with all the arts of design but with all the arts of production,-always crude, coarse, ugly at one end, always refined, admirably adapted, elegant at the other. Nay, the arts of design and the arts of production are really one. The former have their historic development from the latter, Art is the handmaid of the artisan; it is the beauty of his soul issuing from his finger-tips. What is made for common use serves a higher, and the triumph of the art is striking when the lower use seems a profanation of the higher, and the work, rescued from its inferior service, finds a place of honor in some noble art collection.

Fancy for a moment an ancient Etruscan risen from his sleep of two or three millenniums and roaming through a modern art museum-the surprise, merriment and gratification of the man at seeing, patched, pieced and restored-their homely uses forgotten-the familiar vessels of his kitchen and scullery!

You see the drift of my thought, of course. Drawing, painting, designing, modeling, music, the arts of construction -all these are so many forms of expression, so many kinds of language.

The schools are giving increasing attention to their elements; more attention should also be paid to their master-pieces. Whatever the beginner does in any of these branches, both his feeling and his doing are crude and barbaric; they need strengthening and refining. Now the feeling can be developed somewhat without the doing, but the doing cannot be developed far without the feeling. In improving one's own handiwork and in studying the best handiwork of others, there are high possibilities for culture, just as there are in improving one's own English and in studying the best English of others. The aesthetic element needs to be cultivated as much in handiwork as in English. It needs to be cultivated in the doer as well as in the thing done.

Let us pass at once to some principles of vast consequence that teachers and students of the arts of design, of representation, and of construction cannot afford to lose sight of.

And one of them is the transcendent importance, nay, the necessity, of the child's framing and developing in his own mind the ideas, the concepts, the standards, by which he should be guided. It is a truism, I know. But there is the significance of it,-the deep, inner stub

born meaning of it that I would press home. It is, of course, a fundamental principle in all teaching, this lodging and fixing of ideas in the child's mind for him to work from. If child study has any value, it is in finding out precisely what ideas or concepts are present in child experience for teaching to connect with and build upon. Any teaching that ignores actual child concepts and actual child ways of enlarging such concepts, but relies on concepts or standards in the teacher's mind or in books or in other places than the child's mind, is to that extent unsound.

Indeed, the essence of education lies precisely here, says Professor James. It consists in taking natural reactions, the things a child does on impulse and spontaneously, and knitting them to new consequences. Thus the child is furnished with new ideas. Once he responded to a stimulus; now he responds to what has been associated with that stimulus.

The domination of the senses has given way to that of ideas. The child ceases to be a waif of impulse; he has become a creature of deliberation; that is, he has been educated. And the length and width and height and depth of his education-it all turns upon the length and width and height and depth of the ideas that have been welded to his primary impulses.

A child draws a house. It matters not what pretty houses may have been pictured on the retina of his eye. He draws only what is in his mind, what he sees with his mental eye, the two or three things he has crudely made his own. And so if he makes his door two stories high, if he draws a man taller than the door, if he lets his flag float one way and his smoke another, it is because he does not see to the contrary. When he sees for himself that the door should admit to the first floor only, that the man should be able to get in at the door, that the wind cannot blow opposite ways at once, he will straighten these things out, and not before. Nay, if he is drawing from the object he cannot do much better; because although the eye pictures much, the mind pictures but little, and it is the mind, not the eye, that guides his pencil. Even the observant Agassiz, if asked to look at something through a microscope, was wont to insist on knowing before looking what he was expected to see, so afraid was he of missing it.

There is only one way: and it is to train the child to draw what he sees, not what is, for what is, is forever beyond him; to draw what he sees, not what you see, for what you see is outside of his mind and cannot shape its action; to draw what his mind sees, not what his eye takes in, for the eye takes in ten thousand things that never reach the mind. The standards for the child to go by must be the incomplete and crude ones of his own mind; they cannot by any possibility be other than these.

The concept-forming power of the mind, however, is something marvelous. Take the extreme case of a person congenitally deaf. Why is he dumb? His vocal organs are perfect; give them the right stimulus from the brain, and they will act. In other words, the mind can direct these organs just as soon as it has concepts or standards of the sounds to be aimed for.

But the sad fact is that no sound has ever entered the deaf person's mind; his mind has no conception, therefore, of what sound is; it does not realize its own silence even. Vocal organs-the idea of vocal is forever beyond its grasp. There they are, those wonderful organs, all ready for their appointed work, and the mind doomed never to know what that work is. The deaf are deaf through physical powerlessness, but they are dumb through mental powerlessness, dumb simply and solely because the mind has no standards of sound to go by.

