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static, and dwells upon a form of nude art that exists instincts of men and women are thus in accord with solely in its imagination.

Opposed in this matter as these several writers are, it yet may be asked whether any distinct difference of opinion exists among those persons who have a moral right to enter judgment. It must be remembered that while artists, and possibly art-critics, are competent judges of all purely artistic matters, are final authority as to the drawing, the composition, the chiaroscuro, the texture, and the tone of any painting, they are even less competent than laymen to pronounce upon its moral effects. In all art-features artists are experts; but in effects upon morals they are not experts-they are even partial, one-sided judges, their personal interests being largely concerned in the verdict. The true experts as to the morals of a work of art are students of morals, those persons who make a study of the operations of the mind, of the natural tendencies of emotion and passion, of the laws of ethics. These are the only persons who can be accepted as authority in any question of morals. This fact needs to be enforced, inasmuch as great mental confusion exists in regard thereto. It is continually assumed that the opinions of artists and critics of art are authoritative as to the ethics of art because they are authorities as to the techniques of art. This is a singular mistake. Mr. Page's opinion of the execution of Titian's Venus is entitled to very great respect; but Mr. Page's opinion as to the moral effect of Titian's Venus is worth very little by the side of Dr. Crosby's opinion on that subject, just as Dr. Crosby's opinion as to the color and drawing of any performance is of no authority whatever. This distinction has not, we believe, been pointed out; and yet it is a very clear one. People, being dependent upon certain authorities for instruction in the principles of art, have come to believe that their domain extends to the morals of art. What, we have to ask, is the opinion of experts in the matter? What do moralists say about the influence of nude art in morals? Now, there are two classes of moralists that are almost unanimous in their judgment: First, there is the whole body of the people who without special training have yet the instincts that come of moral culture; second, there is the whole body of teachers of ethics, the specialists who make the study of right and wrong the business of their lives-and these two classes are nearly of one mind as to the propriety of nudity in art. The instinct of modesty, for instance, is very powerful in women of all classes and grades, and we may be sure that the mothers, wives, and sisters of men are here nearly of one mind-altogether of one mind, if we except the few who being artists or connected with artists, or otherwise under the influence of the art theories of the day, have forced down their instincts and brought themselves by a series of sophistries to think things which in their heart of hearts they do not believe. If the instincts of modesty are not so powerful in men as in women, they are still very general, and, until reasoned away by artistic sophistries, are sure to be shocked at those displays in art which in real life are never permitted. The natural

the deductions of moralists. The Christian Church, the expositor of the moral sentiments of mankind, has always condemned the sensuous aspects of art. Here is a passage from Mr. Symonds's recently published "Renaissance in Italy," which reads strangely by the side of the confident utterances of "The Home Journal": "On the very threshold of the matter I am bound to affirm my conviction that the spiritual purists of all ages- - the Jews, the iconoclasts of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors-were justified in their mistrust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, but because it can not free itself from sensuous associations. It is always hurrying us back to the dear life of earth, from which its faith would sever us. It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us to forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and ascetics have mortified. The masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example, lead the soul away from compunction, away from penitence, away from worship even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming color, graceful movement, delicate emotion. . . . When the worshiper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite, ineffable, unrealized, how can he endure the contact of those splendid forms in which 'the lust of the eye and the pride of life,' professing to subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the goodliness of sensual existence? ... As displayed in its most perfect phases in Greek sculpture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual mundane life of man; but Christ, in the language of uncompromising piety, means everything most alien to this mundane life-self-denial, abstinence from fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond the grave."

This is a just and exact analysis of sensuous art as it stands related to religion, and by the side of this clear and logical exposition "The Home Journal" argument, that “art "(referring specially to sensuous art) "holds a place as an agency of spiritual culture side by side and one with all pure and undefiled religion," vanishes into the atmosphere of the transcendent and the absurd. Art gives us many pleasurable emotions, but we suspect that at its very best it is never more than simply not immoral. By the very conditions of its being art is sensuous in character, appealing to the love of color and to the sense of form. The story that a picture tells may excite very ecstatic feelings, but the story is the literary and not the artistic quality of a work of art.

