The test of "truth," therefore, in the sense of fact, is insufficient. The question is, Truth for whom? Not for a child or a savage. If we were to show a fine landscape to a Hottentot, it would be a mistake to say he saw it, though the image might be demonstrable on the retina of his eye. He would not see what we mean when we speak of it, any more than we should see the footstep on the ground or hear the stirring in the grass that is plain enough to him, and hits our organs, too, though we are not trained to perceive it. If the test of merit be the production of a likeness to something we see, then the artist should know no more of Nature than we do. But then, though it may surprise us into momentary admiration to recognize familiar things in this translation,—just as common talk sounds finer in a foreign tongue,—yet it is but for a time, and then the inevitable limitations of the counterfeit come in,—its narrowness and fixity,—crude paint for sunbeams, cold and colorless stone for the living form. The only test of a work of Art is, how far it will carry us,—not any comparison by the yardstick. We demand to be raised above our habitual point of view, and be made aware of a deeper interest than we knew of. It is in hope of this alone that we pardon the necessary shortcoming of the means.

This deeper interest has its root in nothing arbitrary, or personal to the artist. It is not inventing something finer than Nature, but seeing more truly what Nature shows, that makes the artistic faculty. This is the lesson taught by the history of Art. Take it up where you will, this history is nothing but the successive unfolding of a truer conception of Nature, only speaking here the language of form and color, instead of words. It is this that lies at the bottom of all its revolutions, and appears in its downfall as well as in its prosperity.

Where the human form is the theme, the aim must of course be to give its typical perfection. No naturalist describes the defects of his specimens, though it may happen that all are imperfect. Comparatively few persons ever saw our robin in the plumage in which it is always described. Only in early spring, not very commonly then, is the black of the head and tail seen pure. But no one hesitates to call this the true color. The sculptor does not reproduce the peculiarities of his model, but aims to give ideal form as the most natural form of man.

But in Painting, and especially in Landscape, it seems less easy to fix upon any ideal, not only from the multifariousness of the details, but, above all, from the elusiveness of the standard. We might agree upon an ideal of human beauty, but hardly upon the ideal of anything else. The sophist in the Hippias Major was prepared to define the beauty of a maiden, or of a mare; but he was confounded when it was required that the beauty of a pipkin should be deducible from the same principle, and yet worse when it was shown to involve that a wooden spoon was more beautiful than a gold one.

What you see in the woods and mountains depends on what you go for and what you carry with you. We may go to them as to a quarry or a wood-pile, or for pleasantness,—the cool spring and the plane-tree shade, as the ancients did,—or to see fine trees, waterfalls, mountains. To many persons the beauty of any scene is measured by its abundance in such specimens of streams, mountains, waterfalls, etc. Of course the connection is demonstrable enough: one collocation of features is more readily suggestive of beauty than another. We expect to find the scenery of a hill-country more attractive than a sand-desert. But comparing a landscape with a statue, or even Painting generally with Sculpture, the connection between a happy effect and any definite arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to the meagrest landscape—a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture—a charm of which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such experiences that the difference between one patch of earth and another is wholly superficial, and indicates not so much anything in it as a greater or less dulness in us. The celebrated panoramas and points of view are not the favorite haunts of great painters. They do not need to travel far for their subjects. Mr. Ruskin tells us that Turner did not paint the high Alps, nor the cumulus, the grandest form of cloud. Calame gives us the nooks and lanes, the rocks and hills, of Switzerland, rather than the high peaks; Lambinet, an apple-orchard, a row of pollard-elms, or a weedy pond,—not cataracts or forests. This is not affectation or timidity, but an instinct that the famous scenes are no breaks in the order of Nature,—that what is seen in them is visible elsewhere as well, only not so obvious, and that the office of Art is not to parrot what is already distinct, but to reveal it where it is obscure. This makes the inspiration of the artist; this is the source of all his power, and alone distinguishes him from the topographer and view-maker.

This transcendentalism is more evident in Painting, as the later and more developed form; but it is common to all Art, and may be read also in the Greek sculptures. The experience of every one who with some practice of eye comes for the first time to see the best antiques is not that he falls at once to admiring the perfection of their anatomy, and wondering at the symmetry and complete development of the men and women of those days, but rather that he is carried away from all comparison and criticism into a solitude from which returning he discovers that his previous acquaintance with Sculpture was with masks only, and that the meaning of plastic art as a capital interest of the human mind is now for the first time made known to him. He sees that it was no whim of the Greeks, but an instinct of the infinity it typifies, that made them take the human form as alone possessing beauty enough to stand by itself. Not the images of their deities alone, but all their statues were gods. The charm of the Lizard-Slayer of Praxiteles, or of those immortal riders that swept along the friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a troop of Athenian citizens on horseback. These are the deathless forms of the happy Olympians, high above the cares and turmoil of the finite, self-centred and independent. It is the Paradise age of the world, before the knowledge of good and evil, before sin and death came; the worship of the Visible, when God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Hence the air of repose, of eternal duration, that marks these figures. They have nothing to regret or to hope, no past or future, but only a timeless existence.

It is from this essential self-sufficingness, not from fancied rules, that Sculpture is limited with respect to dramatic expression, that is, expression of passing feeling, accidental action, not identified with the form. In the best period the first requisite was that the interest should be thoroughly identified with the shape in which it is manifested, and not imparted, as by history, association, etc. The decline began when this lofty isolation was felt as negative, needing to have interest and expression added to it. But whatever was added only emphasized without curing the defect. Even the "awful diagonal" of the Laocooen and the godlike triumph of the Belvedere Apollo show a lower age. Why triumph, if he was supreme before? These are casual incidents only, examples of what might happen as well to anybody, not the adequate conclusive embodiment of an idea. The more elaborately the meaning is wrought into the form, the more evident that they are not originally identical.

In Modern Sculpture this deification of the human form is either expressly banished from the artist's aim, or at least he is not quite in earnest with it. For instance, in Mr. Palmer's White Captive,—exhibited not long since in Boston,—the sculptor's account of his work is, that it portrays an American girl captured by Indians and bound to a tree. We have to take with us the history and the circumstances: a Christian woman of the nineteenth century, dragged from her civilized home and helpless in the hands of savages. This is not at all incidental to the work, but the work is incidental to it. It is a story which the figure helps to tell. This is no universal type of womanhood, nor even American womanhood. American women do not stand naked in the streets, but go about clothed and active on their errands of duty and pleasure; if we must needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances. In place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a painful incongruity that no study or skill can obviate.

Nor has Modern Sculpture any better success, when, instead of the pretence of history, it adopts the pretence of personification. Its highest result in this direction is, perhaps, Thorwaldsen's bas-relief of Night,—a pretty parlor-ornament. There is a fatal sense of unreality about works of this kind that even Thorwaldsen's genius was unable to remove. They are toys, and it seems rather flat to have toys so cumbrous and so costly.

The reason of this insipidity is, that the ideality aimed at is all on the outside. There is no soul in these bodies, but only an abstraction; and so the body remains an abstraction, too. In each case the radical defect is the same, namely, that the interest is external to the form: they do not coalesce, but are only arbitrarily connected. We cannot have these ideal forms, because we do not believe in them. We do not believe in gods and goddesses, but in men and women; that is, we do not at last really identify the character with its manifestation. Such was the fascination of beauty to the Greek mind, that it banished all other considerations. What mattered it to Praxiteles whether his Satyr was a useful member of society or not, or whether the young Apollo stood thus idle and listless for an instant or for a millennium, as long as he was so beautiful? And the charm so penetrated their works that something of it reaches down even to us, and holds us as long as we look upon them. But as soon as we quit the magic circle, the illusion vanishes,—Apollo is a handsome vagabond whom we incline to send about his business. He ought to be slaying Pythons and drying up swamps, instead of loitering here.