And yet the deaf can be taught to speak after all. Standards of muscular positions and efforts are attainable by them, if standards of sound are not,-standards attainable through the eye if not through the ear; and by these the organs of speech are unlocked. Now there is an adaptability of mind in all this that is astonishing, and the climax of astonishment is reached when we hear those speak who have been not only deaf from infancy but also blind; for now we are in the presence of concepts into whose fabric neither sound nor vision can enter,-concepts that are built up by touch under guidance, that exist in the mind as terms of muscular sense, that the tissue of the brain has literally grown to, and that find expression in what to the speaker is only a silent posing of organs, a silent using of muscles, but to the listener intelligible speech.

I had the pleasure last June of making

the acquaintance of Helen Kellar. This young girl has been deaf and blind from infancy and for many years she was also dumb. She is to prepare for college in Cambridge and to enter Radcliffe. With neither sight nor hearing, she promises to surpass in scholarly attainments many possessors of both. I recently addressed the school where Helen is to study and whose closing exercises she attended. Imagine my astonishment when Helen's teacher, Miss Sullivan, said to me that she had reported to Helen every word of my address as rapidly as it was given. She did it by making signs in the palm of Helen's hand. I know not which was the more surprising, Miss Sullivan's success in reporting the speaker with her swift and wonderful signs, or Helen's success in interpreting those signs, in her swift and wonderful way. Had Miss Sullivan reported me orally, Helen could also have followed me by placing her hands upon her teacher's mouth. To this power of interpreting both signs and spoken words, Helen adds the power of intelligible and expressive speech. Indeed, she recently addressed a large audience in Washington. What a marvellous revelation it all is of the conceptforming power of the human mind!

These two points come out, then, with distinctness, the impossibility of the mind's working apart from its own standards, the marvelous adaptability of the mind in acquiring standards. Now what are the teacher's relations to these standards? Right teaching of the child leads him to enlarge and improve these humble standards; it seems to find out what they are; it makes much of the child's interest in them; it respects the child's fidelity to them, it trusts the same laws of growth for them that it trusts for the child's learning to walk; the artless activity of the child in making and doing, the very thing he used to get his knuckles rapped for, it welcomes as a sign of promise.

The teacher, you see, works at the beginning and the end of hidden pathways. He can control in part what enters there. He can see in part what issues thence. But the pathways are nature's own, and midway, out of sight, are the all-important standards. Here, apart from the teacher, the real educational process goes on. It is a record in cell and tissue, a record built up through the slow processes of waste and growth.

By no possibility can the mind be pushed ahead of this physical record of its activity. Certain outward conditions the teacher controls; the process itself,-that is too intricate, too delicate, too vital for him to manage, and so nature handles it herself.

The thought that begins to stand out in all these words is this: That imitation is our great reliance in aesthetic training. I do not mean imitation in the sense of blindly or mechanically copying, but in the higher sense of acquiring standards in nature's unconscious way and of conforming the practice to them. The child is always in the realm of imitation. He always likes to do things, to do them as he sees others do them, to do them as well as others do them or better, and to possess things, especially if it costs him something to get them. The child's interest centers in and blossoms out of these four primary instincts. There is a chance for him to go astray in each of them. Bad construction,-that is botchery or mischief; bad imitation,-that is yielding to poor or evil example; bad emulation, that is full of envy and vindictiveness; bad ownership,-that is unearned or dishonest possession. But there is the golden opportunity as well of his rising through judicious use of these tendencies to noble youth and manhood. All this is simply another way of saying that the child's environment may do him good or harm, that the examples set the child may be for his weal or his woe. In short, the right use of these instincts practically resolves itself into the various ways of seeing things as they ought to be seen and doing them as they ought to be done, that is, of seeing and doing them in conformity to good standards. Thus the philosophy of imitation and that of learning by doing run into each other and become essentially one.

Ruskin tells us that in manufacture we use the hand only; in art, the hand and the mind; and in the fine arts, the hand, the mind and the heart. All this is sufficiently true for Ruskin's purpose. The fact is, however, that any use of the hand that is not automatic involves with it a play of both thought and feeling. In pure manufacture, there is little thought and less feeling; in art of an ordinary sort, more thought with an increase of feeling; in the fine arts, the blended play of thought and feeling at their best; but always the mind, in whatever it does, is

moving as a unit. Psychology may separate mental functions one from another to give an isolated view of each, but there is no such separation in mental action. Better guidance of the hand, truer thought, finer feeling, -any one of these things granted, the whole mental action is lifted.

