Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/753

Rh them as high art if they please; but, at the same time, let the truth as it is in nature and reason have a chance to appear in the field of art. If Theology and Art are sisters (and they are in one sense), let them be twin sisters, walking hand in hand, with the stamp of truth, as we know it, in every line, word, and feature, irrespective of any pious frauds or false rules of art bequeathed to us by past ages. Spiritual truth ought to be reënforced by scientific truth, and art as well as religion will be the gainer.

I know very well that I am treading here on debatable ground, and that those who follow, or think they follow, the ideal in art, will rise as a host against me. My object here is to show that art has too much neglected the laws of living animal nature; that mythology has been followed rather than zoölogy, where attention to the latter would have been just as good for all the purposes of art, and far better for the interest of truth. In one sense, the ideal is the ultimate aim of art, if by that is meant that it shall suggest true ideas, and excite emotions which shall educate and elevate; but not, if by the ideal we signify the merely imaginary, fanciful, unnatural, and impossible, however beautiful such creations may be.

Even admitting that a work of high art by the old masters may include the impossible, the unnatural, as symbolic, if judged by the knowledge of the times and the motives of the artist, that is no reason for advocating similar errors in the nineteenth century. It seems to me that the symbolic in art bears a relation to the natural and the true, similar to that which the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians do to the written languages of the moderns—the one indefinite, suggestive, but variously interpreted, local, and temporary; the other defifinitedefinite [sic], positive, universal, and for all time unmistakable—and that we might as well go back centuries and adopt the hieroglyphic as the simply symbolic without reference to its truth in art. Symbolism is the visible expression of a myth, possessing a variable amount of truth and a large amount of error; both are characteristic, in the progress of civilization, of the lower phases of development.

I speak of art from the natural, not the imaginative point of view, and my arguments are addressed chiefly to such as have a fair knowledge of anatomy, physiology, zoölogy (living and fossil), and the laws of development in the animal kingdom. As, however, many deeply interested in the progress of art have very little acquaintance with living nature, it will be necessary for me to enter into some details, tiresome perhaps for the scientific expert, but important for the popular understanding of my argument.

While I do not deny the artistic value of the imaginative, symbolic, and ideal, I maintain that such, at the present time, if contrary to nature, is not the highest art, is not necessary for the expression of the most ennobling ideas, and is not demanded by the most exalted aspirations of humanity.