THE FIELD OF ART
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.