We agree with Dr. Crosby as to the possibility of pure marble nudities, and unquestionably sculpture is less sensuous than the nude figure in painting; but we deny the distinction that is drawn between lewd and what is called pure art in their moral effects. Lewd art, as we have already said, simply disgusts; but what is the effect of the nude-we include in the nude the semi-nude also-as we find it from the hands of the masters, upon the susceptible imagination of youth? In considering this question it

is necessary to keep near to earth, and not lose ourselves in mists; to accept art as it is and human nature as it is, and not to lose the whole issue in a flood of poetic declamation. If "The Home Journal" argument is at all true, if the "body of man inspires by its simplicity, nobleness, and purity of line," then it must do so in nature as well as in art, and the civilized world has consequently made a mistake in clothing it. The human figure, however, is clothed by the necessities of climate as well as by the dictates of modesty; and a mystery thereby is made of the body which art can not unfold to curious speculation without danger. The imagination of youth speedily catches fire at the vision of female beauty that art reveals; it finds no fascination in coarse art, but a world of untold and dangerous emotions in the loveliness that sculptor and painter delight to dwell upon. To say that youthful imagination ought not to be sensuously stirred by art of this kind is to require of it more than is possible in nature. Such emotions are natural, but they are dangerous because they are apt to lead to great evil, and consequently the moralists are right in deploring all art and literature that tend to inflame them. The plain common sense of the world is right in this thing, as it is in many other things which philosophers and critics quarrel over.

WOMEN AS HORICULTURISTS.

"

THE last "Macmillan's Magazine" has an article entitled "A New Vocation for Women," which attempts to show what may be done in horticulture by female labor. Much of what is said pertains specially to England, but there are some general truths and a few suggestions that are applicable to this country. "There is," it says, one particular section of the people to which gardening as an industry ought to prove extremely beneficial, though it has never yet recognized the fact that horticulture as a profession is suitable to it. We allude to women, and we fail to see why women of all classes should not adopt this vocation with success." With the exception of the roughest kinds of labor, there is scarcely a department of gardening, according to this writer, that is not adapted to women, "while for many operations their quick intuition, their patience, and their skillful fingers are preëminently suited." He mentions hybridizing, grafting, budding, disbudding, and asks, Who could accomplish these tasks better? "The growth and tendance of seeds and cuttings, the management of plant-houses, the training of espalier and cordon fruit-trees, all these are works suitable for women; and, since many ladies undertake them for their own amusement, there does not seem to be any reason why others should not do so for profit.”

England differs from this country largely in the fact that a greater part of its fruit is imported, while with us fruit importation consists solely of tropical products. Fruit, with the exception of a few kinds, is not nearly so abundant in England as it is with

us, and there is there abundant room and need for the development of its culture. Here apples, peaches, pears, grapes, melons of all kinds, pour into our market with immense profusion, and women who attempted to compete with the established growers of these articles would find their task a difficult one. The culture of cherries and plums and hot-house grapes would admit, we should say, of considerable extension, and it is possible that choice varieties of all kinds of fruits are never fully up to demand. There are some articles which we scarcely cultivate at all in this country. Mushrooms, for instance, are largely imported from France, our native supply being wholly irregular and inadequate. The mushroom-culture in the abandoned stone-quarries in the vicinity of Paris is very extensive, one proprietor alone having twenty-one miles of beds in these subterranean galleries. Here is a wholly unworked branch of horticulture that women might take up to great profit. It is fairly certain that with an increase of supply of fresh mushrooms the consumption would steadily increase, and eventually reach a hundred-fold what it is now.

Flower-culture has greatly increased in recent years in the vicinity of all our large cities, but the taste for flowers is something that grows upon what it feeds, so here is large space for women to exercise their skill and industry. The supply and the demand for cut flowers are both very large, and probably keep pace with each other, but window flower-culture is only in its infancy. Within the last few years an increased taste for this sort of ornamentation has been very evident. Ten years ago there was probably not an hotel or restaurant in New York that planted flowers in its courtyards or approaches, and now nearly every one has them. Very beautiful, indeed, is the flower garniture at some of these places. In private dwellings window-boxes of flowers are becoming more and more common, but the majority of houses are still without this pleasant and graceful ornamentation, and hence the ladies who take up plant-growing might with a little tact greatly stimulate the public taste in this particular. And what more fitting pursuit for women than the cultivation of flowers? in what more charming conjunction can we imagine them? what employment is there anywhere that accords so exactly with their love of color, their passion for beauty, their delicate susceptibility to odors, their delight in whatever is sweet, cleanly, pure, and needing care and nurture? It is a wonder that flower-rearing is not already generally in their hands.

