story in buildings. Here the use and the structure furnish a plan, or key, which the art instinct is asked to refine, not obscure. The beauty must be made to lie in these main spacings. But we violate this law everywhere in the crude notion of applying ornament. Wherever we see an empty space we rush to mar it by filling it with trivialities. All inlay, all shadow mottling, all color, which violate the large proportion of these spaces are vicious. The most complex figure painting, if it be good, carefully divides a few main areas.

The next step is to perceive that these areas, to be clear, must be bounded; hence the presence of line in all art. But the lines of things are structural where planes intersect or stresses converge. Curves are the expression of resistances. You can feel them in your thumb. Now art takes up these lines and refines them to a single, clear impression. It does not impose something alien upon them. It expands them into fuller meaning. They still underlie and guide its most complex system.

How opposed to almost all our ordinary methods of drawing and designing is this rule! We sprawl our lines lawlessly anywhere over our paper or wood, making arbitrary curves and systems which only deface our surfaces. Let all lines spring from the main lines. How splendidly painting follows this rule in the composition of Raphael's Vatican stanza, and sculpture in the infinitely complex draperies of the Parthenon pediments! Structure forms the backbone of such ultimate line systems. But the law may be first exemplified in pottery.

Next we may see that our visual areas can be harmonized, not only in terms of their proportions, but in terms of their varying luminosities, the quantities of light which they severally reflect. It is not that dark and light spots are to be sprinkled about at will, but the law is that this dark and light must follow the dark and light of structure and yet be beautiful. Any artificial inking or modeling which breaks the silvery luminosity of the planes is vicious. Materials, too, may give us these masses, as when bronze comes out dark against white marble.

More constantly than any other we violate this law. All poor drawing and painting relies upon the accidents of vagueness. We muddy our tones instead of keeping them flat and clear. But the best photography from nature often gives us composition in three clear values. This is why methods of stencil work and block-printing, too, are so valuable in elementary study that they secure flat tones and give scope for easy variation. Power to create in two or three tones underlies all the complex combinations of painting. The whole subject can be worked out in the course of rug designing.

For three-dimensional study wood-carving has points of advantage over clay-modeling. It gives firmer lines and planes. In clay we smear weak, curved surfaces. In bad drawing we try to make things look round. But the great problem in art is not to make things look round,

but how to make round things look square. We must conceive of solid things in planes. It is difficult, in clay, to produce the impression of firm planes. Both in our bad modeling and bad drawing we treat nature as if made up of tufts of wool or cannon balls.

So, the lead pencil is the worst possible tool to draw dark and light masses with. Pencil blacks have no flatness and no luminosity. They give tones like the grizzled head of a negro.

Lastly comes the grouping of visual areas according to the quality of the light with which they are charged. Here structure finds play chiefly thru materials. The color scheme of a room is guided by the wood of its furniture, exterior house tints by the nature of landscape surroundings. But the color must not violate the purity of the large planes, thus distracting attention from the structure. Moreover, it should be simple. To let children run wild with a color-box is almost as criminal as to let them play with gunpowder. Yet the three-color box is too limited. In the real art of color there are no primaries. Any groups that neutralize, out of thousands, may be taken as primary in their own key. Therefore, we must constantly vary the tints we use, in order to advance in power over color. Perhaps one good method is sometimes to follow the evolution of pigments in industry. Color is a wonderful great world of law, which has hardly yet been explored. It is a mistake to give it to children freely, just because they want it. The color sense is the latest and least developed in the human race of all the art instincts. To make it take the place of simpler and clearer work is to violate the order of nature and of evolution. Young children are interested more vitally in actions, and color lends least of all to the expression of action. The child's liking for color is, therefore, mostly aimless play.

I come, lastly, to what I conceive to be one of the highest merits in this view of art, namely, its identity of plan with physical and social life.

Such discipline in synthesis should have the highest spiritual value. The enthusiasm for fine proportion, which becomes a second nature, should transfigure our whole life. Every case of art is an enhancing of mutual values thru contact. A color, like a man, becomes utterly transformed thru its surroundings. The circle of the parts must be complete; all are essential. Art so conceived gives us the type of positive economy, where each member is used to the full. It admits no loss, no waste, no clashing, no friction. It is literally transposed, for all the parts are reflected thru each other. Such ease and perfection are found in normal animal life, the delicate feline curve, the sturdy tower of the pine. So the impulse in man to feel beauty and to create it should be one. There is positive muscular delight in drawing a fine curve. So good carriage, graceful manner, genuine greeting are the incorporation. of this order in ourselves a true species of art. Even character takes on

an unconscious charm, as if its beauty were rather of a flower than of a gnarled oak.

