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What is Art?-We are lost in the consideration of the above question, from the fact that there seems to be a general haziness or fogginess existing as to what constitutes art, especially as we have tailors designating themselves "arttailors." There is in the term art, when applied in a very wide sense, a latitude or all-embracing power, which includes in its range the whole of the arts of peace and war. Industrial art, imitative art, high art, and low art, plastic art, and constructive art, all these are terms which roll glibly off the tongues of the numerous preachers on art matters. query at the head of this paper is, we think, a very pertinent question in these days, when dukes, lords, and commons are delivering fine speeches, orations, and diatribes on art on every convenient occasion; when everybody seems called upon to air their theories and dilate upon the canons of art; when schools of design abound; when multitudes of writers in the various professional journals are striving to indoctrinate the public with their individual and peculiar ideas on the subject; when book after book is being published upon art at home and art abroad, art in the work-shop and factory, art in and upon everything, until everything we use and wear must be works of art or nothing. According to these apostles of art, we must furnish our houses in accordance with the peculiar art-notions of this and that professor. One eminent teacher tells us that the patch-work style of Japan is the thing for us, and is so convinced by the fact, that he goes into a large way of business in order to be able to supply the articles he recommends. Another equally eminent man tells us that we can only prove true art in our home by following his particular ideas of art, and so ad libitum, but in all this we find no answer to our question as to what is art. Let us see if we can answer the question. One great authority tells us that art is the expression of man's delight in God's work. If we accept this doctrine, we must conclude that the nearer we approach nature in our efforts to produce art works the better the art; and that all good art must be natural in its form and expression.

Art is defined by another writer as having for its motive and end the giving of pleasure. While we acknowledge that the giving of pleasure to others is one of the purest and best pleasures we ourselves can enjoy, we can hardly accept this as the highest motive in the production of art works, nor indeed as a primary motive, for we are well assured that some of the greatest and most important works the world has seen have been done without a thought of what others would think about them. A real and true artist is and ever must be absorbed in his work, having no thought of what he or she will say. He has no room in his thoughts for such ideas, the whole powers of his brain and intellect are concentrated upon what he is doing. If this were not so, how poor that work would be; no doubt works thus created do give the keenest pleasure to the beholder, and the artist himself will derive pleasure from the success which elicits such expressions from others, there being but few of us who are insensible to praise or blame (replicas of Diogenes being exceedingly rare).

Another writer makes out art to be the science of the beautiful, and gives his reason that beautiful objects create feeling, hence the word aesthetics, which is ever at the tongue's-end of pretenders to art knowledge, who apply the

word, or rather misapply it, to objects having no connection with art whatever. Beautiful objects are produced by art, but this is simply one of the effects or results of art, and not art. The varions writers on æsthetics, from Baumgarten, Schelling, Hegel, Metor Cousin, to Burke, on the sublime and beautiful; Allison, Jeffries, and others discourse most eloquently on the æsthetics of art, but we cannot gather from any or all of these what really constitutes art. They preach of association of ideas, Platonism, and all sorts of notions in connection with art, which are simply not art, but some of its effects.

We conceive art to be the active manifestation of the inventive and creative faculty in man, elevated and refined by intellectual culture, acting upon and controlling the imagination. Let us see how this applies.

Primitive art, as exhibited by savage tribes, is in its degree as true a manifestation of art as is the highest production of the most cultivated intellect. We say in its degree, for it will be evident that the savage can only carve or paint up to and not beyond the standard of his intellectual or imitative faculties; what he knows he can represent in his own way, but no more; and what he does he marks with his own individuality, the mind showing itself in the work, which is the vital test of all art. Skill in manipulation, while necessary, and, in fact, indispensable to art, is in itself but a medium for the visible rendering of the thought influencing the mind at the time. In carving his war-club or the prow of his canoe, in weaving the mats he wears or uses, or in arranging the shells, feathers, animals' teeth, and other objects with which he adorns himself, he no doubt follows, to some extent, the traditions and customs of his fathers, especially in those wonderful geometrical patterns which he produces with such exactness, interlaced in such intricate and labyrinthian form, leading us almost to the conclusion that there is an instinctive faculty of order implanted in the human mind, which impels even the most ignorant savage to arrange his decorative treasures in symmetrical forms, and, while possibly imitating to some extent what has been done before, gives to his work some sort of impress of his own individuality, which constitutes what is called art.

