ART in itself is not a thing apart from our daily lives. It finds its expression in the details of our homes and garments as well as in public buildings and statues. As I am, however, writing principally from the point of view of the painter, let me begin with an elucidation of the province of the painter's art; that is, decorative painting and its outgrowth, the so-called easel picture. This art is a language no less than as though it were tongue-spoken. It is not an idea, or a collection of ideas, any more than words are ideas; like them, it is rather a "translation of the spiritual original into the language which human thought can comprehend" (Science and Health, p. 210).
A great thought ungrammatically expressed is still a great thought, and as such counts; but its value in full to our present consciousness is obtained when, by obeying the human-made laws of rhetoric and grammar, it is clearly communicated to others. So in the pictorial art there are laws to be obeyed, though less rigid than those of literature, and of such comparatively recent birth that we find no difficulty in tracing their growth up from the ancient picture-writing. From the first the mission of art has been twofold, that of story-telling, the literal side, and that of embellishing. The gradual perfecting of a written and printed literature absorbed to a great extent the storytelling, so that picture-making found its most rapid development in the unfolding of structural, decorative, and picturesque beauty. In this the province of its song is as peculiarly its own, and as untranslatable into words as is the harmony of sound in music and line and proportion in architecture. This latter function of painting is fundamental,—the essence, the fiber of the fabric,—but it is often misread or totally ignored by the layman.
To make this more clear I would like to cite, as an example, some decorations in the Boston Public Library. One of these is Edwin A. Abbey's "Quest of the Holy Grail." and the first instinctive concern on seeing this series of paintings is for the story,—to learn their meaning. To obtain the explanatory tablet and with it make a tour of the room, tracing the story in the pictures, seems imperative. Having done this, I have heard many exclaim, "How scientific!" while without the tablet there would be nothing to call forth such an exclamation, proving that it is indeed just this description, the literary side only, that has appealed to the beholder as being scientific. In the hallway of the building are two other decorations, by Puvis de Chavannes, vaguely interesting in their subjects, but taking their place in the harmony of the whole with a compelling restfulness. It is this harmony of the whole, not the desire to assert himself or to create a sensation, that has been the artist's first consideration. With high-minded humility, noble in its spacings as the architecture itself, the big, soft, blue-toned decorations take their place harmoniously behind, not before, the yellow marble. In these structural qualities they are as scientific as any paintings that have decorated our walls since the first flowering of Christian art.
This first Christian art was slow to find its foothold, slow in evolving into a definite art movement. It is not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that we find it in its full bloom, soon like the early healing to decline. In the Tuscan and Venetian schools of this period we find an art which is Christian not only in that the subjects are chosen from Biblical history instead of representing pagan gods and goddesses, but into the very sinews of the line, the very gestures of the figures, the harmony of color and tenderness of modeling, was wrought the new love, the motherhood quality of God, the gentleness, the peace, the love that protects and destroys not. In the photographic sense of drawing there was hardly a Greek who could not have surpassed Fra Angelico, but the spiritual qualities he brought out in those exquisite paintings on the walls of San Marco were to the world a new tongue; and the point upon which I wish to insist is this, that though we were ignorant of the subject, we would still feel these qualities. The work of the Greek we would admire; of Fra Angelico, love. When I first saw the decorations of Giotto I was an agnostic. I did not follow the story part with definite interest; but they, and work akin to them, kept alive in my heart the longing for better, purer, and nobler things than the world and its pleasures could furnish.
To-day, whether professed followers of Christ or not, the great body of the people are essentially Christian, in that their ideas of right and wrong, born and bred in the bone, are founded on Jesus' teachings; so that, broadly speaking, all the art of our time is Christian, for from Giotto to the present day the ideal so eagerly sought by the art world has included in its demands something of the Christ-awakened spirituality transmitted into our modern work and vernacular as "feeling." To-day we are standing on the edge of a new light, and into this light of Christian Science, in an ever-widening path, the new art is appearing. Already has the building begun, already are we finding subjects in the new teaching, already is the art of the entire country feeling the effect of spiritualized thought directed understandingly toward Truth, Life, and Love. Must there not logically result a new school, reflecting the truth not only in its subjects, but bringing out in ever-increasing degree peace, love, grace, harmony, dignity, and tenderness,—all the attributes of divine Mind,—blended in a decorative and picturesque beauty of which previous art has given us only a hint?A correction was made in the November 1908 Journal: "We are in receipt of a letter from C. H. Phelps, in which he states that the article, 'Christian Art,' published in the October Journal, should also have been credited to A. Farnsworth Drew, as it was written in collaboration and was signed by both of them. The possible significance of the double signature escaped us, inasmuch as the personal pronoun was used in the singular throughout the article. "
