Wroblewski and Olszewski have but lately achieved success. Having compressed the hydrogen in the above named manner, they froze it by means of nitrogen boiling in a vacuum. Still it did not liquefy. It was yet in a gaseous liquid state, but when the tube was opened then there appeared a transparent and colorless liquid. At last the question of the liquefaction of gases, which has been discussed so long, has been settled. When we think of the simplicity of these final experiments, it seems strange that the problem was so difficult to solve. The trouble lay in the fact that at the start there was everything to find out; there was the critical point and the means of freezing to discover. It was necessary to proceed by steps, using each gas for the reduction of the one more stubborn than itself. Really, as Biot says, nothing is so easy as what was discovered yesterday, nothing so difficult as what must be discovered to-morrow. It might be asked whether the result is worth the trouble necessary to collect these liquids. The answer must be left to the future. The chemist will take up this new law of gases, and art will adapt it to its purposes. For the present, all that it amounts to is that the natural philosopher has proven that all kinds of materials may exist in three conditions, and obey the same common laws.—Abridged and Translated from “Révue des Deux Mondes” for “The Chautauquan.”
AMERICAN DECORATIVE ART.
BY COLEMAN E. BISHOP.
Among the many so-called “booms” that followed the civil war, as the result of the wonderful intellectual, moral and material impulse that it gave the country, one of the most marked and promising of influence on the national character is the advancement in decorative art that this generation has seen and felt. Its presence and influence are observable in the general demand for more artistic interior finishing and furnishing: for better form and coloring in wall paper, frescoing, painting, floor-coverings, upholstery and drapery, and in that broader study of the harmonious wholes of which these are related parts.
It is not an art renaissance, so much as a new birth of popular art feeling; a creation, rather than a revival. Facts seem to indicate the beginning of the long-talked-of American school of art. It is a peculiar, and peculiarly-encouraging circumstance that this new development is native and popular instead of imported and select.
For, we may be very sure that any movement that is to abide and have much power over our people must be one that touches the average citizen. To reach him it must be American. It need not be divergent from, and it should not be antagonistic to established art principles; but, not the less, in its sympathies, subjects, and methods it must be national. An art that is to live with any people must be of that people. With us this requirement of popularity is doubly strong, because we are so intensely national; because all institutions live and move and have their being in the commonalty, and because the citizen is the only source of living patronage of art here, where the state does not foster art as foreign states do. The artist must eat, and the people must feed him. Before they will pay for art, they must have sufficient culture to care for it dollars’ worth, and it must be of a nature to reach their sympathies. Even in monarchial England, Ruskin perceives the necessity for beginning at the bottom to upbuild national taste, and he addresses volumes of letters upon art “To the Workmen and Laborers of Great Britain” (see “Fors Clavigera”).
We have not much to hope for in the way of education of American taste from imported art, for this can never reach or touch the people. A few dilettanti in our cities can do very little toward creating, or even influencing a national taste. They have no rapport with true American culture; they offend national sensibilities by unreasoning rejection of everything undertaken here; and, above all, if they be brought to the test, it will be found that they generally have no fixed art principles back of their opinions and—prejudices. If the average American could not appreciate foreign works, he was not much helped to a better understanding of them by their admirers; and he came to think himself at least quite capable of correctly estimating devotees who could no more give good reasons for worshiping everything foreign than they could for scorning everything indigenous.