being in that body equally represented. If now in 1787, Connecticut presented a model worthy to be copied in the framing of our National government, Connecticut in 1888 can show as good a model for the reconstruction of our National Benevolent Societies. "The Missionary Society of Connecticut," whose beginnings date back nearly a century, is that model. The churches represented in this General Conference manage it through Directors chosen by the Conference. I need not tell you with what wisdom, efficiency and economy its work has been done, nor how dear it is to the churches. If now, by the application of the same principle, we can manage our National Benevolent Societies, through men chosen by our several State Conferences or by the National Council, we shall achieve a result quite as important to our churches, as was the change of the old "Articles of Confederation" for the "Federal Constitution," to these United States. In conclusion: The result towards which this discussion has been aiming, and to which the truth and Providence of God seem to conduct us, may be comprehensively expressed in the following terms: While we render all due honor to the Christian foresight, faith, and courage manifested in the founding of our National Benevolent Societies, and while we gratefully recognize the rare fidelity with which their affairs have been administered, the time has come, when they should, by the requisite changes in their structure, be brought into organic connection with the churches, and so become the appropriate and responsible agencies, through which the churches, as being Congregational in form, may do their appointed work for the world's evangelization. ARTICLE III.—SUGGESTIVENESS IN ART. THOSE people who go out into the roadways of art crying Haro! Haro! in the name of realism would certainly gain their cause could numbers alone give them a verdict. For to say that the present tendency of the masses is toward the realistic side of life and art is but to state a trite axiom. We have about us on every hand the evidence of its truth. The age in which we live, dubbed Positive by Comte, has lost none of its positivism with his followers, but on the contrary has added to itself some latter-day exactness. So to-day we hear of innumerable exact sciences established by exact thinkers whose one aim is to get at the truth. This is quite as it should be; for the proper aim of science is to discover and establish truth. But outside of the exact thinkers are a great many people who, burdening their minds with no great problems of moment, fancy they like truths and realities because these are en rapport with the time, and for the further reason that whatever is true must necessarily be good for one's mental digestion. Truth being a very convenient pair of scales wherein things may be weighed one is not surprised to find it used for many things outside of the sciences. The arts are put in the balances and we hear great talk of realistic painting, life-like sculpture, and scientific poetry. Doubtless when the exact thinkers have time to turn their minds upon it we shall hear somewhat of an exact music and a positive drama. The inclination is that way. This is not quite as it should be; for the expressive arts have to do with the realm of the imagination, and their province is to please by stimulating the imagination of the beholder. They are not in any sense simple statements of truths or facts. But it is not strange that people of to-day should demand an art of facts. The age, as already observed, is prosaic, scientific, realistic. The idealist is scouted at as a relic of speculative days; the romantique has received his death wound at the hands of Mr. Howells; and the old-time poet-well he is considered quite a good joke all around. The populace, always cursed with a want and possessed of a longing for exact knowledge quite worthy of our first parents, calls out for truth. And they have it—have it in excellent form at that. The modern poet, in perfect conformity with the demand for greatness in little things, does not ascend the brightest heaven of invention, but, on the contrary, like the Peri descends to an earthly love. He pitches his tent in the valley and begins to dissect the wind, the rain, the light, the daisy, the blade of grass at his feet, the minds of the people about him. His researches, remarkable for their subtle analyses and pretty conceits, find vent in verse of polished form and of scientific veracity. The novelist rather leads the poet in minuteness of description. The society talk at an afternoon tea; the motives inducing a heroine to accept an offered love or shun a great temptation; the glare of a ball room, the flash of diamonds, the sheen of satin; a description of nature's face on a June day; mountain life in Tennessee; or boulevard life in Paris are all set forth with realistic fidelity and not without skill of handling. But it is the painter after all to whom people look for absolute truthfulness. If an audience becomes weary it can skip along bits of realism in poetry and fiction, but in painting it insists upon it that nothing shall be omitted and everything shall be realized. The great number of people understand painting to be an imitation of nature, and so the reasoning is, naturally enough, the closer the imitation the better the art. What wonder then that the artist paints a sportsman's outfit on the back of a door and spends days recording the inscription on a