We do not believe in gods, nor quite as the ancients did in heroes,—but in representative men, that is, in ideas, and in men as representing them. Washington is not to us what Achilles or Agamemnon was to the Greeks. The form of Achilles would do as well for a god; the antiquaries do not know whether the Ludovisi Mars was not an Achilles,—perhaps nobody ever knew. But in all our veneration of Washington, it is not his person we revere, but his virtues,—precisely the impersonal part of him, or his person only from association. There is nothing incongruous in this association as it exists in the mind, any more than there would have been in his presence, because of the overpowering sense of his character and history, to which all the outward show of the man is constantly subordinate. But if we isolate this by making a statue of him, we have only an apotheosis of cocked-hat and small-clothes, in which we see what it really was to us. This awkward prominence of the costume does not come from the accident of modern dress, but from our unconscious repugnance to petrifying the man in one of his aspects. It is a touch of grave humor in the genius of Art, thus to give us just what we ask for, though not what we want.

The Greeks could have portrait-statues, because all they looked for in the man they saw in his form, and, seeing it, could portray it. If the modern sculptor truly saw in the figure of Washington all that the name means to him, he could make a statue worthy to be placed by the side of the Sophocles and the Phocion. These were true portraits, no doubt; thus it was that these men appeared to their fellow-citizens; but it does not follow that they would have appeared so to us. What they saw is there; it is a reality both for them and for us; but the literal identification of it with the form belongs to them, not to us, and our mimicry of it can result only in these abstraction's. For us it is elsewhere, beyond these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use, but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic. Hence the air of caricature in modern portrait-statues; for caricature does not necessarily imply falsification, but only that what is given is insisted on at the expense of more important truth.

To the view of the early Christian ages, too, the body is old clothes, ready to be cast off at any moment, good only as means to something higher. It might seem that Christianity should give a higher value to the body, since it was believed to have been inhabited by God himself. But the Passion was a fact of equal importance with the Incarnation. This honor could be allowed to matter only for an instant, and on the condition of immediate resumption. That the Highest should suffer death as a man might well seem to the Greeks foolishness. To the understanding it is the utmost conceivable contradiction. Yet it is only a more complete statement of what is involved in the Greek worship of beauty. The complete incarnation of Spirit, which is the definition of beauty, demands equally that there be no point it does not inhabit, and none in which it abides. The transience of things is no defect in them, but only the affirmation of their reality through the incessant casting-off of its inadequate manifestations. It is not from the excellence, but from the impotence of its nature, that the stone endures and does not pass away as the plant and the animal. The higher the organization, the more rapid and thorough the circulation.

The same truth holds in Art, also, and drives it to forsake these beautiful petrifactions and seek an expression less bound to the material. Ideal form is good so far as it brings together in one compact image what in Nature is scattered and partial; but it is an ideality of the surface only, not of the substance. It shuts out the defect of this or that form, but not of Form itself. The Greek ideal is after all a thing, and its impassive perfection a stony death.

The justification is, that the sculptor did not say quite what he meant. He said flesh, but he meant spirit, and this is what the Greek statues mean to us. The modern sculptor does not mean spirit, and knows that he does not; and so, with all his efforts, he gives us only the outside. Is it asked, Whence this divorce of flesh and spirit? why not give both at once as Nature does? Then we must do as Nature does, and make our forms as fluid as hers. But this the sculptor contravenes at the outset. To follow Nature, he should make his statue of snow. To make it of stone is to pretend that the form is something of itself. This the Greeks never meant, for then it would follow that all parts of it were alike significant. Haydon was delighted to find reproduced in the Elgin marbles certain obscure and seeming insignificant details of the anatomy that later schools had overlooked, such as a fold of skin under the armpit of the Neptune, etc. But any beginner at a life-school could have pointed out in the same statue endless deficiencies in anatomical detail. The fold was put in, not because it was there, but because to the mind of the Greek artist it meant something. Sculptors of the present day comfort themselves with the belief that their works are more complete and more accurate in the anatomy than the antique. Very likely, for the ancients did not dissect. But this accuracy, if it is founded on no interest beyond accuracy, is after all an impertinence.

The Greek ideal is founded on the exclusion of accident. It is a declaration that the casual shape is not the true form; it is only a step farther to the perception that all shape is casual,—the reality seen, not in it, but through it. The ideal is then no longer perfect shape, but transparency to the sentiment; the image is not sought to be placed before the beholder's eyes, but painted as it were in his mind. Henceforth, suggestion only is aimed at, not representation; the cooeperation of the spectator is relied upon as the indispensable complement of the design. The Zeus of Phidias seemed to the Greeks, Plotinus says, Zeus himself, as he would be, if he chose to appear to human eyes. But a Crucifixion is of itself not at all what the artist meant. It is not the agony of the flesh, but the triumph of the spirit, that is intended to be portrayed. If the end be attained, the slighter and more unpromising the means the better. Thus a new scale of values is established; nothing is worthy or unworthy of itself; nothing is excluded, but also in nothing is the interest identified with the thing, but imparted.

Christian Art, after mere tradition had died out,—for instance, in the Byzantine and early Italian pictures from the eighth to the middle of the thirteenth century,—presents the strongest contrast to all that had gone before. The morose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudeness of these figures seems like contempt not only of beauty, but of all natural expression. They are meaningless of themselves, and quite indifferent to the character they represent, which is appended to them by inscriptions,—their relative importance, even, indicated only by size, more or less splendor of costume, etc., but the faces all alike, and no attempt made to adapt the action to the occasion. It is another world they belong to; the present they pointedly renounce and disdain, condescending to communicate with it only indirectly and by signs.

The main peculiarities were common to Painting and Sculpture, though most noticeable in Painting. An interest in the actual world seems never so far lost sight of, and earlier revived, in Sculpture. Even down to the spring-tide of Modern Art in the thirteenth century, the "pleasant days" when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in Painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form,—while in the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in excess of the antique as the Byzantine fell short of it.

It is commonly said that Nicola Pisano revived Art through study of the antique; his models, even, are pointed out, particularly a sarcophagus, said to have been brought to Pisa in the eleventh century from Greece. But this sarcophagus, wherever it came from, is not Greek, but late Roman work; and we find in Nicola no mark of direct Greek influence, but only of the late Roman and early Christian sarcophagus-sculptures. In the reliefs upon his celebrated pulpit at Pisa we have the same short-legged, large-headed, indigenous Italian or Roman figures, and the same arrangement of hair, draperies, etc., as on those sarcophagi. Taken by themselves, his works would, no doubt, indicate a new direction. But by the side of his son Giovanni, or the sculptors of the Northern cathedrals, he seems to belong to the third century rather than to the thirteenth.

In Giovanni Pisano the new era was distinctly announced. The Inferno, usually ascribed to him, among the reliefs on the front of Orvieto Cathedral,[1] and in his noble pulpit at Pistoia, shows the traces of the antique only in unimportant details, ornamentation, etc. The antique served him, no doubt, as a hint to independent study, but the whole intent is different,—all the beauties and all the defects arrived at by a different road. In place of the impassive Minos of the Shades, we have a fiend, serpent-girt,[2] his judicial impartiality enforced apparently against his will by manacles and anklets of knotted snakes; and throughout, instead of the calm impersonality of the Greek, dealing out the typical forms of things like a law of Nature, we have the restless, intense, partisan, modern man, not wanting in tenderness, but full of a noble scorn at the unworthiness of the world, and grasping at a reality beyond it. He is intent, first of all and at all risks, upon vivid expression, upon telling the story, and speedily outruns the possibilities of his material. He must make his creatures alive to the last superficies; and as he cannot give them motion, he puts an emphasis upon all their bones, sinews, veins, and wrinkles,—every feather is carved, and even the fishes under the water show their scales. That mere literalness is not the aim is shown by the open disregard of it elsewhere; for instance, the size of each figure is determined, not by natural rules, but by their relative importance, so that in the Nativity, Mary is twice as large as Joseph and three times as large as the attendants. And the detail is not everywhere equally minute, but follows the intensity of the theme, reaching its height in the lower compartment, where the damned are in suffering, and especially in the figures of the fiends. This is no aim at literalness, but a struggle for an emphasis beyond the reach of Sculpture,—taking these means in despair of others, and, in its thirst for expression, careless alike of natural probability, typical perfection of form, and pleasing effect. Different as it seems, the same spirit is at work here and in Painting. In both it is the repudiation of the classic ideal,—in Sculpture by a reductio ad absurdum, putting its implicit claims to the test of realization,—in Painting by mere negation, as was natural at the outset of a new career, before the means of any positive expression were discovered.

