I knew, in my youth, a French village far up among the Cevennes
Mountains, where the one cultivated man of the place, saddened by the
unlovely lives of the peasants around him and by the bare walls of the
village school, organized evening classes for the boys. During these
informal hours, he talked to them of literature and art and showed them
his prints and paintings. When the youths’ interest was aroused he lent
them books, that they might read about the statues and buildings that had
attracted their attention. At first it appeared a hopeless task to
arouse any interest among these peasants in subjects not bearing on their
abject lives. To talk with boys of the ideal, when their poor bodies
were in need of food and raiment, seemed superfluous; but in time the
charm worked, as it always will. The beautiful appealed to their simple
natures, elevating and refining them, and opening before their eager eyes
perspectives of undreamed-of interest. The self-imposed task became a
delight as his pupils’ minds responded to his efforts. Although death
soon ended his useful life, the seed planted grew and bore fruit in many
humble homes.
At this moment I know men in several walks of life who revere with
touching devotion the memory of the one human being who had brought to
them, at the moment when they were most impressionable, the gracious
message that existence was not merely a struggle for bread. The boys he
had gathered around him realize now that the encouragement and incentive
received from those evening glimpses of noble works existing in the world
was the mainspring of their subsequent development and a source of
infinite pleasure through all succeeding years.
This reference to an individual effort toward cultivating the poor has
been made because other delicate spirits are attempting some such task in
our city, where quite as much as in the French village schoolchildren
stand in need of some message of beauty in addition to the instruction
they receive,—some window opened for them, as it were, upon the fields of
art, that their eyes when raised from study or play may rest on objects
more inspiring than blank walls and the graceless surroundings of street
or schoolroom.
We are far too quick in assuming that love of the beautiful is confined
to the highly educated; that the poor have no desire to surround
themselves with graceful forms and harmonious colors. We wonder at and
deplore their crude standards, bewailing the general lack of taste and
the gradual reducing of everything to a commonplace money basis. We
smile at the efforts toward adornment attempted by the poor, taking it
too readily for granted that on this point they are beyond redemption.
This error is the less excusable as so little has been done by way of
experiment before forming an opinion,—whole classes being put down as
inferior beings, incapable of appreciation, before they have been allowed
even a glimpse of the works of art that form the daily mental food of
their judges.
The portly charlady who rules despotically in my chambers is an example.
It has been a curious study to watch her growing interest in the objects
that have here for the first time come under her notice; the delight she
has come to take in dusting and arranging my belongings, and her
enthusiasm at any new acquisition. Knowing how bare her own home was, I
felt at first only astonishment at her vivid interest in what seemed
beyond her comprehension, but now realize that in some blind way she
appreciates the rare and the delicate quite as much as my more cultivated
visitors. At the end of one laborious morning, when everything was
arranged to her satisfaction, she turned to me her poor, plain face,
lighted up with an expression of delight, and exclaimed, “Oh, sir, I do
love to work in these rooms! I’m never so happy as when I’m arranging
them elegant things!” And, although my pleasure in her pleasure was
modified by the discovery that she had taken an eighteenth-century comb
to disentangle the fringes of a rug, and broken several of its teeth in
her ardor, that she invariably placed a certain Whister etching upside
down, and then stood in rapt admiration before it, still, in watching her
enthusiasm, I felt a thrill of satisfaction at seeing how her untaught
taste responded to a contact with good things.
Here in America, and especially in our city, which we have been at such
pains to make as hideous as possible, the schoolrooms, where hundreds of
thousands of children pass many hours daily, are one degree more
graceless than the town itself; the most artistically inclined child can
hardly receive any but unfortunate impressions. The other day a friend
took me severely to task for rating our American women on their love of
the big shops, and gave me, I confess, an entirely new idea on the
subject. “Can’t you see,” she said, “that the shops here are what the
museums abroad are to the poor? It is in them only that certain people
may catch glimpses of the dainty and exquisite manufactures of other
countries. The little education their eyes receive is obtained during
visits to these emporiums.”
If this proves so, and it seems probable, it only proves how the humble
long for something more graceful than their meagre homes afford.
