Canon Steward's Address 259 



human life and character. How can a child be led to 

 this unless the objects presented to him appeal to his 

 best sympathies, and attract him through that won- 

 derful appreciative child-instinct which is the outcome 

 of neither education nor experience? Inherent in the 

 child is a love for, a sympathy with, the forms and 

 colours, habits and life, in the world of Nature. Pri- 

 mary art education should be that which Nature sup- 

 plies in its infinite phases. Herein are provided the 

 most perfect objects for the human eye to contem- 

 plate, forms in themselves perfect, absolute beauty 

 of proportion, harmony, and adaptation. It is Mr. 

 Scott who points out that humanity is part of Nature, 

 and so human faculties, senses, and emotions are in 

 sympathy because they were formed for appreciation 

 of it. Herein the essentials of expression are more 

 easily secured, namely truthfulness in purpose as in 

 fact, and self-reliant individuality, the product of the 

 child's own senses and observations expressed in the 

 child's own way.* 



Ruskin writes of his own " steady habit of always 

 looking for the siibject principally, and for the art only 

 as the means of expressing it", and he proceeds: "All 

 literature, art, and science are vain and worse if they 

 do not make you glad — enable you -xaLpelv opOm — 

 give you rational and real enjoyment ". The value of 

 Nature-study, and of art in relation to it, is that it is 

 pursued for no ulterior motive than its own self — not 

 by any artificial stimulus of bribe or punishment, 

 applause or popularity, for its commercial value, or 

 our advancement in life. Herein, too, there is little 



* Teachers would do well to read Nature-study and the Child, by C. B. 

 Scott. (Heath & Co.) 