gun-lock, the exact creases in a pheasant's foot, or the seams and texture of a shooting coat. What wonder that he paints rugs, bronzes, china, and Second Empire furniture to be picked up; that his open sea shows a myriad of tiny waves reflective of the sky; that his people all walk out of their canvases; that his heads realize wrinkles and eye lashes; that his trees show each individual leaf. He assures us, as all realists do, that he speaks truth, and so he does; yet somehow we get little satisfaction out of his art. We wonder how it is all done, but our wonder is that of a child at a juggler's trick. The mind is perhaps astonished at the count less touches of the brush as the child by the conjurer's leger de main, but there is no æsthetic pleasure to be derived from such art. The poem, the novel, the painting, none of them touches us profoundly. And why is this since they are all so very true, so realistic? For that very reason; they are nothing but truth. The element of imagination is wanting in both the object and the subject. There is no suggestion of anything that may stir the mind of the beholder. We have before us a mechanical problem of truth submitted to the intellect and appealing in no way to the emotions. In this element of the imagination many observers are lacking, like Joe Willet; and, as the elder Willet expressed it, they need their faculties "drawed out." One day in the Medici Chapel at Florence I chanced to overhear a party of tourists lamenting the fact that the great marble of Michael Angelo, the Day upon the tomb of Lorenzo, had never been carried to completion. The figure of Night on the opposite side they thought rather good, especially after one of them had read Michael Angelo's lines explanatory of it, but the Day had chisel marks in the face, the foot looked as though covered with ice and snow, and there was no titular explanation to it. It was "such a pity." Is it then a pity that the sculptor never finished it? I think not. Every additional stroke of the chisel would have detracted from it, every rough edge smoothed away would have carried with it some morsel of strength. As it remains to us it is the very embodiment of power. Finish might have ruined it, but it is doubtful if it could have improved it. There like a fallen god he lies half embedded in his matrix of stone. The suggestion of mighty power is given; let the observer's imagination do the rest. The half finish, the mystery, the uncertainty give the opportunity. One may fancy as many have done, that the figure symbolizes the loss of Florentine freedom and that the grand captive with his massive brow and sunken eyes half rises wearily to view the morning light shining for him in vain. Again one may think him a new Prometheus bound to the rock; one of the Gigantes; or perhaps a conquered Titan lying along the hills of Tartarus in the drear twilight brooding in melancholy silence over the loss of Olympus. To whatever one may imagine regarding the figure, the element of reserved strength will lend assistance. Cut the captive from his bed of stone and the strength falls short, lacking the foil of resistance; finish the marble, and an existent fact precludes the possibility of wide imagination. For the same reason one finds it hard to regret that some of the finest Greek marbles have come to us in fragments only. The Venus of Melos with her fine head reveals to us an almost perfect beauty; but is the Crouching Venus with her head, arms, and feet gone, and part of her left knee knocked out, less beautiful? The exquisitely modeled torso, the graceful pose, the rhythm of line, the rendering of the flesh raise the mind to a lofty pitch in conceiving what the head should be. Place a head like that of the Medicean Venus upon it and the statue loses; imagine, however, a head of that living beauty which sculptor's chisel never yet cut from stone and the statue gains. This is equally true of that marble which I venture to think one of the very greatest that has come to us out of all the past -the Samothracian Victory of the Louvre. Headless, armless, footless, sustained as by her remaining wings of stone, with the motion of rapid flight still about her, she touches, just alights upon the prow of a ship. How the push of that grand figure up against the wind flutters and strains the delicate drapery until the limbs and the torso seem bursting through its folds! How strong must have been the gale beating against the broad bosom and whistling through the mighty wings that required the throwing forward of the upper part of the body to meet it! Who was she, what was she, whence came she? Had she the head of a grey-eyed Athene, calm, majestic, powerful in repose; did she hold in her hand the laurel wreath for those who had lately conquered; or was she a War Fury with flying disheveled hair, eyes aflame like a Medusa, and an outstretched arm and finger pointing the way to battle? One may be pardoned for not regretting the lost head. It might have been insipid, for the Greeks placed the head below the body in importance, and with the actual fact before us there would be no room for the imagination. A handsome, even a superior face would have dragged down the whole marble. Nothing but a head of superlative majesty could crown that faultless figure, and, great as were the Greek artists, it would have required a great god of art such as we have never known to realize so high an ideal. Given the figure alone and it kindles in |