MOSES ON THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT PISGAH.

To which my wandering feet have turned; Nor with assembled Israel raise

THE Fine Arts are said by one whom artists have justly deemed a high priest of the fraternity, to "belong to an age of luxury." To us, hard-delving, hand-to-mouth generation of Yankees the word 'luxury,' is anti-republican, and not so reputable an epithet as it is in some other ears. Instead of imparting to a common man a downy idea of comfort, and causing him to wish the arrival of that day, ten chances to one that he wiped his brow in pious solemnity, and looked awfully republican at the sound. His thoughts might, perhaps, settle on some soft handed Moslem, sitting cross-legged in his big turban and trowsers, with pipe and opium, hot coffee, hot baths and harem, but on nothing better. A state of licentiousness and enervating excess however, is not meant as the fit soil of the Fine Arts. Hard-delving and hard favored as we are, it behoves us to look to their cultivation; and to foster those who have embarked their genius and ambition in rendering them worthy of our regardand us worthy of regarding them. The useful and the beautiful are never apart,' said Periander and it is a blind man's question to ask, why those things should be loved, which are beautiful.'

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An age of luxury,' in this connexion, is that stage of society, when a nation, snugly ensconced behind its walls of political security, has become so thrifty in the pursuits of peace that it can spare a portion of its wealth, leisure, and talents, to something more than the daily bread,' and homely necessities of life-that stage when it is fain to consult ease as well as convenience, and study how to unite beauty with utility-when society has toiled up from homely want to refined plenty--and the three-legged stool,' as Cowper

has playfully portrayed it, by slow 'transitions has reached "the accomplish'd sofa,"

an

"Necessity invented stools,

Convenience next suggested elbow chairs,

And luxury th' accomplish'd Sofa last."

Have we reached such a stage? If, after the fashion of some, answer were to be gathered from the disposition practically manifested in starving the Arts and their disciples out of the land, verily, their day and generation has not yet arrived. But there is in this answer a slur upon the taste of our countrymen, though artists will insist upon having it thus, which has in it a spice of spleen and petulance. It is a fact-accounted for in the history of our political extract and growth-that we possess the ingredients of such an age, in an unequal proportion: in taste, genius and refinement we are in the advance of wealth and leisure. The fellows of every profession, craft and mystery, here, which is not reared directly on the wants of life, are constrained to keep each other in countenance by relieving their spleen in similar complaints, Iwith the more bitterness in artists, doubtless, from their discovering in the intellectual culture of society a refinement above its means, an ability to appreciate what we cannot buy; a yankee struggle, in short, to live above our cloth.' The inconsistency, instead of being the object of invidious stigma, is, as was remarked, naturally and historically accounted for in the story of our political birth. We did not, either in laws, religion, or taste, come up as nations are wont to be matured; but present the novel spectacle of a nation 'brought up,' or rather, struck out, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter.

The consequence is, we have taken leave of our political parent, as is the case of most wilful children, better educated than endowed. Our British inheritance is that of an English younger brotherproud, but poor-well taught, but ill treated-blood enough, with none of the heraldry-pretensions in abundance, but little of the patririmony. In behalf of our inheritance, too, we are reputed to have improved unequally upon the old ancestral stock. In pride, which ran high enough in the veins of our Father Bull, and has been mounting fast enough for all practical purposes ever since, we are said to have won the race; have the credit of arrogating more, even, than is esteemed good manners in the old world. This foible, seconded by no better an endorser than poverty, could not fail of exposing us to merited stigma and the spleen of disappointment. Those however who have cast off their bile, should not persist in reproaching the taste and genius of the land with its poverty and pride. Nor should they miscal the latter. It is poverty, and not parsimony; nor is much of its pride vanity. Pride can scarcely vaunt itself into vanity while scanning the immunities, great and good,

which have rendered our clime the bulwark of freedom, be it ever so windy and grandiloquent-though there are features in the caprices and elegant indulgencies of life which betray a national homage to the meaner branch of the sentiment, revealing an ambitious ostentation of those points which make out the reputation of being large and liberal. As to parsimony, the prodigality of our countrymen of their little wealth is the standing paradox of travellers. We are written down and printed, by each and every one of them, as spending money faster, wearing finer cloth, wasting more at dinner and the like, than they do even at the old homestead.