Ideal form was to the Greeks the highest result, the success of the universe. The end of Art was conceived as Nature's end as well, whether actually attained or not. Nor was this preference of certain forms arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only, not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only so much phosphate or silicate, and can come to be something only in a foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is seen the dawning of individuality, and just as the thing rises in the scale the principle of form becomes dominant. The handful of earth is sufficiently described by the chemist's formula,—these ingredients make this substance. But an organic body cannot be so described. The chemist's account of sugar, for instance, is C^{6} H^{10} O^{5}. But if we ask what starch is, we have, again, C^{6} H^{10} O^{5},—and the cellular tissue of plants, also, is the same. These things, then, as far as he knows, are identical. Evidently, he is beyond his depth, and the higher we go in the scale the less he has to say to the purpose,—the separate importance of the material ingredients constantly decreasing, and the importance of their definite connection increasing, as the reference to an individual centre predominates over helpless gravitation. First, aggregation about a centre, as in the crystal,—then, arrangement of the parts, as upper, under, and lateral, as in the plant,—then, organization of these into members. Form is the self-assertion of the thing as no longer means only; this makes its attractiveness to the artist. The root of his delight in ideal form is that it promises some finality amid the endless maze of matter. But this higher completeness, which is beauty, whether it happen to exist or not, is never the immediate aim of Nature. It is everywhere implied, but nowhere expressed; for Nature is unwearied in producing, but negligent of the product. As soon as the end seems anywhere about to be attained, it is straightway made means again to something else, and so on forever. The earth and the air hasten to convert themselves into a plant, the flower into fruit, the fruit into flesh, and the animal at last to die and give back again to the air and the earth what they have transmitted to him. Whatever beauty a thing has is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to be baffled and soiled by accident. This is the "jealousy of the gods," that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of imperfection to confess its mortal birth.

The world is full of beauty, but as it were hinted,—as in the tendency to make the most conspicuous things the most beautiful, as flowers, fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface, the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in accordance with Lord Bacon's suggestion that "Nature is rather busy not to err, than in labor to produce excellency") in the tendency to hide those that are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals. But these are hints only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce "not ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place." Were beauty the aim, it should be most evident in her chief products; whereas it is in things transient, minute, subordinate,—flowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic details of structure,—that it meets us most invariably, rather than in the higher animals or in man. Nor in man does it keep pace with his civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his nature.

This ambiguity of every fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of detecting its true connection. There is reality there, even in blight and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing before us,—as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in the rose-bed. The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, but the obvious facts are not this, any more than the canvas and the pigment are the picture. The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,—the Alps split into paving-stones,—Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved, more or less of their vital relations.

Art is not to be blamed for idealizing, for this is only completing what Nature begins. But the completion of the design is also its limitation. It is final to the artist as well as to the theme, and cannot yield to further expansion. In Nature there is no such pretence of finality, and so her work, though never complete, is never convicted of defect. Her circuits are never closed; she does not aim to cure the defect in the thing, but in something else. Each in turn she abandons, and appeals to a future success, which never is, but always about to be. The reason is, that the scope of each is wider than immediately appears. It is not simple completeness that is aimed at, but ascent to higher levels, so that the consummation it demands, if granted, would cut it off from more vital connections elsewhere. The ideal of the crystal seems to be clearness and regularity, but better things are in store for it. It must become opaque and shapeless in order to be fitted for higher transformations. The leaf must be cramped to make the flower. Homer's heroes must hoe potatoes and keep shop before the higher civilization of the race can be reached.

The Greek ideal is an endeavor to ignore the imperfections of natural existence. The ideal life is to be rich, strong, powerful, eloquent, high-born, famous. It was a glorification of the earthly, not by transcending, but by keeping its limitations out of sight. But this is only making the limitation essential and irrevocable, so that it infects the ideal also, which in this very avoidance submits to recognize it. The statue is not less, but more, a thing than the natural body. Life is not mere exclusion of decay, but organization of it, so that the fury of corruption passes into fresh vital power. It is a cycle of changes, the type and show of which are the circulation, constantly removing effete particles and building up new, and therein giving its hue to the flesh. But sculpture supposes the current checked, and one aspect fit to stand for all the rest. The statue is not only a particle, but an isolated particle, and must first of all divert attention from its fragmentariness. Mr. Garbett has remarked that plants should not be copied in sculpture, because the plant is not seen entire, but is partly hidden in the ground. But the point is not the being seen or not, but the suggestion of incompleteness. The same remark applies to animals, and even to man, unless his relations to the world, as an individual among individuals, can be kept out of sight.

But the finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant perfection is atrophy,—as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,—or, as Plato says, the human to become godlike by taking away here and adding there,—but remains a radical incongruity of Nature, never to be escaped from. It brings death and dissolution to the fair shapes of the earlier world,—for the worship of form is justified only so long as the mind thinks forms and not ideas.

The statue may embody an infinite meaning, but to the artist form and meaning are one. It is not a sentiment that he puts into this shape, but it is the shape itself that inspires him. The symbolism of Greek Art was the discovery of a later age. We know what is meant by Circe and Athene, but Homer did not. It was thus only that the Greek mind could grasp ideas,—this is the thoroughly artistic character of that people. Their philosophers were always outlaws. What excited the rage of the Athenians against Socrates was his endeavor to detach religion from the images of the gods. When it comes to comparisons between meaning and expression, as adequate or inadequate, it is evident their unity is gone;—the meaning is first, and the expression only adjunct or illustration. It did not impair the sacredness of the Greek deities that they were the work of the poets and sculptors. But the second Nicene Council forbade as impious any images of Christ as God, and allowed only his human nature to be represented,—a strange decree, if the Church had realized its own doctrine, that the humanity of Christ is as real as his divinity. But the meaning is, that the finite is not there to stand for the infinite, but only to indicate it negatively and indirectly,—that its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a pardonable exaggeration to make it even more suitable.

The hero is now the saint; the ideal life a life of poverty, humility, weakness, labor,—to be long-suffering, to despise and forsake the world. The present life, the heaven of Achilles, is now Hades, the forced abode of phantoms having no reality but what is given to them by religion, and the Hades of the Greek the only true and substantial world. The new church fled the light of the sun, and sought impatiently to bury itself in the tomb. The Roman catacombs were not the mere refuge of a persecuted sect,—their use as places of worship continued long after such need had ceased. But "among the graves" they found the point nearest to the happy land beyond, and the silence and the darkness made it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal, was the only possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never completely died out. Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were too real:—"Your scandalous figures," said he, "stand quite out from the canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues." It is a tenderness towards the idea, lest it should be dishonored by actuality. Matter is gross, obscure, evil, an obstacle to spirit,—and material existence tolerable only as momentary, vanishing, and, as it were, under constant protest, and with the suspicion that the Devil has a hand in it. It belongs especially to the Oriental mind, and its logical result is the Buddhist heaven of annihilation.

The defect of this view is not that it is too ideal, but that it is not ideal enough. It is an incomplete idealism that through weakness of faith does not hold fast its own point of view, and so does not dispose of matter, but leaves it outside, as negation, obstacle. The body is allowed to exist, but remains in disgrace and reduced to the barest indication. But it is honoring matter far too much to allow that it can be an obstacle. It is no obstacle, for it is nothing of itself. Rightly understood, this contempt of the body is directed only against the false emphasis placed upon single aspects or manifestations. It is a feeling that the true ideal is not thus shut up in a forced exception, as if it were the subtilized product of a distillation whereby the earthly is to be purged of its dross; but that it is the all-pervading reality, which the finite can neither hinder nor help, but only obey, which death and corruption praise, which establishes itself through imperfection and transience.

Gibbon, speaking of the Iconoclasts, says,—"The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy of taste and genius." Such comparisons mistake the point. These are not parallel attempts, but opposed from the outset. The "Catholic image" was a declaration that the problem cannot be solved in that way. An early legend relates, that a painter, undertaking to copy his Christ from a statue of Jove, had his hand suddenly withered. The attempt is accused because of the pretence it makes to coordinate body and spirit, Nature and God,—as if one configuration of matter were more godlike than another. The figure of the god claims to complete what Nature has partly done. But now the world is seen to be not merely the product of Mind working upon Matter, but the Creation of God out of nothing,—thus altogether His, in one part as much as in another. The only conceivable separateness, antagonism, is that of the sinful Will, setting itself up in its vanity; this it must be that arrogates to itself the ability to represent its Creator.

