_ART IN THE SCHOOLS—FIRST CONSIDERATIONS._
It is not this year for the first time that the Regents of the
University of New York State have prepared valuable photographs for
distribution among the schools of the State. Now, however, there
comes a "tentative list" of similar photographs, and this brings up
in a forcible way the old question, whether there is any such thing
possible as teaching art in the schools, and if so, how it may best be
undertaken.
Some preliminary definitions seem to be required, however. The question
as to the fitness of the photograph for this purpose is nearly always
stated, as if the graphic and plastic arts were expressible in terms of
the literary art. Unfortunately, this is not true at all. Indeed, the
student of those arts of non-literary expression is apt to go rather
too far in asserting the falsity of it.
When the student first perceives clearly that each of the fine arts
differs very widely from all the others, he is very apt to assume too
much importance for his own differentiation of those arts. He sees such
striking differences that he ignores resemblances and similarities;
or he is very ready to do so. It is evident to him that the piece of
literature needs a subject of the nature of narrative, or description,
or exhortation, or prayer, or jest, and that the dignity or meanness of
the subject has much to do with the artistical result. Then it appears
to him that music requires no subject of that character; that music
goes to work in another way and addresses the spirit of man, not by
relating or describing, not by appeals to morals or to memory. He hardly
disputes Arnold's dictum that poetry is "a criticism of life;" referring
only to the same author's explanation of criticism and to the further
elucidation of the thought which is contained in the phrases "We turn
to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us;" but
he reflects that he would be a rash critic who should try to judge any
piece of music in that way. This is clear to the mind of the student;
but still he ponders over the graphic arts, over sculpture and painting,
in all their forms, wondering why those arts seem to him half-way
between literature and music, having less to do with preaching or
portraiture than the one, and more, it seems, than the other. He finds
that painters are more concerned with light and shade, and also more
busy with composition and the leading lines and, again, more thoughtful
of bringing whites prettily together, than they are of telling any story
or influencing any person's conduct. And the sculptors are concerned
with dignity of form, and care as little about whether they deal with
piety or with passion as do the musical composers.
He reflects upon architecture, too, if his imagination and memory take
him so far out of the present time that architecture seems to him a fine
art at all; and he asks: What is the "subject" of that work of art which
exists in the interior of Aya Sophia, and which one sees as he enters it
by the _Porta Basilica_? It is, indeed, not surprising that some writers
are always at work, comparing architecture and music. Suppose that one
were to try to give in words that impressive effect of the inside of
the great church. He would have either to describe the effect produced
upon him, thus translating from one language into another, or he would
have so to combine thoughts, expressed in words, as to give the same
impression of awe-inspiring dignity, mingled with grace, with charm,
with what one might call suavity. In order to produce this effect upon
the reader of a prose passage or a piece of verse, the writer would have
to take a subject other than that afforded by the mere description of
a building. In other words, he could not translate; the language would
break down under him; he could not give the same impression in the
language of words which the artist has given in the language of space,
of masses, of delicate tones, of light and shade. And he would recall
the fact that the time was when Aya Sophia gave also an impression of
soft blooming color, of which now only a slight indication remains.
It is not then essential that the work of art in architecture should
have a subject in the sense in which the work of art in literature must
have a subject. Unless our logic is too rapid for us, it would seem that
the same rule must apply in the case of any comparison between two of
the fine arts, and that it does not follow from the need of a subject
in literature, as of narrative in one poem, of description in another,
of patriotism, mingled with exhortation to courage, in a third, and
so on, that a painting must needs have similar subject. And the first
painting that the student meets as he enters a gallery of pictures
will very likely be a landscape, and he will at once see that in this
picture there is no narration, no morality, no piety, no appeal to the
spirit—nothing but description, and a description admittedly so slight
and cursory, so deliberately incomplete, that it may almost be dismissed
as not of weight in the consideration of the picture's value. And yet
a picture must represent something natural, something tangible; it
cannot go straight to the emotions as music can, but has to act through
memory and knowledge. And the student is left wondering, as we found
him wondering a few lines above, whether painting be, indeed, half-way
between music and literature in requiring less subject of the kind that
is not merely artistic than the one art, and more than the other.