Mm 
 
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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 FREDERIC THOMAS BLANCHARD 
 
 FOR THE 
 
 ENGLISH READING ROOM
 
 Ubc ^oDern Ueacber's Series 
 
 Edited by WILLIAM CHANDLER BAGLEY 
 
 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCITTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 AN ESSAY ON THE PEDAGOGICS 
 OF BEAUTY 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANK HERBERT ^AYWARD, B.Sc, D.Lit. 
 
 INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS FOR THE LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL 
 
 ENGLAND 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE SECRET OF HERBART" 
 
 "EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION AND CRITICISM," ETC. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1922 
 
 All righii resetted
 
 Copyright, 1915, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1915. 
 
 NortaooB JPrfBB 
 
 J. 8. Cusblng Co. — Berwick <fe Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The part of this book on which the chief stress should 
 be laid is the first part, in which is discussed the teach- 
 ing of poetry. These opening chapters spring from 
 personal experience, observation, and reflection. The 
 chapters on music are an obvious pendant to the ones 
 that precede, while those that follow are of the nature 
 of a necessary though far from satisfactory appendix. 
 In a few years' time I shall probably be able to write 
 with far more confidence than at present on the peda- 
 gogics of pictorial and plastic art. 
 
 Meanwhile, in apology for any faults or omissions 
 that the reader may discover, I would point out that 
 the literature of this subject is scanty almost to non- 
 existence. Books on aesthetics there are in abundance ; 
 popular guides to music and pictures are also numer- 
 ous ; but books intended to help the teacher of the 
 young child or even of the adolescent have hardly yet 
 been produced by the educationists of any land, the 
 reason, no doubt, being the confusion of purposes 
 detected by M. Cousinet and referred to in the last 
 chapter. 
 
 The only other word of apology is concerned with 
 the predominance of British illustrations and examples 
 in my discussions. The predominance is not, I think, 
 outrageously great, and my friend Professor Bagley 
 has helped to reduce it by supplying some excellent
 
 VI PREFACE 
 
 illustrations drawn from American sources ; still, 
 every book that is the result of personal conviction 
 rather than of commission or requisition from without 
 must bear traces of its origin. British educationists 
 are a quiet folk who rarely rush into print (let us hope 
 that, like the famous but taciturn parrot, they are 
 phenomenally great at "thinking") and at present 
 American books on education are their staple food ; 
 if the tables are turned in this instance and American 
 readers are supplied with diet from a British source, 
 I hope the food will be found at least digestible. 
 
 The series of questions and quotations at the end 
 may serve to stimulate thought and to suggest further 
 developments of the themes discussed in the text. 
 Indeed, on the basis of these questions and quotations 
 a book twice the size could easily be written. 
 
 I have to thank Professor Bagley, not only for general 
 encouragement in connection with the production of 
 The Lesson in Appreciation, but for much help in 
 matters of detail. Though, before I read his Educa- 
 tional Values, I had been moving towards the idea of 
 appreciation as one of our educational ends, it was 
 a passage in that book that gave the final push to my 
 slowly gathering convictions. 
 
 In accordance with the prescribed usage, I have to 
 announce that the London County Council does not 
 hold itself responsible for any of the views of its 
 officers. F H H 
 
 London, England, 1914.
 
 INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES AND 
 TO THE PRESENT VOLUME 
 
 By the Editor 
 
 A GROUP of laymen may decide that it would be advis- 
 able to build a bridge across Niagara or to drive a tunnel 
 through the Sierras. An engineer is asked whether the 
 plan is practicable. He replies that it is, and is forthwith 
 commissioned to put it into execution. He has at his 
 command a complicated technique of procedure. He has 
 accurate means of forecasting stresses and strains ; he 
 knows how to construct caissons and piers and abutments ; 
 he has mastered methods by means of which he can blast 
 rock, and remove debris, and drive a tunnel straight or 
 curved, on a level or at a grade. He can apply this 
 knowledge to the problem in hand ; reduce it to detailed 
 specifications ; and put these specifications into the hands 
 of skilled workmen who will carry out his directions to 
 the minutest detail. In a year or two years the bridge 
 is built or the tunnel bored. The result desired by the 
 laymen and formulated by them in a very general way 
 has been accomplished, but the achievement has been in 
 virtue of the technical knowledge and skill that some one 
 possessed. 
 
 A group of laymen may decide that the public schools 
 should teach the rising generation how to think straight, 
 how to behave themselves properly, how to make a living, 
 
 vii
 
 vm INTRODUCTION 
 
 and how to appreciate the good things of life. They 
 should be able to call in an engineer to tell them whether 
 the desired result can be obtained. The engineer, once 
 he has answered the question affirmatively, should be able 
 to lay down specifications and pass them on to skilled 
 workers to carry out. 
 
 The analogy cannot be carried too far, but it is sugges- 
 tive of a real need in education. We have the educational 
 administrator who corresponds roughly to the engineer. 
 We have the classroom teacher who corresponds roughly 
 to the skilled worker. We have the group of laymen — 
 a large group known as the Public. The public can and 
 does express its desires and wishes. The teacher can, 
 in a great many instances, work apparent miracles ; if a 
 definite aim is formulated in plain, concrete terms, he or 
 she can realize the aim. But the point of vital weakness 
 is the almost complete lack in education of anything 
 approaching the engineer's ability to reduce a vague, half- 
 formulated demand into these simpler, more concrete, 
 thoroughly understandable specifications. Our conven- 
 tional educational aims, it has often been asserted, are 
 too general ; they oflfer no suggestions that will help the 
 teacher in carr}ing them out ; they need to be split up 
 into more concrete aims that may be interpolated between 
 the present, actual, existing condition of affairs and the 
 desired condition. Lacking this important element in 
 achievement, the teacher labors under a severe handicap. 
 His or her condition is quite analogous to that of a group 
 of skilled workers who should be asked to accomplish, 
 unaided by engineering science, the task of building a 
 bridge or tunneling a mountain. The task might be
 
 INTRODUCTION IX 
 
 accomplished even under these conditions, — as many 
 tasks in education are accomplished under equally unfa- 
 vorable conditions. But it is highly probable that the 
 bridge would fail to bear its own weight, or that the tunnel 
 
 — even if it did not cave in before it was completed — 
 would be badly " out of plumb." And the outcomes of 
 teaching are often characterized by analogous defects. 
 
 In the series of books of which the present volume is 
 the initial number, an attempt will be made to provide 
 something akin to specifications for some of the more 
 common tasks that the teacher is asked or commanded 
 to assume. The present volume is, indeed, typical of 
 what the editor has had in mind in planning the series. 
 For a good many years there has been a demand for a 
 kind of education that would help to raise the general 
 standard of public taste. Forthwith certain " subjects " 
 have been introduced into the school program. This is 
 our customary procedure in solving educational problems, 
 
 — and this is about as far as " specifications " have ever 
 gone in education. Shall we guard our rising generation 
 against the evils of bad literature and bad drama ? Obvi- 
 ously this is a duty of the school. Very well ; " teach " 
 the pupil "to appreciate " good literature and good drama 
 and good poetry. Shall we protect our children against 
 the cheap, the tawdry, the suggestive, and the degrading 
 in pictorial art and in music ? Then " teach " the 
 " appreciation " of good art and good music in the schools. 
 
 This seems to be a simple order that any intelligent 
 teacher might easily fulfill. As a matter of fact, it is a 
 very large order, and that is one reason why the results 
 have not been altogether satisfactory. It is very far from
 
 X INTRODUCTION 
 
 an easy task. Building a bridge across Niagara, indeed, 
 is not unfairly to be compared with it in point of difficulty. 
 
 It is this problem of aesthetic education that Dr. Hay- 
 ward has attacked. He has taught little children, and 
 knows how hard it is to do some things that seem very 
 easy when looked at from a safe point of vantage. He 
 has studied the principles of aesthetics. He has mastered 
 the principles of psychology bearing upon this problem so 
 far as these have been worked out. He has observed and 
 studied the work of teachers who have, through struggle 
 and effort, succeeded in bridging Niagaras, and he has 
 brought to the service of his readers the lessons of these 
 fortunate experiences. His work deals with a " practical " 
 problem in a " practical " way, — but it does not shrink 
 from the presentation of theory when theory will enlighten 
 the practice. 
 
 This, in general, is the plan that the editor hopes to 
 follow in the books of this series. Each will deal specif- 
 ically with some vital problem of teaching. The topics, 
 in the main, will be those large and comprehensive 
 tasks which are persistently pressed upon school teachers 
 for solution, but which demand re-formulation in simpler 
 terms before they can be successfully worked out. The 
 aim will be to present definite and often detailed sugges- 
 tions for actual teaching. Sometimes these suggestions 
 will be in the nature of " working plans," but more often 
 they will of necessity be concrete illustrations of principles 
 rather than rule-of-thumb directions for practice. After 
 all, it is here that the teacher differs fundamentally from 
 the artisan. In dealing, as the teacher does, with human 
 materials, ready-made devices often fail to " work " when
 
 INTRODUCTION XI 
 
 they have been lifted from their original setting and 
 applied to new situations. Human minds cannot be 
 standardized, like steel or concrete, but the teacher has 
 a right to demand principles that can be illustrated by 
 clear, definite, and typical applications ; and principles of 
 this sort, abundantly illustrated, this series will attempt 
 to furnish. 
 
 Two books will, it is hoped, quickly follow the publica- 
 tion of the present volume. One will be concerned with 
 the problem of school discipline, and the development of 
 the habits, attitudes, and ideals of order, industry, and 
 self-control that are so essential not only to successful 
 school work but to right living and efficient work in adult 
 life. The other will discuss the problem of study — another 
 of those large and comprehensive tasks that the school 
 must assume, but which it is hopeless to attack unless we 
 analyze it into subordinate and specific problems which 
 can be formulated in concrete terms. Other books in 
 prospect or in preparation will treat of habit-formation 
 and the skill outcomes of education ; the problem of training 
 pupils to think ; and the problem of socializing school life. 
 
 W. C. B. 
 
 Urbana, Illinois, 
 June, 1914,
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Preface v 
 
 Introduction vii 
 
 Chapter I. The Principle of the First Impression. 
 
 Subtlety of the subject. — The first impression a privi- 
 leged impression. — Red-letter lessons. — The personal 
 qualities of the teacher as affecting appreciation . . 1 
 
 Chapter II. Enemies in the Gate. 
 
 Working up excitement : a passage from Wagner. — 
 Distraction the supreme enemy. — Distraction destroys 
 the unity of the work of art. — Getting rid of intellectual 
 distraction. — Bad artistic workmanship. — The distrac- 
 tion of technique. — But technique is necessary. — The 
 view of M. Cousinet 9 
 
 Chapter III. Some Principles of Music and Poetry. 
 Substance vs. form in art : Art for art's sake. — 
 Decorative vs. expressional music. — Prose vs. poetry. 
 — Metaphors and similes. — New possibilities of artistic 
 expression. — Rhythm in poetry and in prose. — English 
 poetry does not follow the classical forms of prosody. — 
 Modern experiments in art form 24 
 
 Chapter IV. Positive or Constructive Preparation. 
 Grouping ideas together as a source of aesthetic pleas- 
 ure. — Analysis of some metaphors. — Reviving attenu- 
 ated and lost meanings. — Practical corollary : pioneer 
 the metaphor. — The employment of familiarity . . 39 
 
 Chapter V. The Threshold of the Lesson — and Over. 
 Wagner again. — Immediate preparation. — The five 
 " formal steps." — Preparing the mind and the mood . 51 
 
 xiii
 
 xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter VI. The Hour of Appreciation. pagb 
 
 A criticism of the precept, " Read as if you were talk- 
 ing." — Bernard Shaw's opinion of the elocutionist. — 
 Two rules for expression. — The pronunciation of proper 
 names. — Classical meters. — The preservation of poet- 
 ical units. — The " flavor" of words and the cause of it. — 
 Repetition. — Milton's mastery of words. — The poetry of 
 Swinburne. — Rhythm and meaning. — The function of 
 the pause. — Other rhetorical effects .... 61 
 
 Chapter VII. The Final Stages. 
 
 Dangers in " stages." — Stage five : aesthetic discussion. 
 — ^ The induction of aesthetic principles .... 83 
 
 Chapter VIII. The Finai, View of the Lesson. 
 
 Stage six : Intellectual discussion or the exposition of 
 meaning. — Reading by pupils. — Learning by heart. — 
 Reference to the printed book. — Summary ... 91 
 
 Chapter IX. Possibilities. 
 
 The biographical element in appreciation. — Art for 
 art's sake? — The elements of truth in the dictum. — The 
 advantage of multiplying significances. — Proportion in 
 dealing with biographical materials. — Concrete illustra- 
 tions. — The teaching of epics and dramas ... 99 
 
 Chapter X. Some Principles of Music. 
 