The Christian image is without form or comeliness,—rejects all outward graces, seemingly glories in abasement and deformity, fearing only to attribute to Matter some value of its own.

Henceforth the connection is no longer at arm's-length, as of the workman and the material. Resistance to limitation is changed into joyful acceptance; for it is not in the limitation, but in the resistance, that the misery of earth consists. The quarrel with imperfection is over. The finite shall neither fortify itself in its finiteness, nor seek to abolish it, but only make it the willing instrument of universal ends. Thus the true self first exists, and no longer needs to be extenuated or apologised for.

The key-note of all this is contained in those verses of the "Dies Irae,"—

"Quaerens me sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus; Tantus labor non sit cassus."

Here we have in its compactest expression the difference between this age and the classic: that I, the vilest of sinners, am the object of God's highest care,—not the failure and mistake I seem, not the slag and refuse of Nature's working, but the object of this most stupendous mystery of the Divine economy. It is no purification or idealizing that is needed,—any such attempt must be abomination,—but a new birth of the self, by devotion of it to the purpose for which it was made.

The astounding discovery is slowly realized, and the statement of it difficult, from the need to distinguish between the true self and the false, and to declare that this importance belongs to the individual in virtue of his spiritual nature alone. The sainthood of the saint is not to be confounded with his personality. What have his virtues to do with his gown and shoes? what, indeed, with his natural disposition, as courageous, irascible, avaricious? The difficulty is pervading, not to be avoided; every aspect of him reveals only what is external, dies from him daily, and, if isolated, has already lost its meaning. It is only in his work, in his connection with the world, that we see him truly. Accordingly, the statue becomes the group, and the group a member of a series, a cycle in which each is incomplete without the rest. The classic ideal is shivered into fragments, all to be taken together to make up the meaning. Of the hundreds of statues and reliefs that surround the great Northern cathedrals, (Didron counts eighteen hundred upon the outside of Chartres,—nine thousand in all, carved or painted, inside and outside,) each has its appointed place in the sacred epos in stone that unfolds about the building from left to right of the beholder the history of the world from the Creation to the Judgment, and subordinated in parallel symbolism the daily life of the community, whatever occupied and interested men,—their virtues and vices, trades and recreations, the seasons and the elements, jokes, even, and sharp hits at the great and at the clergy, scenes from popular romances, and the radicalism of Reynard the Fox,—in short, all that touched the mind of the age, an impartial reflex of the great drama of life, wherein all exists alike to the glory of God.

It is not the glory of earth that is here celebrated. M. Didron says the statues which the mob pulled down from the churches, at the first French Revolution, as the images of their kings, were the kings and heroes of the Old Testament. Had they known this, it might not have saved the statues, but it shows how wide a gulf separated these men from their fathers, that their hands were not held by some instinct that here was the first hint of the fundamental idea of Democracy,—the sovereign importance of man, not as powerful, wise, beautiful, not in virtue of any chance advantage of birth, but in virtue of his religious nature, of the infinite possibilities he infolds.

The need to indicate that the source of value is not the accident of Nature, but Nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment,—on one side qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with the form. For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror embodied, as the Jove of Phidias embodied dignity and command; but the terrific is accumulated on the outside of them, as tusks, claws, etc. One can easily believe that the ancient sculptors, had it been lawful, could have put more horror into the calm features of a Medusa than is contained in all this apparatus and grimace. The concreteness of the antique, the form and meaning existing only for each other, is gone; the union is occasional only, and needs to be certified and kept up afresh on every new occasion. The form must assert itself, must show itself alive and quick, not the dead sign of a meaning that has fled. It would have been a poor compliment to a Greek sculptor to say that his work was life-like; he might answer with the classically disposed visitor of the Elgin marbles in Haydon's anecdote,—"Like life! Well, what of that?" He meant it for something much better. But during the Middle Ages this is constantly the highest encomium. Amid the utmost rudeness of conception and of execution, we see the first trace of awakening Art in the unmistakable effort to indicate that the figures are alive; and in the cathedral-sculpture of the best time this is still a leading characteristic. Even the single statues have for their outlines curves of contrary flexure, expressing motion; they seem to wave in the air, and their faces to glow with passing emotion. The animals are often uncouth, but the more life-like; a turn of the head or of the eye, a restless, unbalanced attitude, brings us nearer to the actual living creature than the magnificent repose of the antique lions and eagles,—as if they did not trust to our recognizing their character, but were prepared to demonstrate it with beak and claws. Even in the plants, though strictly conventionalized, it is the freedom and spring of their lines that more than anything else characterizes them and defies copying.

The world of matter, being no longer endowed with independent reality, is no longer felt as a contamination incurred by the idea in its descent into existence. The discrepancy is not final, so that the supremacy of the spirit is not shown by resistance, but by taking it to heart, carrying it out, and thereby overcoming it. In a Crucifixion of the twelfth century, Life is figured on one side crowned and victorious, and on the other Death overcome and slain. The finiteness of the finite is not the barrier, but the liberation, of the infinite.

But the statue remains stone; this unmeaning emphasis of weight and bulk, though diminished, is not to be got rid of. The life that sculpture can give is superficial and abstract, does not penetrate and possess the work; it is still the petrifaction of an instant, that does not instantly pass away, but remains as a contradiction to the next. It is the struggle against this fixity that gives to the sculpture of the Renaissance its aspect of unrest, of disdain of the present, of endless unsatisfied search. Hence the air of conflict that we see in Giovanni Pisano, and still more in later times,—the sculptor going to the edge of what the stone will allow, and beyond it, and, still unsatisfied, seeking through all means to indicate a yet unexecuted possibility. It is this that seethes in those strange, intense, unearthly figures of Donatello's, wasted as by internal fire,—the rage for an expression that shall at the same time declare its own insufficiency.

All that is done only makes the failure more evident. The fixity continues, and is only deepened into contortion and grimace. What we see is the effort alone. Hence in modern statues the uneasy, self-distrustful appeal to the spectator, in place of the lofty indifference of the antique. In Michel Angelo the same striving to indicate something in reserve, not expended, led to the exaggerated emphasis of certain parts, (as the length of the neck, depth of the eye-sockets, etc.,) and of general muscularity,—a show of force, that gave to the Moses the build of a Titan, and to the Christ of the Last Judgment the air of a gladiator. Michel Angelo often seems immersed in mere anatomy and academic tours de force, especially in his later works. He seems to see in the subject only a fresh problem in attitude, foreshortening, muscular display,—and this not only where he invents, but also where he borrows,—sometimes most strangely overlooking the sentiment; as in the figure of Christ, which he borrows from Orcagna and the older painters, even to the position of the arms, but with the touching gesture of reproof perverted into a savage menace; or in the Expulsion, taken almost line for line from Masaccio, but with the infinite grief expressed in Adam's figure turned into melodrama by showing his face.

It was not for the delight of the eye, nor from over-reverence of the matter-of-fact. He despised the copying of models, as the makeshift of ignorance. His profound study of anatomy was not for greater accuracy of imitation, but for greater license of invention. Of grace and pleasingness he became more and more careless, until he who at twenty had carved the lovely angel of S. Domenico, came at last to make all his men prize-fighters and his women viragos. It is clear that we nowhere get his final meaning,—that he does not fairly get to his theme at all, but is stopped at the outset, and loses himself in the search for a mode of expression more adequate to that "immense beauty" ever present to his mind,—so that the matter in hand occupies him only in its superficial aspects. What he sought on all hands, in his endless questioning of the human frame, his impatience of drapery, the furious haste to reach the live surface, and the tender modulation of it when it is reached, was to make the flesh itself speak and reveal the soul present at all points alike and at once. Nothing could have satisfied him but to impart to the marble itself that omnipresence of spirit of which animal life furnishes the hint. In this Titanic attempt the means were in open and direct contradiction to the end. It was a violation of the wise moderation of Sculpture, whose rigid and colorless material pointedly declines a rivalry it could not sustain. Else why not color the stone? The hue of flesh is the most direct assertion of life, but at the same time a direct negative to that totality and emphasis of the particular shape on which Sculpture relies. The color of the flesh comes from its transparency to the circulation,—the eternal flux of matter coming to the surface in this its highest form. It is the display in matter itself of what its true nature is,—not to resist, but to embody change,—to reduce itself to mere appearance, and be taken up without residuum in the momentary manifestation, and then at once give place to fresh manifestations.

