes through many gradations. It may be the mere exhilaration of spirits, or intense sensuous delight in graceful forms and brilliant colors, or it may mount to spiritual rapture. It is not the noblest tendency of the soul to rest in feeling; thoughts are awakened, the ideas suggested by these sensuous objects are presented, and when intense thought is blended with intense feeling the highest religious and artistic activities of the soul are generated. The nature of these activities is explained by the character of the factors that produce them. Intense sensuous delight, with little thought, produces only beautiful idolatry in religion, gorgeous description in poetry, and picturesque fidelity in painting. On the other hand, intense thought with little sensuous feeling results in rationalism or formalism in religion, and in the merely allegorical or didac tic in poetry and painting. Every great achievement in religion or in art involves the cooperation of keen sensibility and profound reflection upon lofty ideals. The convictions of the artist give character to his work; his grasp of truth, his ideals, his relations to humanity, and his environment—all these breathe in his creations and make them living. Inspiration would be only a passing flame, were it not fed by meditation; thought makes the mind of the artist a magnet, which draws to itself images and ideas and thus enables him to create out of the garnered wealth of his own soul and the universe. "Let no one hope without deep thought," said Plato," to fashion everlasting material into eternal form."

Among painters of the present century Corot is one who has received his inspiration largely from nature, "the creative in him corresponding to the creative in nature," and by their "blended might" accomplishing creations that mirror in a remarkable degree his own character and that of nature. We are told of him:

Even in the last years of his life you could see him, when night came, leaning out of his little window at Ville d'Avray, as in the time of his youth, his poetic soul absorbed in contemplation, and gathering from the tranquil purity of the stars treasures for the morrow. Corot dreamed by night; and by day, in the night of nature, wrote his dreams on his canvas. It was thus by the observation of beautiful things that his heart became golden and his palette silver.

Nature in her myriad forms has continually wooed the soul of the artist to give to her illusory appearances fixity and completeness. Her sympathetic power over the human spirit is revealed by the noble landscapes of Claude Lorraine, Turner's mystery of light and Rembrandt's mystery of darkness, Ruysdael's solemn pathos and Millet's humble grandeur, Diaz's evangels of color, and Daubigny's frank, human messages. The ministry of earth, sea, and sky has a goodly band of apostles, and the best of them reveal in their paintings the eternal Mind shining in a world of material forms.

Nature, however, has not in the past been such an interesting and inspiring theme with artists as has man in the full developed energy of his physical, intellectual, and spiritual powers. The Greeks delighted in the external forms of human life. Their gods were made in the image of man. Man, as warrior, as athlete, as a lover of culture or of pleasure, was an engrossing object of study and a source of continual inspiration. The mystical element was ignored, except so far as it was expressed by an inner repose and dignity. Sculpture naturally became the favorite art of the Greeks. The genius of the sculptor was exercised in bringing out in their truth and significance whatever in man is sensuous and plastic. To artists under the influence of Christianity the spiritual nature of man has, however, furnished the most enthusiasm and inspiration. The soul is glorified, and often at the expense of the body. Christian virtues have no necessary connection

with bodily symmetry and grace. A Greek faun must be graceful, a Greek god must be beautiful, a Greek athlete must be vigorous, but a Christian saint without any physical charm might be enshrined with glory. The Greek had no appreciation for such beauty as Bernard of Clairvaux saw in his hymn to the Crucified One:

All the strength and bloom are faded,
Who hath thus thy state degraded?
Death upon thy form is written;
See the wan, worn limbs, the smitten
Breast upon the cruel tree!

Thus despised and decorated,
Thus in dying desolated;

Slain for me, of sinners vilest,

Loving Lord, on me thou smilest,

Shine, bright face, and strengthen me.

Christianity and art have always been intimately associated, except in the age of the Puritans, when, as Lowell says, "they turned beauty out of the meetinghouse, and slammed the door in her face." But that was a perverted Christianity, and the art of that age was also perverted; beauty was debased and made a substitute for something higher and purer. To use Tennyson's terrible phrase, "She was a procuress to the lords of hell." Art, however, generally courts the ideal, and the lofty ideals of Christianity have been the objects of profound and reverent study by the greatest masters of art. Why have the birth, life, sufferings, death, and resurrection of Christ been such favorite themes with artists? Because the absolute ideal of human perfection was in Christ made flesh, and these are the crowning incidents of its manifestation. Why have the Virgin Mary, Christ's disciples, and the saints of the Church figured so prominently in painting? Because they are conspicuous manifestations of the divine Spirit in the religious life of man. By their Christlike characters and lives they are, in some measure, re-representations of the divine ideal in humanity.

It is with such reflections as these upon the lofty mission of art that we pass to the consideration of a painting of wonderful spirituality which has recently been brought to America-