Among our distinguished actors are many who on earth were clergymen, politicians, and of other occupations.[A]

[Footnote A:  I am told that the Rev. Newland Maffit is at present a distinguished actor in the spirit world.  ED.]

GILBERT STUART.

ART CONVERSATION.

People are fools in religion, and worship as divine the most stupid monstrosities ever conceived of!  Only tell the masses that St. Luke, St. John, or Mary Magdalen was the author of some absurdity, which, if you or I had originated, they would scoff at, and they will clasp their hands in mute admiration over that miracle of art!

So it seems to me to be with Spiritualists.  Drawings devoid of taste, hard, and out of proportion, are received by them with acclamations of joy, and credited, if they are figures, to Raphael, and if landscapes, to Claude Lorraine or some other great master of art.

Now I, for one, wish people would use their brains, and not be so easily gulled.

It is truly wonderful that a spirit can make a person draw a straight line who never could draw any but a crooked one.  It partakes something of the miraculous, I admit; and that spirits should produce likenesses, and representations of flowers, scrolls, and ornamental designs, and unearthly landscapes, through mediums whose powers of representation and artistic talents have never been developed, is indeed marvellous! but that these drawings should be called works of art, and looked upon as the genuine offspring of those immortal painters, is ridiculous, and a thing to be deprecated by every intelligent spirit and Spiritualist, either here or in any other world!

Why, God Almighty himself could not take a raw, unschooled, undisciplined hand, and produce a work of art!

If a medium is content with what he has done, if he does not comprehend the faults of his work, if his eye and brain are not educated artistically,—­then he must stand like a machine working in a groove.

Neither Phidias nor any of his descendants could inspire a high production through such means!

Now I do wish that educated artists would seek to be controlled by us spirits; or that those mediums whom we do influence would go to school, and submit to the drudgery that is necessary to give them skill in design and execution.

Then could we hope to represent something of the progress of art in the spirit world; and would be enabled to depict marvels of landscapes, and the seraphic beauty of the human face with its grace and perfection of form, as it meets us in this artistic land.

Yon ask if we have galleries of art here.  I should think so:  art-love is immortal!  You do not suppose that Benjamin West, Washington Allston, Henry Inman, Copely, Stuart, and we Americans who loved our art, would be satisfied with laying down the brush, and would have contented ourselves with singing and playing on cymbals constantly for the hundred years or so that we’ve been here?  Now, where there is a will there is a way, and having the will, we have found the way to exercise the genius which God gave us.