The social value of such art education would be twofold. Its identity with the manual or industrial side brings personal work into conscious harmony with the great currents of civilization. Art, however individual in its creation, is no selfish loiterer in a detached heaven, as some sneeringly suppose. There can be but one Shakespeare, and one Beethoven ; yet they have widened the very definition of humanity. So the pupil may feel that in his contribution, however humble, if it be genuine, he adds a new unit, a new art individual to the sum of human treasure. And this treasure is to be no mere luxury for the galleries of the rich, but shall illumine the daily toil and consumption of the masses. In Japan today thousands of new designs, simple and fine, are turned out in cheap printed cottons for simple clothing every year and every month. The national consciousness fairly bubbles with creative energy. Art is primarily social.

But a second and more subtle social value is given in the very type of being which such art embodies. It brings virtually a new dispensation, the age of harmony. A mechanical world carries us out and off into endless series of time, space, and cause. A utilitarian opens up endless lines of means. But all imply simple process, change; there is no mutuality, no integration, no return into the self. So the world of scholastic logic, which shuts over the European brain a cap of Chinese formalism, can do nothing but run up and down endless scales of classification. Classification always accentuates an abstraction, a point of transition, as if our bamboo should be nothing but joints. When I pluck a flower or cut a seed to study it, I tear into death the very life I wish to observe. Definition is innocent of the element of reciprocity. Nothing really acts singly; give becomes take; all negation is reaction, as positive a process as action.

Now, if there were a kind of being in which mutuality reigned supreme, and all modifications became simultaneous, so that we must see all to know each one, this would give us a higher logical type, fitly to be called harmony. Such, indeed, is art. And it is clear that similar terms might be used of an ideal society. Art gives an approximate definition of the state; for in an ideal state each individual should help all the others to be themselves, call out their positive powers, so that from such perfect co-operation a larger freedom of social life shall spring. Every great work of art is thus virtually a lesson in good citizenship. And so, without superstition, and in no mystical sense, we might regard the power of creation in art as literally bringing the order and type of spirit to earth, and incorporating it in man's material life.

PRACTICAL CO-OPERATION BETWEEN ART AND
MANUAL TRAINING

HAROLD PEYSER, INSTRUCTOR IN MANUAL TRAINING, PUBLIC SCHOOLS,
NEW YORK CITY

Manual training used to mean, very literally, hand training. We aimed, by a series of exercises, to impart to the pupil notions of method and accuracy. Nowadays I think we have gradually come to the conclusion that, while method and accuracy are desirable and necessary qualities, the aim of manual training is rather to cultivate an appreciation of the proper use of material in adaptation to ends; how to bring construction and art together to make the useful beautiful, with a beauty that is simple, restful, harmonious.

We want our schools to lay the foundation of that good taste which will make of us a nation of lovers of the beautiful. We will demand, then, of our manufacturers that the commonest utensil of everyday use, turned out by the thousands perhaps, shall be beautiful as well as useful. Necessarily, a mere series of drill exercises would not help much in furthering our object. We must have a number of constructive models, admitting of original thought on the part of the pupil, and whose execution will show the qualities of the material he works in, its uses and its beauties.

In designing something for any given purpose, the first consideration is the fitness of the material determined upon; does it answer all the requirements of utility? Second, what must be the general form of the object for the given use? Art now steps in and makes of the merely useful form a beautiful one; it also discovers the inherent beauty of

the material. This determines the nature of our decoration, which must be a part of the object, growing out of it, conditioned by it, and not something foreign that is grafted on. Design should be worked out from the object, not on it; it is not a study of abstract spaces and ways of filling them, and should certainly not be taught in the class-room as such. Given a beautiful form, our decoration must bring out its beauty and add interest to the surface.

There are many forms that manual training takes. I will use some of the more important ones and endeavor to show that the method of con

Let us take up construct

sidering them all may be essentially the same. ive design in wood first. Say we want to make a book-rack. We are agreed that wood is eminently fitted for this purpose. We determine upon the length, width, height, and method of fastening ends to base. Here is the purely mechanical side of our work; it gives us a block form. Now, we ask, what are the characteristics and beauties of wood that we must take into account in modifying our type form? It is fibrous, therefore the lines of our design should be simple and strong. It has a grain which can be brought out by staining, polishing. If we use color it should not be opaque, and thus hide the grain. In other words, our design should be strong, broad, and woody. Our first problem in design might be to modify the end of this book-rack, keeping it simple, making no projections liable to be broken off, using as far as possible a line that is continuous and directive and that gives the appearance of strength. I

have here a series of such modifications that were worked out in the class-room.

The second problem is to work out of our space a pleasing design, that will stay flat, whose lines will harmonize with the

shape of the end and its colors with the color of the wood. What are the limitations of our design? It must be basal; chief interest will center at the top. We may decide upon a border design which draws attention to the outline, or upon an all-over design which makes the surface the more important beauty. In the first case we might use, say, a stem

form, following the outline, working into a leaf or flower form at the top, and a root form at the bottom, sufficiently heavy to give the proper basal effect.

On the other hand, if we decide upon an all-over design, we must divide our space into a series of masses. Take the same end, as example: Figs. 1 and 2 are purely abstract; 3 makes use of a leaf form; 4