The practical difficulties with young women searching for a vocation is that they have no capital, no special training, little knowledge of current commercial needs, and no disposition to enter untried fields of labor. They are ceaselessly demanding new avenues for employment, under the impression apparently that by talking about them vigorously these new avenues will open of their own accord. Assuredly fruit-growing, flower-culture, and kindred pursuits offer no great obstacles to young women with a small measure of determination and a little

activity of imagination. The great point with us all is to be able to think out things, and this is what we mean in this instance by imagination. Neither men nor women are likely to gain much success in established vocations, much less enter upon untried ones, unless they have ideas, the power to construct, to form, to plan, to discover relations between facts and possibilities of facts, to detect significances and follow them to their logical outcome. In flowergrowing, however, there is this advantage-many ladies have natural taste and a little smattering of the art, and hence it would not be difficult for them to gain sufficient knowledge from books and practical experience in their own gardens to make a test of the suggestion which the writer in "Macmillan makes; and eventually training-schools may be established in which young women could enter. The thing is, to make a beginning; and to make a beginning the very first requisite is practical intelligence.

ART AND DEMOCRACY.

"

THERE is an article in the August "Cornhill," with the title of "Art and Democracy," which deplores the influence of the multitude upon art because "the many prefer small themes to large themes, little subjects to big ones, matters of private interest to matters of public interest." The many, we are assured, are very worthy people, "but it would be ridiculous to pretend that they cherish lofty ideas in any direction, and most of all in the direction of art. The day of high art is over; the turn of the average person has come, and he is using his rights freely and unreservedly, not exactly by replacing high art with low art, but with common art-with an art that accords with his own ideals, and his ideals are comprised within the limits of his own experience."

If the writer of this article had substituted aristocracy for democracy in his title, and argued that the world of fashion "prefers small themes to large themes, little subjects to big ones, matters of private interest to matters of public interest," he would, we apprehend, have come much nearer to the truth. His arguments are all sound, but he applies them to the wrong class. Haydon, who declaimed incessantly about high art, had once persuaded a wealthy gentleman to purchase one of his big heroic canvases for a certain place on his walls. "But, my dear," exclaimed the gentleman's wife, “what then shall I do with my piano?" The high-art picture had to give way to the piano; and this fairly measures the concern that aristocracy feels in art. On the other hand, there has never been a great art in the world that has not been rooted in the strong sympathies and passionate feelings of the people. The democracy have no taste for pettiness and prettiness, for the small perfections of art, for the pedantry and niceties of pundits and critics. The people are doubtless indifferent to refinement and insensible to subtilties of expression, but largeness is distinctly

the thing they comprehend and delight in. "No man," says the "Cornhill" writer, "whose mental experience has ranged through the ages, whose sympathies have been enlarged by travel, been developed by education, and been elevated by history, can fail to walk through the room full of dazzling color in Burlington House without feeling that he has been moving in a somewhat narrow world. He will have seen much to please, no little to move him. The current features of domestic life, the curiosities of contemporary civilization, the faces of his more celebrated acquaintances, reproductions of natural scenery or picturesque architecture, these and much more of the same sort will have been offered to his gaze; but he will not, he can not feel that he has been admitted to very high regions of art, or that he has been lifted beyond the petty range of his own normal experiences." This feeling will be experienced by every layman who enters an English or American art-gallery if he is a man of imagination and reflection; but the need thus set forth does not appear to be felt by artists and connoisseurs. The whole cultivated art - world seems to be animated by other ideas; to be wholly absorbed by the refinements and subtilties of art, rather than by high, large, and great ideas. "Art," says Mr. Whistler, "may be concerned alone with the arrangement of color and line." This is what the " 'higher culture" declares is art. Color," nocturnes," "symphonies," arrangements, impressions, decoration, effects in light and shade, any sort of play and trick with pigments and lines, constitute the new philosophy. Is art of this sort the art of the many, the art of the democracy, the art of the people, the art of feeling and passion? The people demand emotion and feeling in poetry; the pedants think more of arrangement, of new tricks in versification, of freshly used terms; and a similar manifestation is apparent in art. "Can not," said Lord Beaconsfield, in his address at the last Royal Academy dinner, can not English art attempt a higher flight, and give to the nation pictures to compare with those which Raphael has bequeathed to Rome, and Tintoretto to Venice?" In order that this sort of art shall revive, there must be a change of heart among the artists rather than among the people. Dilettanteism must be extinguished. Delight in the mere grammar of art must be exchanged for delight in ideas. The notion that the story of a picture is the literature and not the art of a picture—not the thing with which art is really concerned-must be abandoned. And, if the primary concern of art is arrangement of colors and lines, there is necessarily an exclusion from it of high and noble ideas. The artists undoubtedly do aim to express poetical sentiment in art, to awaken sensations by harmonies of color just as sensations are awakened by harmonies of music; and, when poetry of technical expression is wedded to the poetry of story, when harmonious lines and colors are employed to illustrate great heroic facts in human history and human experience, we shall have a high art which people of both high and low degree will unite in loving and admiring.

