Art instruction produces a certain amount of culture which is carried beyond the school into other departments of life. Williams James says: "Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar." The same is true in lesser degree of beauty and of ugliness. Let the eyes become open to beauty, and the heart will soon follow. So Corot believed when he wished that he might paint the walls of the prisons, because he felt that if he could make the prisoners see the appeal of dawn in the woodland, the mystery of twilight and bright noonday, they could not but feel the loving-kindness of God and obey his laws. Culture, widening man's experience, gives him broader sympathies, better judgment, more extensive interests, and a larger sphere of pleasure as well as of usefulness. Culture may transfuse an otherwise commonplace existence with a light which makes rough places less rough, and heavy burdens less wearisome. Culture is the result of certain mental processes habitually active. Art education is a handmaid that can minister to the needs of the child by cultivating such habits as may best subserve the uses of culture. To quote Mr. James once more: Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. Art education habituates the child to a recognition, nay, a search for beauty. How much may be added to the thought content of a mind, to the joy of living, by the habitual search for loveliness! If the latent forces for good resident in art education are thus made use of, the child will become art-conscious, awake to beauty, receptive of its message; and in very fact unable to leave a park or any other manifestation of beauty, without carrying with him some influence for good. You may have heard of the woman living in the slums of New York whose sad life was made one ray the brighter by the perception of color. A settlement worker had called her attention to the beauty and variety of color to be found everywhere if one's thought is but open to it. A few days later the woman came to the settlement with gleaming eyes, saying in her broken English that the day's hard labor had been lightened by the beauty of color always visible from her window, but never before perceived. To the search for beauty we may add the habit of discrimination. Art education promotes perceptive discrimination; and perceptive discrimination widely cultivated promotes conceptional discrimination, which, of the two, is the more assiduous worker for the growth of culture. One of our noted psychologists says that: Any personal or practical interest in the results to be obtained by distinguishing makes one's wits amazingly sharp to detect differences. And long training and practice in distinguishing has the same effect as personal interest. Such a statement is fuel to endeavor, especially to that of the manual-training teacher. We may include the cultivation of memory in the good work which art education is doing. It is well known, psychologically, that those facts which are most closely interwoven with other facts lodge most securely in the grooves of memory, while isolated facts glide quickly over the smooth surfaces of mortal mind and are lost. To tell a pupil that Michael Angelo carved the statue David, will not fix the fact in mind; but show him a picture of the statue, tell him how it was carved from a supposedly useless block of marble; let him know that it was the same David who used small pebbles with such telling effect; and you can be reasonably certain that the point has become a fixed quantity. The relation of art education to everyday life is a very vital one, for art education stands for the establishment of ideals of beauty. The child who is naturally of aesthetic tastes should have his ideals of beauty broadened. The child who seems devoid of aesthetic tastes surely needs the seeds of beauty sown in his mind that his life may become more worth the living because of beauty looked for and perceived. We know that the truest beauty, and the permanent and the real, is of the spirit; and if art education in the schools can in even slight measure produce that beauty in everyday life, it will be rendering an inestimable service. Reform is ever from within. A disorderly child never becomes really orderly until he has a love of order in his heart. He may be compelled to keep his room in order, for instance, but tho he does so, he is not, and never can be, an orderly boy thru compulsion. We can, however, do something to forward the birth of right desire. As with reform so with beauty. For example, to be able to recognize a Rembrandt by its chiaroscuro is alone of no cultural potency, were it not that the ability to recognize the works of a master is perhaps the thin edge of a wedge which will open up a love of good pictures. The love may be followed first by some slight understanding that the artist had the beauty within before he externalized it on canvas; second, by a realization of the manifold principle that beauty of thought creates beauty; or it may beget a desire to create beautiful things, not necessarily pictures, nor poems, nor statues, but things of beauty, nevertheless; and given a right desire, what cannot be accomplished thru edu