HUMAN life, we know, is not to be lived on bread alone. As life rises above the barest necessities of existence, it becomes more and more a thing of the higher senses. The oyster may go on supporting its limited and motionless existence through its mouth alone; civilized men and women feed also through the eye and the ear, the mind and the heart.

We are somewhat too much accustomed nowadays to substitute the word Art" for the proper and better term “the Arts.” Art is not simple but manifold. It is not a special technique, but a method and a spirit, applied to all things. The commonest necessaries may be ennobled and caused to give added enjoyment by suffering that magic touch. The object of our voluntary Art Associations ought not to be the mere making of pictures, so much as the cultivation of this Art Spirit amongst their members, and, through their influence, in the community around them. Under the influence of Art, clothing early ceased to be merely a means of warmth and covering. Art arranges its folds and selects its colors. It becomes significant of taste and character. Food and drink have become the subjects of nicety and refinement. The house, once a mere shelter, enlarged in time into "butt and ben," is transformed at

length into home, sweet Home. From the days of our rude ancestors, huddling around their forest fires, wrapped in skins, uncouth and unclean, and wrangling over bones and pottagewhat a miraculous change to the thousands of happy homes of the cities. and towns of our fair Canada: their myriad comforts and graces, their gentle faces and refined manners! What an hourly delight are those pictured interiors; how fondly borne abroad in memory! We think of good and gracious women, whose mere entrance brings an indescribable illumination into a room. To experience this-is it not to know the consummation of civilization-the highest product of the art of Life? The same art that has brought the picture to its perfection has labored on its fitting frame. What beauty in daily surroundings! What wealth in simple common things! We eat from pictured plates, spread on snowy cloths, decked with flowers. drink from sparkling crystal. We are ungrateful if we return thanks for food alone. We would be forgetful of the brightness insensibly reflected into mind and soul from a multitude of daily foregoing atten-. tions:-quiet, patient ministrations, working mutual respect and mutual pleasure.

We

The nature of all arts is human skill

applied to some end. While some satisfy needs of the body, the fine arts answer a like upward hunger of the human mind. The study of each one of the fine arts may be divided between two forms or directions of study. Every art requires appreciation of the end, as well as the knowledge to use the means. Technical skill should be preceded by faithfulness in observation an intelligent intimacy of perception. The perceptive side of art, which appeals to the understanding, is certainly not less important than the imitative side, which depends upon

the senses.

Art, thus studied, is a worship of Nature. If it does not begin with it; it must lead to it. Worship reverently believes in its object, and seeks to know it as it is. The attempt to represent and reproduce it, without this previous search for an inner suggestion underlying the forms of nature, is an idolatrous, not a true, worship. It prostrates itself before superficial resemblances. It sets up its own, perhaps misshapen, images in ultimate forgetfulness of the true Divinity. The curves of every mountainous sea tell of the mighty struggle between gravity and force. The stratification of a cliff, the outline of mountain ranges, are subject to the symmetry of law, and possess characters which should be studied and made to retell their story to the intelligence. The forms of trees obey primal instincts of growth that suggest a mysterious correspondence with our human pleasure in grace and balance of proportion. The sturdy branches spring from the common trunk, according to the secret of an appointed order, pursued into the infinite tracery of twig and leaf. Struggling and yielding, they attain to a division of the free air among them. The mind is enticed into a mystic region, where Equality and Fraternity reveal themselves, reigning immemorially in Nature's laws of form, before they gave birth to our legal conceptions and our moral sympathies.