That the earlier practice of coloring statues was given up just when the need would seem to be the greatest shows its incompatibility with the fundamental conditions of the art. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries statues were still painted and gilded. Afterwards, color is restricted to parts not directly affected by the circulation, the hair and the eyes; and at last, when Sculpture is given over to pictorial effect and is about to yield entirely to Painting, it is wholly relinquished. Evidently it was felt that to color a statue in imitation of flesh would only enforce the fact that it is stone.

What Art was now aiming at was not the mere appearance of life, but a unity like that which life gives, in place of the abstractness and partiality inherent in Sculpture. This makes the interest of the fact of life,—that it is the presence of the soul,—the unity established amid the sundered particularity of matter. In free motion a new centre is declared, whereby the inertia of the body, its gravitation to a centre outside of it, is set aside. In sensibility this new centre declares itself supreme, superseding the passive indifference of extension. The whole pervades each part, each testifies to the whole and may stand for it. But the statue, having no such internal unity, is less able to dispense with outward completeness. All the sides must be given, so that the whole cannot be seen at one view, but only successively, as an aggregate.

In the earlier Greek statues the head remains lifeless, abstract, whilst the limbs are full of expression. In a contrary spirit, more akin to modern ideas, the Norse myth relates that Skadi, having her choice of a husband from among all the gods, but having to choose by the feet alone, meaning to take Baldur, got by mistake Niordr, an inferior deity. This does not seem so strange to us; but a Greek would have wondered that the daughter of a wise Titan should not know the feet of Apollo from those of Nereus. It was said of Taglioni that she put mind into her legs. But to the modern way of thinking this is clearly exceptional. It is in the face, and especially in the eye, that we look to see the soul present and at work, and not merely in its effects as character. As types of character, the lineaments of the face were explored by the later Greek Art as profoundly as the rest of the body. But the statue is sightless,—its eyes do not meet ours, but seem forever brooding over a world into which the present and its interests do not enter. To the Greek this was no defect; but to us the omission seems to affect the most vital point of all, since our conception of the soul involves its eternity, that is, that it lives always in the present, is not too fine to exist, secure that it is bound neither by past nor future, but capable of revolutionizing the character at all moments. Here is the ground of the remarkable difference that meets us already in the reliefs of the later classic times. In the reliefs of the best age the figures are always in profile and in action. Complete personification being out of the question, it is expressly avoided,—each figure waives attention to itself, merges itself in the plot. Later, when the profounder idea of a personality that does not isolate or degrade has begun to make itself felt, this constraint is given up,—the figures face the spectator, and enter as it were into relation with the actual world.

The Church very early expressed this feeling of the higher significance of the head, by allowing it to be sufficient if the head alone were buried in holy ground. In Art it is naively indicated by exaggerated size of the head and of the eyes,—a very common trait of the earlier times, and not quite obsolete at the time of the Pisani. This clumsy expedient is relinquished, but the need it indicated continued, without the possibility of finding any complete satisfaction in Sculpture, instead of the intensity and directness that Art now insists upon, Sculpture can give only extension and indirect hints; instead of mind present, only its effects and products, with the working cause expressly removed.

This is the ground of the seeming injustice to Sculpture at the time of the Revival. Its relative excellence was undervalued, because what it could do was not quite to the point. While the painters went on producing their antediluvian forms, the sculptors saw things much more as we do,—yet the paintings seemed the most life-like. It is astonishing, when we remember that Nicola was older than Cimabue, Giovanni than Giotto, Ghiberti than Fra Angelico, that the painters did not learn from the sculptors more of the actual appearance of things. It is still more astonishing that it is the painters that get all the praise for accuracy. Vasari is endless in his praises of Giotto, Spinello, Stefano, (called Scimia, or the Ape of Nature,) and a host of others, for accurate imitation. Giovanni Villani boasts that "it is our fellow-citizen Giotto who has portrayed most naturally every form and action." Ghiberti finishes an admiring account of some paintings of Ambrogio Lorenzotto's with the exclamation that it is truly marvellous to think that all this is only a picture. Few persons, probably, would see in the specimens of Ambrogio's work that still remain anything wonderful for resemblance to Nature,—whilst in Ghiberti's everybody acknowledges the astonishing truth of the detail. He tells us that he sought "to imitate Nature as far as was possible to him,"—but he seems not to be aware how much better he succeeded than the people he praises. Paolo Uccello, who was twenty years younger than Ghiberti, got his nickname from his skill in painting birds. But one would rather undertake to paint birds as well as Paolo than to carve them as well as Ghiberti.

We may learn here how little the demand to "imitate Nature" expresses what is intended. No accuracy, however demonstrable, will satisfy it. To interest me in a picture, it is not enough that something is as visible there as it is elsewhere; it must be something that I was already striving to see. It was not a greater circumstantiality of statement than was demanded, but greater directness,—that it should be relieved of what was unessential to its purpose, tending only to obscure it. A painting, however rude, has at least this negative merit, that, by the express substitution of the appearance for the actual image, needless entanglement in the material is avoided. Weight and bulk are not indeed annihilated, but they are no longer of primary importance, and thus less obstructive. The work gains precisely in what it gives up. By the flat omission of depth infinite depth is acquired,—by the ignoring of size the expression of size becomes possible; a mountain, for instance, which would be an absurdity in Sculpture is representable in Painting. Thus, instead of being more abstract than Sculpture, Painting is in truth less so, since what it omits is only negative to the purpose of Art.

It seems to us easier to paint than to carve, and we might expect to find Painting the older art. But the difficulty lies less in the execution than in the conception. Painting is not a tinting of surfaces, but the power to see a complex subject in unity. We may think we have no difficulty in seeing the landscape, but most persons, if called upon to state what they saw, pictorially, would show that they could not see the wood for the trees. Beginners suppose it is some knack of the hand that they are to acquire, when they learn to draw; but that is a small part of the matter; the great difficulty is in the seeing. Ordinary vision is piecemeal: we see the parts; but not the picture, or only vaguely. Even the degree of facility that is implied in any enjoyment of scenery is not so much a matter of course as it seems. Caesar occupied himself, while crossing the Alps, with composing a grammatical treatise. There is no evidence that there was anything odd in this. Perhaps Petrarch was the first man that ever climbed a hill to enjoy the view. We are not aware how much of what we see in Nature is due to pictures. Hardly any man is so unsophisticated, but that, if he should try to sketch a landscape, he would betray, in what he did or in what he omitted, that he saw it more or less at second-hand, through the interpretations of Art. A portfolio of Calame's or Harding's or Turner's drawings will give us new eyes for the most familiar scenes.