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SIDE from the intrinsic importance of the work, evolution of conduct, showing that, as evolution of

what melancholy interest attaches to

Herbert Spencer's "Data of Ethics,"* because of the intimation by which it is accompanied that the System of Synthetic Philosophy, upon which the author has so long been engaged, is likely to remain incomplete. According to the programme of publication long since announced, two more volumes of "The Principles of Sociology" should have preceded the "Data of Ethics," which is the first division of the work on "The Principles of Morality," with which the system ends. Mr. Spencer explains that he was led to deviate from the order originally set down by the fear that failing health might compel him to leave the final work of the series, to which all the preceding works are subsidiary and preliminary, unexecuted. "Written as far back as 1842, my first essay, consisting of letters on The Proper Sphere of Government,' vaguely indicated what I conceived to be certain general principles of right and wrong in political conduct; and from that time onward my ultimate purpose, lying behind all proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong, in conduct at large, a scientific basis. To leave this purpose unfulfilled, after making so extensive a preparation for fulfilling it, would be a failure the probability of which I do not like to contemplate; and I am anxious to preclude it, if not wholly, still partially. Hence the step I now take."

Another consideration which has made the author anxious to indicate, at least in outline, this final work of his system, is that the establishment of rules of right conduct on a scientific basis is a pressing need of the time. "Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred origin, the secularization of morals is becoming imperative. Few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it"; and yet this, according to Mr. Spencer, is precisely what is now happening.

From the foregoing explanation it will be seen that "The Data of Ethics" constitutes the first division of the work on "The Principles of Morality," with which Mr. Spencer intended that his System of Philosophy should end, and that its aim is to find a scientific basis for the principles of right and wrong in human conduct. In seeking such a scientific basis, of course the most important preliminary step is to define with exactness what is meant by right and wrong, or good and bad, conduct; but, in order to make his definition more intelligible, Mr. Spencer prefaces it with a most suggestive chapter on the

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of structures, so advance in conduct has been strictly correlative to advance in structure and functions. In the lowest types of animals the conduct is constituted of actions so little adjusted to ends that life continues only as long as the accidents of the environment are favorable; in animals of a somewhat higher grade, along with more developed structures and greater power of combining functions, we find a better adjustment of acts to ends, and a consequent preservation of life for a longer period; and finally in man we not only find that the adjustments of acts to ends are both more numerous and better than among lower animals, but we find the same thing on comparing the doings of higher races of men with those of lower races. And, along with this greater elaboration of life produced by the pursuit of more numerous ends, there goes that increased duration of life which constitutes the supreme end.”

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This leads up naturally to the essential point of Mr. Spencer's work—his definition of good and bad conduct. Illustrating by many examples the various uses of the two words, he points out that, in the last analysis, they always refer to the greater or less efficiency of the adjustment of instruments or acts to ends. "The good knife is one which will cut; the good gun is one which carries far and true; the good house is one which duly yields the shelter, comfort, and accommodation sought for. Conversely, the badness alleged of the umbrella or the pair of boots, refers to their failures in fulfilling the ends of keeping off the rain, and comfortably protecting the feet, with due regard to appearances. . . . And those doings of men which, morally considered, are indifferent, we class as good or bad, according to their success or failure. A good jump is a jump which, remoter ends ignored, well achieves the immediate purpose of a jump; and a stroke at billiards is called good when the movements are skillfully adjusted to the requirements. Oppositely, the badness of a walk that is shuffling and an utterance that is indistinct is alleged because of the relative non-adaptations of the acts to the ends." Now, since (as is shown in the chapter on the evolution of conduct) the great primary aim of the actions of living crea tures is the preservation, prolongation, and bettering of life, those actions or causes of conduct which tend to preserve, prolong, or better life, are called good, while those which tend to the opposite effects are called bad.

Of course, this judging as good, conduct which conduces to life involves the assumption that animate existence is desirable-in other words, that life is worth living-and, since it is universally admitted that life can be regarded as desirable only in case it *The Data of Ethics. By Herbert Spencer. New brings a surplus of agreeable feeling, it follows that York: D. Appleton & Co. 12m0, pp. 288. the test of good or bad conduct is whether or not it

produces this surplus of agreeable feeling. "There is no escape," says Mr. Spencer, "from the admission that in calling good the conduct which subserves life, and bad the conduct which hinders or destroys it, and in so implying that life is a blessing, and not a curse, we are inevitably asserting that conduct is good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable or painful"; and further along he formulates the proposition that, "taking into account immediate and remote effects on all persons, the good is universally the pleasurable." This being the vital point of Mr. Spencer's ethical theory, we will quote his own summary of his argument:

