Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/463

Rh the advent of machinery, we still insist on teaching all pupils to approach by this route. The result is that few ever emerge from the drudgery to enjoy the beauty in the world, because in school they learn only the a, b, c of drawing, painting or modeling and such meager skill is a very poor guide to the great domain of art. In fact it has restricted the attention to a very small part only of the artistic field and so narrowed our conception of art that to-day very few, even intelligent persons, think of art as a possible quality of nearly every human act as well as of its expression in the concrete. I have heard eminent professional men denounce art in language too strong to print, declaring it to be only an absurdity. I once asked one of these art-haters if he thought the room in which we were sitting would be as comfortable and pleasant if it were four times as long and one fourth as wide? I followed his emphatic 'No, of course not!' with the remark that proportion is the corner stone' of decorative art.

A short time ago, in conversation with a very successful worker (an Oxford man) in one of the great social settlements of London, I was emphasizing the importance of art in social work. He interrupted me with: "Oh, yes, we don't go in for art here, but they do at Toynbee Hall. We go in for music, acting plays, literature and dancing." He seemed very much taken aback when I exclaimed; 'But I include all those under art.'

This testimony of these two typical witnesses, I have selected from a large amount of evidence which shows, that to most persons art is a small book written in a strange tongue. It seems incredible that the intelligent world should limit art to pictures and statues. Even Mr. Whistler, when he says: 'There never was an art-loving nation,' evidently has in mind only the plastic arts; for there never was a people who did not love art in some form. Ever since man began to reshape the external world; to employ his leisure to give pleasure to himself and others, art has been the one universal mode of communicating feeling. There is not, and there has never been, a group of people which has not expressed its emotions in some form of art.

As I have said above, science is largely responsible for the widespread misconceptions and indifference to art. It has dug a new channel into which it has turned the current of our thought. Out of these conditions naturally arise methods of teaching art which reinforce our wrong notions and increase our apathy; for the results approved by science are produced by pupils and teachers devoid of all appreciation for art.

In art, as in all forms of human activity, to produce and to consume are diverse operations which call into play different sets of intellectual faculties. Why, then, are not both producers and consumers legitimate claimants to recognition in education? In the nature of things, is there