But we are aided still more by our habit of looking at things theoretically, apart from their immediate practical bearing. A savage can comprehend a carved image, but not so readily a picture. An Indian whom Catlin painted with half his face in shadow became the laughingstock of the tribe, as "the man with half a face." It is not necessary to suspect Mr. Catlin's chiaroscuro; what puzzled them was, doubtless, the bringing together in one view what they had seen only separate. They were accustomed to see the man in light and in shadow; but what they cared for, and therefore what they saw, was only the effect in making it more or less easy to recognize him and to ascertain his state of mind, intentions, etc. His face was either visible or obscured; if they could see enough for their purpose, they regarded only that. For it to be both at once was possible only from a point of view which they had not reached. A child takes the shading of the portrait for dirt,—that being the form in which darkening of the face is familiar to him. A carved image is easier comprehended, because it can be handled, turned about, and looked at on different sides, and a material connection thereby assured between the various aspects. To transfer this connection to the mind—to see varying distances in one vertical plane, so that mere gradations of light and shade shall suggest all these aspects arranged and harmonized in one view—is a farther step, and the difficulty increases with the variety embraced. Cicero was struck with this superiority in the artists of his time. "How much," he says, "do painters see in shadow and relief that we do not see!" Yet their perception seems strangely limited to us. The ancients had little notion of perspective. Their eyes were too sure and too well-practised to overlook the effect of position in foreshortening objects, and they were much experienced in the corrections required, and the effect of converging lines in increasing apparent distance was taken advantage of in their theatre-scenes. But they had not learned that the difference between the actual and the apparent form is thorough-going, so that the picture no longer stands in the attitude of passive indifference towards the beholder, but imposes upon him its own point of view. It was thought remarkable in the Minerva of Fabullus, that it had the appearance of always looking at the spectator, from whatever point it was viewed. This would be miraculous in a statue, and must seem so in the picture so long as it is looked upon only as one side of a statue. The wall-paintings of Pompeii, doubtless copies or reminiscences of Greek originals,—with masterly skill in the parts, and with some success in the landscape as far as it was easily reducible to one plane,—are only collections of fragments, and show utter incapacity to see the whole at once as a picture. For instance, in one of the many pictures of Narcissus beholding himself in the well, the head, which is inclined sideways, instead of being simply inverted in the reflection, is reversed,—so that the chin, which is on the spectator's left in the figure, is on the right in the reflected image: as if the artist, knowing no other way, had placed himself head downwards, and in that position had repeated the face as already painted. Such a blunder could not originate with a copyist, for it would have been much easier to copy correctly. It is clear from the general excellence of the figure that it is not the work of an inferior artist. Nor can it have come from mere carelessness; it is too elaborate for that,—and, moreover, here is the main point of the picture, that which tells the story. Doubtless the painter had noticed the pleasingness of such reflections, as repeating the human form, the supreme object of interest; but the interest stopped there. He saw the face above and the face below, as he would see the different sides of a statue; but so incapable was he of perceiving the connection and interdependence of them, that, even when Nature had made the picture for him, he could not see it. This is no isolated, casual mistake, but only a good chance to see what is really universal, though not often so obvious.

In this and other pictures the water is like a bit of looking-glass stuck up in front,—without perspective, without connection with the ground,—the mere assertion of a reflection. The conception embraced only the main figure; the rest was added like a label, for explanation only. These men did not see the landscape as we see it, because the interest was wanting that combines it into a picture for our eyes. Our "love of Nature" would have been incomprehensible and disgusting to a Greek; he would have called our artists "dirt-painters." And from his point of view he would be right. Dirt it is, if we abide by the mere facts. The interest of Art lies not in the facts, but in the truth,—that is, in the facts organized, shown in their place. It is not that we care more about stocks and stones than they did, but that we hold the key to an arrangement that gives these things a significance they have not of themselves.

* * * * *

SNOW.

Lo, what wonders the day hath brought, Born of the soft and slumberous snow! Gradual, silent, slowly wrought,— Even as an artist, thought by thought, Writes expression on lip and brow.

Hanging garlands the eaves o'erbrim,— Deep drifts smother the paths below; The elms are shrouded, trunk and limb, And all the air is dizzy and dim With a whirl of dancing, dazzling snow.

Dimly out of the baffled sight Houses and church-spires stretch away; The trees, all spectral and still and white, Stand up like ghosts in the failing light, And fade and faint with the blinded day.

Down from the roofs in gusts are hurled The eddying drifts to the waste below; And still is the banner of storm unfurled, Till all the drowned and desolate world Lies dumb and white in a trance of snow.

Slowly the shadows gather and fall,— Still the whispering snow-flakes beat; Night and darkness are over all: Rest, pale city, beneath their pall! Sleep, white world, in thy winding-sheet!

Clouds may thicken, and storm-winds breathe; On my wall is a glimpse of Rome,— Land of my longing!—and underneath Swings and trembles my olive-wreath; Peace and I are at home, at home!

* * * * *

HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.

BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.

II.

I am a frank, open-hearted man, as, perhaps, you have by this time perceived, and you will not, therefore, be surprised to know that I read my last article on the carpet to my wife and the girls before I sent it to the "Atlantic," and we had a hearty laugh over it together. My wife and the girls, in fact, felt that they could afford to laugh, for they had carried their point, their reproach among women was taken away, they had become like other folks. Like other folks they had a parlor, an undeniable best parlor, shut up and darkened, with all proper carpets, curtains, lounges, and marble-topped tables, too good for human nature's daily food; and being sustained by this consciousness, they cheerfully went on receiving their friends in the study, and having good times in the old free-and-easy way; for did not everybody know that this room was not their best? and if the furniture was old-fashioned and a little the worse for antiquity, was it not certain that they had better, which they could use, if they would?

"And supposing we wanted to give a party," said Jane, "how nicely our parlor would light up! Not that we ever do give parties, but if we should,—and for a wedding-reception, you know."

I felt the force of the necessity; it was evident that the four or five hundred extra which we had expended was no more than such solemn possibilities required.

"Now, papa thinks we have been foolish," said Marianne, "and he has his own way of making a good story of it; but, after all, I desire to know if people are never to get a new carpet. Must we keep the old one till it actually wears to tatters?" This is a specimen of the reductio ad absurdum which our fair antagonists of the other sex are fond of employing. They strip what we say of all delicate shadings and illusory phrases, and reduce it to some bare question of fact, with which they make a home-thrust at us.

"Yes, that's it; are people never to get a new carpet?" echoed Jane.

"My dears," I replied, "it is a fact that to introduce anything new into an apartment hallowed by many home-associations, where all things have grown old together, requires as much care and adroitness as for an architect to restore an arch or niche in a fine old ruin. The fault of our carpet was that it was in another style from everything in our room, and made everything in it look dilapidated. Its colors, material, and air belonged to another manner of life, and were a constant plea for alterations; and you see it actually drove out and expelled the whole furniture of the room, and I am not sure yet that it may not entail on us the necessity of refurnishing the whole house."

"My dear!" said my wife, in a tone of remonstrance; but Jane and Marianne laughed and colored.

"Confess, now," said I, looking at them, "have you not had secret designs on the hall- and stair-carpet?"

"Now, papa, how could you know it? I only said to Marianne that to have Brussels in the parlor and that old mean-looking ingrain carpet in the hall did not seem exactly the thing; and, in fact, you know, mamma, Messrs. Ketchem & Co. showed us such a lovely pattern, designed to harmonize with our parlor-carpet."

"I know it, girls," said my wife; "but you know I said at once that such an expense was not to be thought of."

"Now, girls," said I, "let me tell you a story I heard once of a very sensible old New-England minister, who lived, as our country-ministers generally do, rather near to the bone, but still quite contentedly. It was in the days when knee-breeches and long stockings were worn, and this good man was offered a present of a very nice pair of black silk hose. He declined, saying, he 'could not afford to wear them.'

"'Not afford it?' said the friend; 'why, I give them to you.'

"'Exactly; but it will cost me not less than two hundred dollars to take them, and I cannot do it.'

"'How is that?'

"'Why, in the first place, I shall no sooner put them on than my wife will say, "My dear, you must have a new pair of knee-breeches," and I shall get them. Then my wife will say, "My dear, how shabby your coat is! You must have a new one," and I shall get a new coat. Then she will say, "Now, my dear, that hat will never do," and then I shall have a new hat; and then I shall say, "My dear, it will never do for me to be so fine and you to wear your old gown," and so my wife will get a new gown; and then the new gown will require a new shawl and a new bonnet; all of which we shall not feel the need of, if I don't take this pair of silk stockings, for, as long as we don't see them, our old things seem very well suited to each other.'"

The girls laughed at this story, and I then added, in my most determined manner,—

"But I must warn you, girls, that I have compromised to the utmost extent of my power, and that I intend to plant myself on the old stair-carpet in determined resistance. I have no mind to be forbidden the use of the front-stairs, or condemned to get up into my bedroom by a private ladder, as I should be immediately, if there were a new carpet down."

"Why, papa!"

"Would it not be so? Can the sun shine in the parlor now for fear of fading the carpet? Can we keep a fire there for fear of making dust, or use the lounges and sofas for fear of wearing them out? If you got a new entry- and stair-carpet, as I said, I should have to be at the expense of another staircase to get up to our bedroom."

"Oh, no, papa," said Jane, innocently; "there are very pretty druggets, now, for covering stair-carpets, so that they can be used without hurting them."

"Put one over the old carpet, then," said I, "and our acquaintance will never know but it is a new one."

All the female senate laughed at this proposal, and said it sounded just like a man.