In the hope of training the younger generations to better standards and
less vulgar ideals, a group of ladies are making an attempt to surround
our schoolchildren during their impressionable youth with reproductions
of historic masterpieces, and have already decorated many schoolrooms in
this way. For a modest sum it is possible to tint the bare walls an
attractive color—a delight in itself—and adorn them with plaster casts of
statues and solar prints of pictures and buildings. The transformation
that fifty or sixty dollars judiciously expended in this way produces in
a schoolroom is beyond belief, and, as the advertisements say, “must be
seen to be appreciated,” giving an air of cheerfulness and refinement to
the dreariest apartment.
It is hard to make people understand the enthusiasm these decorations
have excited in both teachers and pupils. The directress of one of our
large schools was telling me of the help and pleasure the prints and
casts had been to her; she had given them as subjects for the class
compositions, and used them in a hundred different ways as
object-lessons. As the children are graduated from room to room, a great
variety of high-class subjects can be brought to their notice by varying
the decorations.
It is by the eye principally that taste is educated. “We speak with
admiration of the eighth sense common among Parisians, and envy them
their magic power of combining simple materials into an artistic whole.
The reason is that for generations the eyes of those people have been
unconsciously educated by the harmonious lines of well-proportioned
buildings, finely finished detail of stately colonnade, and shady
perspective of quay and boulevard. After years of this subtle training
the eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and the crude. There is
little in the poorer quarters of our city to rejoice or refine the
senses; squalor and all-pervading ugliness are not least among the curses
that poverty entails.
If you have a subject of interest in your mind, it often happens that
every book you open, every person you speak with, refers to that topic.
I never remember having seen an explanation offered of this phenomenon.
The other morning, while this article was lying half finished on my desk,
I opened the last number of a Paris paper and began reading an account of
the drama, _Les Mauvais Bergers_ (treating of that perilous subject, the
“strikes”), which Sarah Bernhardt had just had the courage to produce
before the Paris public. In the third act, when the owner of the factory
receives the disaffected hands, and listens to their complaints, the
leader of the strike (an intelligent young workman), besides shorter
hours and increased pay, demands that recreation rooms be built where the
toilers, their wives, and their children may pass unoccupied hours in the
enjoyment of attractive surroundings, and cries in conclusion: “We, the
poor, need some poetry and some art in our lives, man does not live by
bread alone. He has a right, like the rich, to things of beauty!”
In commending the use of decoration as a means of bringing pleasure into
dull, cramped lives, one is too often met by the curious argument that
taste is innate. “Either people have it or they haven’t,” like a long
nose or a short one, and it is useless to waste good money in trying to
improve either. “It would be much more to the point to spend your money
in giving the poor children a good roast-beef dinner at Christmas than in
placing the bust of Clytie before them.” That argument has crushed more
attempts to elevate the poor than any other ever advanced. If it were
listened to, there would never be any progress made, because there are
always thousands of people who are hungry.
When we reflect how painfully ill-arranged rooms or ugly colors affect
our senses, and remember that less fortunate neighbors suffer as much as
we do from hideous environments, it seems like keeping sunlight from a
plant, or fresh air out of a sick-room, to refuse glimpses of the
beautiful to the poor when it is in our power to give them this
satisfaction with a slight effort. Nothing can be more encouraging to
those who occasionally despair of human nature than the good results
already obtained by this small attempt in the schools.
We fall into the error of imagining that because the Apollo Belvedere and
the Square of St. Mark’s have become stale to us by reproduction they are
necessarily so to others. The great and the wealthy of the world form no
idea of the longing the poor feel for a little variety in their lives.
They do not know what they want. They have no standards to guide them,
but the desire is there. Let us offer ourselves the satisfaction, as we
start off for pleasure trips abroad or to the mountains, of knowing that
at home the routine of study is lightened for thousands of children by
the counterfeit presentment of the scenes we are enjoying; that, as we
float up the Golden Horn or sit in the moonlight by the Parthenon, far
away at home some child is dreaming of those fair scenes as she raises
her eyes from her task, and is unconsciously imbibing a love of the
beautiful, which will add a charm to her humble life, and make the
present labors lighter. If the child never lives to see the originals,
she will be happier for knowing that somewhere in the world domed mosques
mirror themselves in still waters, and marble gods, the handiwork of
long-dead nations, stand in the golden sunlight and silently preach the
gospel of the beautiful.