Of the general beneficial influence of Art-Unions, at least of those conducted on the plan of that in Philadelphia, we have not the shadow of a doubt. We are happy, however, to quote a couple of passages quite in point. The first is from the North British Review.
“We believe that by a judicious distribution of engravings more may be done for the culture of the public taste than by any other means whatsoever. One thoroughly good engraving, fairly established and domiciled in a house, will do more for the inmates in this respect, than a hundred visits to a hundred galleries of pictures. It is a teacher of form, a lecturer on the beautiful, a continually present artistic influence. Nor do we see any reason why the same system should not be extended to casts, which might be taken either after the antique, or some thoroughly good modern sculptor, such as Thorwarldsen. If such a system were carried out, matters might soon be brought to a state in which there should scarcely be any family which did not possess within its own walls the means of forming a taste, and that a genuine and a high one, both in painting and sculpture.”
The second passage is still more to the point. It is from our contemporary, the Saturday Courier.
“This Institution, [The Philadelphia Art-Union,] by its Free Gallery, and by its being a centre of action for artists and amateurs, is continually operating in a silent but most perceptible manner upon public taste. Every visit to the Free Gallery, every picture sold from its walls, every picture which it is the means of calling into existence, every print which it sends abroad into the community, is so much done toward the promotion of a popular taste for what is refined and elegant, and a consequent distaste for what is coarse, illiberal, and depraved. Every man in the community has on interest—not merely a moral, but a pecuniary interest—in the promotion of a popular taste for the Fine Arts. It is a part of the moral education of society, which, like all other good popular education, adds at once to the value and the safety of every man’s property.”
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
Lectures on the History of France. By the Right Honorable Sir James Stephen, K. C. B., LL. D.; Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. New York: Harper & Brother. 1 vol. 8vo.
Sir James Stephen is the writer of a number of essays in the Edinburgh Review, which, at the time they appeared, were mistaken by some readers as the productions of Macaulay. There were no real grounds for such a supposition, as Stephen’s mind has hardly a single quality in common with Macaulay’s, and the resemblance of his style to that of the historian of the Revolution is of a very superficial kind. Stephen, like Macaulay, is a writer of clear, clean, short, compact sentences, and deals largely in historical allusions, parallels and generalizations, but his diction has none of Macaulay’s rapid movement, and his knowledge betrays little of Macaulay’s “joyous memory.” Stephen’s mind is large and rich in acquired information, but it is deficient in passion, and its ordinary movement is languid, without any of Macaulay’s intellectual fierceness, eagerness and swift sweep of illustration and generalization, and without any of Macaulay’s bitterness, partizanship and scorn of amiable emotions. Stephen, indeed, if he be a mimic, mimics Mackintosh rather than Macaulay, and in charity, in intellectual conscientiousness, in courtesy to opponents, in all the benignities and amenities of scholarship, and also in a certain faint hold upon large acquisitions, he sometimes resembles without at all equaling him. The reader is continually impressed with his honesty and benevolence, with his continual clearness and occasional reach of view, and with his graceful mastery of the resources of expression; but to continuous vigor and vividness of conception and language he has no claim.
The present volume, a large octavo of some seven hundred pages, is evidently the work of much thought, research and time, though the author regrets that he was compelled to prepare his lectures without adequate preparation. They were delivered at the University of Cambridge, Stephen occupying in that institution the professorship of history. He succeeded, we believe, William Smythe, a dry, hard and pedantic, though well read professor, whose lectures on history and on the French Revolution are the most uninteresting of useful books. Stephen is almost his equal in historical knowledge, and his superior in the graces of style and in the power of making his knowledge attractive. His work, indeed, though it can hardly give him the reputation of a great historian, is altogether the best view of French history in the English language, and is an invaluable guide to all who wish to gain a thorough acquaintance with France in her historical development. It gives the causes of the decline and fall of the various dynasties of her government, the character of her feudal system, the steps by which her government became an absolute monarchy, and the differences between the absolute monarchy of Henry IV. and Louis XIV. The lectures on the anti-feudal influence of the municipalities, of the Eastern Crusades, of the Albigensian Crusades—the masterly view of the position occupied by the Parliaments, the Privileged Orders and the States General, in relation to the Monarchy of France—and the expositions of the sources and management of the revenues of the nation, are all eminently lucid and valuable, and without any of the ostentatious brilliancy and paradoxical generalization which are apt to characterize the French historical school, are really modest contributions to the philosophy of history.