interfere with the development of the power of initiative. Of course, if the teacher must be eliminated before this power can be developed, I can see where the interference occurs, for sloyd insists upon a wise supervision of all the pupil's acts. But this supervision is not inconsistent with the cultivation of the power of self-expression, for self-expression does not necessarily mean invention or origination. As well expressed by our president, Mr. Richards, "It means putting the worker's own thought and feeling into the thing he is working upon, rather than some other person's thought and feeling."

And this is the true sloyd spirit. I think it was Coleridge who said: "If genius be the initiative and talent the administrative, sense is the conservative branch of the intellectual republic." Substitute in this quotation "sloyd" for "sense," and "field of manual training" for "intellectual republic", and you will have the position sloyd occupies in the field of educational manual training. If genius be the initiative and talent the administrative, sloyd is the conservative branch in the field of manual training.

But, however excellent the principles of sloyd, they fall short of their purpose unless wisely administered; and this brings us to the question, Who shall be the teacher? The question has been variously answered by the action of school authorities all over the country, and the way in which it has been answered has determined the degree of success or failure of the work wherever it has been undertaken. Too often the only consideration has been mere skill of hand. Any ordinary mechanic has been thought good enough to direct the work of the shop. Culture and refinement have not been deemed essential qualifications of the manual-training teacher. The boys and girls have learned to look for these qualities in their other teachers, but when they enter the shop they expect to find a man with limited education and little culture, and they are surprised if they find instead a cultivated, scholarly gentleman.

This is the kind of an answer that has hindered the progress of the work more than anything else. I believe, with Mr. Keyes, that "the only way the friends of manual training can so improve and elevate that work as to make it sought for by the best people in every community is to labor for the improvement and elevation of the manual-training teacher, with special emphasis on the "man" and the "training."

When we are able to place in our school shops teachers whose personality compels respect, and whose general culture, wealth of knowledge, and power of expression, both lingually and manually, is such as will excite the admiration of their pupils, and create in them a desire to cultivate like qualities in themselves, then opposition to manual training will cease and the public will recognize the manual-training teacher as belonging to the very highest rank of the profession.

POSSIBILITIES OF ART EDUCATION IN RELATION TO MANUAL TRAINING

BY ERNEST F.

FENOLLOSA

I naturally approach this complex subject from the point of view of art, because my experience for twenty-five years has fallen chiefly in that direction. My knowledge of recent methods in manual training was so meager, and I felt so little able to put before myself the immediate problem of the grade-school teacher, that I shrank from accepting the invitation to read this paper. Professor Richards, however, overpersuaded me, on the ground that, in taking a larger view, based upon the art and social experience of several races and of many times, I might be able to contribute some suggestions of value.

In the first place, I find it extremely difficult to conceive a clear line of division between manual training and art education. The two are not merely entangled, but identical. We cannot draw the line, as the word "manual" seems to imply, at hand-work, for all forms of visual art demand the highest muscular skill. Neither can a difference in use justify the cleavage, as if industry produced utensils to be consumed, but art, luxuries to be treasured. Our modern collections in art museums have deceived us here so many thousands of pictures and statues torn away from the places and uses which once gave them value.

Shall we, then, fall back on difference of plan, shop-work dealing only with laws of mechanical structure, art with spiritual? There, if anywhere, the line would cut. But such a limitation implies too much modesty and abnegation on the side of manual training. It defeats the specific end. of a rounding out and synthesis of human faculties. It was a good thought to supplement book-work with hand-work, and thus get away from abstractions. But if we confine the plan of work to mathematical and physical laws, we get right back to abstractions, in somewhat the same way as the old art teaching which harped upon type solids.

ture.

But the weakness of separation shows up more glaring still from the side of art. Painting and sculpture are but branches of useful industry, ways of treating material surfaces, the plaster and the bronze of architecArt infuses harmony into all man's surroundings, transfigures with some new law of his spirit the material which he touches, makes virtual extension of the realm where internal affinities supplement external restraints. Beauty exhibits a kind of higher economics, in which waste and even compromise must be eliminated, in that each part helps all and uses all. A thing, therefore, can have no real beauty if its material values be not involved in the harmony.

Hence I urge the union of art education and manual training on higher grounds than the clamor of industry for superficial ornament; I

declare it to be involved in the very life and health of art education itself. As a student of the history of art, I assert that the great creative impulses of all races and times have sprung from the needs and laws of structure. Not only is this clear in the simplicity and structural quality of all Greek ornament, but it is involved in the fact that the greatest schools of painting itself have grown out of mural painting. There boundary of column and arch and structural spacing furnish the very key to composition; the lighting of the wall strikes the note of the necessary values; and the colors of surrounding materials govern the pictorial tones. The so-called "easelpicture" that starts from blank canvas, with no trace of structural key, has seldom furnished seed for a great school of art. It gluts the market, as we see in our exhibitions, with unusable objects, fit only for the mausoleums of art galleries. But the vitality of Greek mosaics, of Italian frescoes, of Chinese and Japanese mediæval painting, springs solely from the fact that structural problems furnished the seed for the æsthetic. So with sculpture. Greek statues, torn from their appropriate niches, crowded into the palaces of Roman conquerors, eventually dug out of the ruins of those palaces and set up artificially in Italian gardens, have at last come to litter the corridors of our museums, thus becoming virtually threefold abstractions. And the worst of it is that we go on creating more abstract Venuses to crowd more corridors.