 The social significance of musical appreciation. — The 
 principle of repetition. — The principle of contrast. — 
 Variety in repetition. — The principle of association. — 
 The "Leitmotif." — The importance of the introduction. 
 — Intermediate and concluding passages .... 113 
 
 Chapter XI. The Teaching of Music. 
 
 The evil of formalism in teaching music. — Absurdities 
 of the " time " and " tune " tests. — The place of technique 
 in musical appreciation. — The principle of the first im- 
 pression in musical appreciation. — Precautions against 
 the distraction enemy. — Suggestions .... 127
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS XV 
 
 Chapter XII. Principles of Pictorial Art. page 
 The principle of unity or principality. — Devices for 
 insuring the effect of unity. — Unity may be destroyed by 
 excess of detail. — The principle of balance. — Variety 
 in unity. — Other principles : repetition, symmetry, radia- 
 tion, interchange 140 
 
 Chapter XIII. The Teaching of Art Appreciation. 
 
 M. Cousinet's principles. — M. Cousinet's method. — 
 Professor De Garmo's theory of teaching appreciation. — 
 Utility vs. beauty in the teaching of appreciation. — 
 Practical suggestions : the biographical treatment, and 
 symbolism. — Interpretations and problems. — The appre- 
 ciation of ornamentation. — The appreciation of statuary. 
 
 — Applied art 148 
 
 Chapter XIV. The Modern Drama and the Novel. 
 
 The modern drama: abolition of the sohloquy. — The 
 dramatic unities. — Variety in unity. — Comedy and farce. 
 
 — The novel. — -The treatment of the novel in schools. — 
 The problem element in novels. — The aesthetic element 
 
 in novels. — The art of story- telling ..... 165 
 
 Chapter XV. The Polemics of Appreciation. 
 
 The genesis of the appreciation lesson. — The social 
 need of training in appreciation. — The gulf between 
 modern artists and the masses. — Arguments against the 
 attempt to " teach " appreciation. — Evidences of the need 
 for aesthetic guidance. — The doctrine of inner growth. — 
 The by-product theory. — Direct vs. indirect methods. — 
 Experimental aesthetics. — Confirmation of the principle 
 of distraction. — Appreciation of pictures . . . 178 
 
 Appendix A. Questions, Exercises, and Quotations. 
 
 Appendix B. A Selected Bibliography. 
 
 Appendix C. Key to A.
 
 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE FIRST IMPRESSION 
 
 Subtlety of the subject. — The mechanism by which 
 we appreciate is probably subtler than those mecha- 
 nisms by which we perform most other mental acts. In 
 reasoning, for example, there is always a problem. ^ 
 to be solved, a situation to be met, a purpose to be 
 realized. We then reflect upon the resources that may 
 aid in the solution of the problem or the realization 
 of the purpose, " thinking through " the possible ways 
 in which these means may be adapted to the end 
 that we desire. Reasoning or thinking is a delayed, 
 a deliberate process, sufficiently pedestrian to seem 
 devoid of mysteriousness.^ But appreciation, both 
 aesthetic and moral, seems often to come as a subtle 
 dawn or a sudden flash. In the oft-quoted words 
 of Browning: — 
 
 ^ The German term Aufgabe has a considerable vogue. See 
 Titchener's Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes. Also 
 below, p. 13, on Appreciation v. Intellection. 
 
 2 There is, however, a " flash " of imagination or interpretation 
 in discovery and invention. See note above. 
 B I
 
 2 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 " There's a sunset touch, 
 A fancy from a fiowerbell, some one's death, 
 A chorus-ending from Euripides ; ' ' 
 
 and these things rap and knock at the soul in ways 
 so unforeseen that it is not a matter of surprise to 
 find appreciation regarded by many people as some- 
 thing too personal and intangible to be susceptible 
 to actual training in schools or other institutions. 
 The spirit here seems to " blow where it listeth " ; 
 beauty is " a light that never was on sea or land." 
 
 But something can be done. The process, as we 
 shall soon discover, is not wholly mysterious. Sooner 
 or later, in all probability, mankind will not only un- 
 derstand it, but will exploit it in the interests of 
 human happiness. Certainly there are some prin- 
 ciples of appreciation upon which there can be no 
 debate, and the first of these forms the caption of 
 the present chapter. 
 
 The first impression is a privileged impression. — 
 How significant first impressions are to our concrete, 
 everyday life each can testify from his own experi- 
 ence ; and the same principle operates in the realm of 
 art. The first impression of a poem, a song, and, — 
 though perhaps to less extent, — a picture, a statue, 
 and a building is a privileged impression ; not only 
 does the impression seem more unsophisticated and 
 spontaneous, but it is actually more intense, as a 
 rule, than any subsequent impression, and its influ-
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE FIRST IMPRESSION 3 
 
 ence on life and taste is usually far greater. For 
 these reasons the first impression is of extraordinary 
 pedagogical importance, and the failure of educa- 
 tionists to recognize its importance is a measure of 
 the failure of education in the task of teaching appre- 
 ciation. 
 
 As has been suggested, this principle is one that applies 
 to every phase of human experience. It applies to interviews 
 between man and man, between candidates for appointment 
 and committees of selection, between superintendents and 
 inspectors and teachers. "Love at first sight" — and dislike 
 at first sight — are important illustrations of it, and biography 
 is full of evidence that confirms it. Our first view of the sea 
 or of the mountains or of a foreign country is a notable event 
 in our lives. Many of us remember exceptionally well the 
 plants that bloom earliest in the spring, or the first chapter of 
 a book that we have read, or our first lesson in Latin, or our 
 first day in a new school or a new employment. Every 
 American knows when Columbus discovered America, and the 
 reason is not merely the importance of that date but the fact 
 that it is the first that he learns in school. Every English 
 teacher knows more about Julius Caesar and the ancient 
 Britons than about the Chartists of 1848. 
 
 The pedagogy of the first impression is often neglected in 
 the teaching of subjects other than hterature and art. In the 
 first lessen on oxygen, for example, the initial details of prepa- 
 ration (the mixing of the potassium chlorate and the manganese 
 dioxide) assume, in the eyes of the pupils, an exaggerated 
 importance simply because they are initial; while the main 
 purpose of the lesson, the demonstration of the qualities of 
 oxygen, being relegated to a less impressive place, is often
 
 4 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 missed. Possibly we should begin with the jars of gas ready- 
 prepared. In one of his delightful essays, Samuel McChord 
 Crothers calls attention to the first lesson that he learned in 
 geography, — a lesson devoted to a demonstration of the 
 earth's rotundity, — and contrasts the vivid impression that 
 this important fact made upon his mind with the impression 
 that he (with some justice) assumes the same fact to make 
 on the minds of contemporary school children after several 
 months devoted to rather less significant data. 
 
 Many a printed book, too, suffers because the first impres- 
 sion conveyed by its introductory chapters is feeble and un- 
 satisfactory, and many a drama has been ruined by a weak 
 first act. 
 
 Certainly in the lesson in aesthetic appreciation the 
 principle of the first impression is all-important, and 
 the best advice that can be given to a teacher of appre- 
 ciation is that he should lavish care and thought upon 
 making the first impression which the child receives 
 from a work of art a powerful impression, and that 
 the greater the work of art, the greater the amoimt 
 of care and thought he should lavish. Poetry or 
 music that is commonplace may (if treated at all) be 
 treated in a commonplace fashion ; but the higher 
 the materials with which he deals rise above the level 
 of the commonplace, the higher ought the teacher's 
 method also to rise. 
 
 Red-letter lessons. — It is a great mistake to 
 suppose that all lessons are equally important and 
 should receive equally elaborate treatment. Some
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE FIRST IMPRESSION 5 
 
 lessons should be — must be — routine lessons, stop- 
 gap, preparatory, recapitulatory, memoriter lessons, 
 perhaps almost humdrum in their lack of exceptional 
 qualities.^ But some should be, both for the class, 
 and for the teacher, epoch-making lessons which he 
 dreams about in prospect and they dream about in 
 retrospect. It is the respectable and creditable 
 mediocrity, not the badness or goodness, of much 
 school work that strikes intelligent observers most, 
 and it is this consistent and conscientious mediocrity 
 that takes the heart out of the teacher himself. He 
 refuses to respond to the exhortations of educational 
 prophets because he knows that many details of his 
 school work must inevitably be of a routine nature, 
 and it is hard to be enthusiastic, it is hard " to express 
 his individuality," in connection with such things. 
 And the prophets themselves usually have no formula 
 for generating the enthusiasm they desire. But 
 there is a formula, and it is this formula of the epoch- 
 making lesson. Many lessons must necessarily show 
 little but mediocrity in the amoimt of brilliance that 
 they reveal to the expectant observer. But let us in- 
 sist that, here and there in the school week, or month, 
 or year, will occur lessons, particularly lessons in ap- 
 preciation, which ought to stand out as notable events 
 in the memory of teacher and pupil. 
 
 1 Professor Adams has drawn the same distinction in recommend- 
 ing that some lessons should be "dull."
 
 6 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 Such lessons would serve three purposes, each of 
 large importance in its own domain. First, they would 
 provide supervisors and administrators with op- 
 portunities for judging a teacher's work at its high- 
 water mark, not merely at its medium levels. Now 
 the high-water mark of a teacher's ability is one of 
 the best indications of his caliber ; — " It is our best 
 moments — not our worst — that reveal our true 
 selves." In the second place, these lessons would 
 render the teacher's Ufe more interesting, because 
 more varied by hills, plains, slopes, summits, visions, 
 and vistas ; every day would not be like every other 
 day. In the third place, such lessons would be epoch- 
 making in the lives of the pupils. 
 
 Certainly these lessons should not be confined to 
 the field of art. Science and history afford many op- 
 portunities for thrill and climax, and even the teaching 
 of mathematics should not be devoid of its mountain 
 peaks. But the opportunities will perhaps be more 
 frequent in connection with art ; and in any case the 
 educational treatment of a work of art illustrates most 
 clearly the necessity for lessons of this type. To spoil 
 a work of beauty by clumsy or hasty presentation is 
 an aesthetic crime of large magnitude. The teacher 
 who commits it deserves Uttle mercy, just as, con- 
 versely, he who rises to the full majesty of the occasion 
 deserves all the recognition and reward that our edu- 
 cational systems can supply.
 
 THE PRINCIPLE OF THE FIRST IMPRESSION 7 
 
 The personal qualities of the teacher. — It is clear, 
 too, that some teachers are not fitted, by training or 
 by constitution, to give these lessons. Harsh voices, 
 lethargic attitudes, neurotic gestures, should not be 
 associated with the pupil's first impression of a great 
 work of art. "I shall think the worse of fat men," 
 said Mistress Ford, after learning the infamy of Sir 
 John Falstaff, " so long as I have an eye to make 
 difference of men's liking." Wagner in a passage of 
 his Autobiography tells us that, at an early age, he con- 
 ceived a strong prejudice against the Italian tongue, 
 whether spoken or sung, merely as the result of an 
 unfavorable impression made upon him by a male 
 soprano, " a huge pot-bellied giant," who had horrified 
 him with his effeminate voice, his astonishing volubil- 
 ity, and his incessant, screeching laughter. There is 
 plenty of room in school for teachers fat as well as 
 teachers lean, teachers with loud voices as well as 
 teachers with soft voices, and various other forms of 
 physical unfitness may be thrown into the background 
 by genuine beauty of character. Mere external 
 charm or freedom from blemish may coexist with 
 mental or moral qualities that make the teacher's 
 influence most unfortunate ; and, conversely, apparent 
 defects may sometimes be real assets. But the prin- 
 ciple remains : if the first lesson — the privileged 
 lesson — on a poem or a song or a picture is to be of 
 the " red-letter " type here intended, care should
 
 8 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 be taken to exclude every unfavorable circumstance. 
 As the minds of the pupils play in retrospect around 
 the lesson, there should not come, if we can prevent 
 it, a single harsh or discordant association, — no 
 memory of a rasping voice, an unsvTnpathetic face, 
 a gloomy day, a crowded or an ugly classroom, or 
 a morning hour broken by a dozen interruptions from 
 the outside.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 ENEMIES IN THE GATE 
 
 Let us assume that one of these " red-letter " 
 lessons is to be given. A first impression is to be made 
 which, we hope, will be indelible. We wish to make 
 the lesson the starting point of a new and powerful 
 interest. How can this end be effected ? The enemies 
 to appreciation are, perhaps, subtle and numerous. 
 How are they to be overcome? 
 
