11. Art

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"Give honour unto Luke Evangelist:

   For he it was (the aged legends say)

   Who first taught Art to fold her hands and pray.

Scarcely at once she dared to rend the mist

Of devious symbols: but soon having wist

   How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day

   Are symbols also in some deeper way,

She looked through these to God, and was God's priest.

"And if, past noon, her toil began to irk,

And she sought talismans, and turned in vain

   To soulless self-reflections of man's skill,

   Yet now, in this the twilight, she might still

Kneel in the latter grass to pray again,

Ere the night cometh and she may not work."

-- DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

When we consider how much of the direction of life depends upon the quality of our taste, upon right discernment in what we like and dislike, it is evident that few things can be more important in education than to direct this directing force, and both to learn and teach the taste for what is best as far as possible in all things. For in the matter of taste nothing is unimportant. Taste influences us in every department of life, as our tastes are, so are we. The whole quality of our inner and outer life takes its tone from the things in which we find pleasure, from our standard of taste. If we are severe in our requirements, hard to please, and at least honest with ourselves, it will mean that a spur of continual dissatisfaction pricks us, in all we do, into habitual striving for an excellence which remains beyond our reach. But on the other hand we shall have to guard against that peevish fastidiousness which narrows itself down until it can see nothing but defects and faults, and loses the power of humbly and genuinely admiring. This passive dissatisfaction which attempts nothing of its own, and only finds fault with what is done by others, grows very fast if it is allowed to take hold, and produces a mental habit of merely destructive criticism or perpetual scolding. Safe in attempting nothing itself, unassailable and self-righteous as a Pharisee, this spirit can only pull down but not build up again. In children it is often the outcome of a little jealousy and want of personal courage; they can be helped to overcome it, but if it is allowed to grow up, dissatisfaction allied to pusillanimity are very difficult to correct.

On the other hand, if we are amiably and cheerfully inclined to admire things in general in a popular way, easily pleased and not exacting, we shall both receive and give a great deal of pleasure, but it will be all in a second and third and fourth-rate order of delight, and although this comfortable turn of mind is saved from much that is painful and jarring, it is not exempt from the danger of itself jarring continually upon the feelings of others, of pandering to the downward tendency in what is popular, and, in education, of debasing the standard of taste and discrimination for children. To be swayed by popularity in matters of taste is to accept mediocrity wholesale. We have left too far behind the ages when the taste of the people could give sound and true judgment in matters of art; we have left them at a distance which can be measured by what lies between the greatest Greek tragedies and contemporary popular plays. Consternation is frequently expressed at seeing how theatres of every grade are crowded with children of all classes in life, so it is from these popular plays that they must be learning the first lessons of dramatic criticism.

There are only rare instances of taste which is instinctively true, and the process of educational pressure tends to level down original thought in children, as the excess of magazine and newspaper reading works in the same direction for older minds, so that true, independent taste becomes more rare; the result does not seem favourable to the development of the best discernment in those who ought to sway the taste of their generation. If taste in art is entirely guided by that of others, and especially by fashion, it cannot attain to the possession of an independent point of view; yet this in a modest degree every one with some training might aspire to. But under the sway of fashion taste is cowed; it becomes conventional, and falls under the dominion of the current price of works of art. On the other hand it is more unfortunate to be self-taught in matters of taste than in any other order of things. In this point taste ranks with manners, which are, after all, a department of the same region of right feeling and discernment. If taste is untaught and spontaneous, it is generally unreliable and without consistency. If self-taught it can hardly help becoming dogmatic and oracular, as some highly gifted minds have become, making themselves the supreme court of appeal for their own day.

But trained taste is grounded in reverence and discipleship, a lowly and firm basis for departure, from which it may, if it has the power to do or to discern, rise in its strength, and leave behind those who have shown the way, or soar in great flights beyond their view. So it has often been seen in the history of art, and such is the right order of growth. It needs the living voice and the attentive mind, the influence of trained and experienced judgment to guide us in the beginning, but the guide must let us go at last and we must rely upon ourselves.

The bad effect of being either self-taught or conventional is exclusiveness; in one case the personal bias is too marked, in the other the temporary aspect appeals too strongly. In the education of taste it is needful that the child should "eat butter and honey," not only so as to refuse the evil and choose the good, but also to judge between good and good, and to know butter from honey and honey from butter. This is the principal end of the study of art in early education. The doing is very elementary, but the principles of discernment are something for life, feeding the springs of choice and delight, and making sure that they shall run clear and untroubled.

