Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/780

 748 The modern age. The fine arts. [1850-1900 that it retains a spiritual honesty, like that of Elizabethan English- men, which has kept unbroken its perhaps mistaken confidence in its own essential integrity. In earlier days the ideals were perhaps more frequently asserted than now; for, at least since the great national convulsion of the Civil War, Americans have been forced, by circum- stances beyond human control, to devote their chief energies to the practical solution, in the simplest attainable way, of questions which, if they had paused to master their complexity, might have proved almost paralytically appalling. So meanwhile, very naturally, their literary expression has tended, on the whole, to rather journalistically precise and vivid statements of something resembling fact. In fine arts other than that of literature America has not yet found very characteristic expression. Its sculpture and its painting have been so far modelled on the contemporary work of Europe that the only American sculptors or painters who have attained high excellence have generally been resident abroad. Something similar is true of music in America. Of late years, par- ticularly in Boston, New York, and Chicago, America has had orchestras of admirable quality. It has also many respectable schools of music; and the standard of musical art, in general, has become more than respectable. But American musical life and expression have not yet assumed any tangibly national character, such as one feels, for example, in the music of Italy, of Germany, of France, or of Russia. Neither performers nor composers differ much from well-trained performers and composers else- where. When America desired a national march for the Centennial Celebration of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Wagner was invited to write it ; and the performance of it was intrusted to musicians who were mostly of German birth. What was true twenty-seven years ago remains on the whole equally true to-day. With architecture the case is different. In later colonial times, American buildings, though generally constructed of wood, and always lighter in material than the monumental buildings of Europe, had often exhibited a certain delicacy of proportion which renders such of them as still exist agreeable examples of the pseudo-classic style general through- out the eighteenth century. The earlier buildings of the independent Republic, such as the State House in Boston, and the White House and the original Capitol at Washington, preserve, on a somewhat more pre- tentious scale, much of this charm. In the United States, as in England, there succeeded a period of architecture from which all trace of fine art seemed to have departed ; and when, about the time of the Civil War, some signs of an artistic revival appeared, its first efforts, particularly in public buildings, were singularly unfortunate. Within the last thirty years, on the other hand, something resembling a true architectural renaissance has declared itself in America. The great increase of wealth