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Everything conspires to urge on the general introduction of elementary art training in the schools of the people, so that the pupils may be best fitted for that subsequent technical art training which shall enable them to enter at once upon this inviting field of labor. Thus, at the very moment when the old employments, for which the former school training was a good preparation,-no longer provide adequate work and pay, these new industries wait for efficient and skilful workers.

With this conjunction of very general facilities for elementary art training, and this new and growing demand for the products of every form of art industry, and with these opportunities for the exercise of every grade of art capacity, a remarkable development of American artists and art workers may be anticipated during the decade upon which we are now entering.

The labor now most desired is that which is able to construct homes of beauty and to make the articles which will fitly adorn such palaces and their inmates. Silversmiths, goldsmiths, makers of beautiful potteries and porcelains, designers and weavers of costly and artistic stuffs for hangings and upholstery, all these, and like skilful workers in their allied industries, will be sure of finding ample employment. By and by, trained by these art industries as were the apprentices in the silversmiths' shops of Florence, will appear great masters of art.

That the Nineteenth Century should see, in this American land, a similar art development to that which then arose in Florence, will not seem so strange a phenomenon to the future student of history, as the statement of its possibility will probably seem to the reader.

To that student in the remote future, our age, foreshortened to his view, will be seen to be but a portion of that very era of "the revival of learning," which began when men first rediscovered Greece and Rome, and which is still in progress; as is shown by our explorations among the buried tombs, temples, and cities of Greece, in the hope, even yet, of recovering a few more of the precious fragments of their arts, which may add to our knowledge of that wonderful civilization. of a remote past.

It is, perhaps, not easy to realize that this Nineteenth Century, with its boasted discoveries, its wonderful inventions and machines, its feverish activities, and its conceit of progress, is one with that far away time when the finding a few long forgotten words, woke man's intellect to a new life; while the discovery of some mutilated statues and fragments of overthrown buildings proved the inspiration and the despair

of modern art; nor, are we of this bustling century quite ready to admit, that the modern race of men still toil vainly behind that Athenian race, whose superiority in the Arts,-one is sometimes tempted to believe in all things-is still so preeminent.

Nevertheless this very century is the child and heir of that age of the new dawn, which, adding to the humanizing influence of the Christian teaching, the culture and wisdom of the Philosophies, Arts, and Laws of the Wise Ancients, heralded and inspires all our Modern Civilization.

We of to-day, are living in "the Renaissance." The progress has been continuous though now seemingly delayed here and now there, it was but to bring up some stragglers in line with the onward march. Now giving attention to the principles of government, now to those of religion; now investigating natural phenomena, now pursuing art; now contending for individual liberty, now laying broad the foundations of ordered society; Humanity, all the while, moves onward toward the excellence attained by the old Athenians;-towards, we confidently believe, a higher excellence; a grander, humaner development.

French Revolutions, Napoleonic wars, Crimean battles, in Europe, African slavery and secession wars, in America, seem to retard; but, as time passes, are seen to have effected some needed change, to have removed some hindering influence, to have advanced, not endangered, the true progress of the Race!

The Seer, Emmanuel Swedenborg, declared, a century or more ago, that our sun was situated in that part of the heavens known as "The Milky Way," and indicated the exact place; within a few years, "stareyed Science," toiling far behind the Seer, has gravely confirmed the statement.

To the unastronomical mind it seems as hard to realize that our place in the universe can be so localized in that wonderful Galaxy which illumines our nightly sky, as it does to think that our place in history will come, in time, to seem one in development and almost one in actual contact, with the days of the Medici, of Petrarch, of Raphael, of Galileo, and of Da Vinci. Yet it is, even now, by no means difficult to trace back the spring and origin, "fons et origo,"-of our present development to those days and men!

Recalling the history of that "new birth of learning" in Italy, reflecting upon the wealth piled up by those medieval commercial Republics, and the manner in which the demands caused by the consequent luxury,

were responded to by the marvellous development of all the artistic industries, and by the production of the nobler works of art; the idea that a similar art development may be anticipated in this modern commercial Republic of ours, no longer seems absurd.

When, besides, one recounts the names of justly famous artists that have appeared in Europe during the last forty years; and further considers the marvellous improvement in quality and increase in variety and amount of productions of all the artistic industries both in England and on the Continent since the year 1850; nothing, in the prospective art development of America, seems impossible.

If effects still lurk in causes, a great artistic development may be confidently predicted in America, and there are many indications, which might here be cited, of its near approach; but, at present, we must return to a further consideration of the problem of elementary art training, and to the possibilities for such training afforded by our system of public schools.

ADDENDA.

ON FASHIONS IN ARCHITECTURE.