Teaching concerning art which can be given to girls has to be approached with a sense of responsibility from conviction of the importance of its bearing on character as a whole. Let anyone who has tried it pass in review a number of girls as they grow up, and judge whether their instinct in art does not give a key to their character, always supposing that they have some inclination to reflect on matters of beauty, for there are some who are candidly indifferent to beauty if they can have excitement. They have probably been spoiled as children and find it hard to recover. Excitement has worn the senses so that their report grows dull and feeble. Imagination runs on other lines and requires stimulants; there is no stillness of mind in which the perception of beauty and harmony and fitness can grow up.

There are others—may they be few—in whose minds there is little room for anything but success. Utilitarians in social life, their determination is to get on, and this spirit pervades all they do; it has the making of the hardest-grained worldliness: to these art has nothing to say. But there are others to whom it has a definite message, and their response to it corresponds to various schools or stages of art. There are some who are daring and explicit in their taste; they resent the curb, and rush into what is extravagant with a very feeble protest against it from within themselves. Beside them are simpler minds, merely exuberant, for whom there can never be enough light or colour in their picture of life. If they are gifted with enough intelligence to steady their joyful constitution of mind, these will often develop a taste that is fine and true. In the background of the group are generally a few silent members of sensitive temperament and deeper intuition, who see with marvellous quickness, but see too much to be happy and content, almost too much to be true. They incline towards another extreme, an ideal so high-pitched as to become unreal, and it meets with the penalty of unreality in over-balancing itself. Children nearly always pull to one side or the other; it is a work of long patience even to make them accept that there should be a golden mean. Did they ever need it so much as they do now? Probably each generation in turn, from Solomon's time onward, has asked the same question. But in the modern world there can hardly have been a time in which the principle of moderation needed to be more sustained, for there has never been a time when circumstances made man more daring in face of the forces of nature, and this same daring in other directions, less beautiful, is apt to become defiant and unashamed of excess. It asserts itself most loudly in modern French art, but we are following close behind, less logical and with more remaining traditions of correctness, but influenced beyond what we like to own.

In the education of girls, which is subject to so many limitations, very often short in itself, always too short for what would be desirable to attain, the best way to harmonize aesthetic teaching is not to treat it in different departments, but to centre all round the general history of art. This leaves in every stage the possibility of taking up particular branches of art study, whether historical, or technical, or practical, and these will find their right place, not dissociated from their antecedents and causes, not paramount but subordinate, and thus rightly proportioned and true in their relation to the whole progress of mankind in striving after beauty and the expression of it.

The history of art in connexion with the general history of the human race is a complement to it, ministering to the understanding of what is most intimate, stamping the expression of the dominant emotion on the countenance of every succeeding age. This is what its art has left to us, a more confidential record than its annals and chronicles, and more accessible to the young, who can often understand feelings before they can take account of facts in their historical importance. In any case the facts are clothed in living forms there where belief and aspiration and feeling have expressed themselves in works of art. If we value for children the whole impression of the centuries, especially in European history, more than the mere record of changes, the history of art will allow them to apprehend it almost as the biographies of great persons who have set their signature upon the age in which they lived.

As each of the fine arts has its own history which moves along divergent or parallel lines in different countries and periods, and as each development or check is bound up with the history of the country or period and bears its impress, the interpretation of one is assisted and enriched by the other, and both are linked together to illuminate the truth. It is only necessary to consider the position of Christian art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the changes wrought by the Renaissance, to estimate the value of some knowledge of it in giving to children a right understanding of those times and of what they have left to the world. Again, the inferences to be drawn from the varied developments of Gothic architecture in France, Spain, and England are roads indicated to what is possible to explore in later studies, both in history and in art. And so the schools of painting studied in their history make ready the way for closer study in after years. Pugin's "Book of Contrasts" is an illustration full of suggestive power as to the service which may be rendered in teaching by comparing the art of one century with that of another, as expressive of the spirit of each period, and a means of reading below the surface.

Without Pugin's bitterness the same method of contrast has been used most effectively to put before children by means of lantern slides and lectures the manner in which art renders truth according to the various ideals and convictions of the artists. It is a lesson in itself, a lesson in faith, in devotion, as well as in art and in the history of man's mind, to show in succession, or even side by side, though the shock is painful, works of art in which the Christian mysteries are rendered in an age of faith or in one of unbelief. They can see in the great works of Catholic art how faith exults in setting them forth, with undoubting assurance, with a theological grasp of their bearings and conclusions, with plenitude of conviction and devotion that has no afterthoughts; and in contrasting with these the strained efforts to represent the same subjects without the illumination of theology they will learn to measure the distance downwards in art from faith to unbelief.

