Page:How to show pictures to children (IA howtoshowpictur00hurl).pdf/24

 sidered, the matter would be simple enough. The very fact that the imagination needs so little to set it going, and supplies so many deficiencies, makes his elders a bit careless about the pictures they give him. If a poor thing affords him as much enjoyment as a masterpiece, why bother to get anything better? As well give him a comic supplement as a Raphael’s Madonna, and trouble no more about it. But the faithful educator is concerned with the child’s future, and the object of all culture is rounded development. Everything in the child’s environment is chosen for this end, and the pictures should be among the most carefully selected of all his surrounding influences.

It is an almost cruel fact of psychology that a lack of youthful training can never be fully made up in after years. We see the inexorable law illustrated in the lives of hundreds of people about us, in manners, speech, and taste. So if children are surrounded by sentimental or meretricious pictures, they are seriously handicapped in after life in their susceptibility to noble art. On the other hand, the young mind fed only on the best pictures will by and by turn naturally to the good and reject the inferior. If the taste is cultivated in the impressionable years, it will become as sensitive to æsthetie impressions as a delicately adjusted instrument to atmospheric conditions. The theory is clear enough, but there have been many difficulties in its practical application. For obvious reasons graphic art is not nearly so widely understood or appreciated as literature. It is over four centuries since the printing press brought