II
FREE-HAND DRAWING—STUDIES FROM LIFE
All the preceding exercises are "formative" for the art of drawing. They develop in the child the manual ability to execute a geometric design and prepare his eye to appreciate the harmony of proportions between geometric figures. The countless observations of drawings, the habit of minute examination of natural objects, constitute so many preparatory drills. We can, however, say that the whole method, educating the eye and the hand at the same time and training the child to observe and execute drawings with intense application, prepares the mechanical means for design, while the mind, left free to take its flight and to create, is ready to produce.
It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes. The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one's own hand—that is what is necessary. Inspiration is an individual thing, and when a child possesses these formative elements he can give expression to all he happens to have.
There can be no "graduated exercises in drawing" leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit. That is our reason for not teaching drawing directly to the child. We prepare him indirectly, leaving him free to the mysterious and divine labor of reproducing things according to his own feelings. Thus drawing comes to satisfy a need for expression, as does language; and almost every idea may seek expression in drawing. The effort to perfect such expression is very similar to that which the child makes when he is spurred on to perfect his language in order to see his thoughts translated into reality. This effort is spontaneous; and the real drawing teacher is in the inner life, which of itself develops, attains refinement, and seeks irresistibly to be born into external existence in some empirical form. Even the smallest children try spontaneously to draw outlines of the objects which they see; but the hideous drawings which are exhibited in the common schools, as "free drawings" "characteristic" of childhood, are not found among our children. These horrible daubs so carefully collected, observed, and catalogued by modern psychologists as "documents of the infant mind" are nothing but monstrous expressions of intellectual lawlessness; they show only that the eye of their child is uneducated, the hand inert, the mind insensible alike to the beautiful and to the ugly, blind to the true as well as to the false. Like most documents collected by psychologists who study the children of our schools, they reveal not the soul but the errors of the soul; and these drawings, with their monstrous deformities, show simply what the uneducated human being is like.
Such things are not "free drawings" by children. Free drawings are possible only when we have a free child who has been left free to grow and perfect himself in the assimilation of his surroundings and in mechanical reproduction; and who when left free to create and express himself actually does create and express himself.
The sensory and manual preparation for drawing is nothing more than an alphabet; but without it the child is an illiterate and cannot express himself. And just as it is impossible to study the writing of people who cannot write, so there can be no psychological study of the drawings of children who have been abandoned to spiritual and muscular chaos. All psychic expressions acquire value when the inner personality has acquired value by the development of its formative processes. Until this fundamental principle has become an absolute acquisition we can have no idea of the psychology of a child as regards his creative powers.
Thus, unless we know how a child should develop in order to unfold his natural energies, we shall not know how drawing as a natural expression is developed. The universal development of the wondrous language of the hand will come not from a "school of design" but from a "school of the new man" which will cause this language to spring forth spontaneously like water from an inexhaustible spring. To confer the gift of drawing we must create an eye that sees, a hand that obeys, a soul that feels; and in this task the whole life must cooperate. In this sense life itself is the only preparation for drawing. Once we have lived, the inner spark of vision does the rest.