The conclusions may carry them further, to judge from the most modern paintings of the tone of mind of their own time, of its impatience and restlessness and want of hope. Let them compare the patient finish, the complete thought given to every detail in the works of the greatest painters, the accumulated light and depth, the abounding life, with the hasty, jagged, contemporary manner of painting, straining into harshness from want of patience, tense and angular from want of real vitality, exhausted from the absence of inward repose. They will comment for themselves upon the pessimism to which so many surrender themselves, taking with them their religious art, with its feeble Madonnas and haggard saints, without hope or courage or help, painted out of the abundance of their own heart's sadness. This contrast carries much teaching to the children of to-day if they can understand it, for each one who sets value upon faith and hope and resolution and courage in art is a unit adding strength to the line of defence against the invasions of sadness and dejection of spirit.

These considerations belong to the moral and spiritual value of the study of art, in the early years of an education intended to be general. They are of primary importance although in themselves only indirect results of the study. As to its direct results, it may be said in general that two things must be aimed at during the years of school life, appreciation of the beautiful in the whole realm of art, and some very elementary execution in one or other branch, some doing or making according to the gift of each one.

The work on both sides is and can be only preparation, only the establishment of principles and the laying of foundations; if anything further is attempted during school life it is apt to throw the rest of the education out of proportion, for in nothing whatever can a girl leaving the school-room be looked upon as having finished. It is a great deal if she is well-grounded and ready to begin. Even the very branches of study to which a disproportioned space has been allowed will suffer the penalty of it later on, for the narrow basis of incomplete foundations tends to make an ill-balanced superstructure which cannot bear the stress of effort required for perfection without falling into eccentricity or wearing itself out. Both misfortunes have been seen before now when infant prodigies have been allowed to grow on one side only. Restraint and control and general building up tend to strengthen even the talent which has apparently to be checked, by giving it space and equilibrium and the power of repose. Even if art should be their profession or their life-work in any form, the sacrifices made for general education will be compensated in the mental and moral balance of their work.

If general principles of art have been kept before the minds of children, and the history of art has given them some true ideas of its evolution, they are ready to learn the technique and practice of any branch to which they may be attracted. But as music and painting are more within their reach than other arts, it is reasonable that they should be provided for in the education of every child, so that each should have at least the offer and invitation of an entrance into those worlds, and latent talents be given the opportunity of declaring themselves. Poetry has its place apart, or rather it has two places, its own in the field of literature, and another, as an inspiration pervading all the domain of the fine arts, allied with music by a natural affinity, connected with painting on the side of imagination, related in one way or another to all that is expressive of the beautiful. Children will feel its influence before they can account for it, and it is well that they should do so—to feel it is in the direction of refusing the evil and choosing the good.

Music is coming into a more important place among educational influences now that the old superstition of making every child play the piano is passing away. It was an injustice both to the right reason of a child and to the honour of music when it was forced upon those who were unwilling and unfit to attain any degree of excellence in it. We are renouncing these superstitions and turning to something more widely possible—to cultivate the audience and teach them to listen with intelligence to that which without instruction is scarcely more than pleasant noise, or at best the expression of emotion. The intellectual aspect of music is beginning to be brought forward in teaching children, and with this awakening the whole effect of music in education is indefinitely raised. It has scarcely had time to tell yet, but as it extends more widely and makes its way through the whole of our educational system it may be hoped that the old complaints, too well founded, against the indifference and carelessness of English audiences, will be heard no more. We shall never attain to the kind of religious awe which falls upon a German audience, or to its moods of emotion, but we may reach some means of expression which the national character does not forbid, showing at least that we understand, even though we must not admit that we feel.

It is impossible to suggest what may be attained by girls of exceptional talent, but in practice if the average child-students, with fair musical ability, can at the end of their school course read and sing at sight fairly easy music, and have a good beginning of intelligent playing on one or two instruments, they will have brought their foundations in musical practice up to the level of their general education. If with some help they can understand the structure of a great musical work, and perhaps by themselves analyse an easy sonata, they will be in a position to appreciate the best of what they will hear afterwards, and if they have learnt something of the history of music and of the works of the great composers, their musical education will have gone as far as proportion allows before they are grown up. Some notions of harmony, enough to harmonize by the most elementary methods a simple melody, will be of the greatest service to those whose music has any future in it.