Rising in the scale of civilization, knowledge, and intelligence, we find the same principles in application, but in a higher and more intellectual form. The symbolism in the works of the ancient Egyptians, and their representations of the games, customs, and ceremonies, while retaining a general resemblance, are each and all full of evidence of true art; that is, individualism. Coming down still later, we see this principle more strongly and fully exemplified in painting, sculpture, and music. The greatest workers of the greatest artists of any age or country carry out this principle, and have written it in plain language on their works. We see in these works the motive, the feeling, and the inner mind of the artist, from whence the conceptive idea emanated and was perfected; we see in it the master mind and hand, the two being in perfect unison; the individualism is so marked that hundreds of years after, their works can be distinguished from all others. And when the material value of these works comes to be appraised, how soon do the judges apportion the difference in value of an original by a great master, and a copy of the same! In the one is the man as

he lived, thought, and worked, and in the other we see but a copy, and, however close that may be to the original, its value as a work of art is nil. No copyist can impart that indescribable charm which the original possesses; he can simply render what he sees, which is not his individualism, but another's, and is not art. The greater the mind, the greater the art. In the works of Michael Angelo we see evidences of power, vast, sublime, a towering majesty of mind, which is impressed in unmistakable language upon all he has done, written so large that all men who behold his works, high and low, the ignorant and the learned, are alike impressed with the grandeur and sublimity of the concep tions of his mind, which qualities are the essence and sum of all art. Where these qualities are absent, art does not exist.

Coming down to our own times, with whose art productions we are more immediately concerned, we find that the term art is being prostituted to purposes whose sole aim and end is money-making, therefore it is all the more necessary that we should understand what art really is.

The painter who from the unity of mind and hand creates is an artist (i.e. a creator of art). Whatever be the subject of his work, pictorial or decorative, in which he clearly and distinctly shows the motive which actuates and governs him, and which is imprinted unmistakably on all he does, then he is an artist; otherwise, he is simply a copying machine, and not an art-creator or artist.

We hear much nowadays of art manufactures; there is no such thing, nor can there be. We have been taught that engravings are works of art. The engraving itself, the work of the engraver on copper or other metal, may be a work of art, for although he may copy the work of some great master and engrave it, yet the very nature of his work necessitates a creative power, in order to give a faithful rendering of the painter's work. Here, again, while the manipulative skill is indispensable, and must be acquired by long practice and experience, it is nought without the mind to comprehend and control the hand which executes. Many of our great engravers have been and are true artists, but the copies taken from their works, which are called engravings, are not in themselves works of art, but are simply copies of a work of art obtained by mechanical means, and do not require the aid of the artist, but can be, and are, produced by persons not having one spark of artistic feeling in them.

The same principle applies if we take music, which is termed one of the fine arts. It is the composer, the creator, and not the singer, who is the true artist; it is he whose name goes down to posterity on the roll of fame. The singer may be, and often is, a truly artistic expositor of the great maestro's works, but after all he is but the expositor and not the creator, consequently holds but a secondary place in the temple of fame. The true artist is the originator, the inventor. We might as well say that the printer who prints the score is an artist; his is not a work of art, nor are the copies he produces works of art, and so it is with engravings.