 Working up excitement : A passage from Wagner. 
 — In some cases it will be possible to work up what 
 we may call anticipatory interest or excitement. We 
 all know the tricks of advertisers, — a most instructive 
 topic for teachers to study. If an exhibition is to be 
 opened or a new play to be produced, the management 
 will take measures to arouse the expectation of the 
 public long before the opening. " Inspired " news 
 items will appear in the papers ; Httle concrete and 
 personal anecdotes will keep the general topic in the 
 public mind ; and at the " psychological moment " 
 ambitious posters will flare from the hoardings. 
 Preliminary interest is, as it were, a marketable com- 
 modity with a money value of its own. And if it 
 
 9
 
 lO THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 has this value in the general scheme of life there is 
 no doubt that it rests upon a fundamental principle 
 of human nature which education may be able to turn 
 to its own ends. Let us see. 
 
 Wagner, in the Autobiography already quoted, 
 describes how, early in his career, he worked up an 
 effective preliminary interest in a forthcoming per- 
 formance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. 
 
 "In the first place, I drew up a program, for which the book 
 of words for the chorus furnished me with a good pretext. I 
 did this in order to provide a guide to the simple understanding 
 of the work, and thereby hoped to appeal, not to the critical 
 judgment, but solely to the feeUngs of the audience. Be- 
 sides this, I made use of the [Dresden] newspaper by writing 
 all kinds of short and anonymous paragraphs, in order to 
 whet the public taste for the work. Concerning the artistic 
 side of the performance, I aimed at making the orchestra 
 give as expressive a rendering as possible, and to this end 
 made all kinds of notes myself in the various parts, so as to 
 make sure that their interpretation would be as clear and as 
 colored as could be desired. ... I tried to get the three 
 hundred singers into a state of genuine ecstasy ; for instance, 
 I succeeded in demonstrating to the basses that the celebrated 
 passage . . . could not be sung in an ordinary manner, but 
 must, as it were, be proclaimed with the greatest rapture. 
 I also took care that, by means of the complete reconstruction 
 of the hall, I should obtain good acoustic conditions for the 
 orchestra." 
 
 Wagner inserted in the local press " all kinds of 
 short and anonymous paragraphs in order to whet the
 
 ENEMIES IN THE GATE II 
 
 public taste " for the forthcoming performance. This 
 may not be the noblest or the subtlest way of pre- 
 paring a class for a future lesson, and indeed Wagner, 
 as he tells us, used other and higher methods. But it 
 is thoroughly legitimate to apply in teaching the gen- 
 eral principle here exemplified. One may drop occa- 
 sional hints that something exceptional or extraor- 
 dinary in the way of a lesson is to occur at some 
 definite time in the future ; and these hints, perhaps, 
 will serve their purpose best if introduced incidentally 
 in connection with other matters. 
 
 The skillful teacher, then, will sometimes manipu- 
 late other lessons in the interest of this red-letter 
 lesson in appreciation. For example, a character 
 that is referred to, an episode that is recounted in the 
 history lesson may lend itself to exploitation in this 
 forward-looking way : "On next Wednesday, we 
 shall study a great poem written by this man " ; or 
 a phrase or quotation may be brought in for purposes 
 of illustration, and then : " Before long you shall hear 
 in a lesson who used those words for the first time; 
 it was a great man, a wonderful occasion." . . . 
 
 How much more interesting school work would be, 
 both for teacher and for pupil, if there were more of 
 this element of anticipation! Even the teacher's 
 wife would find her husband less dull if she heard from 
 him, not only about the jealousies of colleagues and 
 the blindness of supervisors and superiors, but also
 
 12 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 about the great lesson coming off next Monday ! 
 Quite conceivably, too, she might give him some use- 
 ful suggestions. Better salaries, better prospects of 
 promotion, better conditions of work, — these things 
 are needed ; but vistas are needed, too, and artistic 
 enthusiasms, variety, crisis, consummation, success; 
 for it is these things that give hfe its color and make 
 it worth while ; and of these in our school work there 
 is often a great barrenness. 
 
 Distraction the supreme enemy. — But now let us 
 advance a step further. The lesson is to be given on 
 such or such a day. But an enemy is on the watch 
 ready to spoil the first impression and indeed every 
 producible impression. It is therefore the teacher's 
 task to take sword in hand and show no quarter. This 
 enemy is distraction. 
 
 The psychologists have known of his existence 
 longer than the educationists. A pleasurable emotion, 
 they tell us, is easily destroyed. A cold draught of 
 air, a rasping noise, a haunting memory, — and the 
 spell is broken. The forms which distraction assume 
 are legion, but one in particular is deadly to the lesson 
 in appreciation. This is intellectual distraction, — 
 the " critical judgment " as Wagner terms it in the 
 passage just quoted. We cannot appreciate a work 
 of art if we are worrying over unsolved problems; 
 if the unfamiliar, the ambiguous, or the inconsistent 
 in what we are contemplating persists in irritating us ;
 
 ENEMIES IN THE GATE 13 
 
 if extraneous stimuli, unrelated to the poem or the 
 symphony or the picture, intrude themselves upon 
 our attention. Art is a jealous mistress, — whether 
 to those who create or to those who contemplate. 
 
 The process of appreciation here differs absolutely from 
 the intellectual, investigatory, or inventive, processes. In 
 these latter everything depends on a problem or Aufgabe, 
 which is variously described by writers like Dewey, Titchener, 
 and McMurry as arising from a "strained situation," a 
 "felt difficulty," "conditions that are unsatisfactory," a 
 "bafflement," a "vague discomfort," and so forth. The 
 whole process is perhaps most clearly seen in the records of 
 criminal detectives. The first stage of it is the discovery of 
 a mystery or problem to be solved, the second stage is a hunt- 
 ing around for clews, the third stage the discovery of a clew 
 or the formulation of an hypothesis (this often comes "with a 
 flash"), the fourth stage the working out of the implications 
 of the hypothesis, the fifth the testing of the hypothesis by a 
 comparison with objective facts. It will be seen that the five 
 steps of the detective process are very similar to the "five 
 steps " of the Herbartians. Appreciation differs from intellection 
 mainly in the early stage of the process, the principle of the 
 first impression being all-important in the case of the former. 
 Later we shall see that intellectual factors may be exploited 
 in connection with appreciation. 
 
 Distraction destroys the unity of the work of art. — 
 
 Distraction kills appreciation because it destroys the 
 unity which is the soul of art in every one of its various 
 forms. In a masterpiece of painting, every line and 
 every pigment contributes something that is essential
 
 14 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 / to the total effect. In a great poem every word 
 fulfills a purpose with reference to the larger purpose 
 of the work as a whole. In a great drama or a great 
 novel each character and each incident plays its own 
 essential part in the development of the plot. .Es- 
 thetic creation is marked at every point by restraint, — 
 by economy of materials ; not niggardly economy 
 that fears to waste, but an economy that recognizes 
 the supreme danger of obtruding non-essentials. 
 For non-essentials distract; they raise their own 
 problems to the forefront and so negate the purpose 
 for which the work exists. 
 
 "Every man that can paint at all," says Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds in his Discourses, "can execute individual parts; but to 
 keep these parts in due proportion and relative to a whole re- 
 quires a comprehensive view of art that more strongly implies 
 genius than perhaps any quality whatever." 
 
 Getting rid of intellectual distraction. — We are 
 
 trying to insure appreciation of a poem by our pupils. 
 But there are many hard words in the poem, and at 
 every step the child is puzzled and distracted. The 
 poem either conveys no meaning to him, or, here and 
 there, some wildly erroneous meaning. The teacher, 
 struggling with the difficulty, conscientiously explains 
 one word after another, and the literature lesson 
 becomes an exercise composed around the formula, 
 " What is the meaning of ? " Little real appre- 
 ciation can arise in these circumstances. The mind
 
 ENEMIES IN THE GATE 15 
 
 of the pupil is continually upon the stretch if not upon 
 the jerk. The poem, as has been said, is a unity, 
 else it is not worth teaching. Light and shade and 
 line and pigment exist in it, though we call them by 
 other names, — emphasis, cHmax, metaphor, — and 
 just as it would be folly to cut a painting into frag- 
 ments in order to study it, so it is folly to cut a poem 
 into words in order to study it. Yet if a teacher is 
 constantly discussing meanings or explaining ob- 
 scurities he is necessarily committing this folly. 
 
 What, then, is to be done? One is sometimes 
 tempted to say, Drop all serious attempts to teach 
 Hterature in the lower classes ; do humble things there, 
 and lavish, really lavish, your efforts at awakening 
 appreciation on the older pupils. But the solution 
 is drastic, for, after all, a start must be made, and 
 indeed the situation is not so hopeless as it looks ; 
 we may take a leaf from the book of Wagner's ex- 
 perience and prepare in advance for the difficulties of 
 the situation. 
 
 I lay stress upon this. It is a type of far-ahead 
 preparation which though unrecognized in our books 
 on school methods is bound to become an element 
 in the technique of successful teachers of appreciation. 
 The works of art that are studied in the schools are 
 comparatively few in number. It is quite within the 
 capacity of every teacher who attempts work of this 
 sort to catalogue the difficult words, the inverted or
 
 l6 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 unusual phrases, the obscure references that a poem 
 involves. These can then be introduced before the 
 lesson proper is given so as to insure some familiarity 
 through repetition and practice before the " great 
 day " comes. 
 
 " I drew up," says Wagner, " a program. ... I 
 did this in order to provide a guide to the simple 
 understanding of the work, and thereby to appeal 
 [when the performance was given], not to the critical 
 judgment but solely to the feelings of the audience." 
 The purely intellectual part of the work, then, was 
 finished beforehand, and when the time for apprecia- 
 tion came, the whole heart and soul could be given to 
 the pure enjoyment of the music. 
 
 In an earlier part of his Autobiography, Wagner illustrates 
 the same principle which was evidently to him an established 
 conviction. He was about to produce his Liebesverbot, and the 
 directors of the theater " failed to have the book of words 
 printed in time." "From this cause," he says, " it was im- 
 possible to blame the people for being at a loss to understand 
 and appreciate the piece." 
 
 And as with music, so with poetry. Difficult words 
 are not the only possible source of intellectual dis- 
 traction, though, in connection with poetry, they are 
 the chief. Antiquated constructions, such as the use 
 of " an " for " if " (" Nay, an you weep, I am fallen 
 indeed "), or the now almost obsolete use of the sub- 
 junctive (" It were an evil day "), and the like,.
 
 ENEMIES IN THE GATE 1 7 
 
 present similar difficulties which should be removed 
 in the same way. Where a whole phrase, verse, or 
 stanza is obscure, it is often well to present it en bloc 
 to the class in the EngHsh lesson and make it intelH- 
 gible long before the poem as a whole is given in the 
 appreciation lesson, — sufficiently intelligible for the 
 purpose, let me add, for it should not be depleted 
 of all its charm by excessive dissection. 
 
 Bad artistic workmanship. One might perhaps In- 
 clude under the head of distraction the effects pro- 
 duced by awkward combinations of letters or words in 
 a poem. One of Browning's most inspired stanzas is 
 injured by the presence of two s's in immediate con- 
 tact with each other and therefore difficult to pro- 
 nounce, as in the second verse here : — 
 
 "Then welcome each rebufif 
 That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
 Each sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but go ! 
 Be our joy three parts pain ! 
 Strive and hold cheap the strain ; 
 Learn, nor account the pang ; dare, never grudge the throe." ^ 
 
 Browning, indeed, is an old offender in these 
 
 matters. It is a hard matter to frame one's speech 
 
 to the second half of the second verse of : — 
 
 " CavaHers, up ! Lips from the cup, 
 Hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup 
 TiU you're 
 
 Marching along. . . ." ' 
 
 1 Rabbi Ben Ezra. ^ Marching Along. 
 
 c
 
 1 8 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 When the reader or reciter is trying to throw him- 
 self into the martial enthusiasm of the piece, he finds 
 himself wrestling with his own teeth and hps. Oc- 
 casionally, too, Browning spoils, for a time, the aes- 
 thetic effect of his work by sheer vulgarities of speech. 
 It would be hard to find four verses structurally more 
 atrocious than these from A Grammarian' s Funeral ; — 
 
 " That low man goes on adding one to one, 
 His hundred's soon hit : 
 This high man, aiming at a million, 
 Misses an imit." 
 
 Here we have two s's coming together, a \ailgar 
 phrase, an ungrammatical construction, and a techni- 
 cal word used unsuitably. That Browning can write 
 beautifully need not be denied — the quotation on page 
 2 is some evidence of this, but on the whole his great- 
 ness Ues in originality of idea rather than in beauty 
 of form. 
 
 The distraction of technique. — The above remarks 
 lead us naturally to consider another type of dis- 
 traction that is ruinous of appreciation. 
 
 Until recently, teachers have had the notion that 
 poetry should be approached, even by children 
 scarcely able to read prose, through the medium of the 
 printed page ; and that songs, likewise, should be 
 learned through one or another of the sets of symbols 
 known as the " sol-fa " and the old-notation systems. 
 In neither case was the voice of the teacher to be
 
 ENEMIES IN THE GATE 19 
 
 allowed to make the first appeal. This is now coming 
 to be recognized as a fatal pedagogical blunder. 
 