Quotations in regard to modern "Queen Anne" and other vagaries of American architects from an article in the September 1883, number of Harper's Magazine, on "Recent Buildings in New York," written by Montgomery Schuyler-" The best ten buildings in the United States."

The Queen Anne craze has become so dangerously epidemic, that I am glad to be able to quote here some of the pertinent remarks made by Mr. Schuyler concerning this latest phase of mindless and indiscriminate imitation. The closing words of the article are given as applicable to all art questions that may arise; since they embody philosophic and scientific truths which should underlie all artistic effort and without which, as a foundation, no true art can be developed here or anywhere.

"Queen Anne' is a comprehensive name which has been made to cover a multitude of incongruities, including, indeed, the bulk of recent work which otherwise defies classification, and there is a convenient vagueness about the term which fits it for that use. Whoever

recalls Viollet-le Duc's pregnant saying, that 'only primitive sources supply the energy for a long career,' would scarcely select the reign of Queen Anne out of all English history for a point of departure in the history of any one of the plastic arts."

"The revivalists of Queen Anne have not confined their attentions to the reign of that sovereign. They have searched the Jacobean and the Georgian periods as well, and have sucked the dregs of the whole English Renaissance. Unhappily, nowhere in Europe was the Renaissance. so unproductive as in the British Islands. It was so unproductive, indeed, that Continental historians of architecture have scarcely taken the trouble to look it up or to refer to it at all. Not merely since the beginning of the Gothic revival, but since the beginning of the Greek revival that was stimulated by the publication of Stuart's work on Athens, in which for the first time uncorrupted Greek types could be studied, what contemporary architects have ransacked as a treasury was considered a mere lumber room, and fell not so much into disesteem as into oblivion. During two generations nobody any more thought of studying the works of English architecture, from Hawksmoor to Capability' Brown, than anybody thought of studying the poetry of Blackmoor and Hayley. The attempt within the past ten years to raise to the rank of inspirations the relics of this decadence, which for years has been regarded by everybody as rather ugly and ridiculous, is one of the strangest episodes in the strange history of modern architecture."

"This justifiable preference for Bowling Green and Washington Square and St. John's Park over Broadway and Madison Square and Murray Hill, for an architecture confessedly colonial over an architecture aggressively provincial, is no doubt the explanation why so many of our younger architects made haste to fall in behind the Queen Anne standard. What we really have a right to blame them for is for not so far analyzing their own emotions as to discover that the qualities they admired in the older work, or admired by comparison with the newer, were not dependent upon the actual details in which they found them. To be content to dwell in decencies forever' was not considered the mark of a lofty character even by a poet of the time of Queen Aune. If virtue were indeed, 'too painful an endeavor,' and if there were no choice except between the state of dwelling in decencies and the state of dwelling in indecencies forever, we could but admit that they had chosen the better part. But they were not, in fact, confined to a choice between these alternatives. The Gothic revival in England, after twenty years, had succeeded in establishing something much more like a real vernacular architecture than had been known in England before since the building of the cathedrals-an architecture which, although starting

from formulas and traditions, had attained to principles, and was true, earnest, and alive.”

"Another generation of artists as earnest as those who began the Gothic revival might have brought this rough and swelling bud to a splendid blossom. But in an evil hour, and under a strange spell, the young architects of the United States followed the young architects of England in preferring the refinements of a fixed and developed architecture to the rudenesses of a living and growing architecture."

*

"They have had their way in New York for seven or eight years, during a period unprecedented in building activity, and out of all comparison in the profusion with which money has been lavished upon building and decoration. What have they gained for architectural art?"

"They have built so much and so expensively that they have produced in minds-like some of their own-which do not reflect much upon these things, the impression that if luxury and art are not synonymous, they are at least inseparably connected, with the latter in the capacity of hand maiden. But will any educated architect assert that the characteristic monuments of the last five or six years, greatly superior in quantity, and superior by a great multiple in cost, are equal in architectural value to the work of the decade preceding?

*

"So the new departure is still but a departure, and it seems time that such of the victims of it as are artists who take serious views of their art should ask themselves why they continue to work in a style which has never produced a monument, and in which it is impossible to discern any element of progress. In doing Queen Anne, have they done anything but follow a fashion set, as fashions in millinery and tailoring are set, by mere caprice?

The professional journal which is the organ of the architects in this country has indeed declared that 'architecture is very much a matter of fashion,' and architects who take this view of their calling will of course build in the fashion, as they dress in the fashion, in spite of their own knowledge that the fashion is absurd. But it is impossible to regard an architect who takes this view as other than a tradesman, or to discuss his works except by telling what are the latest modes, in the manner of the fashion magazines. It seems impossible for architects who take this view of their art to take their art seriously, any

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