Photography is not art; it is the result of scientific principles applied through and by the aid of light to the production of sun-prints, and is, in fact, reduced to a mere mechanical process. There is no trace of the artist's mind,

and hence the pictures are produced independently. He does not create them; he merely chooses his positions, sup plies the means, the light does the rest. As a matter of course, there is in photography (as in all else) scope for the exercise of skill, taste, and knowledge, there being photographers and photography, but art is something different to this. There can be no art without originality; the degree of imagination and refinement pervading each manifestation of this originality or creative power will in a great measure depend upon the peculiar properties of the imagination possessed by each particular individual, being in its expression high or low, refined or coarse, according to the degree of culture, knowledge, and experience each individual mind is possessed of, apart entirely from manipulative skill. Hundreds of men can copy who cannot originate or create; these are not artists, nor art-workmen.

Let us enter one of the numerous so-called art manufactories, where so much of the sham cut furniture is made. We there see men employed making furniture in the prevailing style, whatever may be fashionable at the time. One man is making one part, one another, and still yet another part is being made by some one else, and in the aggregate reproducing mere fac-similes of what has been originated and created long ago. These men, with other workmen so engaged, are no doubt, so far as their manipulative skill is concerned, the best of their kind, but they are mere human machines, not allowed (even if they had the power) to depart one iota from their model. Labor is divided and sub-divided, and each individual workman is compelled to go on grinding away at a stereotyped pattern, ad infinitum, until it becomes almost impossible for him to get out of the rut or groove; his inventive or creative powers become blunted, or lost entirely. Now these men cannot by any stretch of language be called art-workmen, nor is the work they produce art-work. If a man adds to the article he makes anything of detail, either in form, color, or as a decoration, and that addition is entirely his own original idea, his own creation, that man produces art-work, poor and feeble it may be, but yet art, it being, however simple, a manipulation of the inventive and creative power possessed by that individual man.

This being admitted, let us get away from the cant of the day, and call a spade a spade. Art can invent and create, can construct and carve, can paint and draw, but art cannot be manufactured.

Notes. We are in receipt of the " Mississippi Valley Medical Monthly," published at Memphis, Tenn., and edited by Julius Wise, M.D. It is a magazine devoted exclusively to the medical profession, containing lectures and essays on interesting cases, their treatment and cure. The copy before us is number six of the first volume, and as it is yet young the publisher has our best wishes for the success of his undertaking.- -We are also in receipt of a pamphlet from the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, giving an interesting account of the progress of education in Belgium and Malta, and some statistics on illiteracy and crime in France. In reference to the latter, of over three thousand criminals arrested in one year for various crimes, only five hundred could read and write well.

climax is reached, the fate of the characters is decided; only here it is the portion of the passions and cares that have ruled life that is pointed out. This love is extinguished; this absorbing ambition is put away like a worthless care; that neglected aspiration is brought forward and placed in the very core of the heart. "It is, then, all the comfort that I find in my old age," says Montaigne in one of his immortal essays, "that it deadens many desires in me, and many cares that troubled life; care for the court and the world; care for wealth, greatness, science, health, for myself."

The old age of the domineering egotist-of the cynic whose mummified moral nature is embalmed in epigrams is only one degree less degrading than that of the voluptuary, whose white-faced terror of death would be piteous were it not revolting. There is a loveliness and a charm in old age to whom accumulating years have brought wisdom and left the feelings young. Those dear, enchanting old people, who can enjoy nature and sympathize with youth, laugh at innocent jokes, and who have yet seen enough to understand pity-there is something of the priest and the patriarch in such characters. Their neighborhood to the next world gives a sacredness to their personality; their experience of this one makes them our surest guides in our perplexities. They have traveled over life's country, and understand the roads and the cross-roads thereof.

On the relation of the old to the young, Victor Hugo has treated in a poem entitled "L'Art d'être Grand-père." In those fresh and genial pages he has celebrated the delight a❘ child can bring to the old man; the cheer, like hearkening to the chirpings of a nestful of birds, its babble gives-the pure thought its innocence suggests-the phantasies its vivid imagination kindles.

If the tie between the grandfather and child be so subtle, it would seem that the one between it and the grandmother would be many-sided.

