The Education of Catholic Girls

by Janet Erskine Stuart

But trained taste is grounded in reverence and discipleship, a lowly and firm basis for departure, from which it may, if it has the power to do or to discern, rise in its strength, and leave behind those who have shown the way, or soar in great flights beyond their view. So it has often been seen in the history of art, and such is the right order of growth. It needs the living voice and the attentive mind, the influence of trained and experienced judgment to guide us in the beginning, but the guide must let us go at last and we must rely upon ourselves.

The bad effect of being either self-taught or conventional is exclusiveness; in one case the personal bias is too marked, in the other the temporary aspect appeals too strongly. In the education of taste it is needful that the child should "eat butter and honey," not only so as to refuse the evil and choose the good, but also to judge between good and good, and to know butter from honey and honey from butter. This is the principal end of the study of art in early education. The doing is very elementary, but the principles of discernment are something for life, feeding the springs of choice and delight, and making sure that they shall run clear and untroubled.

Teaching concerning art which can be given to girls has to be approached with a sense of responsibility from conviction of the importance of its bearing on character as a whole. Let anyone who has tried it pass in review a number of girls as they grow up, and judge whether their instinct in art does not give a key to their character, always supposing that they have some inclination to reflect on matters of beauty, for there are some who are candidly indifferent to beauty if they can have excitement. They have probably been spoiled as children and find it hard to recover. Excitement has worn the senses so that their report grows dull and feeble. Imagination runs on other lines and requires stimulants; there is no stillness of mind in which the perception of beauty and harmony and fitness can grow up.

There are others—may they be few—in whose minds there is little room for anything but success. Utilitarians in social life, their determination is to get on, and this spirit pervades all they do; it has the making of the hardest-grained worldliness: to these art has nothing to say. But there are others to whom it has a definite message, and their response to it corresponds to various schools or stages of art. There are some who are daring and explicit in their taste; they resent the curb, and rush into what is extravagant with a very feeble protest against it from within themselves. Beside them are simpler minds, merely exuberant, for whom there can never be enough light or colour in their picture of life. If they are gifted with enough intelligence to steady their joyful constitution of mind, these will often develop a taste that is fine and true. In the background of the group are generally a few silent members of sensitive temperament and deeper intuition, who see with marvellous quickness, but see too much to be happy and content, almost too much to be true. They incline towards another extreme, an ideal so high-pitched as to become unreal, and it meets with the penalty of unreality in over-balancing itself. Children nearly always pull to one side or the other; it is a work of long patience even to make them accept that there should be a golden mean. Did they ever need it so much as they do now? Probably each generation in turn, from Solomon's time onward, has asked the same question. But in the modern world there can hardly have been a time in which the principle of moderation needed to be more sustained, for there has never been a time when circumstances made man more daring in face of the forces of nature, and this same daring in other directions, less beautiful, is apt to become defiant and unashamed of excess. It asserts itself most loudly in modern French art, but we are following close behind, less logical and with more remaining traditions of correctness, but influenced beyond what we like to own.

In the education of girls, which is subject to so many limitations, very often short in itself, always too short for what would be desirable to attain, the best way to harmonize aesthetic teaching is not to treat it in different departments, but to centre all round the general history of art. This leaves in every stage the possibility of taking up particular branches of art study, whether historical, or technical, or practical, and these will find their right place, not dissociated from their antecedents and causes, not paramount but subordinate, and thus rightly proportioned and true in their relation to the whole progress of mankind in striving after beauty and the expression of it.

The history of art in connexion with the general history of the human race is a complement to it, ministering to the understanding of what is most intimate, stamping the expression of the dominant emotion on the countenance of every succeeding age. This is what its art has left to us, a more confidential record than its annals and chronicles, and more accessible to the young, who can often understand feelings before they can take account of facts in their historical importance. In any case the facts are clothed in living forms there where belief and aspiration and feeling have expressed themselves in works of art. If we value for children the whole impression of the centuries, especially in European history, more than the mere record of changes, the history of art will allow them to apprehend it almost as the biographies of great persons who have set their signature upon the age in which they lived.

As each of the fine arts has its own history which moves along divergent or parallel lines in different countries and periods, and as each development or check is bound up with the history of the country or period and bears its impress, the interpretation of one is assisted and enriched by the other, and both are linked together to illuminate the truth. It is only necessary to consider the position of Christian art in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the changes wrought by the Renaissance, to estimate the value of some knowledge of it in giving to children a right understanding of those times and of what they have left to the world. Again, the inferences to be drawn from the varied developments of Gothic architecture in France, Spain, and England are roads indicated to what is possible to explore in later studies, both in history and in art. And so the schools of painting studied in their history make ready the way for closer study in after years. Pugin's "Book of Contrasts" is an illustration full of suggestive power as to the service which may be rendered in teaching by comparing the art of one century with that of another, as expressive of the spirit of each period, and a means of reading below the surface.

Without Pugin's bitterness the same method of contrast has been used most effectively to put before children by means of lantern slides and lectures the manner in which art renders truth according to the various ideals and convictions of the artists. It is a lesson in itself, a lesson in faith, in devotion, as well as in art and in the history of man's mind, to show in succession, or even side by side, though the shock is painful, works of art in which the Christian mysteries are rendered in an age of faith or in one of unbelief. They can see in the great works of Catholic art how faith exults in setting them forth, with undoubting assurance, with a theological grasp of their bearings and conclusions, with plenitude of conviction and devotion that has no afterthoughts; and in contrasting with these the strained efforts to represent the same subjects without the illumination of theology they will learn to measure the distance downwards in art from faith to unbelief.

The conclusions may carry them further, to judge from the most modern paintings of the tone of mind of their own time, of its impatience and restlessness and want of hope. Let them compare the patient finish, the complete thought given to every detail in the works of the greatest painters, the accumulated light and depth, the abounding life, with the hasty, jagged, contemporary manner of painting, straining into harshness from want of patience, tense and angular from want of real vitality, exhausted from the absence of inward repose. They will comment for themselves upon the pessimism to which so many surrender themselves, taking with them their religious art, with its feeble Madonnas and haggard saints, without hope or courage or help, painted out of the abundance of their own heart's sadness. This contrast carries much teaching to the children of to-day if they can understand it, for each one who sets value upon faith and hope and resolution and courage in art is a unit adding strength to the line of defence against the invasions of sadness and dejection of spirit.

These considerations belong to the moral and spiritual value of the study of art, in the early years of an education intended to be general. They are of primary importance although in themselves only indirect results of the study. As to its direct results, it may be said in general that two things must be aimed at during the years of school life, appreciation of the beautiful in the whole realm of art, and some very elementary execution in one or other branch, some doing or making according to the gift of each one.