“Step I.—To draw from the children what they know of the poem ‘Beowulf,’ and of the hero himself.
“Step II.—To tell them any points they may miss in the story, as far as they have read (i.e. to the death of Grendel).
“Step III.—To read the description of the dress at that time, and the account of Grendel’s death (including three possible pictures).
“Step IV.—To draw from the children what mental pictures they have made—and to re-read the passage.
“Step V.—To let them produce their mental picture with brush and paint.
“Step VI.—To show them George Harrow’s ‘original illustration’ of Beowulf in Heroes of Chivalry and Romance.”
Drawing Lessons.—But ‘for their actual drawing lessons,’ says the reader, ‘I suppose you use “blobs”?’—‘blobs,’ i.e. splashes of paint made with the flat of the brush, which take an oval form. I think blobs have one use—they give a certain freedom in using colour. Otherwise ‘blobs’ seem to me a sort of apparatus of art which a child acquires with a good deal of labour, and with which, by proper combinations into flowers, and so on, he can produce effects beyond his legitimate power as an artist, while all the time he can do this without a particle of the feeling for the natural object which is the very soul of art. The power of effective creation by a sort of clever trick maims those delicate feelers of a child’s nature by which he apprehends art.
“Let the eye” (says Ruskin) “but rest on a rough piece of branch of curious form during a conversation with a friend, rest, however unconsciously, and though the conversation be forgotten, though every circumstance connected with it be as utterly lost to the memory as though it had not been, yet the eye will, through the whole life after, take a certain pleasure in such boughs which it had not before, a pleasure so slight, a trace of feeling so delicate, as to leave us utterly unconscious of its peculiar power, but undestroyable by any reasoning, a part thenceforward of our constitution.”
This is what we wish to do for children in teaching them to draw—to cause the eye to rest, not unconsciously, but consciously, on some object of beauty which will leave in their minds an image of delight for all their lives to come. Children of six and seven draw budding twigs of oak and ash, beech and larch, with such tender fidelity to colour, tone, and gesture, that the crude little drawings are in themselves things of beauty.
Children have ‘Art’ in them.—With art, as with so many other things in a child, we must believe that it is there, or we shall never find it. Once again, here is a delicate Ariel whom it is our part to deliver from his bonds. Therefore we set twig or growing flower before a child and let him deal with it as he chooses. He will find his own way to form and colour, and our help may very well be limited at first to such technical matters as the mixing of colours and the like. In order that we may not impede the child’s freedom or hinder the deliverance of the art that is in him, we must be careful not to offer any aids in the way of guiding lines, points, and such other crutches; and, also, he should work in the easiest medium, that is, with paint brush or with charcoal, and not with a black-lead pencil. Boxes of cheap colours are to be avoided. Children are worthy of the best, and some half-dozen tubes of really good colours will last a long time, and will satisfy the eye of the little artists.