Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/775

Rh The investigator can also be comforted with the knowledge that a thoughtless multitude enjoying the benefits conferred upon it by him, hardly knows to whom it owes them; that while the name of every musical virtuoso is in all mouths, and is certain of immortality in the Conversations-Lexicons of the fashionable classes, the name is substantially unknown among us of him who achieved that supreme triumph of inventive genius of making perceptible, through a copper wire stretched over wide regions and over mountain and valley, the sound of a voice as though it was speaking into our ears. "Knowledge is earnest, art is happy," we might paraphrase the poet's expression, without lessening its applicability. Art is the empire of the beautiful; of the creation of that which inspires in us a semi-sensational, semi-spiritual pleasure; and saying this we also say that it is in its widest scope an empire of freedom. In it rule no stiff laws; no strict causality binds the events of the present to those of the past and of the future; no standard unconditionally warrants success. The changing taste of times, peoples, and men assumes to praise and blame, as when the magnificence of Gothic church architecture became the sport of the eighteenth century. Here the definition of genius as the talent for patience goes to the ground; its happy inspiration produces a picture that seizes us and lifts us up with an elementary power which seems to mock the profound interpretation subsequently imposed upon it by art criticism; and the favored hand which perfects it is also a benefactor of care-laden manhood. It unfortunately lies in the nature of things that such force is not developed in every age. Here at one time the highest development is attained in some one direction, in trying to reach which again generation after generation despondently exhausts itself. The finest art theories can neither lift the individual over the limits of his natural ability; nor in the great whole prepare a better destiny for a declining art period. Of what profit is the discussion concerning idealism and realism which has divided the art world for a considerable time? Has it protected us against the hardly tolerable excesses of the latter? Seek for something new; the bold raising of a standard which the untaught multitude blindly follows, will bear the victory, till the antiquated is in some way supplemented by the fresh, or till a personality of commanding altitude unquestionably achieves the mastery.

Still less can pure science help art; and thus, intrinsically alien to one another, without either materially influencing the other, they go each its own way—the one steadily rising, sometimes more rapidly, sometimes more slowly, the other rising and falling in majestic waves. To desire to stamp one of the two, art alone, as the mark of the highest development of the power of the human mind, as not rarely occurs to persons unfamiliar with