The suggestion that the nineteenth century cannot yet be judged as to its final effect in many directions has already been made, and of nothing is this more true than of its Art.  Of one phase of this period, however, we may speak with confidence.  No other century of which we know the history has seen so many changes—­such progress, or such energy of purpose so largely rewarded as in the century we are considering.

To one who has lived through more than three score years of this period, no fairy tale is more marvellous than the changes in the department of daily life alone.

When I recall the time when the only mode of travel was by stage-coach, boat, or private carriage—­when the journey from Boston to St. Louis demanded a week longer in time than we now spend in going from Boston to Egypt—­when no telegraph existed—­when letter postage was twenty-five cents and the postal service extremely primitive—­when no house was comfortably warmed and women carried foot-stoves to unheated churches—­when candles and oil lamps were the only means of “lighting up,” and we went about the streets at night with dim lanterns—­when women spun and wove and sewed with their hands only, and all they accomplished was done at the hardest—­when in our country a young girl might almost as reasonably attempt to reach the moon as to become an artist—­remembering all this it seems as if an army of magicians must incessantly have waved their wands above us, and that human brains and hands could not have invented and put in operation the innumerable changes in our daily life during the last half-century.

When, in the same way, we review the changes that have taken place in the domains of science, in scholarly research in all directions, in printing, bookmaking, and the methods of illustrating everything that is printed—­from the most serious and learned writing to advertisements scattered over all-out-of-doors—­when we add to these the revolutions in many other departments of life and industry, we must regard the nineteenth as the century par excellence of expansion, and in various directions an epoch-making era.

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When we turn to our special subject we find an activity and expansion in nineteenth-century art quite in accordance with the spirit of the time.  This expansion is especially noticeable in the increased number of subjects represented in works of art, and in the invention of new methods of artistic expression.

Prior to this period there had been a certain selection of such subjects for artistic representation as could be called “picturesque,” and though more ordinary and commonplace subjects might be rendered with such skill—­such drawing, color, and technique—­as to demand approbation, it was given with a certain condescension and the feeling was manifested that these subjects, though treated with consummate art, were not artistic.  The nineteenth century has signally changed these theories.