cation? Surely beauty is practical, if it leads to the beauty of right thinking and high living. May we not remold Tennyson's words: "Great is song used to great ends," into, Great is art used to great ends? Let us use it for the establishment of high ideals of beauty, for, as James L. Hughes says: Ideals transform individuals and ultimately transform national life. Ideals become vital in our lives by consciously choosing them. The child who is trained to choose consciouly the most beautiful things in his environment is being trained in the most effective way to consciously adopt true ideals in manhood. Art has a high moral influence because it tends to lift the race soul above materialism. Unless the material life can be spiritualized, man's tendency is towards the jungle. The spiritual in literature and music and art has lifted the race slowly towards the divine. This is the only true education. Would that the time allowed me to discuss my topic from the national standpoint, because the relation of art education to culture is to become here in the United States more and more intimate as the years go on, for the horizon of American art already glows with the splendid promise of the day. One of our art critics has said, When the vast mind of America, expressed already in invention, speaks through art, will not the whole world join in its applause? And may not the magnificent lead which America has taken in mechanics be regarded as a prophecy of the time to come in art ? To be sure Paris is considered the best place to study art now, but is was to Munich that our older men went, and before that time Rome was art's fountain head. In the ceaseless shifting may not some American city become the next art center? Not that it will come by chance; it must be the result of growth; and art education in our schools can do much to promote the growth which is to mean greater culture for our land. Even some foreigners look to America as the future art center. Edmon Aman-Jean, the French artist, says: My conviction is that like Venice the United States will have one day, the most magnificent school of painting in the world. The Old World is effete; the United States a splendid spectacle of activity. Venice also began by industry and commerce, had sailors before painters, and was obliged to acquire opulence and dominion before she could cry a school of art. The natural resources of our country have been marvelously developed in the interests of industry and commerce, but the growth of art is yet in its incipiency. We have as yet no national art in America, but that we shall have, I doubt not. Public opinion must first be changed, however, as must the attitude of our government. Let us hope that the children who are having the culture side trained by art education will grow up into a constituency which will demand legislators who have ceased to look upon art as a luxury but rather as a necessity to the righteous growth of our nation; legislators who recognize and demonstrate the patriotism of art as well as of courage; legislators who perceive that a nation's ideals find permanent abode in her arts; legislators who will foster the arts even as they are fostered, nourished, and safeguarded in France and Germany, in Spain and Russia. Art education so relates itself to everyday life that the youth of our land when grown to man's estate can and will think of something besides trade and traffic, will have some perception of the "strange, sweet beauty which came down to Raphael and the holy Angelica," and having that perception they will so work that one day we shall have our own Raphaels and Bellinis, our own Angelos and Tintorettos. Let us rejoice that we are facing the sunrise and not the sunset of our culture! THE RELATION OF ART EDUCATION TO EVERYDAY LIFE— FROM THE UTILITARIAN SIDE ARTHUR HENRY CHAMBERLAIN, THROOP POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE, PASADENA, CAL. One is reminded at the outset of the definition of culture as given by Bosenquet. He says: Culture is the habit of mind instinct with purpose, conscious of the continuity and connection of human events, able and industrious, capable of discerning the great from the trivial. Applying this definition of culture to the subject of art education, I find it difficult indeed to dissociate in thought the utilitarian view from the culture standpoint. "Culture," in the language of Bosenquet, "is the habit of mind instinct with purpose," and purpose points to utility; it is "able and industrious," and this again implies utility, or use; it is "capable of discerning the great from the trivial," a consummation of the most truly utilitarian value. In a word, the relation that art education bears to everyday life from the culture side, that it bears also from the utilitarian side. But what do we mean by the utilitarian in art? When we endeavor to analyze our conception of the term utility we have a task far from simple. We are prone to consider in an out-of-hand manner that the utilities are those things, objects, or attributes that can be put to immediate material use. Anything that may be used to our own, or to the advantage of others, anything that contributes to our