the possibility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of her lost love; but a miser cannot sing of his lost money.” "With mathematical precision, subject to no error or exception, the art of a nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of its ethical state." And so he claims that the "love of beauty is an essential part of all healthy human nature; though it can long cöexist with states of life in many other respects unvirtuous, it is itself wholly good;-the direct adversary of envy, avarice, mere worldly care, and especially of cruelty."

In the relation of art to use, he discovers a two-fold office ;"it gives Form to knowledge, and Grace to utility." The expression is a characteristic specimen of Ruskin's specious rhetoric; and indicates a remarkable blindness to the most vital relations in art. The essential function of art is to create form; and it gives form to knowledge in no other sense than to utility, as it also as truly gives grace to knowledge as to utility. And when he proceeds on the following page to emphasize his assertion "that the entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth or full of use, and that however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of an inferior kind, and tend to deeper infirmity, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one, he leads us into a fog and mist in regard to his whole theory of art, out of which we can discern no way of escape. He had repeatedly given forth in elaborated form of utterance that the three sole functions of art are to enforce religion, to perfect morals, and do material service; and now ignoring the first two functions, he restricts the entire vitality of art to the third-to use, which yet is here no longer mere material service alone, but proinotion of knowledge also. Evidently he has no well-settled theory of art. He has never thought out its essential properties and its relations, and carefully distinguished them. He is, hence, ever mixing up the ideas which art expresses with the proper beauty which art produces, and this beauty, which is the sole, immediate end of art, so far as pure or aesthetic, with the remote end of art or the motive to art, which may be some utility; as also the ideas expressed and the beautiful forms given in the expression with the conditions of art-expression.

Thus, he says, as if characterizing fully the two classes of arts, that in the graphic arts you have skill, beauty, and likeness, which last element he afterwards calls verity, and in the architectural arts, you have skill, beauty, and use. Beauty, he seems to conceive of as a coördinate attribute with skill, as if there could be supposed beauty in art without skill. Either the imposing announcement is an empty trnism or it is deceptive. If he simply means that all perfect, graphic art must have skill, that is, power to render, we need not be told that; nor that perfect art, whose sole function it is to produce beauty, must give beauty, if it produce at all; nor yet, that where it undertakes to imitate, it must imitate or produce likeness. But Ruskin intended something more than these bald truisms. If, however, the enunciation be taken as embracing, coördinately, all the essential characters of graphic art, the statement is incorrect. The truth is that all art consists in rendering idea, and its one comprehensive result is form. All idea is true, beautiful, and good, while it may be regarded for the time by us more or less exclusively and predominantly as the one or the other. While art properly has to do with form, it may so render the true in its form that the true shall prevail in its impression on the mind contemplating the product; it may so teach rather than awaken admiring emotion, and it is then preëminently didactic art. Or it may seek solely perfect form; it is then fine art, aesthetic art; and its legitimate effect is loving admiration. Or still further it may in its rendering in form seek some good; it is then useful art; its proper effect is beneficent. But didactic art must have form or beauty; and thus one contemplating mind may absorb itself with the beauty, while another may be taken up with the truth revealed. Just so with useful art. The arts thus are properly discriminated by the more immediate, specific end proposed or attained by the artist, or according as he proposes to make the true, the beautiful, or the good the more prominent idea. Yet the true cannot be, except as involving the beautiful and the good. All teaching art must, if perfect, please, that is, be in perfect form, be beautiful; all fine art must, also, instruct and also profit as well as please; and all useful art must be in truth and in beauty to reach the highest utility.

In the same manner, the elements of artistic genius are com prehensively the three so justly and philosophically enumerated by the Apostle Paul as making up the Christian spirit, "power, love, and sound mind;" for the spirit of piety, of art, of all rational culture is the same in its general, constituent elements, and they are of such close affinity, that perfection in one cannot be but in connection with the others.

There must be skill in all art, indeed, but skill is not the exclusive element of artistic excellence. There must be verity and utility in all art, but verity and utility are only the remoter incidental ends in fine æsthetic art, and all art must proceed alike in verity and result in utility.

III. We shall dismiss our notice of Ruskin's doctrine of method in art, with a specification of a most just and most important principle, applicable to all art, to oratory and poetry, to music and to sculpture, as to painting, to which it is immediately applied,-indeed applicable to all culture conceived as the formation of a perfect character. In its application to painting, it is thus expressed:-" arrange broad masses and colors first, and put the details into them afterwards." Or, to state the principle in its generic form and as applicable to all art and to all culture:-begin with the whole, proceed to the part. This method, Ruskin observes, is the reverse of the usual method; but he vindicates it as the natural method, and followed by all successful artists; as less irksome than the reverse method and more definite, and as facilitating and rendering more instructive the study of models. Its importance may be exemplified in the art of discourse. Here the principle requires that the orator or writer first conceive in definite outline the entire scope and object of his discourse, as well as the extent of his theme, before he enters upon the parts, or the filling up. To proceed in the reverse way of beginning with no conception of the total design, and going on from one part to another with no such notion of the whole, must ever hinder the highest achievement in any particular oratorical or literary effort; as the habit of thus writing or speaking must ever hinder growth in oratorical skill and power. So in culture, in the highest, christian culture, the beginning must be in the adoption of the whole spirit of piety and the progress be then in filling up the

details of Christian living;--conversion first, progressive sanctification in particulars afterwards. To begin with the adoption of one Christian virtue, although this is better certainly than not to begin at all, is to hinder perfect attainment, to have such attainment liable to failure. So in regard to each part of culture, the principle prescribes that it be taken up first as a whole and then the progress be in filling up and perfecting the details.

We have no space to exhibit the application of this principle to all art and all culture, or even to do more than indicate in this most general way its applicability and importance to any. But we deem it fundamental in all training; and place the inculcation of it among those many teachings of Ruskin which reach down so deep and are so suggestive to every thoughful and aspiring mind.

ARTICLE VII.—A VOICE FROM "SQUASHVILLE:" A LETTER TO THE NEW ENGLANDER FROM THE “REV. MR. PICKERING."

Mr. W. W. Phelps, in his speech at the last commencement dinner, spoke of" Rev. Mr. Pickering of Squashville,” as a clerical member of the corporation of Yale College, and described him as "exhausted with keeping a few sheep in the wilderness." He will not charge me with excessive modesty on the one hand, nor with any unreasonable self-esteem on the other, if I assume that I am the unfortunate individual thus referred to. If I am not, I do not know who is. Any one of the ten clerical Fellows has a right to assume that the courtesy was intended for him; and my right is at least as good as that of any of my nine associates.

When I heard Mr. Phelps on that occasion, I was not sure that I saw precisely the aim of his discourse; on reading and re-perusing what seems to be his own report of his speech, my perplexity is not entirely removed. He undertakes to represent "the younger alumni," and to express their dissatisfaction with "the management of the college." He admits that in scholarship it "keeps progress with the age," but he holds that in everything else it is behind the times. He "finds no fault. with the men" who manage, but "much fault with the spirit of the management." The men with whom he finds no fault are "the President and Professors," whose "superiority to ordinary men" he recognizes with growing "admiration and love." He claims for President Woolsey what the Spanish orator said of Lincoln, "Humblest of the humble before his own soul, greatest of the great before the world." He "claims for Porter, Hadley, Thacher, and their noble associates" nothing less than "the highest moral and intellectual gifts unselfishly devoted to the cause of education." But-oddly enough-while the men who manage are so transcendently gifted and self-sacrificing, "the spirit of the management," without any fault on their part, is just that which does not "keep progress with the age."