wares abroad without calling in an artist to design him an advertisement. The second great factor in the popularisation of art in our times is the growth of free national and municipal museums and galleries; and, arising chiefly out of these, the organisation of temporary loan exhibitions for the general benefit.

The present generation is apt to take an institution like the National Gallery as a matter of course. Yet it is only of recent years that the Gallery has become one of great importance, although the private collections in England are more numerous and rich, probably, than those of any other country Up to the beginning of this century art was considered solely as a luxury for the few, and only by degrees did the democratic conception of art, as a national glory and possession for all to share in, win its way to recognition. The National Gallery was not founded till 1824; the Art Galleries of Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and other towns are of more recent origin. The thousands who frequent these institutions every yearand over half a million visit the National Gallery-number very many of the poor.

One

No doubt there are multitudes on whom such treasures have little or no kindling effect. That is not the point: the point is, that every one, however poor, should have the chance of satisfying thus whatever instinct towards beauty he possesses. The masses are only affected through individuals; and to reach the chosen spirits, "fit though few," is all that is needed. hindrance to this end which has hitherto existed in England is the closing of museums and galleries on Sundays-the one day in the week when working men can best profit by them. The resolution just passed, however, in the House of Commons will at last remove this hindrance.

A concrete instance is more convincing than any number of generalisations. Few men have had more influence on the art of this century than Keats. Every one knows what Keats' social position and bringing-up were: they were of a kind rather to limit and stifle than to expand his genius. The ideal of beauty was colourless and unreal, the desire for beauty rare. It was a happy chance, therefore, that brought to England, just at the budding-time of Keats' gift, those priceless fragments of the most perfect art ever known, the Elgin Marbles. These were to be seen at the British Museum; he could see them every day. And what those sculptures did for Keats we know from what he says himself; still more from his "Hyperion," where the types are borrowed from the beautiful Greek marbles, and the poet's style has acquired, through this converse with

* March 1896.

their serene magnificence, a dignity and greatness which it would otherwise have missed.

This is a single but suggestive instance of the power which museums, stored with the masterpieces of the past, may have in shaping and enkindling natures ripe for their inspiration. Of late years, also, there has sprung up à movement for the holding of temporary exhibitions in the poorer parts of London and other great towns, and the movement is increasing in importance. All these several influences, then, are at work towards the making of art a real factor in the general life of the nation. But for the most part these are seeds sown at random, and the ground is often prepared. How are these influences to be directed, intensified? They must be made a part of education.

Educationalists seem little to have realised the extraordinary force of pictorial art upon children. An experiment made a year or two since in California proved this in an interesting way, though if any one question his own memory he will surely not be in need of proof. A number of boys and girls were examined as to their conceptions of the Deity, the unseen world, heaven, &c.; and in nearly all cases where the starting-point of the idea was traceable, it was found to have been suggested by a picture of some kind, advertisements in shops or newspapers even, but at any rate something pictorial. But every one knows how strong and ineradicable are the associations made by early youth between ideas conceived and things seen or portrayed. Often it happens that these associations are grotesque, simply because the young imagination is not provided with fit material. How infinitely important, then, to supply the impressionable, vivid sensations of childhood with images that expanding reason will not need to discard! Pictures here serve a use in giving a fit and beautiful embodiment to ideal conceptions, as well as being, by the sheer influence of beauty, an illumination and delight to those who live where sordid and ugly things abound.

In 1883 was founded the Art for Schools Association, which aims at meeting this want in education. This society's experience and continually increasing activity are sufficient to show how widely the want is felt. Before its institution teachers had only maps and physiological diagrams with which to adorn their walls. Now they can procure from this association excellent reproductions of pictures at very low prices. Here again one may note how indispensable is photography to the work of diffusing art. One Board School master in Limehouse has under him three or four hundred boys, we believe, who reproduce in metal designs published by the association, and often invent designs themselves.

A younger society is the Fitzroy Picture Society, which does work of the same kind.

Sceptics pretend that art is only appreciated by the cultivated, but this is an unsupported theory. If one examines the lives of the great artists, it is astonishing how many are found to have come from quite humble ranks; we should not be wrong in saying the great majority. Not that this is the slightest disparagement of their glory; but it seems probable that cultivation of the mind through books, quicker apprehension of facts or of logically expressed ideas, is rather a hindrance than a help to appreciation of pictorially expressed ideas to cultivation through the eye. Moreover, pictorial art is an earlier mode of expression than writing; and as science tells us that the history of the race is repeated in the individual, we should naturally expect that children would be more sensitive to the former mode of expression, which experience also confirms; and therefore this should be the first influence in the education of the young.