Catholic girls have a right and even a duty to learn something of the Church's own music; and in this also there are two things to be learnt—appreciation and execution. And amongst the practical applications of the art of music to life there is nothing more honourable than the acquired knowledge of ecclesiastical music to be used in the service of the Church. When the love and understanding of its spirit are acquired the diffusion of a right tone in Church music is a means of doing good, as true and as much within the reach of many girls as the spread of good literature; and in a small and indirect way it allows them the privilege of ministering to the beauty of Catholic worship and devotion.

The scope of drawing and painting in early education has been most ably treated of in many general and special works, and does not concern us here except in so far as it is connected with the training of taste in art which is of more importance to Catholics than to others, as has been considered above, in its relation to the springs of spiritual life, to faith and devotion, and also in so far as taste in art serves to strengthen or to undermine the principles on which conduct is based. We have to brace our children's wills to face restraint, to know that they cannot cast themselves at random and adrift in the pursuit of art, that their ideals must be more severe than those of others, and that they have less excuse than others if they allow these ideals to be debased. They ought to learn to be proud of this restraint, not to believe themselves thwarted or feel themselves galled by it, but to understand that it stands for a higher freedom by the side of which ease and unrestraint are more like servitude than liberty; it stands for the power to refuse the evil and choose the good; it stands for intellectual and moral freedom of choice, holding in check the impulse and inclination that are prompted from within and invited from without to escape from control.

The best teaching in this is to show what is best, and to give the principles by which it is to be judged. To talk of what is bad, or less good, even by way of warning, is less persuasive and calculated even to do harm to girls whose temper of mind is often "quite contrary." Warnings are wearisome to them, and when they refer to remote dangers, partly guessed at, mostly unknown, they even excite the spirit of adventure to go and find out for themselves, just as in childhood repeated warnings and threats of the nursery-maids and maiden aunts are the very things which set the spirit of enterprise off on the voyage of discovery, a fact which the head nurse and the mother have found out long ago, and so have learnt to refrain from these attractive advertisements of danger. So it is with teachers. We learn by experience that a trumpet blast of warning wakes the echoes at first and rouses all that is to be roused, but also that if it is often repeated it dulls the ear and calls forth no response at all. Quiet positive teaching convinces children; to show them the best things attracts them, and once their true allegiance is given to the best, they have more security within themselves than in many danger signals set up for their safety. What is most persuasive of all is a whole-hearted love for real truth and beauty in those who teach them. Their own glow of enthusiasm is caught, light from light, and taste from taste, and ideal from ideal; warning may be lost sight of, but this is living spirit and will last.

What children can accomplish by the excellent methods of teaching drawing and painting which are coming into use now, it is difficult to say. Talent as well as circumstances and conditions of education differ very widely in this. But as preparation for intelligent appreciation they should acquire some elementary principles of criticism, and some knowledge of the history and of the different schools of painting, indications of what to look for here and there in Europe and likewise of how to look at it; this is what they can take with them as a foundation, and in some degree all can acquire enough to continue their own education according to their opportunities. Matter-of-fact minds can learn enough not to be intolerable, the average enough to guide and safeguard their taste. They are important, for they will be in general the multitude, the public, whose judgment is of consequence by its weight of numbers; they will by their demand make art go upwards or downwards according to their pleasure. For the few, the precious few who are chosen and gifted to have a more definite influence, all the love they can acquire in their early years for the best in art will attach them for life to what is sane and true and lovely and of good fame.

The foundations of all this lie very deep in human nature, and taste will be consistent with itself throughout the whole of life. It manifests itself in early sensitiveness and responsiveness to artistic beauty. It determines the choice in what to love as well as what to like. It will assert itself in friendship, and estrangement in matters of taste is often the first indication of a divergence in ideals which continues and grows more marked until at some crossroads one takes the higher path and the other the lower and their ways never meet again. That higher path, the disinterested love of beauty, calls for much sacrifice; it must seek its pleasure on ly in the highest, and not look for a first taste of delight, but a second, when the power of criticism has been schooled by a kind of asceticism to detect the choice from the vulgar and the true from the insincere. This spirit of sacrifice must enter into every form of training for life, but above all into the training of the Catholic mind. It has a wide range and asks much of its disciples, a certain renunciation and self-restraint in all things which never completely lets itself go. Catholic art bears witness to this: "Where a man seeks himself there he falls from love," says a Kempis, and this is proved not only in the love of God, but in what makes the glory of Christian art, the love of beauty and truth in the service of faith.

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