 Music and poetry were invented long before print- 
 ing and probably long before writing ; music, perhaps 
 — despite Herbert Spencer — long before speech. 
 But in our schools literature has meant " books," and 
 for the teacher to recite to a class the poems that the 
 pupils were to study was looked upon as a species of 
 " soft pedagogy." The literature lesson, then, almost 
 invariably meant, in England at any rate, a lesson in 
 reading. The case of music is similar and even more 
 unfortunate. To insist that before we can make the 
 acquaintance of Maxwelton braes and Annie Laurie 
 we must struggle through 
 
 dddd'd'tllsmmrdmr 
 and struggle through it not once but a dozen times ; 
 that we must then learn the poem as a poem, not in 
 association with its music ; and that only after all 
 this drudgery are we to link the two together and make 
 a song out of them ; this may be a good example of 
 " proceeding from the simple to the complex," but 
 it is a bad method from the point of view of apprecia- 
 tion. Milton speaks of music " married to immortal 
 verse " ; he does not speak of it as being nailed and 
 hammered to immortal verse. And Swinburne has 
 expressed the same idea : — 
 
 "If I were what the words are, 
 And love were like the tune,
 
 20 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 With double sound and single 
 Delight our lips would mingle, 
 
 With kisses glad as birds are 
 That get sweet rain at noon ; 
 
 If I were what the words are, 
 And love were like the tune." ^ 
 
 " Mingling," " kissing," — not the forcible and me- 
 chanical joining of two disparate and recalcitrant 
 units. Wagner tells us that he was the only child 
 in a large family who, up to the age of twelve, had not 
 been taught music. Technique — the technique of 
 reading music or reading poetry — may absolutely 
 kill appreciation before it is born.^ 
 
 But technique is necessary. — The specialist, of 
 course, will protest that we must have specific and 
 direct teaching of the technique. We must. When 
 people talk of teaching this or that subject incidentally, 
 they are too often trying to shunt a necessary, though 
 perhaps disagreeable, task. There must, certainly, 
 be specific and direct teaching of the technique of 
 language and music. But the lesson in appreciation 
 is not the time for the systematic and formal teaching 
 of technique, and the early stages of the lesson are 
 not even the time for technical discussions. Lessons 
 should differ enormously from each other, and the 
 
 1 A Match. 
 
 ^ A teacher tells me (indeed, I recollect something of the kind 
 occurring in my own experience) that children were often forbidden 
 to "look at the words" while the note-learning was in progress.
 
 ENEMIES IN THE GATE 21 
 
 lesson in technique must differ, — almost by the whole 
 diameter of being, — from the lesson in appreciation. 
 It is a safe rule never to allow a song to be introduced 
 through the musical notation of a book, and only 
 rarely should a poem be introduced to young children 
 through the printed page. Technique must be ab- 
 solutely kept out of the way or cleared out oj the way if 
 appreciation proper is to take place. Long after the 
 appreciation lesson itself is over, the music books 
 and the poetry books may be brought out ; and then 
 the class may be set to work, amid the retreating 
 sunlight of that lesson, at the fuller mastery of the 
 song or the poem. But appreciation is one thing and 
 technique is quite another, and the laws of the two 
 are different. 
 
 It may be suggested that books — music books and poetry 
 books — might at least stand open on the pupils' desks while 
 the teacher sings or recites the new piece. I think not. I 
 have often tried to follow a Beethoven symphony with the 
 open score before me, and I have invariably found that the 
 attempt was destructive of appreciation. It is true that 
 minds may differ essentially, some having greater power of 
 distributive attention than others — Beethoven and Watts, 
 for example, were more distributive than Goethe and Macau- 
 lay. But I know of no evidence in favor of attempts at the 
 same moment to obtain appreciation and to study the symbols 
 of art. Doubtless some pupils will ask for the technique 
 earlier than others; some will ask for the production of the 
 printed material after a single hearing ; others will prefer two, 
 five, or even ten repetitions. But I doubt whether, in any
 
 22 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 circumstances where auditory appreciation is possible, the work 
 of the eye should precede that of the ear. 
 
 The view of M. Cousinet. — The all-importance of 
 this matter of distraction has been emphasized by 
 a French educationist, M. Cousinet, in a somewhat 
 different connection.^ He divides human life into 
 five or six periods, some of which are aesthetically 
 promising and others not. What is it that makes 
 a period unpromising? The presence oj distraction. 
 There are, he says, certain periods of life when the 
 human being is able to appreciate (or " contemplate ") 
 with comparative ease, and certain other periods 
 when active affairs introduce an unfavorable influence. 
 After the first twelve or eighteen months of increas- 
 ing skill in perception, the child begins to " contem- 
 plate." He stops before shining things, but he does 
 not seek to use or possess them. He cries out, " How 
 beautiful ! " He loves to juxtapose colors and appre- 
 ciates color contrasts. If he only persisted in this 
 mood, his aesthetic education would be an easy 
 matter. 
 
 At about the third year, a change is noticed. Con- 
 siderations of utility and propriety invade his mind. 
 Things become pegs on which to hang names. 
 Pleasure is taken, not in beauty, but in the ability 
 to recognize, to identify, to name. This aesthetic 
 eclipse continues (says M. Cousinet) up to the years 
 
 ^ L'Educaleur Moderne, 1912-1913.
 
 ENEMIES IN THE GATE 23 
 
 of adolescence, — language, the social life, and the 
 utilities of things claim the child's attention. Even 
 adults do not stop eating in order to admire, and why 
 should we expect children to be more disinterested ? 
 
 Adolescence, however, is another period of repose 
 when aesthetic contemplation is possible. But this 
 is followed (sometimes far too quickly) by the storm 
 and stress of practical life. Professional preparation, 
 even perhaps brutal forms of wage earning banish the 
 appeal of beauty, and possibly the appeal never comes 
 again. The man is aesthetically dead, so that when, 
 in later years, the struggle for professional existence 
 becomes again less intense, and he is able to turn 
 " undistracted " to things of beauty, he may have 
 lost the power or the inclination to turn. Inner 
 resources are lacking. He has gained, perhaps, " the 
 whole world " that he coveted, — but he has " lost 
 his own soul." Women may be in the same predica- 
 ment. A mother of seven children — a woman of in- 
 tellect — who had had no leisure for eighteen years 
 said at the end of that time " all the threads of her 
 intellectual life seemed broken."
 
 CHAPTER III 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC AND POETRY 
 
 At this point, when the expectation of the reader 
 is possibly running high, it is necessary to pause in 
 order to discuss what poetry is. The teacher does 
 not need to be a profound student of all the subtleties 
 of this subject ; indeed, in his case as in that of the 
 child, a detailed knowledge of technique (unless com- 
 pensated b}^ other factors) may, through distracting 
 attention from spirit to form, injure rather than aid 
 appreciation. Yet unless one knows, at least in an 
 untechnical fashion, the leading principles of poetical 
 construction, one is certain in teaching either to ignore 
 many matters of interest or to expound them in 
 misleading or erroneous ways. If, then, the present 
 chapter breaks the sequence of the exposition at a 
 rather vital point, it does so in the interest of the reader 
 himself. 
 
 Substance versus form in art : art for art's sake. — 
 A long battle has been fought, and it is not yet over, 
 between those who lay the chief stress in matters of 
 art on substance and subject matter and those who 
 lay the chief stress on form, — who subscribe to the 
 doctrine of " art for art's sake." According to the 
 
 24
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC AND POETRY 25 
 
 latter, if something is beautiful in itself we need not 
 ask for it also to be moral and instructive. The artist 
 is neither a preacher nor a teacher. It is one thing 
 to have " someting to say " and quite a different thing 
 to know " how to say it," and the advocates of " art 
 for art's sake " always lay stress on the " how " 
 rather than on the " something." Indeed they often 
 become impatient with those people who expect the 
 artist to have a " message." 
 
 Innumerable examples illustrative of this controversy could 
 be selected from the history of art. Wagner had to fight a 
 battle of many years' duration because people did not under- 
 stand that he was more interested in delivering a moral or 
 social message in music than in producing beautiful music 
 itself. Bernard Shaw has made this distinction and many 
 others clear in his little books, The Perfect Wagnerite and The 
 Sanity of Art. Music may be purely decorative, just as plastic 
 ornament may be purely decorative; it may convey no mes- 
 sage at all beyond its own pure, sensuous beauty. But Wag- 
 ner's music is not of this kind. This is particularly striking 
 in his great four days' opera, The Ring of the Niebelung, which 
 is an impeachment of the existent system of society. But 
 one who compares even his shorter operas with those of his 
 contemporaries and predecessors will see that he was generally 
 trying to convey certain ideas, and not to produce music beau- 
 tiful merely in itself. The Meister singers of Nuremberg, for 
 example, represents in musical drama the struggle between 
 living artistry and dead pedantry. 
 
 Decorative versus expressional music. — But people 
 did not understand. They said that Wagner's was
 
 26 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 not " pure music " ; it seemed to them formless because 
 it followed the actual course of human actions and 
 emotions instead of certain rules and traditions which 
 were independent of such a course. Undoubtedly 
 " pure music " is a quite legitimate thing. We have 
 it in fugues, sonatas, symphonies, and the like. But 
 even here many great musicians have tried to break 
 down the distinction between the two kinds of music ; 
 having " something to say," they have compelled the 
 music to " say it " for them, even at the expense of 
 rules and traditions. Beethoven, after composing 
 eight magnificent symphonies, composed late in life 
 a ninth in which, after three movements of purely in- 
 strumental music, he confessed that something more 
 was needed (0 brothers, not such be our music !) and 
 made voices join with orchestra in Schiller's Ode to 
 Joy. This was the Choral Symphony over which, as 
 we have seen, Wagner took such pains. 
 
 The point to remember is that music may be purely 
 formal, general, and decorative but that it may also 
 be a medium for the expression of specific thought and 
 emotion, — a form in which to symbolize and per- 
 petuate lessons and ideals. Which is the higher and 
 better way to employ music, and, indeed, any kind 
 of art ? The classicists say the former ; the roman- 
 ticists, the latter. The greatest artists have gener- 
 ally been, or have tended to become, romanticists. 
 For example, Shakespeare was a romanticist in
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC .\ND POETRY 27 
 
 matters of poetry, and the classicists of the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries were, for that reason, dis- 
 satisfied with him. 
 
 Browning has much to say, but is not always suc- 
 cessful in saying it beautifully ; Swinburne has not 
 much to say, but he often says it in forms that are 
 full of sensuous beauty and charm. Thomas Cole, 
 the American painter, has stupendous subjects. The 
 Course of Empire and The Voyage of Life; William 
 M. Hunt has comparatively trivial subjects, e.g. The 
 Boy and the Butterfly, but he paints them with great 
 artistic subtlety. 
 
 It would be a mistake to press the distinction too 
 far. Some people doubt whether there is any such 
 thing as aesthetic appreciation entirely divorced from 
 ideas. " The merest germ of the sense of beauty seems 
 to imply a distinction between stimulus and signif- 
 icance," — between form and content.^ It is a 
 matter of degree, but the student needs to know the 
 distinction, — and, after hearing a poem or a song, 
 or after seeing a picture or a statue, to ask himself 
 whether the charm lies in the ideas conveyed or in the 
 mere form. If the charm lies in both, he is face to 
 face with art of the highest kind. 
 
 Prose versus poetry. — " But ideas can be con- 
 veyed in prose," some one objects. Where, then, 
 lies the difference between prose and poetry? 
 * Bosanquet, quoted by De Garmo.
 
 28 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 Undoubtedly there is much poetical prose and much 
 
 prosy poetry. Pope begins his Essay on Man with : — 
 
 " Awake, my St. John ! Leave all meaner things 
 To low ambition and the pride of kings." 
 
 Is this prose or poetry? Except for the rhyme it is 
 
 almost indistinguishable from prose, for the note of 
 
 )oetical distinction is missing. On the other hand, 
 
 Milton's prose is often highly poetical, as in the famous 
 
 Areopagilica passage : — 
 
 "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation 
 rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her 
 invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle, mewing her 
 mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid- 
 day beam. . . ." 
 
 Where, then, lies the difference between prose and 
 poetry ? The difference is one of degree, clearly, but 
 wherein does it consist? 
 
 Partly in the ideas that are summoned into the 
 mind in the two cases. A weary and disappointed 
 man may say, " I am in a state of mental and physical 
 collapse," and he is obviously talking in prose. Or 
 he may say with Macbeth, " I am fallen into the sere 
 and yellow leaf," and we recognize the presence of 
 poetry. The words " state," " mental," " collapse," 
 are prosy, general words, useful in ordinary speech 
 but without any very intimate associations with our 
 life. But the words, " sere and yellow leaf," recall all 
 kinds of personal and pensive experiences — how, one
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC AND POETRY 2g 
 
 day, we sat in the woods and felt the life of the old 
 
 year dying away And the word " fallen " 
 
 suggests a weakness and hopelessness that is very real 
 and very human. 
 
