The work on both sides is and can be only preparation, only the establishment of principles and the laying of foundations; if anything further is attempted during school life it is apt to throw the rest of the education out of proportion, for in nothing whatever can a girl leaving the school-room be looked upon as having finished. It is a great deal if she is well-grounded and ready to begin. Even the very branches of study to which a disproportioned space has been allowed will suffer the penalty of it later on, for the narrow basis of incomplete foundations tends to make an ill-balanced superstructure which cannot bear the stress of effort required for perfection without falling into eccentricity or wearing itself out. Both misfortunes have been seen before now when infant prodigies have been allowed to grow on one side only. Restraint and control and general building up tend to strengthen even the talent which has apparently to be checked, by giving it space and equilibrium and the power of repose. Even if art should be their profession or their life-work in any form, the sacrifices made for general education will be compensated in the mental and moral balance of their work.
If general principles of art have been kept before the minds of children, and the history of art has given them some true ideas of its evolution, they are ready to learn the technique and practice of any branch to which they may be attracted. But as music and painting are more within their reach than other arts, it is reasonable that they should be provided for in the education of every child, so that each should have at least the offer and invitation of an entrance into those worlds, and latent talents be given the opportunity of declaring themselves. Poetry has its place apart, or rather it has two places, its own in the field of literature, and another, as an inspiration pervading all the domain of the fine arts, allied with music by a natural affinity, connected with painting on the side of imagination, related in one way or another to all that is expressive of the beautiful. Children will feel its influence before they can account for it, and it is well that they should do so—to feel it is in the direction of refusing the evil and choosing the good.
Music is coming into a more important place among educational influences now that the old superstition of making every child play the piano is passing away. It was an injustice both to the right reason of a child and to the honour of music when it was forced upon those who were unwilling and unfit to attain any degree of excellence in it. We are renouncing these superstitions and turning to something more widely possible—to cultivate the audience and teach them to listen with intelligence to that which without instruction is scarcely more than pleasant noise, or at best the expression of emotion. The intellectual aspect of music is beginning to be brought forward in teaching children, and with this awakening the whole effect of music in education is indefinitely raised. It has scarcely had time to tell yet, but as it extends more widely and makes its way through the whole of our educational system it may be hoped that the old complaints, too well founded, against the indifference and carelessness of English audiences, will be heard no more. We shall never attain to the kind of religious awe which falls upon a German audience, or to its moods of emotion, but we may reach some means of expression which the national character does not forbid, showing at least that we understand, even though we must not admit that we feel.
It is impossible to suggest what may be attained by girls of exceptional talent, but in practice if the average child-students, with fair musical ability, can at the end of their school course read and sing at sight fairly easy music, and have a good beginning of intelligent playing on one or two instruments, they will have brought their foundations in musical practice up to the level of their general education. If with some help they can understand the structure of a great musical work, and perhaps by themselves analyse an easy sonata, they will be in a position to appreciate the best of what they will hear afterwards, and if they have learnt something of the history of music and of the works of the great composers, their musical education will have gone as far as proportion allows before they are grown up. Some notions of harmony, enough to harmonize by the most elementary methods a simple melody, will be of the greatest service to those whose music has any future in it.
Catholic girls have a right and even a duty to learn something of the Church's own music; and in this also there are two things to be learnt—appreciation and execution. And amongst the practical applications of the art of music to life there is nothing more honourable than the acquired knowledge of ecclesiastical music to be used in the service of the Church. When the love and understanding of its spirit are acquired the diffusion of a right tone in Church music is a means of doing good, as true and as much within the reach of many girls as the spread of good literature; and in a small and indirect way it allows them the privilege of ministering to the beauty of Catholic worship and devotion.
The scope of drawing and painting in early education has been most ably treated of in many general and special works, and does not concern us here except in so far as it is connected with the training of taste in art which is of more importance to Catholics than to others, as has been considered above, in its relation to the springs of spiritual life, to faith and devotion, and also in so far as taste in art serves to strengthen or to undermine the principles on which conduct is based. We have to brace our children's wills to face restraint, to know that they cannot cast themselves at random and adrift in the pursuit of art, that their ideals must be more severe than those of others, and that they have less excuse than others if they allow these ideals to be debased. They ought to learn to be proud of this restraint, not to believe themselves thwarted or feel themselves galled by it, but to understand that it stands for a higher freedom by the side of which ease and unrestraint are more like servitude than liberty; it stands for the power to refuse the evil and choose the good; it stands for intellectual and moral freedom of choice, holding in check the impulse and inclination that are prompted from within and invited from without to escape from control.
The best teaching in this is to show what is best, and to give the principles by which it is to be judged. To talk of what is bad, or less good, even by way of warning, is less persuasive and calculated even to do harm to girls whose temper of mind is often "quite contrary." Warnings are wearisome to them, and when they refer to remote dangers, partly guessed at, mostly unknown, they even excite the spirit of adventure to go and find out for themselves, just as in childhood repeated warnings and threats of the nursery-maids and maiden aunts are the very things which set the spirit of enterprise off on the voyage of discovery, a fact which the head nurse and the mother have found out long ago, and so have learnt to refrain from these attractive advertisements of danger. So it is with teachers. We learn by experience that a trumpet blast of warning wakes the echoes at first and rouses all that is to be roused, but also that if it is often repeated it dulls the ear and calls forth no response at all. Quiet positive teaching convinces children; to show them the best things attracts them, and once their true allegiance is given to the best, they have more security within themselves than in many danger signals set up for their safety. What is most persuasive of all is a whole-hearted love for real truth and beauty in those who teach them. Their own glow of enthusiasm is caught, light from light, and taste from taste, and ideal from ideal; warning may be lost sight of, but this is living spirit and will last.
What children can accomplish by the excellent methods of teaching drawing and painting which are coming into use now, it is difficult to say. Talent as well as circumstances and conditions of education differ very widely in this. But as preparation for intelligent appreciation they should acquire some elementary principles of criticism, and some knowledge of the history and of the different schools of painting, indications of what to look for here and there in Europe and likewise of how to look at it; this is what they can take with them as a foundation, and in some degree all can acquire enough to continue their own education according to their opportunities. Matter-of-fact minds can learn enough not to be intolerable, the average enough to guide and safeguard their taste. They are important, for they will be in general the multitude, the public, whose judgment is of consequence by its weight of numbers; they will by their demand make art go upwards or downwards according to their pleasure. For the few, the precious few who are chosen and gifted to have a more definite influence, all the love they can acquire in their early years for the best in art will attach them for life to what is sane and true and lovely and of good fame.
The foundations of all this lie very deep in human nature, and taste will be consistent with itself throughout the whole of life. It manifests itself in early sensitiveness and responsiveness to artistic beauty. It determines the choice in what to love as well as what to like. It will assert itself in friendship, and estrangement in matters of taste is often the first indication of a divergence in ideals which continues and grows more marked until at some crossroads one takes the higher path and the other the lower and their ways never meet again. That higher path, the disinterested love of beauty, calls for much sacrifice; it must seek its pleasure on ly in the highest, and not look for a first taste of delight, but a second, when the power of criticism has been schooled by a kind of asceticism to detect the choice from the vulgar and the true from the insincere. This spirit of sacrifice must enter into every form of training for life, but above all into the training of the Catholic mind. It has a wide range and asks much of its disciples, a certain renunciation and self-restraint in all things which never completely lets itself go. Catholic art bears witness to this: "Where a man seeks himself there he falls from love," says a Kempis, and this is proved not only in the love of God, but in what makes the glory of Christian art, the love of beauty and truth in the service of faith.