The important point is to keep the child's mind steadily active in these three classes of functions and on ascending lines. It will never do for the teacher to cut adrift from the child's humble concepts or his artless interest in them.

Thus we see why, in drawing, for instance, crudest expressions of thought need to be respected, why the germ of fondness for it needs to be nourished, why the drawing habits should be early established, why we ought to be hopeful if new thoughts keep coming out in the rude work of novices. We see also why there should be abundant practice,plenty of paper, plenty of objects, a little judicious questioning now and then and but scant indulgence at first in telling. We do not tell a child how to learn to walk; we cannot do it; we simply encourage him to walk. Then comes a time for shaping the child's work, directing his observation, leading him to see the sphere in the orange, the cylinder in the tree-trunk, and all that. From the beginning it is the free expression of thought, not the painful drawing of pictures; the mind kept on the thing to be expressed, not on the language that expresses it; the child thinking with his pencil,-at first as his own fancy prompts him and then as the teacher begins to lead him. And the various expedients adopted in the teaching of drawing have one element of promise in them if pupils, because of them, work voluntarily beyond the specific exercises assigned them.

Indeed, why should they stop with an assigned lesson-especially with one that insults their capacity? Why should the teacher discourage, or, at least, fail to encourage the doing of work he cannot examine and correct? The principle is wholly bad that no work should be done by pupils beyond the teacher's power to criticise it completely. It means for the conscientious teacher no escape from the bondage of those headache stacks of papers, stacks that, heaped however high, mean practice for the pupils that is shamefully scant. fully scant. When shall we learn that corrections imposed upon pupils from

without are infinitely inferior to corrections that come from standards growing within them? Making blue pencil marks into the midnight,-such work by the teacher is not getting at the heart of things. The learner must wield his own blue pencil. Let the school ideal be, rather, plenty of work by the pupils-uncorrected work, blundering work, if you please-more work in the aggregate than the teacher can possibly handle by blue pencil methods. I do not mean work that the teacher may ignore; on the contrary, he cannot get much work unless he has a glowing interest in it. I do not mean that he shall not care to have it corrected. On the contrary, he shall bring his profoundest skill to bear on those standards within from which only amendment can come. I have seen great quantities of work done by pupils in algebra, in geometry, in chemistry-without thought of detailed criticism by the teacher-work of steadily improving character, the only incentives thereto being the interest of the pupils in their own work and in the work of one another, the gentle pressure of the teacher's interest, as shown in hints that may be made about subjects and the handling of them, the influence of exhibited specimens, and so on.

Drawing as a simple language needs. this extended practice; its culture value is not easily reached without it; its art value is impossible without it. Of course, no school sets itself the impossible task of training any one to be an artist. If it sends an artist forth, call him the gift of God, not the product of the school. It is a great thing, however, if the conditions of school work have been congenial soil for the artist to grow in. Practice in drawing that means abundant seeing and thinking is certainly such soil, for the more of such seeing and thinking, the more likely the soul is to be moved, only the seeing and the thinking, if culture purposes are to be served, must be supplemented in various ways.

In the first place, the pupil must be led to refer the endless phenomena of appearances and constructions to a few elementary principles. It is in drawing and construction as in science-if one grasps a principle, he grasps a thousand facts; and when he grasps a deeper principle he grasps a hundred principles that rest upon it. No wonder the dream comes to the artist, as to the philosopher, of some foundation principle, the deepest of all, the

possession of which is the key to all there is in art.

In the next place, his attention should be called to illustrations and examples of the sort of work he is doing that are a little more elaborate, more skilful, more beautiful than any he has produced himself.

Here is where school exhibitions of the pupils' work come in-particularly of work that surpasses the average. Such work exerts a lifting and toning influence upon the humbler workers below. Moreover, there is the encouragement of it. It is the work of learners, not of experts, and it holds out the hope to other learners, that they may equal it in time.

In the third place, the master pieces of painting, of architecture, of sculpture, of construction, should be interpreted to the pupil-I mean only such grander features of them as can be presented in elementary

ways.

All this means a certain equipment in pictures, photographs, casts and models, but it need not be an extensive equipment, if well selected. The press is flooding us nowadays with half-tone pictures -beautiful and cheap. These, too, can be so selected and classified as to illustrate and fix elementary principles. Indeed, we need some guide through this wealth of pictures to prevent a certain Sunday-newspaper effect upon us.