Why has this fatal gap between art and structure been allowed to vitiate the work of our schools? My answer is, because the nature and aim of art has been falsely conceived to be representation. In all the discussions about art in schools, I see talk of landscapes and dramatic groups, of technical advance in shadow drawing, perspective, anatomy, and of the separate study of noses and toes. Art, we suppose, is the painting of things, and therefore, if we let children sit down and express their crude ideas, it will be the natural beginning of art education. Somehow or other we seem surprised when we find that children of the middle grades have learned practically nothing from all this, and are quite incapable of any systematic progress. But there need be no surprise. Leading artists whom I have talked with in New York and elsewhere generally condemn this realistic art work in schools as waste of time. No child, say they, under the age of fifteen or sixteen can master the scientific analysis necessary to represent with accuracy. And this opinion seems to be borne out by the experience of our teachers.. There is no progressive way to teach these abstract means to the child mind.

But even if this elementary work in representation were practical, it had absolutely nothing of help to offer the manual trainer. He, weighted. with the inertia of matter, asked for a hint of grace to enliven his mechanics, and all he could get in reply was how children tell a story. Perspective, and anatomy, and cast-shadows, and reflected lights are useless to him.

Of themselves they imply no harmony, no proportion, no graceful adjustment, no interior law.

And here we come flat against the great antimony of modern art, the dualism, nay the divorce, between representation and design. Before the year 1600 no such gap existed. In no creative era have painters suspected that their work differed from industry. It was only after pride in the mastery of realism led to the conception of painting as an intellectual and academic exercise superior to craft that design fell into contempt. We now admit that industrial ornament may be conventional; but, in order to prevent its poisoning our academic courses, we shut it up in water-tight compartments, labeled "design schools." In 1887 I visited the South Kensington Museum and Academy, which had been founded by the English government for the very purpose of building up national design. But the director confessed to me that the purpose was practically defeated in that all the best pupils insisted on taking the painting and sculpture courses, leaving only the incapables for the inferior work.

And that this ingrained prejudice against design lingers with us today is proved by the enormous disproportion between demand and supply in art. Here we have tens of thousands of abstract paintings and sculptures dumped upon the world year after year, with no purchasers; while on the other hand our manufacturers in vain offer large prizes for corps of designers, who have to be supplied chiefly from Belgium and France. We see in it the fact that we still assume proper art work in schools to be based upon representation. We see in it the persistent use of the word "conventional," which, in the very arguing away from representation, still takes representation for the starting point. We see in it the preference of the superficial term "decorative" to the vital term "structural."

But this antimony, this divorce of representation from structure, is a mistake. It is not that one approaches nature and the other recedes from it; it is that under both lies a common set of vital qualities which define their value of art. These are the qualities of unity, of harmony, of affinity, between line and line, mass and mass, color and color. These comprise a whole new world for study as truly as do the laws of harmony in music. This is what distinguishes art from not-art. If a design has those visual harmonies it is good. If a representation has them, it is good. If it has them not, it is bad as art, no matter how good it may be as representation.

I am not the least surprised to find that the representative art work of children does not improve, rather degenerates, above the first and second grades. What else could we expect? If it could improve, it would be only because conscious mastery of these underlying harmonies were taught. But it is not taught. The seed of art is not nature, but the consciousness of harmony in the mind, which goes out from itself to see

beauty in nature. The country bumpkin finds nothing in the sunset that nightly would minister to him. But the child, whose keen grasp of harmony has been stimulated, not blunted, recognizes all beauty in a common leaf. Therefore, art education can be nothing but the orderly stimulation by exercise of this power to perceive and create beauty.

Now, the best and most natural exercise of this faculty is found in beautifying the products of human industry. It is a mere accident of habit that we should study line harmonies in the form of pencil marks on paper. These are abstractions from reality. Better to find them in the lines of support and stress, the patterns of weaving, and the yielding contours of pottery. Here they are realities, and here the child feels their identity with human needs and human history. Let us create in matter, not merely on paper.

One of the most vital thoughts of manual training has been to follow the course of evolution in leading human industries. Here the structural need spells itself out to the child as to the primitive man. But how if the æsthetic need, the order of the synthetic line and color problems, were found to follow essentially the same course? The simplest line relations should spring naturally from the simplest industries. The savage hut would grow into the Greek temple by a progressive refining of lines which were always structural. The study of dark and light would follow, not the difficult representation of shadows in drawing, but the way in which the indentations and openings of structure contribute to the beauty of things. We need not be forced here to press history too far. Still it remains true that all the artistic possibilities of line problems lie wrapped up in the indications of the loom, the forge, the potter's wheel, the contrast of supporting posts with horizontal lintels, in the strengthening transition of the diagonal bracket, and in the supreme synthesis of the arch.

If this be true, it will not be difficult to state an important practical law in all art work. This is that all line and color systems should utilize, spring from, carry out, enrich, but never obscure, the structural elements given in the uses, forms, and materials of things. This rule is as absolute in the highest realms of painting and architecture as in the lowest. of basket weaving. It distinguishes strong art from weak everywhere. It is a rule which manual training is in a natural position to apply for itself.

Let us follow this matter a bit further. Art consists in the positive value given to each other by a group of contiguous visual areas. One of the simplest kinds of such value is given in the proportion of these areas. In fact a feeling for fine proportion is one of the natural instincts of the human race. But all industrial structures present contiguous areas; for instance, the sides of a piece of furniture, the spacings of roof, wall, and