 Metaphors and similes. — Does, then, the differ- 
 ence between prose and poetry consist in the more 
 extensive use of metaphor and simile in the latter? 
 Largely, but not entirely. Metaphors and similes 
 may be powerful and yet not exactly poetical — at 
 any rate according to our present notions. " Chem- 
 ical afhnity is love between the molecules " ; this 
 metaphor certainly approaches the poetical. But if 
 we reverse it and say, " Love is chemical affinity 
 between the souls of men," is our metaphor poetical? 
 Possibly it is — for the scientist. But for most men 
 it is not. Indeed there is some doubt whether we 
 ought to call it a metaphor at all, for a poetical meta- 
 phor should always be more vivid, more vital, more 
 personal, than the idea it is intended to elucidate. 
 
 New possibilities of artistic expression. — It is 
 necessary to speak with some hesitancy here. New 
 forms of art are arising in our midst. Poets have 
 hitherto drawn most of their metaphors from country 
 life ; they are beginning to draw them from industrial 
 and scientific life, — even from what seem to be 
 repellent forms of that Hfe. Painters and sculptors, 
 too, are feeling the same impulse to be " modern." 
 In the entrance hall of the Carnegie Institute at Pitts-
 
 30 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 burgh is a series of frescoes representing half-naked 
 laborers working at the furnaces of the town ; loco- 
 motives adding their huge columns of steam to the 
 torrents of smoke which pour densely from the steel 
 works ; an armed giant — Pittsburgh — rising like a 
 god from the midst of the murky scene, hailed by 
 attendant spirits ; and, far above, a procession of 
 people pressing eagerly on toward a goal of happiness 
 and prosperity. The artist has sought to find romance 
 in the midst of industrialism. Kipling has attempted 
 the same kind of thing in poetry by drawing metaphors 
 from machiner}' , navigation, and the like ; Whitman, 
 too; and Wells, with his highly virile prose style, has 
 drawn powerful metaphors not only from the very 
 heart of Hfe, but from a number of arts and sciences, 
 particularly from his favorite science, biology. 
 
 "She noted that as a good saying and it germinated and 
 spread tentacles of explanation through her brain." 
 
 Socialism must be "a battle against human stupidity and 
 egotism and disorder, a battle fought all through the forests 
 and jungles of the soul of man." 
 
 "The air was thick with feelings." 
 
 "There was a gulf of eight years between her and the young- 
 est of her brace of sisters, an impassable gulf inhabited chaoti- 
 cally by two noisy brothers." 
 
 "The life of a young girl is set about with prowling pitfalls." 
 
 "All the talk seemed to be like a ship in adverse weather on 
 the lea shore of love." ' 
 
 • Ann Veronica.
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC AND POETRY 3I 
 
 What now about " love " and " chemical affinity " ? 
 If the time ever comes when men's minds are occupied 
 more with exciting and personal thoughts about 
 chemistry than with exciting and personal thoughts 
 about love, the comparison of love with chemical 
 affinity will be an effective poetical metaphor. But 
 at present the word " love " is the more intimate 
 word, — perhaps the most intimate word in the 
 language. It is for this reason that Maeterlinck's 
 books. The Life of the Bee and The Intelligence of 
 Flowers are so impressive. The stamens are the 
 bridegrooms who are yearning for the proud brides 
 up yonder or down yonder. Here is a passage : — 
 
 "The Vallisneria [is] a hydrocharad whose nuptials form the 
 most tragic episode in the love history of the flowers. . . . 
 Its whole existence is spent at the bottom of the water, in a 
 sort of half slumber, until the moment of the wedding hour 
 comes, when it aspires to a new Ufe. Then the female plant 
 slowly uncoils the long spiral of its peduncle, rises, emerges 
 and floats and blossoms on the surface of the pond. From a 
 neighboring stem, the male flowers, which see it through the 
 sunlit water, rise in their turn, fuU of hope, towards the one 
 that . . . awaits them, that calls them to a fairer world. But, 
 when they have come halfway, they feel themselves suddenly 
 held back: their stalk, the very source of their Ufe, is too 
 short ; they will never reach the abode of light, the only spot 
 in which the union of the stamens and the pistil can be 
 achieved ! . . . 
 
 "Is there any more cruel inadvertence or ordeal in natiure? 
 Picture the tragedy of that longing. . . . They hesitate a
 
 32 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 moment; then with a magnificent effort, the finest, the most 
 supernatural that I know of in all the pageantry of the insects 
 and the flowers, in order to rise to happiness they deliberately 
 break the bond that attaches them to life. They tear them- 
 selves from their peduncle, and, with an incomparable flight, 
 amid bubbles of gladness, their petals dart up and break the 
 surface of the water. Wounded to death, but radiant and 
 free, they float for a moment beside their heedless brides. . . ." 
 
 It is clear that no metaphor is poetically effective 
 unless it appeals to observation or experience more 
 familiar or intense than that which it seeks to elucidate. 
 If words like " nuptial," " love," " bride," are feeble 
 or meaningless to us we shall fail to appreciate Maeter- 
 linck's expositions of plant and animal life. If 
 words like " jungle," " gulf," " tentacles," are feeble 
 or meaningless to us, we shall fail to appreciate the 
 vigorous prose of Wells. And, for the same reason, 
 if Elizabethan metaphors are feeble or meaningless, 
 a person will fail to appreciate at its full the genius 
 of Shakespeare. Here we come face to face with the 
 pedagogic problem that will confront us in the next 
 chapter. 
 
 Rhythm in poetry and in prose. — But rich, vital, 
 metaphorical language is not the only characteristic 
 of poetry. Poetry is not only metaphorical, it is 
 rhythmical. But so, too, is prose. Here, again, 
 the distinction between prose and poetry is not so 
 clear as it seems at first sight. On this subject, un- 
 fortunately, we have inherited the classical notions.
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC AND POETRY 33 
 
 We are told that the verses or lines of poetry may 
 be: — 
 
 (a) dactylic hexameters (Homer, Vergil, Evan- 
 geline, etc.) ; 
 
 (b) iambic pentameters (" A gentle knight was 
 pricking on the plain." — Faery Queen) ; 
 
 (c) iambic tetrameters (" The stag at eve had drunk 
 his fill." — The Lady of the Lake) ; or 
 
 (d) trochaic tetrameters (" Hiawatha, laughing 
 water "), and so on. 
 
 Thus we imagine that our poetry is not very far 
 removed from the Latin and Greek with its longs and 
 shorts (a dactyl, for example, consisting of one long 
 syllable followed by two shorts _ ^ v./ as in the word 
 " dactylus " itself). We admit that, instead of 
 " long," we should say " accented," and instead of 
 " short," we should say " unaccented " ; but other- 
 wise we imagine that the old scheme of classical meters 
 will suit our language very well. 
 
 It is certainly better to talk about pentameters, 
 hexameters, and tetrameters than it is to say nothing 
 to our pupils about rhythm. There is doubtless a 
 certain interest in discovering inductively that most 
 of Shakespeare's verses contain ten syllables ; that 
 Fletcher was more fond than Shakespeare of an eleven- 
 syllabled verse ; and that scholars have therefore 
 attributed large portions of King Henry the Eighth to 
 Fletcher. But all this is a Uttle superficial, more
 
 34 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 befitting the spirit of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries than the age that produced 
 
 "The quality of mercy is not strained ; 
 It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
 Upon the place beneath ; it is twice blessed. . . ." 
 
 For, in the first of these verses, we have only three high 
 
 II / _ 
 
 stresses (quahty, mercy, strained) ; in the second, only 
 
 four ; and in the third, only three or four. In fact, 
 
 the attempt to discover five iambs in these " iambic 
 
 pentameters " is an impossible one. " Twice blessed " 
 
 is, for example, rather a '' spondee " than an iambus; 
 
 and the syllable " ity " in '' quahty " is " pyrrhic." 
 
 English poetry does not follow the classical forms 
 of prosody, — The genius of Enghsh poetry at its 
 best will never be understood so long as classical 
 notions of syllabic length or even of mere poetical 
 stress hold the field. Poetical rhythm in Shake- 
 speare, Milton, and Keats is intimately related to prose 
 usages, and to the meaning of the ideas expressed. 
 The greatness of these poets Ues in their power to 
 mold ordinary prose rhythm into forms that convey 
 their meaning with supreme power and charm. 
 
 By way of illustration, read the above prose 
 sentence, commencing with " The greatness." It will 
 be noted that 
 
 (a) the article " the " is unstressed ; 
 
 (6) the noun "greatness" has high stress;
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC AND POETRY 35 
 
 (c) the preposition " of " is unstressed ; 
 
 (d) the adjective " their " has moderate stress ; 
 and so on. 
 
 There are a dozen or more laws of this kind, and 
 when we find that certain lines of poetry strike us as 
 immortally great, the reason is not that the poet has 
 composed unusually regular pentameters, but that he 
 has employed the natural stresses of English speech 
 to express what he wishes to express. 
 
 "Your mind is tossing on the ocean," says Salarino to An- 
 tonio in The Merchant of Venice. Where is the iambic pen- 
 tameter, even when we have made "ocean" a trisyllabic word? 
 There are, possibly, three iambs in this verse, but no one can 
 discover more than three, and any attempt to accentuate the 
 "on" would be to deviate from the prose usage that makes a 
 proposition unstressed. Anyone, however, can discover the 
 jerkiness of the line, — a quality fitly symbolic of the state of 
 Antonio's mind. The verse is molded to the thought, not to 
 a scheme of five accented and five unaccented syllables. 
 
 Does all this mean that blank verse is the same as 
 prose ? No ; but merely that blank verse is rooted 
 and grounded in principles of common speech and 
 stress which are distinctively English and differ 
 wholly from the principles that rule in stressless lan- 
 guages like French, and quantitative languages like 
 Latin. The poet, it is true, introduces a more regular 
 rhythm into his poetry than a prose writer introduces 
 into his prose, but the regularity is fitful and unob- 
 trusive ; thought and its natural expression are his
 
 36 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 main concern, and he is a great poet if he can so shape 
 his words as just to suggest regularity and recurrence, 
 and at the same time not to betray in the slightest 
 the everyday genius of the language. 
 
 All of the greatest passages in English blank verse exemplify 
 this ; from Macbeth, for example, — 
 
 "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 
 Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow. 
 Rase out the written troubles of the brain. 
 And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
 Purge the stuffed bosom of the perilous grief 
 That weighs upon the heart ?" 
 
 Is the first verse prose or poetry? Certainly it is 
 
 not an iambic pentameter. To force it into this 
 
 mold : — 
 
 / / /• • 
 
 " Canst thou not minister to a . . ." 
 
 would spoil it completely. The whole passage is 
 rhythmic, but the rhythm is something larger and 
 more organically connected with the thought than any 
 alleged scheme of pentametric prosody can take 
 account of. Shakespeare used language just as 
 Wagner used music — expressively. 
 
 Lyrics, of course, follow a regular scheme more 
 closely than blank verse, and the preceding remarks 
 apply to them only with qualifications. A lyric 
 deals with one specific mood or thought, and is there- 
 fore capable of being shaped into a cameo-like dainti- 
 ness unsuitable for the treatment of large, variegated
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC AND POETRY 37 
 
 themes. Sometimes, indeed, a single stanza is ravish- 
 ingly perfect in itself, complete in thought, regular 
 in form. What can excel this from Whittier: — 
 
 " Not Thine the bigot's partial plea, 
 Nor Thine the zealot's ban : 
 Thou well cans't spare a love of Thee 
 Which ends in hate of man." 
 
 Or this of Matthew Arnold : — 
 
 " Come to me in my dreams, and then, 
 By day I shall be well again ! 
 For then the night will more than pay 
 The hopeless longing of the day." 
 
 Regularity, rigidity indeed, is possible and desirable 
 where the thought is simple, definite, and therefore 
 manageable in small compass. But all art cannot 
 take this form. 
 
 Enough has been said to introduce the reader to 
 the important practical problems of the next chapter. 
 Poetry is clearly a very vital thing. It draws its meta- 
 phors from ordinary life, and it draws its rhythms from 
 ordinary speech. But — emotion demands a greater 
 regularity of rhythm than we expect or desire in our 
 non-emotional moods. That is all that need be said. 
 Any lesson in appreciation that ignores these facts is 
 bound to fail. 
 