"Well," said I, standing up resolutely for my sex, "a man's ideas on woman's matters may be worth some attention. I flatter myself that an intelligent, educated man doesn't think upon and observe with interest any particular subject for years of his life without gaining some ideas respecting it that are good for something; at all events, I have written another article for the 'Atlantic,' which I will read to you."

"Well, wait one minute, papa, till we get our work," said the girls, who, to say the truth, always exhibit a flattering interest in anything their papa writes, and who have the good taste never to interrupt his readings with any conversations in an undertone on cross-stitch and floss-silks, as the manner of some is. Hence the little feminine bustle of arranging all these matters beforehand. Jane, or Jennie, as I call her in my good-natured moods, put on a fresh clear stick of hickory, of that species denominated shag-bark, which is full of most charming slivers, burning with such a clear flame, and emitting such a delicious perfume in burning, that I would not change it with the millionnaire who kept up his fire with cinnamon.

You must know, my dear Mr. Atlantic, and you, my confidential friends of the reading public, that there is a certain magic or spiritualism which I have the knack of in regard to these mine articles, in virtue of which my wife and daughters never hear or see the little personalities respecting them which form parts of my papers. By a particular arrangement which I have made with the elves of the inkstand and the familiar spirits of the quill, a sort of glamour falls on their eyes and ears when I am reading, or when they read the parts personal to themselves; otherwise their sense of feminine propriety would be shocked at the free way in which they and their most internal affairs are confidentially spoken of between me and you, O loving readers.

Thus, in an undertone, I tell you that my little Jennie, as she is zealously and systematically arranging the fire, and trimly whisking every untidy particle of ashes from the hearth, shows in every movement of her little hands, in the cock of her head, in the knowing, observing glance of her eye, and in all her energetic movements, that her small person is endued and made up of the very expressed essence of housewifeliness,—she is the very attar, not of roses, but of housekeeping. Care-taking and thrift and neatness are a nature to her; she is as dainty and delicate in her person as a white cat, as everlastingly busy as a bee; and all the most needful faculties of time, weight, measure, and proportion out to be fully developed in her skull, if there is any truth in phrenology. Besides all this, she has a sort of hard-grained little vein of common sense, against which my fanciful conceptions and poetical notions are apt to hit with just a little sharp grating, if they are not well put. In fact, this kind of woman needs carefully to be idealized in the process of education, or she will stiffen and dry, as she grows old, into a veritable household Pharisee, a sort of domestic tyrant. She needs to be trained in artistic values and artistic weights and measures, to study all the arts and sciences of the beautiful, and then she is charming. Most useful, most needful, these little women: they have the centripetal force which keeps all the domestic planets from gyrating and frisking in unseemly orbits,—and properly trained, they fill a house with the beauty of order, the harmony and consistency of proportion, the melody of things moving in time and tune, without violating the graceful appearance of ease which Art requires.

So I had an eye to Jennie's education in my article which I unfolded and read, and which was entitled,

HOME-KEEPING vs. HOUSE-KEEPING.

There are many women who know how to keep a house, but there are but few that know how to keep a home. To keep a house may seem a complicated affair, but it is a thing that may be learned; it lies in the region of the material, in the region of weight, measure, color, and the positive forces of life. To keep a home lies not merely in the sphere of all these, but it takes in the intellectual, the social, the spiritual, the immortal.

Here the hickory-stick broke in two, and the two brands fell controversially out and apart on the hearth, scattering the ashes and coals, and calling for Jennie and the hearth-brush. Your wood-fire had this foible, that it needs something to be done to it every five minutes; but, after all, these little interruptions of our bright-faced genius are like the piquant sallies of a clever friend,—they do not strike us as unreasonable.

When Jennie had laid down her brush, she said,—

"Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics."

"Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms," said I, with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition. "Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation."

"There papa goes with subjective and objective!" said Marianne. "For my part, I never can remember which is which."

"I remember," said Jennie; "it's what our old nurse used to call internal and out-ternal,—I always remember by that."

"Come, my dears," said my wife, "let your father read"; so I went on as follows:—

I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill Carberry to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed into "that undiscovered country" of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn our apprehensions.

"I'll tell you what, Chris," he said, as he sprang cheerily up the steps and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, "do you know what I chose this house for? Because it's a social-looking house. Look there, now," he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors,—"look at those long south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris, with our books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and Sophie gliding in and out like a sunbeam. I'm getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital suppers and things we'll have there! the nicest times,—everything free and easy, you know,—just what I've always wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free to come and go. And here now's the library,—fancy this full of books and engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just as you please and ask no questions,—all the same as if it were your own, you know."

"And Sophie, what will she say to all this?"

"Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both of you, and a capital girl to keep things going. Oh, Sophie'll make a house of this, you may depend!"

A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over boxes and through straw and wrappings to show me the glories of the parlor-furniture,—with which he teemed pleased as a child with a new toy.

"Look here," he said; "see these chairs, garnet-colored satin, with a pattern on each; well, the sofa's just like them, and the curtains to match, and the carpets made for the floor with centrepieces and borders. I never saw anything more magnificent in my life. Sophie's governor furnishes the house, and everything is to be A No. 1, and all that, you see. Messrs. Curtain and Collamore are coming to make the rooms up, and her mother is busy as a bee getting us in order."

"Why, Bill," said I, "you are going to be lodged like a prince. I hope you'll be able to keep it up; but law-business comes in rather slowly at first, old fellow."

"Well, you know it isn't the way I should furnish, if my capital was the one to cash the bills; but then, you see, Sophie's people do it, and let them,—a girl doesn't want to come down out of the style she has always lived in."

I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.

But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and we all went to see Bill in his new house splendidly lighted up and complete from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he was; but that was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was concerned. The running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys, and making informal calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as likely as if Bill had lodged in the Tuileries.

Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood, and show her principles, and was as different from her former self as your careworn, mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten. Not but that Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital heart, a good, true womanly one, and was loving and obliging; but still she was one of the desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of women whose very blood, as they grow older, is devoured with anxiety, and she came of a race of women in whom house-keeping was more than an art or a science,—it was, so to speak, a religion. Sophie's mother, aunts, and grandmothers for nameless generations back, were known and celebrated housekeepers. They might have been genuine descendants of the inhabitants of that Hollandic town of Broeck, celebrated by Washington Irving, where the cows' tails are kept tied up with unsullied blue ribbons, and the ends of the firewood are painted white. He relates how a celebrated preacher, visiting this town, found it impossible to draw these housewives from their earthly views and employments, until he took to preaching on the neatness of the celestial city, the unsullied crystal of its walls and the polish of its golden pavement, when the faces of all the housewives were set Zionward at once.

Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping is onerous enough when a poor girl first enters on the care of a moderately furnished house, where the articles are not too expensive to be reasonably renewed as time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse when a cataract of splendid furniture is heaped upon her care,—when splendid crystals cut into her conscience, and mirrors reflect her duties, and moth and rust stand ever ready to devour and sully in every room and passage-way.

Sophie was solemnly warned and instructed by all the mothers and aunts,—she was warned of moths, warned of cockroaches, warned of flies, warned of dust; all the articles of furniture had their covers, made of cold Holland linen, in which they looked like bodies laid out,—even the curtain-tassels had each its little shroud—and bundles of receipts and of rites and ceremonies necessary for the preservation and purification and care of all these articles were stuffed into the poor girl's head, before guiltless of cares as the feathers that floated above it.

Poor Bill found very soon that his house and furniture were to be kept at such an ideal point of perfection that he needed another house to live in,—for, poor fellow, he found the difference between having a house and a home. It was only a year or two after that my wife and I started our menage on very different principles, and Bill would often drop in upon us, wistfully lingering in the cozy arm-chair between my writing-table and my wife's sofa, and saying with a sigh how confoundedly pleasant things looked there,—so pleasant to have a bright, open fire, and geraniums and roses and birds, and all that sort of thing, and to dare to stretch out one's legs and move without thinking what one was going to hit. "Sophie is a good girl," he would say, "and wants to have everything right, but you see they won't let her. They've loaded her with so many things that have to be kept in lavender, that the poor girl is actually getting thin and losing her health; and then, you see, there's Aunt Zeruah, she mounts guard at our house, and keeps up such strict police-regulations that a fellow can't do a thing. The parlors are splendid, but so lonesome and dismal!—not a ray of sunshine, in fact not a ray of light, except when a visitor is calling, and then they open a crack. They're afraid of flies, and yet, dear knows, they keep every looking-glass and picture-frame muffled to its throat from March to December. I'd like for curiosity to see what a fly would do in our parlors!"

