There is always a necessity for this expression of the character of the age. This spirit of our age, this mixed materialistic and imaginative spirit,--this that abroad prompts Russian and Italian wars, and at home discovers California mines,--that realizes gorgeous dreams of hidden gold, and Napoleonic ideas of almost universal sway,--that bridges Niagara, and under-lays the sea with wire, and, forgetful of the Titan fate, essays to penetrate the clouds,--this spirit, so practical that those who choose to look on one side only of the shield can see only perjured monarchs trampling on deceived or decaying peoples, and backwoodsmen hewing forests, and begrimed laborers setting up telegraph-poles or working at printing-presses,--this spirit also so full of imagination,--which has produced an outburst of music (that most intangible and subtile and imaginative of arts) such as the earth never heard before,--which is developing in the splendid, showy life, in the reviving taste for pageantry that some supposed extinct, in the hurried, crowded incidents that will fill up the historic page that treats of the nineteenth century,--this spirit is sure to get expression in art.
The American people, cosmopolitan, concrete, the union, the result rather of a union of so many nationalities, ought surely to do its share towards this expression. The American people surely represents the century,--has much of its spirit: is full of unrest; is eminently practical, but practical only in embodying poetical or lofty ideas; is demonstrative and excitable; resembles the French much and in many things,--the French, who are at the head of modern and European civilization,--who think and feel deeply, but do not keep their feelings hidden. The Americans, too, like expression: when they admire a Kossuth or a Jenny Lind, a patriot exile or a foreign singer, all the world is sure to know of their admiration; when they are delighted at some great achievement in science, like the laying of an Atlantic Cable, they demonstrate their delight. They make their successful generals Presidents; they give dinners to Morphy and banquets to Cyrus Field. They are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the age. Therefore they are artistic.