At present we are only on the threshold of the real popularisation of art. We have laid stress on the extraordinary importance of photography, as an invention, but it must not be forgotten that, as we have said, it was the result of deliberate experiments; and throughout this century the ever-increasing excellence of all kinds of reproduction is as much the answer of a want, deeply and widely felt, as the foundation of free museums and the holding of loan exhibitions. After two hundred years, the prison of Puritanism begins to crumble; there is a universal feeling of expansion in England, influenced doubtless immensely by the expansion of our race over the world; and the desire for beauty, so impassioned in that earlier time when discovery was daily enlarging the world's horizons, is manifested anew. As we suggested, the time may come when this age will seem as important for art as was the fifteenth century, with its printing-press, for literature.

EDITORIAL NOTE-In this essay the popularisation of art has been treated in one of its phases only, but the effect of that popularisation on the public taste is equally, if not more striking, through the multiplication of objects of art and utility. The works of Wedgewood, Doulton, and others; the artistic productions of the Black Forest, Switzerland, France, and other European countries, as well as of the Far East, have exercised a potent educating influence. They are found everywhere, in the cottage as in the palace, and wherever they penetrate their civilising influence is inestimable.

ESSAY XXIII

OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE UNIVERSE

ALL the knowledge which Man has been able to obtain respecting the material universe, beyond the globe forming his dwellingplace, and the surrounding gaseous envelope, which, indeed, may be considered an integral part of it, is ranked under the head of astronomy, the most ancient and sublime of all the sciences. The nature of that knowledge has undergone a wonderful development within the last hundred, and especially within the last fifty years, a development rich in its testimony to the activity of the human mind, and important in its effects upon it. The most striking result of this advance, the one which dominates and crowns all others, is the growth of the conception of the unity of the visible universe. When the last century was drawing to a close, no ordinary observer of the celestial motions, no astronomer, save perhaps one or two, appears to have dreamed that there was aught to be seen or learned beside the apparent relative positions of the stars and heavenly bodies on the celestial vault, and the deductions therefrom of the motions of the earth and her sister planets. The popular mind still judged the stars to be lamps set for the service of mankind in the vault of night; the observer, indeed, recognised that a few bright stars had proper motions, but proceeded not a step along any of the many avenues of knowledge that were thus opened. The mathematical and mechanical treatment of the structure of the solar system had alone attained a high state of development.

One hundred years ago, therefore, though the movements of the planets round the sun, in obedience to the grand law of gravitation, were thoroughly understood, and though, in consequence of the transits of Venus of 1761 and 1769, and of Henry Cavendish's earth-weighing, the distances, diameters, and masses of the sun, and therefore of the planets, were known with a considerable approach to accuracy, this was almost the limit of astronomical attainment. Even the great father of modern astronomy himself, Sir William Herschel, had so little

conception of the actual constitution of the sun as to imagine it a body habitable by beings like ourselves; conceiving that the heat might be limited to an upper fiery atmosphere, which a cloud-screen might temper to an agreeable warmth for the inhabitants of the great solid globe, which he imagined as existing far within the glowing orb seen by us.

Naturally astronomers were not so far astray as to the constitution and condition of the planets. They were generally believed to be habitable worlds like our own, and the waxing and waning of the white polar caps of Mars, in complete synchronism with its astronomical seasons, received the natural interpretation which is still generally current to-day, that these showed the formation and melting of ice and snow on the hemisphere in winter. No just account was, however, taken of the great differences in the amount of light and heat received by the different planets, none of their great diversity in density and surface gravity, and therefore of atmospheric distribution and pressure; whilst the more numerous moons of those more distant were popularly supposed to make up in no inconsiderable degree for the enfeeblement, through greater remoteness, of the influence of the sun.

Comets and meteors, the other two classes of members of our solar system, were even less understood. Halley had, indeed, shown that one of the former was as thoroughly a member of the system as Saturn or Jupiter, but the astronomical relations of meteors were wholly unsuspected.

In the world of stars it had already been noted that some had a perceptible motion relative to the others, and Prevost and the elder Herschel were beginning, at the epoch referred to, to show that a portion at least of these "proper motions" must be assigned to the onward movement through space of the sun, with all his attendant planets. The variation in brightness of some stars had also been remarked. Two of these in particular, Mira, in the Whale, and Algol, had attracted attention, and these two stand to-day as exemplars of the two great divisions of variables and of the two chief causes of variation-Mira of changes in the star itself, Algol of obscuration caused by the recurrence of an eclipse. But however probable the eclipse theory may have seemed one hundred years ago, it was until recently beyond the power of astronomers to demonstrate it.

Of the constitution of the stars nothing was known; it was simply guessed vaguely that they were suns," without any appreciation of what that term involved. The problem of their distances was beyond the instrumental power of the astronomers of the time to attack with success; nor can we