 Modern Experiments in Art Form. It was shown above 
 that many new subjects (industrialism p. 29) are being ap-
 
 38 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 propriated by artists and writers for artistic purposes, and it 
 is equally important to recognize the existence of other changes. 
 The principles upon which art is or should be built are still a 
 matter of controversy, just because all art is progressive and 
 new forms of it are constantly being devised. Many of these 
 forms, no doubt, will perish unlamented as being begotten of 
 a mere craving for notoriety or a desire to defy conventional 
 standards. "Futurist painting," "impressionist music" (im- 
 pressionist painting seems to have come to stay), Walt Whit- 
 man's prose-poetry, Paul Fort's Ballades franqaises (written 
 in prose, yet largely poetical) are examples of artistic novelties 
 about which people hold very different opinions. Art has to 
 steer between the Scylla of excessive regularity which becomes 
 monotonous and expressionless, and the Charybdis of an ex- 
 pressional chaos which is not art at all. Meanwhile it is in- 
 teresting to note that Professor Saintsbury has recently studied 
 the rhythms of prose and has tried to show how they differ 
 from those of poetry. We learn from him, too, not only that 
 poetry easily slips into prose but that "fine prose" is often 
 really poetry: Dickens, for example, often wrote in hexam- 
 eters. Perhaps it would be not far wrong to say that good 
 prose should just suggest poetical rhythm (and other poetical 
 devices) but should never pass over into continuous poetry ; 
 while good poetry should just suggest the prose rhythms, which 
 we use in common life, but should never become continuous 
 prose. Everything is here a matter of degree.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 POSITIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE PREPARATION 
 
 It is now time to resume the consideration of the 
 appreciation lesson itself. The readers of Chapters I 
 and II might be inclined to infer that the chief recipes 
 for carrying the lesson to a successful conclusion are 
 two : (a) make an energetic first impression ; and 
 (b) keep distractions away. But the problem is much 
 more complex than this. The first impression is cer- 
 tainly important ; and it is so gravely interfered with 
 by distractions of any kind that the removal of the 
 latter is a cardinal item in the technique of the lesson. 
 We may call this the principle of negative preparation. 
 But there is need of a more subtle kind of preparation. 
 Negative preparation gives appreciation a chance to 
 arise ; it does not contribute actively to appreciation 
 itself. That is the task of positive preparation. 
 
 Grouping ideas together as a source of aesthetic 
 pleasure. — M. Cousinet has rightly traced much of 
 the highest aesthetic pleasure to the " grouping together 
 of ideas," — the reinforcing of crude admirations by 
 means of such intellectual elements as interpreta- 
 tions, memories, contrasts, and the like. Now if 
 
 39
 
 40 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 such " groupings " and " reinforcings " are within 
 the possibilities of pedagogy, it is plain that pedagogy 
 can positively create aesthetic pleasure. The reinforce- 
 ment of the word " affinity " by the word " love " 
 is only a type of what may take place a thousand 
 times. We here enter a most fascinating realm of 
 educational possibilities. 
 
 There are limits to the possibilities, of course. 
 The word " love " — at any rate in the sense in which 
 Maeterlinck uses it in his Intelligence of Flowers — 
 stands for an experience which children are too young 
 to have had ; consequently all " nuptial " metaphors 
 can never mean very much for the child, nor, indeed, 
 can they ever mean so much for the passionless as 
 for the passionate. School can provide instruction, 
 but it is limited in the forms of direct experience that 
 it can provide. Much, however, can be done. 
 
 We have seen that a metaphor or simile implies 
 two ideas, and sometimes, indeed, as in the " blind 
 mouths" passage^ in Milton's Lycidas, — more than 
 two ideas, in which case it may be a mixed metaphor. 
 The reader should study with care Ruskin's exposi- 
 tion of that passage in Sesame and Lilies. He will 
 learn from it that, when a great writer uses a powerful 
 and striking word, we are faithless to him if we allow 
 the meaning of the word to be attenuated or lost. 
 
 * "Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold a 
 sheep hook."
 
 POSITIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE PREPARATION 41 
 
 The theme of the present chapter is how this disas- 
 trous result may be prevented. 
 
 Analysis of some metaphors. — Londoners speak 
 of their parks as the "lungs" of the city; but if 
 we have never heard of lungs, or have only a vague 
 idea of their function, the metaphor is meaningless, 
 just as it would have been meaningless to Shakespeare 
 with his inadequate ideas of the circulation of the 
 blood. Conversely, if we have a rich knowledge of 
 the function of the lungs, we shall probably see, better 
 than most people, the extreme appropriateness of 
 calling the parks " lungs," and we shall realize that 
 the person who first used this metaphor caught and 
 crystallized a certain connection between ideas — 
 a connection which, obvious though it may now seem, 
 would occur only to one person perhaps in ten thou- 
 sand. 
 
 Take again the word " rack." In Shakespeare's 
 plays, it has two meanings. Prospero says toward 
 the end of The Tempest : — 
 
 "These our actors, 
 As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 
 Are melted into air, into thin air : 
 And like the baseless fabric of this vision. 
 The cloud-capped towers, the great globe itself, 
 Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve. 
 And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
 Leave not a rack behind."
 
 42 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 Here, of course, the word " rack " means a whisp 
 of vapor (German, Ranch). Perhaps it is hardly 
 necessary for the teacher to explain such a word as 
 this in advance, unfamiHar though it is ; the context 
 prevents any serious misapprehension. But the word 
 " rack " was also used in Shakespeare's (or Bacon's) 
 time to designate an instrument by which the human 
 frame could be diabolically tortured and pulled 
 asunder. Hallam tells us that " the rack seldom 
 stood idle in the Tower for all the latter part of 
 EUzabeth's reign " ; thus the word was a familiar 
 one ; it meant something. To-day we can regain the 
 word, or understand its meaning in the minds of men 
 three centuries ago, only by reading some harrowing 
 account of Tudor or Stuart times. If we have Hved 
 imaginatively or vicariously through some of these 
 typical experiences, we are in a position to appreciate 
 the words uttered by Kent toward the end of King 
 Lear. The old monarch is at his last gasp ; the busy- 
 bodies standing around him cry to him in their 
 crude and meaningless sympathy to " Look up! " — 
 to him who had been torn between his egoism 
 and his affection in his contest with Cordeha, and 
 who, in the later contest with Goneril and Regan, 
 had run like a baffled animal from one to the other. 
 It was to this old man, from whom, as the last blow of 
 all, Cordeha had now been taken, that the bystanders 
 call out, " My lord, look up! " Cannot we see the
 
 POSITIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE PREPARATION 43 
 
 exquisite appropriateness of Kent's reply to their 
 
 importunities, — 
 
 "O, let him pass ! he hates him 
 That would upon the rack of this tough world 
 Stretch him out longer." 
 
 The word " rack " is the one and only word that 
 seems to fit Lear's tragic experience. Job had his 
 trials too, but his nature was not pulled asunder 
 quite as Lear's was. Under the " buffetings of chance " 
 his head was bloody ; but the buffetings were external 
 as buffetings usually are. OEdipus was pursued by 
 a mahgnant destiny and caught in a trap devised, as 
 it seemed, by some devil for his destruction ; but his 
 terrible sorrow was one gigantic thing, a kind of enemy 
 from without. The buffetings of Job and the trap 
 of CEdipus were different from the rack on which Lear 
 was stretched. 
 
 Another great example of the use of metaphor may 
 be found in the twenty-third Psalm : — 
 
 "The Lord is my shepherd — " 
 
 No, a thousand times No ! 
 
 "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." 
 
 The whole weight of the psalm is upon that one word, 
 *' Shepherd." 
 
 "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth 
 me beside the stUl waters.
 
 44 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 "He restoreth my soul: he Icadeth me in the paths of 
 righteousness, for his name's sake. 
 
 "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of 
 death, I will fear no evil, 
 
 "For thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort 
 me. . ." 
 
 What is the mistake that is commonly made in 
 dealing with this Psalm ? It is one of the ever-recur- 
 ring mistakes that dog our lessons in literature : 
 using metaphors and similes in a feeble way, making 
 no attempt, — except post hoc attempts or after- 
 thoughts, — to load tJie metaphor or simile with mean- 
 ing before allowing it to be used at all. The Psalm 
 has six verses ; five of them are concerned with a 
 sheep and a shepherd, and with nothing else. We 
 must drink deep of pastoral life before we can appre- 
 ciate the Psalm at all. We must even drink deep of 
 the geography of Palestine, for the " valley of the 
 shadow of death " meant one of the many ravines of 
 the land, haunted by robbers and by wild beasts, and 
 gloomy even at midday. And " green pastures " 
 similarly meant, to the Oriental in his half-parched 
 lands, ten times more than it can mean to us. Nay, 
 " the paths of righteousness " are not paths of right- 
 eousness at all ; the idea is " right paths," " right 
 tracks," as opposed to delusive tracks that lead the 
 flocks nowhere. " Thou preparest a table before me 
 in the presence of mine enemies " ! the shepherd
 
 POSITIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE PREPARATION 45 
 
 prepares a resting place for the flock at night, roots 
 out adders and scorpions, and dresses the wounds of 
 the sheep with oil before they settle down for the 
 night. 
 
 When we have grasped all this, we begin to perceive 
 the magnificence of the matchless twenty- third Psalm. 
 But if we prematurely meddle with the metaphor, — 
 pulling it asunder though hardly born ; if we explain 
 that the " valley of the shadow of death " meant 
 "death "and that the paths of righteousness meant the 
 paths of virtue and respectability ; we may be teach- 
 ing theology well, but we are teaching literature badly. 
 
 Reviving attenuated and lost meanings. — Not 
 infrequently the meanings that formerly attached to 
 certain words have weakened, and it becomes the 
 duty of the teacher of poetry to revitalize them. The 
 word " charming " is a case in point. When Imogen 
 says, in Cytnbeline, — 
 
 " Or ere I could 
 
 I Give him that parting kiss which I had set 
 
 Betwixt two charming words, comes in my father," 
 
 she meant by "charming," enchanting — working 
 a kind of magical protection for her lover. At the 
 beginning of the eighth book of Paradise Lost, the 
 same word, although a little weaker than in the 
 instance just cited, is far stronger than when used in 
 ordinary conversation to-day : —
 
 46 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 " The angel ended, and in Adam's ear 
 So charming left his voice, that he awhile 
 Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear ; 
 Then, as new waked, thus gratefully replied." 
 
 The notion of magical enchantment still remains in 
 this passage. 
 When Olivia in Twelfth Night says to Viola : — 
 
 " What might you think ? 
 Have you not set mine honor at the stake, 
 And baited it with all the unmuzzled thoughts 
 That tyrannous heart can think ? " 
 
 she is, of course, referring to bear baiting. The 
 metaphor is coldly understandable by us even to-day, 
 but we hardly feel its power. Nor do we feel the full 
 power of Hamlet's " mutines in the bilboes " — per- 
 haps we do not even know what " bilboes " were, 
 nor the vexatious restraint, often passing into anguish, 
 which they inflicted on the unfortunate " mutines." 
 
 In the present state of school time-tables it will 
 perhaps be impossible to give a large amount of time 
 to the task of making meaningful all of the words 
 that the pupils meet in the literature they read ; 
 but much work of this type will have to be done if the 
 full possibilities of lessons in appreciation are to be 
 realized. 
 
 Words may meet a more unhappy fate than merely 
 to be attenuated in meaning. They may lose all 
 meaning, or they may acquire a meaning far removed
 
 POSITIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE PREPARATION 47 
 
 from their original. Are we to allow such words to 
 be dumped down before a class and thus create won- 
 derment and distraction ? Yes — if our concern is 
 something less than appreciation ; if, for example, it 
 is the scientific study of words in and for themselves. 
 But if our concern is appreciation, we must be very 
 cautious of allowing such interferences with Hmpid 
 understanding and pure delight. 
 
 Practical corollary : pioneer the metaphor. — To 
 what, now, does the preceding discussion point? 
 It points once more to the necessity of red-letter les- 
 sons, preceded (days, weeks, or perhaps months in 
 advance) by phases of positive as well as of negative 
 preparation. It may be excusable to exclude real 
 literature from the preadolescent schools, or it may 
 be excusable to employ hterature for Hturgical pur- 
 poses only — as a part of a stately School Ritual ; 
 but it is not legitimate to teach literature in a feeble, 
 hurried, makeshift, ad hoc manner and without pains- 
 taking preparation. If a child is to appreciate a 
 great metaphor we must supply him with experience 
 that will make it meaningful ; and if he is to appre- 
 ciate the subtle appropriateness of words whose mean- 
 ings have been weakened or lost, we must do some- 
 thing — unfortunately we can usually do but little — 
 to make that appropriateness evident. 
 
