SCIENCE VERSUS ART-APPRECIATION. 457 



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 communi- 

 cating 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 wide- 

 spread 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 apprecia- 

 tion 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 