The truth that conduct is considered by us as good or bad, according as its aggregate results, to self or others, or both, are pleasurable or painful, we found on examination to be involved in all the current judgments on conduct: the proof being that reversing the applications of the words creates absurdities. And we found that every other proposed standard of conduct derives its authority from this standard. Whether perfection of nature is the assigned proper aim, or virtuousness of action, or rectitude of motive, we saw that definition of the perfection, the virtue, the rectitude, inevitably brings us down to happiness experienced in some form, at some time, by some person, as the fundamental idea. Nor could we discover any intelligible conception of blessedness, save one which implies a raising of consciousness, individual or general, to a happier state; either by mitigating pains or increasing pleasures.

Even with those who judge of conduct from the religious point of view, rather than from the ethical point of view, it is the same. Men who seek to propitiate God by inflicting pains on themselves, or refrain from pleasures to avoid offending him, do so to escape greater ultimate pains, or to get greater ultimate pleasures. If, by positive or negative suffering here, they expected to achieve more suffering hereafter, they would not do as they do. That which they now think duty they would not think duty if it promised eternal misery instead of eternal happiness. Nay, if there be any who believe that human beings were created to be unhappy, and that they ought to continue living to display their unhappiness for the satisfaction of their Creator, such believers are obliged to use this standard of judgment; for the pleasure of their diabolical god is the end to be achieved. So that no school can avoid taking for the ultimate moral aim a desirable state of feeling called by whatever name-gratification, enjoyment, happiness. Pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is an inexpugnable element of the conception. It is as much a necessary form of moral intuition as space is a necessary form of intellectual intuition.-(Page 45.)

Having thus defined what is meant by the terms good and bad as applied to conduct, and furnished a test by which to judge them, Mr. Spencer proceeds to the consideration of moral phenomena as phenomena of evolution; being, as he says, forced to do this by finding that they form a part of the aggregate of phenomena which evolution has wrought out. "If the entire visible universe has been evolved-if the solar system as a whole, the earth as a part of it, the life in general which the earth bears, as well as that of each individual organism-if the mental phenomena displayed by all creatures, up to the highest, in

common with the phenomena presented by aggregates of these highest-if one and all conform to the laws of evolution; then the necessary implication is that those phenomena of conduct in these highest creatures with which morality is concerned, also conform." He takes up in succession the physical view, the biological view, the psychological view, and the sociological view, devoting a chapter to each. These chapters are in the highest degree interesting and instructive, involving as they do a summary and application of all the preceding volumes of the series; but they can not be summarized-in fact, an adequate summary would be very apt to be longer than the chapters themselves.

Proceeding to the next stage in his argument, Mr. Spencer demonstrates the relativity of pains and pleasures -a comparatively familiar topic, which, however, he renders fresh and living by his method of treatment. He then discusses-and the four chapters in which he discusses them are among the most significant and interesting in the volume-the relative claims of Egoism, or self-regarding actions, and Altruism, or other-regarding actions. The conclusion which he reaches is that both are primordial law of nature, while care for others (as, for example, requisites to life; self-preservation being the first in the rearing of offspring) is essential to the continuance of life from the beginning. The two are not, as is commonly supposed, mutually exclusive; neither are they necessarily antagonistic, save in their most extreme forms: a rational philosophy of conduct requires a compromise between the two.

It is admitted that self-happiness is, in a measure, to be obtained by furthering the happiness of others. May it not be true that, conversely, general happiness is to be obtained by furthering self-happiness? If the well-being of each unit is to be reached partly through his care for the well-being of the aggregate, is not the well-being of the aggregate to be reached partly through the care of each unit for himself? Clearly, our conclusion must be that general happiness is to be achieved mainly through the adequate pursuit of their own happinesses by individuals; while, reciprocally, the happinesses of individuals are to be achieved in part by their pursuit of the general happiness.-(Page 238.)

Two final chapters discuss "Absolute and Relative Ethics," and "The Scope of Ethics," preparing the way for those specific conclusions and practical applications of principles which will be set forth in future portions of the work, in case, as is most earnestly to be hoped, Mr. Spencer finds himself able to complete it. These conclusions are implied in the present volume in such wise that, as Mr. Spencer says, "definitely to formulate them requires nothing beyond logical deduction"; but it is a very mild statement of the truth to say that no one could formulate them so convincingly as Mr. Spencer himself.

The foregoing summary, it should be added, gives but a very imperfect idea of even the main outlines and conclusions of Mr. Spencer's work: it conveys no idea at all of the depth of its thought, the force of its logic, the comprehensive range of its treat

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