My thought is, that we can study these things just as we study the Merchant of Venice, or Evangeline, or the Chambered Nautilus. The objective point is to get the pupils to thinking in a larger way than it is possible for them to think unaided. Great, complete, philosophical thoughts-those are not to be thought of; but the beginnings of great thoughts, germinal thoughts, ill defined thoughts, that suggest other and higher thoughts, beyond-it is worth everything to start these. People may pooh-pooh at such thoughts, call them vague, ill-fitting and partial, deny them the name even of thoughts, but great thoughts in their origins have usually a chaotic aspect. The formless preceded the formed always.

The mind cannot grow very fast if fed in a scrappy way-a bit here, an item there, a fact somewhere else. Furnishing such disconnected things is not teaching. If it were, the daily newspaper could distance the teacher, and the village gossip outstrip both. 'Hitch your wagon to a star," says Emerson. That is, get the child's mind to hook on to some great

་་

How

Here is a tulip, for instance. gaudy the sepals and petals! Just below, down the stem a little way, a leaf-an unusual one, for a full half of it is colored and gay as the floral leaves above; it is almost a petal. And here is a stamen half changed to a petal, and here another three-quarters changed, and close by a third—why, it is a full-blown petal where a stamen belongs!

Observe other flowers rightly selected for the same thought. The child begins to grasp the idea, not in its fulness, but in its germs, that the parts of a flower are transformed leaves, that a flower bud is a leaf bud changed-an idea that runs through the plant world, illumining a million facts, and giving possession of the facts illumined. Now let the thought work. The wagon is hitched. The journey may fail even now; but the teacher has discharged his duty, for he has harnessed the team.

This should be an aim in all teaching -connecting the child's mind with great thoughts. Just here is the imperative reason for scholarly attainments in the teacher. If he lacks them he sees no great thoughts in nature, only patches and shreds of thoughts. There is no star in his view to which he can hitch his own poor little cart, much less the humbler one of his pupil. So in elementary art, hitch the little mind, if you can, to a great thought.

Take this thought, for instance, how the imagination fills gaps in a drawing or a painting, how it is not necessary to put into the picture every detail of fact, how it is impossible to do so, how it would spoil the picture to attempt it, and so on. Think of the innumerable illustrations of this principle that children can take in. Perhaps it will dawn on some of their minds that the imagination of the beholder has something to do with a picture as well as the artist who makes it; that the artist must address himself to that imagination as well as to the object he is painting; that a thousand details might enter the eye and only a few of them the mind; that a few strokes are better than a hundred; that they should be strokes to reach the mind, not to stop with the eye; that it is a pretty serious matter, therefore, what strokes shall be made and what not; and so on without limit. There can scarcely be better

Here is a man who tries everything with his brush-a cabbage leaf, for instance, with its bloom and its veins, dewdrops and flies on the leaf, with tiny reflections in the dewdrops and sheeny network in the wings of the flies. He gives the imagination nothing to do. And here is another who shirks every detail, and tries for general impressions. Near

to his canvas is blotchy with meaningless daubs; far off these daubs become foliage, fields, mountains, clouds, fine natural effects. This man gives the imagination everything to do.

Now young people can be led to take in elementary differences like these, and to think intelligently about them.

Size,

Again, how prolific in suggestions is the comparison of a word picture with a color picture? Take Shakespeare's picture of Portia "straying about by holy crosses, where she kneels and prays for happy wedlock hours." Suppose a good painter should attempt the same picture. Shakespeare in his picture easily presents several crosses visited at successive times in different places; the painter in his must limit himself to a single cross visited at a particular time in one place. shape, texture, color, light, shade, environment-there is not a hint of such details in Shakespeare, but the painter must show them all. Obviously in picturing the cross the painter has the advantage. If Shakespeare had attempted as much as the painter, his picture would have read like the specifications of an architect. But the holiness of the cross-how is a painter to manage a formless, colorless, elusive thing like holiness? If he is a genius, perhaps he can compass it. But the picture of Portia's "straying about" -that will surely baffle him, especially if he paints her in a position so inconsistent with straying about as "kneeling." And when he reaches the prayer happy wedlock hours," what can he possibly do with that? Something with the pose of prayer, indeed, but nothing with its sweet theme and ineffable emotions. Now the pupil that can appreciate the Merchant of Venice is ready for this sort of work. It has an opening, breezy effect on the mind.

"for

It is capital exercise to study with pupils the possibilities of illustration in an