Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/462

456 objective standard. For example, as literature, we teach analytical grammar, philology, history and events. As a regular exercise in English literature in many schools, students are required to put a beautiful passage of Shakespeare into English! Now, in reality, such a process never carries one beyond the mere incidents of a literary masterpiece, and the one element which makes it a work of art, namely, its power to infect the reader, with the emotion of the writer eludes all such analytical pursuit. Many of us after leaving college, take up Shakespeare, Lowell, Wordsworth or Hawthorne, and are astonished to find them interesting and inspiring. Our apparent purpose in teaching music is to develop dexterity, as though every child were to be a musician.

The plastic arts are taught as parts of an external body of knowledge which the pupil may take in and then give out again, as though his nervous system were glass with the power of transmitting, with more or less accuracy, forms, colors and sounds. Such strong emphasis on the acquisition of technical skill reduces the study of art almost to the level of learning a trade. Those teachers and pupils who pursue higher ideals find themselves in conflict with the accepted educational canons. These, as I said above, demand measurable results which are most easily secured in the plastic arts by devoting the time to training all the faculties to bear upon production. While the appreciation of art may be learned, incidentally, by this method, the index of progress is the amount of dexterity acquired so that all the faculties become set towards making something. This, no doubt, is an excellent way to learn a handicraft, but a questionable method of cultivating understanding and appreciation. Although it can not be denied that a thorough knowledge of how a work of art is produced, of the skill displayed in overcoming special difficulties, affords a peculiar pleasure, we must not forget that the same pleasure comes from seeing, for the first time, anything skilfully done, the difficulties of which one understands. And this is true whether it be artistic or purely mechanical. Whether it be the production of a tone on the violin or the ingenuity of a knitting or type-setting machine. Such ephemeral pleasure comes not from esthetic emotion but from scientific knowledge.

In the days when manufacturing was by handicraft and every workshop was a school of art, there was less need for teaching art in any ether way. But since the factory has displaced the workshop, and the operative the handicraftsman, there is no chance in industry for the application of art, except in a few cases. Art is no longer a quality of the product of every-day work as formerly, and it is hopeless for us to expect it to be. And with its departure from industry, art has vanished from the daily life of men. This is not surprising, because, although the long and toilsome road to art by way of production is closed up by