 The spirit that dominates the school organization 
 will obviously be a large factor in determining the
 
 48 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 efficiency of such work. If all lessons are regarded 
 as of equal importance, " red-letter lessons " are out 
 of the question ; and in conditions of this sort, prepa- 
 ration far in advance will be shirked by the teacher. 
 He will not waste time in pioneering a metaphor which 
 is to be used only after the lapse of two or three 
 months. In short, few teachers will have the incen- 
 tive to do teaching of this subtle kind unless super- 
 visors, inspectors, and superintendents are far-seeing 
 enough to place a premium upon it. But if a premium 
 is placed upon these red-letter lessons — if the teacher 
 recognizes that here is an opportunity for adventurous 
 achievement in his own field — such lessons will be 
 given and given well. 
 
 And in employing this type of teaching, the teacher 
 may discover appreciative possibihties of an un- 
 expected kind in the child. Indeed, the child — 
 primed up with " shepherd " ideas and *' rack " ideas 
 and the like — may actually appreciate literature 
 more ecstatically than the adult. For there is such a 
 thing as " presentative activity " in ideas ; and if the 
 word " rack " has been artificially made to carry a 
 fresher and more vigorous meaning for the inexperienced 
 child than for the experienced adult — skillful teach- 
 ing is probably able to effect this — there is Httle doubt 
 that the child will warmly appreciate things that 
 would leave the adult cold. 
 
 It is difficult to assign, at present, any definite limit
 
 POSITIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE PREPARATION 49 
 
 to the application of this principle. If poetical 
 metaphors are to be taken seriously, there is no 
 option in the matter. The " fairy flax " and the 
 " hawthorn buds " of the Wreck of the Hesperus 
 must be shown to the pupils before the poem itself 
 is heard ; though whether hours, days, or weeks in 
 advance is a matter for the teacher to decide. In 
 some cases, doubtless, only a brief period should elapse 
 between the two events, and recency itself may often 
 be an advantage. In other cases, where more remotely 
 subtle associational values of a word have to be built 
 up, recency would be fatal. But the general nature 
 of the poUcy to be pursued is unafi[ected by differences 
 of detail. If poetry is to be treated seriously in school 
 (and I repeat that there are legitimate doubts on this 
 matter — doubts which experiment and careful obser- 
 vation alone can solve) , then we must treat metaphors 
 seriously ; and this is possible only in some such way 
 as has been indicated. 
 
 The employment of familiarity. — There are, of 
 course, other forms of " positive preparation " than the 
 one above discussed. The " overture " to an opera 
 is usually a collection of the melodies that will appear 
 in the body of the opera itself. The musician intro- 
 duces them at the outset in order that the pleasur- 
 ableness of famiUarity may enhance the pleasurable- 
 ness of the musical beauty of the passages. Now, 
 this " overture " type of " positive preparation "
 
 50 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 is important in the appreciation of poetry and prose 
 as well as in the appreciation of music. The teacher 
 may dehberately seek to enhance the effectiveness of 
 a great passage by quoting fragments of it long in 
 advance of its systematic presentation. The " apper- 
 ception " here is cruder and more primitive in type 
 than that involved in the appreciation of metaphors 
 and similes, but it is hardly less important. It illus- 
 trates a fundamental principle which the philosophy 
 of aesthetics has never adequately recognized: the 
 principle, namely, that famiharity, habituation, and 
 custom are prime factors in determining our likes and 
 dislikes.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE THRESHOLD OF THE LESSON — AND OVER 
 
 Hitherto I have been considering very far-away 
 devices of preparing pupils for appreciating a work 
 of art. But preparation cannot go on forever. The 
 time comes when the lesson itself must be given. But 
 now, on the very threshold of it, the need for still 
 other modes of preparation becomes manifest, though 
 some of these concern the preparation of the teacher 
 rather than of the pupil. 
 
 Wagner again. — A very important phase of the 
 teacher's preparation is indicated clearly by Wagner : — 
 
 "I tried to get the three hundred singers into a state of 
 genuine ecstasy. For instance, I succeeded in demonstrating 
 to the basses that the celebrated passage . . . could not be 
 sung in an ordinary manner, but must, as it were, be pro- 
 claimed with the greatest rapture." 
 
 In the present case we are concerned not with three 
 hundred singers but with one teacher, and the prac- 
 tical inference for him is that he should get himself, 
 like them, into a state of what Wagner calls " ecstasy " 
 or " rapture." If this is impossible, — if the poem 
 does not appeal to him and if he can generate no 
 
 SI
 
 52 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 enthusiasm for it, — he should ask to be relieved of the 
 task of teaching it. 
 
 Wagner gives us further details of how he prepared 
 his orchestra for an expressive rendering of the Ninth 
 Symphony: — 
 
 "I made all kinds of notes myself in the various parts, so 
 as to make sure that their interpretation would be as clear and 
 as colored as possible." 
 
 Now the teacher, to be successful, must take anal- 
 ogous steps. He must go over the poem or the 
 passage to himself, again and again, trying one mode 
 of emphasis after another, stopping here, stopping 
 there, reading a phrase slowly, reading it fast, and at 
 last deciding in his own mind which is the very best 
 mode of all ; and then, if necessary, he should mark 
 this mode on his copy. Not that there is any one way 
 of reading a passage that can be safely prescribed for 
 all people ; but there will be one way for each indi- 
 vidual, and he must find it out if he is to make a suc- 
 cess of the appreciation lesson. 
 
 Consider, for example, the closing lines in Keats's Ode to 
 Psyche: — 
 
 " And there shall be for thee all soft delight 
 That shadowy thought can win, 
 A bright torch and a casement ope at night, 
 To let the warm love in." 
 
 There are two distinct ways in which, before now, I have 
 read these lines. One way is to make a long pause after the
 
 THE THRESHOLD OF THE LESSON — AND OVER 53 
 
 word "love"; this produces an effect of wistful realization or 
 consummation; the visitant comes at last, and the heart is 
 at rest. But the lines may also be read rapidly and without 
 any such pause ; there is then more bustle and swoop. Who 
 is to say which is the better rendering ? One thing is certain ; 
 we must not compromise in matters of expression ; we must 
 choose our rendering and make it a very definite one for our 
 pupils' ears; it must be, as Wagner said, "clear and colored." 
 Better to be guilty of exaggeration here than of tameness : 
 better to force into the poet's Lines more meaning than was 
 intended than to leave any shade of meaning out. "If in a 
 matter of scholarship it is well to be safe or even to 'hedge,' 
 in a matter of Art any such cowardice is fatal." ^ 
 
 But even marks of expression inserted in the 
 teacher's printed copy may not be enough. He 
 should generally know the poem by heart. I speak 
 doubtfully, because to know a poem too well is, in 
 some cases, to lose interest in it. Actors, after a 
 long season, become machines, and lose in feeling 
 what they gain in facility; they are "overtrained." 
 Wagner, indeed, refers to this in another passage of his 
 Autobiography; his Tannhduser artistes were over- 
 trained during the famous Paris struggle. But to 
 know a poem or a song inadequately is far more 
 fatal. The principle of '' distraction " comes in 
 here ; instead of being free to express the emotion of 
 the poem, the teacher, in order to know the words 
 that come next, has constantly to refer to his copy, 
 
 ' Gilbert Murray, Euripides, p. ix.
 
 54 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 thus scattering his attention and dissipating his 
 emotion. Probably, as abready remarked, individ- 
 uals differ ; but there is evidently a strong case for 
 knowing the poem well if not by heart. 
 
 *' Immediate preparation." — And now, at last, the 
 teacher is ready for his lesson. But are the pupils 
 ready? Certainly they are more nearly in the atti- 
 tude that is favorable to keen appreciation than they 
 would have been if negative and positive preparation 
 had been neglected. But are there no finishing 
 touches to be given to the long process discussed in 
 the preceding chapters? I think that there are. 
 There is a need for something that may be called 
 immediate preparation. 
 
 One is reminded of the traditional " formal steps " 
 of the Herbartians. The first of these, as applied 
 to a lesson-unit,^ is known as " preparation " ; 
 and, although I am not aware that either Herbart 
 or his follower Ziller recommended the pioneering of 
 metaphors and the other devices discussed above, 
 and although Ziller was perhaps too keenly interested 
 in the notion of a definite " lesson " (or " method- 
 unit ") to contemplate the possibility of this far-away 
 and almost discursive preparation, both men would 
 
 ^ Perhaps I ought to point out here that a complete "lesson" is 
 not conceived in this book as a single period of thirty, forty, or sixty 
 minutes' duration. It may be of any length and be distributed over 
 minutes, days, weeks, or months.
 
 THE THRESHOLD OF THE LESSON — AND OVER 55 
 
 doubtless have approved of the general procedure 
 here suggested; it is, in fact, an obvious corollary 
 from their basic doctrine of " apperception." 
 
 The five formal steps. — Consider the function of 
 preparation in the scheme of the five steps.^ This 
 first step has often been criticized on the ground that 
 it deteriorates into a discursive and mystifying talk, 
 — a mere waste of the pupils' time, — while the lesson 
 itself is kept waiting. Particularly has it been criti- 
 cized when attempts have been made to " educe " 
 from the pupils things that they cannot be expected 
 to know or at best can only guess at. Some educa- 
 tionists have even objected, less justly, to Ziller's 
 proposal that the " aim " of the lesson should be 
 clearly stated to the pupils. 
 
 Yet surely something akin to " stating the aim " 
 should be a phase of most lessons. Great epic poems 
 have rightly begun with a summary of their theme : 
 " Achilles' wrath " in the Iliad; " Arms and the man," 
 in the yEneid; " Man's first disobedience " in Para- 
 
 ^ First step : Preparation 
 Second step : Presentation 
 Third step : Association 
 
 Observing : 
 
 Fourth step ; 
 
 Fifth step : 
 
 (Sometimes called 
 Comparison and 
 Abstraction) 
 
 Formulation 
 
 (Sometimes called 
 Generalization) 
 
 Application 
 
 Thinking 
 
 Applying
 
 56 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 dise Lost; and there is every reason why our lesson 
 should begin in somewhat the same way. Sometimes 
 the aim of a lesson can only be vaguely expressed, for 
 until actually attained it cannot be fully grasped ; 
 still, Ziller's principle is essentially a sound one, and 
 is closely akin to the previous proposal that antici- 
 patorj^ excitement should be worked up. 
 
 Ziller went further than this. He maintained that, 
 during the step of preparation, the teacher should 
 call up such ideas as would help the process of apper- 
 ception in the second stage of the lesson (presentation) , 
 and prevent the material there presented from para- 
 lyzing by its suddenness and unfamiliarity. Here 
 again he seems to be thoroughly justified. The only 
 necessary amendment to his proposal is that this 
 process should extend further back and be elaborated 
 into the positive and negative preparation of the 
 present book. 
 
 In Flachsmann ah Erzieher, an educational drama 
 deservedly popular in Germany, the function of the 
 step of preparation in the appreciation lesson has been 
 impressively set forth. Dr. Prell, the school inspector, 
 is speaking to the hero of the play, the classmaster, 
 Fleming : — 
 
 "Your literature lesson was particularly good. Superb. 
 Just superb. I never thought a real lyric could be brought 
 home to a child. I see it can be done. You did not tear or 
 hack the poem. You first carefully prepared the mind and
 
 THE THRESHOLD OF THE LESSON — AND OVER 57 
 
 mood; you got the soil ready for the poem, within the chil- 
 dren, and then you raised the whole living plant, rootlets and 
 all, and planted it straight in the children's hearts. Not first 
 in their heads. That was a solemn moment. There was 
 the true consecration of art. . . . You could hear their 
 hearts throb. I must confess to you mine throbbed too. I, 
 too, was your scholar. . . . When you stopped all the chil- 
 dren gave a — Ha ! I gave one too." 
 
 There are several points here to be noted already 
 familiar, by implication, to the reader. There is, 
 for example, a protest against " tearing and hacking " 
 a poem, the dispensing of it in bits, in single phrases, 
 or single stanzas, so that no continuous wave of apper- 
 ception and appreciation is possible. To a discussion 
 of that fatal policy we shall return at a later stage. 
 But if it is important that the poem should not be 
 " torn and hacked," it is equally obvious that the 
 teacher must not intercalate explanations of words, 
 or, still worse, a catechism on the meanings of words, 
 during the appreciation lesson itself. Thus again 
 we are driven back to negative and positive prepara- 
 tion. But something more, something in addition 
 even to this, must precede the giving of the poem. 
 It is the preparation of the " mind and mood." But 
 unfortunately our manuals of school methods do not 
 give us much help here, though moods and attitudes 
 are of importance in connection with every form of 
 mental activity, and are of basic importance in connec- 
 tion with appreciation.
 
 58 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 Preparing the mind and mood. — What, then, is 
 to be done? It would not be difficult to answer the 
 question if we knew what poem was to be taught. 
 For poems in general, it is impossible to provide a 
 " blanket " prescription. Each poem is an individual 
 thing and needs its own specific treatment. 
 