If we apply this test intelligently, we shall not go far wrong in judging between the merits of the schools; whether we use the word school in the technical sense of the character of an historical series of artists, or whether we use it in the commoner special sense of particular contemporary teachers, or systems of instruction. The test is, does the school give more attention to mere technique, to tricks of the hand and material, than to the study of the original? Does it take its satisfaction in the reproduction of accidental and superficial appearances, or does it cultivate in the student that divine dissatisfaction with the best of human efforts, which arises in presence of the ever-opening vision of nature: the depth of thought, the great and pure design that study reveals in her apparent simplicity. Conducted in this spirit, mechanic arts may acquire the dignity of a pursuit of truth; and a fine art, for want of the same spirit, is debased into handicraft. Surely the student, who from the construction of the human eye, and an appreciation of the laws of optics, proceeded to the invention of the telescope, was no mere workman. In the spirit of his method he was to be reckoned among the masters of the fine arts. And the studio or art school which devotes its chief attention, first and last, to the copying of copies, whether it works with pencil or with stump, or even with airbrushes, under however carefully arranged north lights, is, in my humble opinion, a false and misleading, I may also venture to say, a debasing system of instruction The end of these things, intellectually and artistically, is death.

No subject was more frequently or studiously painted by the great masters, generation after generation, than the great series of the natural elements and phenomena. To Fire, Air, Earth and Water; Springtime, Summer, Autumn and Winter, innumerable compositions were devoted, in an untir

ing rivalry of loveliness. All the features of nature, ideally appropriate to the Elements or the Seasons, were grouped around the Genius of the scene, presiding over swarms of inhabiting spirits. A wonderworld of ancient imagination comes down to us, materialized into a jewellery of intellectual art, all fashioned by patient but inspired thought from the apparently common surroundings of

nature.

Fire, the ancients described as a treasure filched from heaven; and they deified the man who was traditioned to have brought it down to human use. We still pursue the allegory into the forms of modern speech. Fire in our language is the symbol of every delight and every power. We speak of the fire of poetry, the glow of patriotism, the light of truth, the flame of love. Human imagination seems always to kindle in its presence. What a phrase is that of one of the ancient sages, among the thoughts collected for all time in that great record of human introspection which we call the Book: "Man is born to trouble even as the sparks fly upward." What deep musings by desert campfires are embodied in his touching simile. The ancient scribe brings back to us, across the gulf of ages and the difference of races, a sympathetic glimpse of primordial life long ago suffered and past. We are claimed in kinship by this mournful and forgotten man. We distinguish him, one of a cluster of shadows surrounding a spark of ruddy light, bounded by immensities of desert darkness: a pitiful cluster of castaways comforting their loneliness upon the shore of the ocean of night. In the darkness behind that illuminated circle of humanity lie toils and cares of days past and days to come within it, what hidden enemies! what dangers that may even at that moment be stealthily creeping upon them! Centered around that glow are all that is known to the little group, of friendship, fellowship and

defence. No wonder faces grow pensive in the blaze; that social sympathy waxes around it; that a sigh, by one consent, flies upward, following the sparks that melt and die away into the illimitable outer darkness.

Have we not a lingering fellowship with these long past conditions: an inheritance of ancient feelings and experiences? Is it not perhaps this that brings, especially upon Canadians, the recurrent fever of the woods? The camp-fire endears our summer memories. Can the house be perfectly happy, or perfectly artistic, that has no visible hearth, bringing the ancestral camp-fire within its four walls? Can any wealth of luxurious surroundings replace it? Bare walls and carpetless floors are glorified by the ancient magic that lurks in the living fire. We mourn its absence, even though surrouuded with the wealth of costly carving, and the rarest skill of oriental looms.

At the recent Parliament of Religions, the Fire-worshipping Parsee was once more permitted to expound to the West the deeply religious thought which has consisted for so many ages with high civilization of life and a lofty code of morals. The sources of the spirit of religion are in awe and gratitude. It is no return to a meaningless idolatry-no despite to the high spirit of the most perfected religion-if we still do reverence to this strange living genius of Fire.

I venture to entertain a theory of my own as to the origin of those numerous and widespread historic religions which made fire solely, or, joined with sun, moon and stars, the central object of devotion. I am inclined to reverse the ordinary theory. It is usual to treat the fire on the altar as an image of the unquenchable source of fire: the god of day, forever circling in the heavens. It seems to me far more natural and more probable to suppose that the visible, tangible, and invaluably serviceable fire was