On the continent, where families, especially in country houses, live in a more patriarchal manner than here, and where it not unfrequently happens that we find three generations living under one roof, the rôle of the grandmother is perhaps more definite. Her experience directs the young mother how to supply the first physical and mental needs of the child; her days of leisurely quiet, spent away from the bustle of life, give her greater opportunities of watching the little one at its games, of listening to its prattle, and entering into its interests; her experienced and more unprejudiced eyes may often discern the varied individualities growing up together in the family brood. And when the little maid steps from childhood into young girlhood, something, often like a mystic tie, unites her to the grandmother. To youth and to old age the present has little import. The attractiveness of life lies away from it. The calm anticipation, in a beautiful old age, of the life beyond the grave, exercises a singular power over youth. A venerable presence near the threshold of the other world is like an assurance of that other world to the young in the first fervor of religious enthusiasm.

The vividness with which the old remember the notable days of their past is one of the most touching characteristics of age. In Tennyson's poem, "The Grandmother," this

pre-Raphaelitic memory for details of the old is dramatically expressed. The love-story of a life related at its close is as romantic and vivid as if the turning episode of existence had all happened yesterday; and yet it may all have taken place, as the story told in that poem did,

"Seventy years ago, my darling, seventy years ago.”

This appreciation of the value of days that, happening at rare intervals, yet resume, in the long run, all life, instinctively draw the young to confide to the old in the great crisis of their existence. Sometimes we fancy the absence of expressions of violent grief in the aged is due to the drying up of their sympathies. Has not Tennyson found a deeper and a truer reason for it when he makes the grandmother say, in the poem to which we have already alluded,

"But how can I weep for Willy? he has gone but for an hourGone for a minute, my son, from this room into the next; I, too, shall go in a minute; what time have I to be vext?"

A witty Frenchman, M. Joubert, said that, "as in life there are four ages, so there are four corresponding loves. The child loves everything; the young man loves woman; then comes the love of order; lastly the love of God." Who will say that the days in which this supreme love is placed are not the best ?" A. C.

Growing Old.— "What is the secret of your long life?" asked Alexander, the young master of the world, of a peasant numbering a hundred and sixty years. The reply was significant, whether regarded as fact or symbol; it was simply: "Oil without and honey within."

A sweet soul breathing good-will and hyblæan kindness; an external, suave, genial, unctuous, smoothing the roughness of every-day contact, will of itself insure long years.

"Old age is unlovely," said the bard of Selma, to whom life was worthless except as filled with the clash of arms and the prowess of contending warriors; but there is no charm in our day in the ghastly crash of artillery and the deadly aim of a Minié rifle, against which the ancient shield and armor of woven steel are as the spider's web.

"The pitcher shall be broken at the fountain, desire shall fail, and the grasshopper be a burden,” is a sorry picture of man in any aspect, and for ages children have pondered these paragraphs till they became ingrained, and cast melancholy shadows as the years lengthened.

When a child of eight or nine years old, I chanced upon a book of anecdotes, which seemed to me a treasure. I had early imbibed a horror for the wrinkles and disabilities of old people, who, it seemed to me, were neglected and solitary, while my own long-lived relatives never grew old, but were bright and intelligent to the last; and I attributed this difference to the superior colloquial powers of the latter; which was not a bad inference for a child. I explained to my older sister this philosophy in this wise:

"When most of people grow old, they are hideous; wrinkled, doubled up, and dull and disagreeable, I can't bear them. I mean to learn all I can out of this book, so that I may have something to talk about, and be funny sometimes."

My sister shouted with laughter, for she was wisely happy in the present. After all, it does require a good degree of philosophy to grow old, if such a thing need be. Even the genial Wordsworth felt this, and said:

"Thus fares it oft in our decay--
But still the wiser mind
Mourns less for what time takes away,
Than what he leaves behind."

