GLIMPSES OF ART AND CHARACTER ALONG THE

THE

BY-PATHS OF EXPRESSION.

(Class Illustrations. Taken from the note-books of students.)

HERE is very little pleasure in a plain, straight road. We all like turns and surprises, hills and valleys and unexpected outlooks. So in thought a dry series of abstractions puts us to sleep, and we long for suggestions, for unexpected by-paths and opening vistas. Tangents are the soul of conversation. He who holds us firmly to one point is dry, wears us out or puts us to sleep. Science and logic try to keep us in a straight road,outlooks to the right or to the left; but art is always a tangent of the soul. It plunges, by a blind instinct, into the woods where no foot has ever trod before. The soul must be free. You can chain man's reason for a time; but his imagination, his feelings, must be free or they die.

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The secret of teaching is to keep the mind of the student in the right road, and yet to give him frequent visions on every side; to show him by-paths into unknown forests where he can walk alone and commune face to face with nature and truth.

FREEDOM is destroyed by obstruction and constriction, but a removal of external constraint will not cause freedom. Place a boy six years old out there on the grass, and he will roam at will, and rejoice in his freedom; but place a child six weeks old in the same place, and how different the result! Freedom implies strength of impulse, control, or co-ordination, of all the forces of the man, as well as removal of obstructions. Training must strengthen the man from within as well as break his external chains.

ART is but a suggestion; words are symbolic. Poetry or art is the union of signs and symbols. A word must be made significant of feeling by vocal expression as well as symbolic of ideas.

Brooding

THERE is no corner of the world that is not hemmed in,- no position in society, no condition of fortune, that is not limited on many sides. Nor is there a mortal without imperfections. continually over faults and hindrances can only produce death. is concentration upon possibilities that produces life and growth.

It

ALL have limitations. When we think of them as hindrances, we can do nothing. The sculptor of the east pediment of the Parthenon had a stiff, awkward gable high above all human eyes. What a poor opportunity, what an awkward place to fill! but what a wonderful scene was portrayed there! All, even the sharp angles at the corners, were made to seem the most beautiful setting for a precious gem, the most beautiful background for a sublime picture. Out of an ugly gable appeared the birth of Athena, the myth of the dawn, a vision of the ideal of the race, and an embodiment of all progress.

RANT is earnestness of emotion without earnestness of thought. It tries to awaken feeling without thinking.

IMPULSE must be spontaneous. Expression is like a horse and a driver, —the horse represents the spontaneous element, and the driver the deliberative. The spontaneous element must ever be in the ascendency. All the whipping in the world cannot make up for lack of spirit in the animal.

"How can you restrain yourself when you have too much enthusiasm ? No man can have too much genuine enthusiasm. In fact, what people call too much enthusiasm refers to what is not genuine. It is often a muscular extravagance and pretence. It is the wild, sudden jump, or spurt, of an old horse under the spur. Sudden explosion is never the natural expression of genuine enthuTrue enthusiasm diffuses emotion into every part of the body. It awakens every power of being, will as well as feeling; that is how it is controlled.

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A TRUE artist, in any form of art, sees the great side of little things. The poor artist-the mere imitator, one who literally reproduces can only see the little elements, even in great things.

A poor

WE speak to mankind when we speak to ourselves. speaker is never able to speak to himself. He dictates to men rather than participates with them in the enjoyment or realization of universal truth. Subjectivity in expression is the secret of sublimity. The sublimest poetry or the sublimest prayer is always subjective. Subjectivity is one secret of Bible reading.

asked to copy one of his He tried, but failed. He

ONE of our foremost painters was pictures half the size of the original. said he could not do it. The real soul of the picture, he said, always seemed to come to him by accident. He could not, in copying one of his own pictures and reducing the size, have the same inspiration as before. In some way the soul escaped him. In spite of all his efforts he had a little of the attitude of the copyist, and was not face to face with the original scene. The picture to be copied was one of his best; still, in trying to reproduce it, he was in an imitative or reproductive, not a creative, attitude of mind.

THE habit of trying to imitate mere external accidents, rather than to assimilate essential conditions, has caused more evils than all artistic famines, histrionic wars, and vocal pestilences.

MEN as a rule do not need counsel; nearly every one knows the difference between right and wrong. What one needs is to have his knowledge made living, made a positive possession of his imagination and heart. The orator must teach often, but more frequently must he transplant his hearer's own knowledge from the cold region of the head to the warmth of the heart, where it will take root and bloom in action.

ONE

THE PARTHENON OF BOSTON.

NE of the places to which every American will make a pilgrimage is the Public Library of Boston. As the visitor approaches Copley Square, he is at first disappointed in the low building which he sees on the opposite side. This plain structure, almost without ornament, is not what the average American expects. As he approaches, he sees above the entrance an unimaginative seal, and as he passes up the steps, he discovers, just over the door, the face of Athena. But his heart sinks as he perceives that she has the pot on her head which is peculiar to Minerva of Rome, and indicative of war and conquest. Alas! why not the unstooping helmet of Athena with the ever-symbolic sphynx, the griffins, and a winged Pegasus on either side, emblematical of the conquest and transformation of physical and barbaric forces by Athena? Why not Athena, the goddess of Dawn, the mythical embodiment of every advance in civilization, and the triumph of the ideal over the base, in individual or nation?

As the visitor enters, he passes into a beautiful hall, where rises before him a stairway of stalagmitic marble with the gigantic lions of St. Gaudens on either side. The light streams in from above, and forms a vision as beautiful as that of some fairy palace. The visitor feels something stirring within him that words can never express; he begins to feel that he is in the presence of a great work of art. When the panels by the decorative painter, Puvis de Chavannes, are in place around the summit, here will be one of the most beautiful visions in the world, certainly something without a parallel in this country.

Here the papers

On one side of the hall is the periodical room. and magazines of the world are lying upon tables, with chairs as luxurious as in a private club, free to all. The visitor passes into the great Bates Hall, and gazes round him at the cases of books with hundreds of seats and tables at which rich or poor can sit and

study; and he begins to feel that he has entered a building expressive of the highest modern civilization, one erected by the people for the people, and embodying the ideals of the people. It is a noble expression of modern literary and social life and public spirit. As Boston has been styled a modern Athens, may we not call its Public Library a modern Parthenon?

If we could have visited Athens about 450 B.C., we should have seen great excitement among all classes. The Persian War was over, and the Athenians were preparing to erect a votive offering to Athena in gratitude for their deliverance. Each took a part in carrying the stones up the hill. According to tradition, even an eighty-year-old mule who had been turned loose as, too old to work walked by the side of the teams that he might share in the enthusiasm of the hour.

All Bostonians have shared in this modern Parthenon; though they have not carried stones, yet most of them have cast stones at the architects and the trustees, and nearly all have been engaged in continuous fault-finding. There was, no doubt, a group of idle Athenians who never did anything but sit upon the stones which others had carried up, and criticise the Parthenon as it rose. No doubt they spoke of the passive stiffness of the tails of the centaurs in some of the metopes first constructed. "An animal's tail," said some of these, " is its agent of expression; and the tails of some of those centaurs hang lifeless, even during the most agitated struggles." Perhaps these criticisms did good; but it is hard for us to appreciate the hot jealousy of the great Phidias that cast him into prison and left him there to die.

The architects, the artists, and the trustees of Boston's Parthenon have not been pilloried according to the ancient method, but they have been tortured just the same. There is, no doubt, justice in some of the criticisms. There is much of modern show, and more exhibition than expression; but many of the criticisms are simply fault-finding. They do not touch any vital point.

One criticism has been upon the subject chosen by Mr. Abbey