physical needs would at once be classed as a utility. The utilitarian view is, to the common mind, opposed to the educational or the aesthetic side; it is the bread-and-butter conception. Utilitarianism in the popular sense refers to trade; it bespeaks the commercial spirit; it has to do with coal and iron, shovel and pick, cotton and coffee, steam and electricity. If this view was, in any narrow sense, the true one, such a discussion as this now before us were impossible. If culture and ability were two distinctly different phases of our problem, art would have no relation to either. All legitimate education is both cultural and utilitarian in character, for what is truly the latter must, perforce, be the former, and the everyday life of the individual is influenced more than he can say by true art, whenever and however it may appear. We mean by art education the appreciation and development of the art spirit in the schools and out of them. How great an effect art education has upon the utilitarian side perhaps cannot be told. As a tool we think of language as the all-important element in the progress of the race. President Butler says in his introduction to Chubbs's The Teaching of English: From one point of view the significance of the development of modern education can best be estimated by the progress of the mother-tongue toward the central place in formal instruction. When the study of the mother-tongue and its literature is made the core of the curriculum, education is something quite different from that training in which a foreign, perhaps an ancient, tongue holds the chief place. No people is intellectually independent until it has a language and literature all its own, worthy to be an educational instrument and an educational end. Just as the language of a people, both spoken and written, furnishes the key to its future development, and, as President Butler says, should hold the central place in formal instruction, so in a lesser degree and perhaps in a more fundamental sense, art performs the same function. It cannot be denied that a people is intellectually independent only when it has an art, that is, an appreciation of art, an appreciation so keen that the moral, intellectual, and commercial life is advantaged thereby. Art that is capable of making its appeal through utility will be appreciated; whenever it is accepted as having value from the utilitarian side, it will make its appeal to culture. True appreciation is not simply a matter of development, of evolution, of education, altho the more complete the knowledge the more perfect the ideal. The real in art may be appreciated at once. This may perhaps be stating in another way, that only the real is art; hence true art can always be appreciated. Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the path one little step ahead Permit me therefore to take the ground that true art cannot exist aside and apart from the useful. This implies that all useful things are beautiful altho there are degrees both of utility and of beauty. But of two things, otherwise equally good, the one most beautiful will serve its purpose best. The crude clay water jug of the primitive savage, fashioned around a basket of woven rushes, was indeed an article of use, and not without artistic merit. The delicately fashioned vase of the Greek, designed for exactly the same purpose and with a capacity equal to that of the clay jug, but combining symmetry and perfect lines, was by far the best piece of work from a utilitarian point of view. The water jug is forgotten by all save the archaeologist, but the vase form is used today as it has been used through all the centuries past. Because it pleases the eye, its market value is greater than that of the other, it will be used as a model while the other will not; it will have an effect upon the life of the individual that the other cannot have-an effect beneficial from both mental and material standpoints. There is one glory of the sun, and a glory of the moon, and another of the stars; there is likewise an art of strength, an art of simplicity, an art of line, form, and color, and all combine in use, which is the art itself. Beauty in form, in color, in musical note, reached a high standard of perfection in the life of the old Greek and Egyptian; in fact, with all of the boasted superiority of our present-day civilization we have never excelled the Greek in his power to depict line and form or the Egyptian in his ability to produce abstract color. Music, painting, and sculpture, have, however, until a recent day, been conceded to comprehend the fine arts. When architecture became an art, then, in a measure, was the utilitarian view considered. It remained for the applied arts, or the so-called industrial arts, to clearly point the way of the relation of art to utility. We have had pictured to us the master Angelo as he toiled day after day and month by month until the Sistine Chapel was complete, a marvel to all the world and a monument to the creative powers of the man; we have stood silent before the incomparable Madonna of Raphael, being drawn again and again to view, with reverence and wonder, this picture; the chisel of Phidias |