We all have an ideal of ourselves which we ought to realize, and might do so, if we were not hindered and debased by the kind of mediæval-age teaching that calls us "worms of the dust," "born in sin," "tending to the grave," etc., while, at the same time, all the glory of youth, beauty, and strength of manhood are treated as misleading snares. Suppose they are; suppose that, now and then, something be done which a wise head or tender heart might wish otherwise; he who never made a mistake is a monster, and will lack human sympathy, for he is not akin to it. He is at best a miserable negation, who never shook a moral bridge like a traveling elephant, to see if it is safe before taking to the depths. We can all pardon actual sin easier than pretentious virtue; the hypocrite is respectable in conventional eyes, but nauseous to the eye of truth; therefore let us cherish the glowing impulses of youth, and if some discomforts arise therefrom, lend a helping hand to retrieve them. This brings us to the youthfulness of what is called old men, whose peccadilloes shock our moral sense, and well they may, if they grow out of a libidinous and depraved accumulation of years. Such may be in the condition of Macbeth, without the ambitious wife to tempt to crime:

"My May of life

Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf:

And that which should accompany old age, As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but in their stead, Curses, not loud, but deep."

No one is old whose heart is fresh and impulses noble. Such renew their youth like the eagle. A long life into the centuries is the right of a man who has good blood in his veins, but this need not be coupled with old age. The dew of youth may lie like a consecrated chrism upon the man or the woman of a hundred years, who has obeyed the obvious laws of life, for it is the breaking of these laws that curtails the number of years a man is entitled to live.

We hear of people talk of retiring from the pursuits of life and living at ease. A busy career necessitates action. The old blacksmith who kicked his anvil aside to live at ease on the profits of his labor found it impossible to sleep in his fine house, and stole out to sleep over the forge, where the sweet sleep of the laboring man came to him. The man or woman who has worked hands or brains through a long period is disqualified for rest, and their only safety is in continuous action. Brain and muscle must keep their habitual channel because all the forces of life are grooved to run in that direction, and there is no let-up from toil for them.

The old knights thought it shame to unbrace their armor while manly service could be done, and they rode in heavy

armor as long as the field of action was open before them. In our unheroic era men make the ultimate aim of life the accumulation of money, and they pine for a repose which they have not earned, and retire to their splendid houses and regale themselves with the singing of birds and the lapsing of waters-selfish creatures who are no better than so many enthroned spiders.

No man or woman can be said to truly live who is void of action that will benefit those around him on the great destinies of the race, and this negation of self is the fountain of youth in the search for which Ponce de Leon periled and at length lost his life.

The best patent of nobility is a long-lived ancestry. Tell us of a man's grandfather and we will write his history.

In our day we see fewer old men and women creeping about our cities than in the country, for the reason that in the city there is more to stimulate the faculties, and people have no time to grow old; they have something better to do, there is much to keep alive a harmless personal vanity. The Western boast of a man, "I can whip my weight in wildcats," was not so bad; physical strength is a thing to be proud of, and physical beauty also, and to decry either is mere mawkishness. I would rather foster the vanity of years as a conservative element not to be despised.

The armor of the olden time was an excellent method of keeping the backbone straight. There could be no bent spine under the linked mail and heavy plates of steel; no contracted chest behind the stiff cuirass. A man was compelled to walk erect and wear a manly aspect, and thus he defied the encroachments of age.

"Stately stepped he east the wall,
And stately stepped he west;
Full seventy years he now had seen,
And scarce seven years of rest.”

There is no help for a man when he begins to round up the back. A stoop is the index to the "long bourne." Beware of losing the manly stride. Sing songs to the gods, to the morning bright Apollo, the ancients would say, which means keep young, don't fret. Do your duty to God and man, and you will live on to the centuries. In the words of the fine old fellow of the long ago, use "honey within and oil without."

Aspiration is the fountain of perpetual youth, to find which Ponce de Leon periled life and fame, not knowing that the alembic of the old chemists was only a symbol of what science has since revealed, that obedience to the laws of life is the elixir to preserve it.

Old men and women are the glory of the household; they invest it with sanctity. They tell better than a gallery of portraits of ancient worth and high endeavor; they tell of the good stock of the race, the pure blood in the veins of mens sano in corpore sano.