"Well," said I, "can't you have some little family sitting-room, where you can make yourselves cozy?"

"Not a bit of it. Sophie and Aunt Zeruah have fixed their throne up in our bedroom, and there they sit all day long, except at calling-hours, and then Sophie dresses herself and comes down. Aunt Zeruah insists upon it that the way is to put the whole house in order, and shut all the blinds, and sit in your bedroom, and then, she says, nothing gets out of place; and she tells poor Sophie the most hocus-pocus stories about her grandmothers and aunts, who always kept everything in their houses so that they could go and lay their hands on it in the darkest night. I'll bet they could in our house. From end to end it is kept looking as if we had shut it up and gone to Europe,—not a book, not a paper, not a glove, or any trace of a human being, in sight. The piano shut tight, the bookcases shut and locked, the engravings locked up, all the drawers and closets locked. Why, if I want to take a fellow into the library, in the first place it smells like a vault, and I have to unbarricade windows, and unlock and rummage for half an hour before I can get at anything; and I know Aunt Zeruah is standing tiptoe at the door, ready to whip everything back and lock up again. A fellow can't be social, or take any comfort in showing his books and pictures that way. Then there's our great, light dining-room, with its sunny south windows,—Aunt Zeruah got us out of that early in April, because she said the flies would speck the frescos and get into the china-closet, and we have been eating in a little dingy den, with a window looking out on a back-alley, ever since; and Aunt Zeruah says that now the dining-room is always in perfect order, and that it is such a care off Sophy's mind that I ought to be willing to eat down-cellar to the end of the chapter. Now, you see, Chris, my position is a delicate one, because Sophie's folks all agree, that, if there is anything in creation that is ignorant and dreadful and mustn't be allowed his way anywhere, it's 'a man'. Why, you'd think, to hear Aunt Zeruah talk, that we were all like bulls in a china-shop, ready to toss and tear and rend, if we are not kept down-cellar and chained; and she worries Sophie, and Sophie's mother comes in and worries, and if I try to get anything done differently, Sophie cries, and says she don't know what to do, and so I give it up. Now, if I want to ask a few of our set in sociably to dinner, I can't have them where we eat down-cellar,—oh, that would never do! Aunt Zeruah and Sophie's mother and the whole family would think the family-honor was forever ruined and undone. We mustn't ask them, unless we open the dining-room, and have out all the best china, and get the silver home from the bank; and if we do that, Aunt Zeruah doesn't sleep for a week beforehand, getting ready for it, and for a week after, getting things put away; and then she tells me, that, in Sophie's delicate state, it really is abominable for me to increase her cares, and so I invite fellows to dine with me at Delmonico's, and then Sophie cries, and Sophie's mother says it doesn't look respectable for a family-man to be dining at public places; but, hang it, a fellow wants a home somewhere!"

My wife soothed the chafed spirit, and spake comfortably unto him, and told him that he knew there was the old lounging-chair always ready for him at our fireside. "And you know," she said, "our things are all so plain that we are never tempted to mount any guard over them; our carpets are nothing, and therefore we let the sun fade them, and live on the sunshine and the flowers."

"That's it," said Bill, bitterly, "Carpets fading!—that's Aunt Zeruah's monomania. These women think that the great object of houses is to keep out sunshine. What a fool I was, when I gloated over the prospect of our sunny south windows! Why, man, there are three distinct sets of fortifications against the sunshine in those windows: first, outside blinds; then, solid, folding, inside shutters; and, lastly, heavy, thick, lined damask curtains, which loop quite down to the floor. What's the use of my pictures, I desire to know? They are hung in that room, and it's a regular campaign to get light enough to see what they are."

"But, at all events, you can light them up with gas in the evening."

"In the evening! Why, do you know my wife never wants to sit there in the evening? She says she has so much sewing to do that she and Aunt Zeruah must sit up in the bedroom, because it wouldn't do to bring work into the parlor. Didn't you know that? Don't you know there mustn't be such a thing as a bit of real work ever seen in a parlor? What if some threads should drop on the carpet? Aunt Zeruah would have to open all the fortifications next day, and search Jerusalem with candles to find them. No; in the evening the gas is lighted at half-cock, you know; and if I turn it up, and bring in my newspapers and spread about me, and pull down some books to read, I can feel the nervousness through the chamber-door. Aunt Zeruah looks in at eight, and at a quarter past, and at half-past, and at nine, and at ten, to see if I am done, so that she may fold up the papers and put a book on them, and lock up the books in their cases. Nobody ever comes in to spend an evening. They used to try it when we were first married, but I believe the uninhabited appearance of our parlors discouraged them. Everybody has stopped coming now, and Aunt Zeruah says 'it is such a comfort, for now the rooms are always in order. How poor Mrs. Crowfield lives, with her house such a thoroughfare, she is sure she can't see. Sophie never would have strength for it; but then, to be sure, some folks a'n't as particular as others. Sophie was brought up in a family of very particular housekeepers.'"

My wife smiled, with that calm, easy, amused smile that has brightened up her sofa for so many years.

Bill added, bitterly,—

"Of course, I couldn't say that I wished the whole set and system of housekeeping women at the—what-'s-his-name? because Sophie would have cried for a week, and been utterly forlorn and disconsolate. I know it's not the poor girl's fault; I try sometimes to reason with her, but you can't reason with the whole of your wife's family, to the third and fourth generation backwards; but I'm sure it's hurting her health,—wearing her out. Why, you know Sophie used to be the life of our set; and now she really seems eaten up with care from morning to night, there are so many things in the house that something dreadful is happening to all the while, and the servants we get are so clumsy. Why, when I sit with Sophie and Aunt Zeruah, it's nothing but a constant string of complaints about the girls in the kitchen. We keep changing our servants all the time, and they break and destroy so that now we are turned out of the use of all our things. We not only eat in the basement, but all our pretty table-things are put away, and we have all the cracked plates and cracked tumblers and cracked teacups and old buck-handled knives that can be raised out of chaos. I could use these things and be merry, if I didn't know we had better ones; and I can't help wondering whether there isn't some way that our table could be set to look like a gentleman's table; but Aunt Zeruah says that 'it would cost thousands, and what difference does it make as long as nobody sees it but us?' You see, there's no medium in her mind between china and crystal and cracked earthen-ware. Well, I'm wondering how all these laws of the Medes and Persians are going to work when the children come along. I'm in hopes the children will soften off the old folks, and make the, house more habitable."

Well, children did come, a good many of them, in time. There was Tom, a broad-shouldered, chubby-cheeked, active, hilarious son of mischief, born in the very image of his father; and there was Charlie, and Jim, and Louisa, and Sophie the second, and Frank,—and a better, brighter, more joy-giving household, as far as temperament and nature were concerned, never existed.

But their whole childhood was a long battle, children versus furniture, and furniture always carried the day. The first step of the housekeeping powers was to choose the least agreeable and least available room in the house for the children's nursery, and to fit it up with all the old, cracked, rickety furniture a neighboring auction-shop could afford, and then to keep them in it. Now everybody knows that to bring up children to be upright, true, generous, and religious, needs so much discipline, so much restraint and correction, and so many rules and regulations, that it is all that the parents can carry out, and all the children can bear. There is only a certain amount of the vital force for parents or children to use in this business of education, and one must choose what It shall be used for. The Aunt-Zeruah faction chose to use it for keeping the house and furniture, and the children's education proceeded accordingly. The rules of right and wrong of which they heard most frequently were all of this sort: Naughty children were those who went up the front-stairs, or sat on the best sofa, or fingered any of the books in the library, or got out one of the best teacups, or drank out of the cut-glass goblets.

Why did they ever want to do it? If there ever is a forbidden fruit in an Eden, will not our young Adams and Eves risk soul and body to find out how it tastes? Little Tom, the oldest boy, had the courage and enterprise and perseverance of a Captain Parry or Dr. Kane, and he used them all in voyages of discovery to forbidden grounds. He stole Aunt Zeruah's keys, unlocked her cupboards and closets, saw, handled, and tasted everything for himself, and gloried in his sins.