i186 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
ers into our chief gate of entrance is a French statue, grand for its size. 
But for anything like great art, or national art, “great ideas common to 
she nation are essential.” Washington, though he has been called an 
““ English country gentleman,” was an American through and through, 
she first great American republican, who let out every drop of monarchi- 
cal blood in him. Our American heroic art has yet to be created, though 
its beginnings may be seen in the Trumbull gallery at Yale University, 
where Colonel John Trumbull, the painter of the Revolution, is better 
seen than at the Capitol in Washington. We have a heroic history as 
Hellas had ; and the canvas of American art must be a wide one, sufficient 
bo take in our history, poetry, faith, American humanity in its full action, 
our industrial energies, our pioneer life and adventure, the vegetation, 
she climate, the grand as well as quiet and familiar features of our scenery, 
our autumn foliage and sunsets, the ideas of freedom and equality, the 
new spirit as contrasted with the spirit of Old World civilization. There 
should be a love of country and a pride in it. There should be an honest 
nthusiasm in this new life, movement, and coloring. It is not common- 
place. It is as nobly human as German or English humanity. It is bet- 
ter than the decayed Italian humanity that Michael Angelo had to mine 
in, for his models and thought. What were the contests of the Guelphs 
and Ghibellines, the narrow struggles of Florence and Pisa and the other 
miniature republics of Italy, compared with ours! We have had, and do 
now have, artists of fine genius, but no master has yet been born to reflect 
American history, American democratic thought, and American nature 
with force enough to originate a new school of American art, if that were 
possible or desirable. It is true that our standard of taste and life has 
been heretofore the useful rather than the poetic ; and that the useful has 
iaken the precedence let us not regret, for it is healthful and right that it 
should do so. Art is grounded on the useful ; it exists in order to supply 
vants that are real, houses to live in, churches to worship in, costumes to 
wear, and also, above all, objects of the imagination and the affections to 
feed the higher nature. But American art will blossom when the aim of 
life for solely commercial ends is more lost sight of, and when the imagina- 
sion has leisure to work, when the poetic stir is felt, when the love of 
beauty is awaked through ennoblement of the mind by culture, so that it 
can rise above the material into the spiritual, where dwell the ideas of 
beauty and truth.