Page:The Academy Of the Fine Arts and Its Future, Edward Hornor Coates, 24 January 1890.djvu/3



"Art sanctifies the sorrow of the world." These are the words of a poet,—of one whose dearest ambition it was, in the early years of his life, to become a painter. But for us—for those of us who have not the happiness to be either poets or painters, whose lines of life have been cast in a mechanical, a railway, an electrical age—a century which, in its special fields of invention, exploration and scientific conquest, claims to have given to the world more than all the ages preceeding it—what shall be said of art? Surely that it still represents for us much of the grace, the charm, the inspiration of life. Almost unconsciously it has become a part of every day. In its simplest forms, and even upon the most prosaic lives, its influence is a dominant one, with a constant appeal and an answer, ever ready, to that faculty of the soul which asks to behold the beautiful, and accords it, when seen, instant recognition.

But while we are told that art, speaking generally, is everything that is not nature, it may not be claimed that all art, or that art in its finer forms and highest expression, appeals to or is intelligible to every one. There are doubtless some who are slow to believe that Wagner's is the music of the future, or who fail to see behind the misty lines of Corot the master poet-painter of landscape art. It is not true that the glories of the Ufizzi,