In these fragmentary first pages of a fragmentary work, it has been the author’s aim to outline certain general ideas and historical facts, which may illustrate their own illustrations as written in the following pages. It will be best seen, when approached from the historical side, what may be regarded as a necessary factor in English art or architecture, and what may be considered as experiment. This is the more important for the American, who is, in an especial sense, “heir of all the ages,” while not limited to the grooves prescribed by any. It is in America that we are to have the great Art of Arts—that whose task is to utilize the Arts of other lands and ages as pigments, to be combined into new proportions for unprecedented effects, and to invest fairer ideals. For America the author has written these contributions toward a knowledge of what has been done, and is being done, in England; but he would prefer now to burn his work rather than have it aid the retrogressive notion that Art in America is to copy the ornamentation or duplicate the work of other countries, much less of other ages. These things can mean for the artists and people of the United States nothing more than culture; and culture means not a mere eclectic importation of select facts and truths, but their recombination, in obedience to a new vital principle related to a further idea and wider purpose.
SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM.
THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM.
“COME,” said my friend, Professor Omnium, one clear morning, “let us take an excursion round the world!” My friend is a German, and he has such a calm familiarity with the unconditioned and the impossible, that a suggestion which, coming from another, would appear astounding, from him appears normal. This time, however, I look through his spectacles to see if his eyes have not a merry twinkle: they are quite serene. Visions of the Parisian play entitled Round the World in Eighty Days, thoughts of Puck and excursion tickets, rise before me, and I gravely pronounce the word “Impossible!”
“But,” says the professor, “Kant declares that it is too bold for any man, in the present state of our knowledge, to pronounce that word.”
“My dear friend,” said I, “it is among my dreams one day to visit India, China, Japan, California; but at present you might as well ask me to go with you to the moon.”