Art-Jottings In Art-Studios.

ART-JOTTINGS IN ART-STUDIOS .

. BY BRO . REV . W . TI 3 BBS . INTRODUCTORY . " When old age shall this generation waste , Thou shalt remain , in midst of other woe Than ours , a friend to man , to whom thou sayest , ' Beauty is truth , truth beauty' ¦ "

T \ EEP in the buried past , but clear as deep , written in imperishable characters , - * - ' stand revealed the souls of men , ancl it is in the . storehouse of antiquarian research that we can read the characters of nations , for no truer test of a people ' s advance in civilization is there to be found than is made manifest in the treasures of the archteologist . In the page' of history , where even it exists , interpolations may have crept in ; the very truth of history itself may have been so overlaid with mis-representation or corrupt

tradition that its story may be nothing worth ; but in the remnants of a nation ' s Art , be they never so few , never so mutilated , there stands recorded , in letters that can be neither doubted nor denied , its perception of the beautiful ancl therefore of the true . For what is Art ?—It is not our purpose here to-write a treatise upon the nature or characteristics of this divine gift to man , but rather to describe in a brief and popular manner some few of tbe processes by which it is brought home to tbe homes of the many , and therefore , a simple definition will suffice . —

Art is the silent language of truth , its embodied reality presented in visible form to the inner eye of man ; in other words , the presentment of true beauty enforcing upon the human mind the precepts of divine perfection . There are those who would tell us that Art is the creation of civilization ; we hold the very reverse , that civilization is the creature of Art . We do not for a moment pretend to deny that in the gradual dawn of culture ancl refinement the work of men's hands will ' grow more true to that of

which it is the presentment , and that thus it will step-by-step grow more ancl more beautiful ; but what we'affirm is this , that Art-work is ever striving to recall an idea once possessed , now lost , but gradually being and to be regained . Peoples , as individuals , are but re-acquiring a long-lost status ; and the gradual growth of civilization is but the nearer-and-nearer approach to a standard of perfection , once existingonce lostbut evermore being strained after and more or less nearl

, , y attained to again . Who , with our record before him , can doubt that man , in his original state , had a knowledge as perfect as humanity could possess it ? who deny that this perfection was lost in man ' s fall ? who doubt , but that in his renewal " and restitution , man shall arrive at it once more ?

As , then , man sank from this former standard of God-given knowledge , he became correspondingly degraded ancl corrupt ; when man gradually comes back to the perception of the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth , so does he gradually draw near to that estate from which he has so long been severed and estranged . We know that there are those who tell us ' that man's religious practice , not his religious instinct , has cultivated in him the pursuit of Art , —that religious teaching has awakened fervour in his soul that has

a forced him to clothe bis ideal in material form ; but if we look at the Art-productions of a savage race in . the way of religious embodiment we shall form but a poor estimate of the spirit that leads hint to represent the good and the beautiful in such barbarous guise ; rather as it seems to us , does something within him , the spirit of Art let us call it , bid him materialise the truth , and then his pursuit of his object softens and moulds him , so ' that at last the beautiful is attained and there stands revealed the true . 2