The inquiries, why the Elegant Arts have not found here a fostering hand, nor the talent and ambition of our countrymen been embarked with more confidence and success in them, are plainly correlative; and the last is answered by having answered the first. If so, the bitterness of speech and professional pique with which they have sometimes been put, is worse than idle; not to speak of the hazard of running under the retort courteous, of a writer in the North American Review, who, by changing ends with the alternative, makes the latter account for the first. Prithee, friend,' quoth he, with an argumentum ad hominem henceforth hermetically sealing the lips of every pining artist, show us that thing of thine worthy of our money which we have not bought !' It is some relief, even, to find oneself speaking with unprofessional lips :—albeit, the above felonious sealing was rendered somewhat abortive and untenable by the prompt humanity of Mr. S. F. B. M., " P. N. A." [*] in the day and time of it. The issue there joined was upon painting principally, and held, too, in so close equipoise between them as to be in no danger of being jostled by our steps, if we proceed to account for the national supineness in another way. Poverty, beyond dispute, is the ultimate cause. Depending on the absence of amassed wealth, or the certainty, rather, of its being soon scattered by our Lycurgan rule of distribution, we have not been often enough, nor long enough, presented with specimens in the arts on which to educate a taste, and from which to catch enthusiasm. From want of familiarity, our countrymen have not been convinced of their intimate bearing on the success of the useful arts; nor been able sufficiently to taste of the pleasure, enduring, exalted and rational which they are capable of imparting.

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Particularly is this true of Sculpture. Situated as we are, far from the land in which the Art had its ancient abode and burial,' as well as from the modern schools in which it has been revivedthe treasures of each, therefore, too remote for success, by the breadth of an ocean; and we too poor to raise the wind' that should waft them nearer-it is a matter of course that they should

*P. N. A. President of the National Academy. [ED.

be, comparatively, strangers to us. It follows no less of course that we should remain, in a degree, strangers, to the pleasure and profit to be derived from them. To set the deficit out in its proper magnitude, let him who has paid his twenty five cents for an hour's saunter amid a collection of some two or three dozen casts, compare notes with one who has come from the magnificent and numerous galleries of Europe. Let him who has thought it a privilege, twice or thrice in his life, to steal behind a screen and admire these few dead and alive representatives of the living marble,' compare notes with one who has been where he might, at pleasure, stroll through the princely depositories of their originals-fancying, if he had a willing fancy, that buried Greece and Rome had met a resurrection- their corruption having put on incorruption, and their mortal immortality ;'— meeting in gallery, garden and grotto, the inhabitants of other and classic centuries, raised into life, as it were, by the triumphant trump of the sculptor, 'till he is constrained-if he came there a scholar, and with a scholar's enthusiasm had done funeral obsequies to their downfall-to cry out in admiration of the Art that thus mocks at Time.

The same injustice, of building reproaches on such facts as are unavoidable, is apparent from such a comparison of our facilities for cultivation with those of other countries. Plaster casts, beautiful as they are, are but sorry, cadaverous representatives of the pure, more beautiful marble. Their opaque, rayless hue detracts very much from the charm which the purity of the material imparts to the original. An artist, who has eyes to probe through to the centre and soul of a statue-be it plaster, or marble-tough as porphyry, or black as bronze-might deem the criticism hypercritical. But it enters more than he imagines into the emotion of the beholder, and has much to do in winning a popular enthusiasm in behalf of the art -the enthusiasm, that is, of such admirers (and all common admirers are such) as catch their admiration from external as well as intrinsic beauties:-all of us not possessing the artist's

"Optics sharp, I ween,

To see what is not to be seen."

One who has detected the insidious influence of external types to tinge and sway the humor of his thoughts, can guess, if he has not felt, what part the purity of the material may have in the power of sculpture. There is in a fair specimen of statuary a translucencya species of illumination among its particles, which is by no means a bad emblem of the light that is within us;' and which renders it a very fit tabernacle for so much of intellect, or heart, as may take up its abode therein. Indeed, it does more. It exerts a sort of vestal rule in chastening and hallowing whatever of life the artist is