Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/371

Rh from physiology and history, and others from psychology. We will inquire, first, what the natural and historical sciences teach us concerning the medium in which art can live.

Art, to reach its full development, requires around the artist and within him a cultivation of beauty of which the Greeks have given an example. This people had, for purity of form, for the harmonious proportion of the limbs, and for beautiful nudities, a love that went to the verge of adoration; and beauty was, in their eyes, invested with something sacred. This worship of beauty was revived at the renascence. In our days, on the other hand, strength and beauty of body are not the ideal. Many things seem to show that a too exclusive preoccupation with pleasing forms, as well as with ornaments and decorations, are a sign by which we can recognize primitive conditions of civilization. With those modern people who are still in an inferior grade of civilization, as with the Arabs, the male sex itself displays much coquetry, and seeks to please especially with its strength and physical beauty, its vesture, and its adornments. Civilization gradually destroys these primitive instincts, which have been, however, according to Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer, the germ of art. The man of our days does not care whether he has, under the convenient and ungraceful vestments that hide him, a well-developed torso and vigorous muscles. Coquetry survives and will doubtless continue to survive with women, but it too often tends to stray from its purpose, which is to bring out the beauty of the members. Women, who ought, more than all other persons, to endeavor to preserve pure and correct forms, take a thousand devices to hinder the development of their bodies and the circulation of their blood. So, not only the ancient culture, but beauty itself, seems to be falling into decadence, and the principal object of the arts is tending to disappear.

Many circumstances in our artificial modern life are combining to produce a tendency to diminution of stature and an augmentation of bodily deformities; among them the constantly increasing division of labor, under which the physical systems of workmen become developed in a single direction only, and too often cramped in other directions; the efforts of philanthropic science to preserve the sick and deformed, and help them propagate their race; the agglomeration of multitudes in cities; conscription, taking the most vigorous men for the army; and the dissipations of society and fashionable life, are producing a kind of reverse selection that may encourage infirmity and ugliness. The brain is becoming more and more the pre-eminently active organ. According to some anthropologists, the nervous system of the civilized man is thirty per cent larger than that of the savage, and it is destined to go on increasing at the expense of the muscular system. It is not probable, however, that this process will go so far as to result in permanent injury, for with the expanding development of the brain will go an increased quickness in detecting whatever evils