 In some cases, the mere vague " statement of the 
 aim," following upon the working up of anticipatory 
 interest, may be quite enough in itself ; " I am going 
 to recite to you a poem about a great man who . . . 
 (or a famous episode which . . .)," and if the poet's 
 life or the famous episode is already known, this 
 task should be fairly easy. In other cases, and par- 
 ticularly when the poem is greater on the intellectual 
 than on the sensuous or rhythmical side, a problem or 
 question may be propounded for solution : " What do 
 you think the people were doing (or ought to have 
 done) during that great event? . . . Now listen to 
 this." Sometimes the problem itself may be one of 
 poetical form. " I am going to recite to you a poem 
 in a very different kind of meter from the last, and I 
 shall ask you to tell me what you think about it." 
 Professor Bagley mentions the case of a teacher who 
 prefaced the reading of Dryden's Alexander's Feast 
 by the remark, " This poem contains two of the finest 
 lines in English literature. Try to find them." The 
 class was, of course, " all attention " to discover the 
 lines.
 
 THE THRESHOLD OF THE LESSON — AND OVER 59 
 
 But Dr. Prell meant something more even than 
 this by " preparing the mind and the mood." In 
 the case of poems that, Hke Tennyson's Break, Break, 
 Break, touch deep chords of human emotion, some- 
 thing more than stating the aim or propounding a 
 problem is required ; a solemn hush may here be the 
 favorable environmental condition for the most 
 effective appreciation. Perhaps some recalled memory 
 of a sorrow or a loss — far enough in the past to have 
 lost the poignancy of anguish — should preface the 
 hearing of the poem itself. One is here, of course, 
 assuming in the teacher very high and almost magical 
 qualities which will enable him to play upon his 
 class as a skilled musician might play upon the keys 
 of a musical instrument, or, to change the illustration, 
 as Antony played upon the emotions of the crowd 
 assembled in the Forum. The successful teacher of 
 literature must be able now to tease his class into 
 the critical attitude suitable for the reception of a 
 problematic, argumentative poem, now to excite them 
 into the boiling-point condition of emotional temper- 
 ature that is essential to the appreciation of a poem 
 of heroism or of dramatic conflict between right and 
 wrong, and now to chill their hearts with anticipatory 
 dread, somewhat after the fashion of Edgar Allen Poe's 
 opening paragraphs to Shadow, Silence, and others of 
 his gruesome tales. ^ 
 
 ^ There are possibilities, too, in color decoration.
 
 6o THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 More than these few hints it is impossible to give 
 in the present stage of our knowledge concerning the 
 intricate psychology of what we call attitudes and 
 moods. The hints are all too meager; but if they 
 do nothing more than direct the reader's attention 
 to the importance of the problem at issue they will 
 not have been made in vain.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 
 
 The teacher has prepared the " mind and the 
 mood " and is at last ready to present the new poem 
 to the class. In fact, the main business of the appre- 
 ciation lesson has now to be accomplished. 
 
 Read as if you were Talking? What rule of 
 procedure is he to follow? Almost exactly the op- 
 posite one to the rule commonly promulgated in 
 schools, " Read as if you were talking." 
 
 Many years ago Coleridge pointed out the peda- 
 gogical error " of tormenting poor children to enforce 
 the necessity of reading as they would talk : " — 
 
 " In order to cure them of singing, as it is called, that 
 is, of too great difference, the child is made to repeat the words 
 with his eyes off the book ; and then, indeed, his tones resemble 
 talking, as far as his fearS; tears, and trembling will permit. 
 But as soon as the eye is again directed to the printed page, 
 the spell begins anew ; for an instinctive sense teUs the child's 
 feelings that to utter its own momentary thoughts, and to 
 recite the written thought of another, are two widely different 
 things." 1 
 
 ^ S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. xviii. (It would 
 appear from what Coleridge says that Joseph Lancaster, of "moni- 
 torial" fame, was responsible for the maxim against which he pro- 
 tests.) 
 
 6i
 
 62 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 Coleridge is here referring to ordinary prose, not to stately 
 prose or poetry ; his words would be still more — far more — 
 pertinent if applied to them ; and indeed he specifically argues 
 against Wordsworth's principle that there is or should be no 
 essential difference between verse and prose. 
 
 It is not difficult to understand how this maxim 
 arose. The child cannot possibly throw into his 
 reading voice the natural intonations of ordinary 
 speech because in the latter the starting point is a 
 thought, which then proceeds to clothe itself in a 
 complete or ostensibly complete set of rhythms. In 
 reading, on the other hand, the starting point is a 
 printed sign, perhaps itself only half familiar to the 
 child. The two processes evidently stand in sharp 
 contrast ; the teacher feels this, and tries to make the 
 one process resemble the other. Of course there is 
 no reason, once the child has interpreted the printed 
 signs (i.e. has grasped the thought they convey) why 
 the teacher should not direct the child to say the sen- 
 tence in a " natural " fashion. But we must never 
 forget that the expression of secondhand thoughts 
 can never be quite so vigorous and lively as the expres- 
 sion of our own thoughts, at least until almost innu- 
 merable repetitions accompanied by powerful appre- 
 ciation have made the thoughts quite our own. And 
 we must never forget that the expression of second- 
 hand thoughts is, consequently, less valuable as a 
 means of training in the art of expression than the
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 63 
 
 expression of spontaneous and so-called original 
 thoughts. On the other hand the secondhand 
 thoughts of great men expressed in poetry or in fine 
 prose demand a style and dignity that we do not 
 commonly employ for our own. 
 
 Bernard Shaw's opinion of the elocutionist. — The 
 elocutionist's attempt to " read as he would talk " 
 has led Bernard Shaw to describe him as a " bom 
 fool," — in which capacity, " observing with pain 
 that poets have a weakness for imparting to their 
 dramatic dialogue a quality which he describes and 
 deplores as ' sing-song,' he devotes his life to the art 
 of breaking up verse in such a way as to make it sound 
 like insanely pompous prose." ^ Clearly, if a poet 
 has deliberately emphasized his purpose by imposing 
 regular rhythms on his work, it cannot be right for 
 us to destroy or obscure those rhythms. But it has 
 already been pointed out that the finest blank verse 
 is fine because its authors knew how to employ the 
 natural prose rhythms of ordinary speech. " He hates 
 him that would upon the rack of this tough world 
 stretch him out longer " is far more nearly related 
 to grand prose than to lyrical poetry. Poetical rhythm 
 is there, but it is interwoven subtly with prose rhythm. 
 
 On the other hand, Shakespeare's earlier plays are 
 written in a style much less close to a natural prose. 
 They are full, as Mr. Shaw says, of the " naive deUght 
 ^ Dramatic Opinions and Essays, i, p. 26.
 
 64 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 of pure oscillation, to be enjoyed as an Italian enjoys 
 a barcarolle, or a child a swing." Their rhetorical 
 effect is grand, but there is an absence of the supreme 
 poignancy which has made many passages in Mac- 
 beth, Lear, Othello, and Hamlet immortal. 
 
 "How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds 
 Make ill deeds done " 
 
 in King John is fine, but it is not equal to 
 
 "Duncan is in his grave. 
 After life's fitful fever he sleeps well." 
 
 Two rules for expression. — From this brief dis- 
 cussion, two rules may be deduced : — 
 
 (i) Do 7iot use a base, colloquial style in the belief 
 that this is " reading as if you were speaking." 
 
 I have heard the Bible read in two ways, equally 
 unworthy of its place in literature and in thought. 
 The first way was a ridiculous chant-like sing-song, 
 affected by the clergy. The second, a kind of protest 
 against this, was familiar, vulgar, and chatty. I 
 can conceive of very few instances in which a teacher 
 should use a base colloquial style in reading poetry. 
 A few pieces of Kipling and of Browning (one from the 
 latter is a school favorite, The Pied Piper of Hamelin) 
 demand something of this sort, but almost all poems 
 worthy of being given a place in our lessons in af>- 
 preciation demand dignity of treatment. 
 
 (2) Preserve, therefore, the rhythm of the poem.
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 6$ 
 
 In the greatest blank verse, the more ' ' naturally ' ' you 
 /ead — the more feelingly and understandingly — the 
 more rhythmically you will read. The great poet really 
 does the work for you and you cannot go wrong except 
 from haste or from obeying the maxims of the elocution- 
 ist. In mediocre blank verse and in rhyming poetry 
 there will be occasional opposition between rhythm and 
 sense. In that case judge for yourself, but do not hesi- 
 tate sometimes to give rhythm your vote, and enjoy the 
 poem " as an Italian a barcarolle or a child a swing." 
 Throw to the winds the strange notion that rhythm 
 should be destroyed by every means in your power, — 
 the absurd notion that if, for example, there is no 
 comma at the end of a metrical line you must run on 
 at double-quick speed in order to conceal the fact that 
 there are metrical lines at all. This policy of " curing 
 the children of singing " has done untold mischief. 
 
 As a general rule, then, it may be said that regular 
 rhythm is all-important; but as the child grows 
 older, his " ear " for rhythm may become sufficiently 
 delicate to justify various apparent irregularities 
 introduced for the sake of expressiveness. To set 
 ourselves to destroy rhythm as if it were an accursed 
 thing is a perfectly fatuous procedure. 
 
 It is safe to say that the teacher in reading poetry 
 should pay scant attention to the printer's stops; 
 he should make his own ; and this kind of thing he 
 should especially avoid : —
 
 66 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 "The shades of night were falling fast 
 As through an Alpine village | passed 
 A youth I who bore mid snow and ice 
 A banner | with this strange device 
 
 Excelsior." 
 
 Quite enough continuity between one metrical line 
 and another is preserved by means of a rising inflec- 
 tion of the voice at the words " passed " and " ice" ; 
 if the teacher gives this, he can, if he choose, make 
 pauses of considerable length. 
 
 Pronunciation of proper names. — Not only is 
 there a tendency among elocutionists and teachers 
 to ignore or weaken the rhythm of a poem, but now 
 and then there is what seems to be a deliberate selec- 
 tion of the most impossible pronunciations of proper 
 names in order to pervert or annihilate it. This is 
 fortimately rare, but cases of the kind have come to 
 my notice either from observation or from hearsay. 
 I take for illustration a passage from Hiawatha: — 
 
 "Two good friends had Hiawatha, 
 Singled out from all the others, 
 Bound to him in closest union, 
 And to whom he gave the right hand 
 Of his heart in joy and sorrow ; 
 Chibiabos the musician 
 And the very strong man Kwasind. 
 
 "Most beloved of Hiawatha 
 Was the gentle Chibiabos. . . ."
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 67 
 
 Actually, I have heard " Chibiabos " transformed 
 into" Chibiabos," and the regular trochees of the poem 
 thus utterly ruined ! 
 
 Again : a certain king of Clusium 
 
 " By the Nine Gods he swore 
 
 That the great house of Tarquin 
 Should suffer wrong no more. 
 
 By the Nine Gods he swore it 
 And named a trysting day, 
 
 And bade his messengers ride forth 
 
 East and west and south and north 
 To summon his array. 
 
 "East and west and south and north 
 
 The messengers ride fast, 
 And tower and town and cottage 
 
 Have heard the trumpet's blast. 
 Shame on the false Etruscan 
 
 Who lingers in his home 
 
 When Porsena of Clusium 
 Is on the march to Rome." 
 
 The word " Porsena " has been deliberately and 
 perversely changed to " Porsena " in order to ruin 
 the rhythm ! 
 
 Classical meters. — One more word on the subject 
 of rhythm. If the teacher tries to teach such a poem 
 as Evangeline he must first realize that each line of 
 it is supposed to represent a classical (Greek or Latin) 
 verse of six feet, with each foot either a dactyl (_ w w)
 
 68 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 or a spondee ( ), the fifth foot invariably the former 
 
 and the sixth generally the latter. 
 
 In the Acadian land on the shores of the basin of Minas . . . 
 
 The attempt to write hexameters in English is not 
 usually regarded with favor, because length of syllable 
 is not the basis of our poetry, but rather accent and 
 certain natural prose rhythms. Still there are a good 
 many so-called hexameters imbedded in English prose : 
 Dickens, in his eloquent moments, lapses or rises into 
 them, and they are not uncommon in the Bible, e.g. — 
 
 "God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a 
 
 trumpet." 
 " Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider." 
 
 In any case, if such a poem as Evangeline is 
 attempted, the hexametric structure must be pre- 
 served and not ruined through ignorance or through 
 straining after a jerky, colloquial " expressiveness." 
 
 The preservation of poetical units. — It has been 
 urged that the first impression of a work of art is of 
 unique importance. But it must be a total impression, 
 — an impression of the whole, not of dissected scraps. 
 The teacher of appreciation should not " tear and 
 hack the poem." 
 
 For this reason the teacher must select his units 
 with great care and generally they should be either 
 complete poems or substantial fragments of adefi-
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 69 
 
 nitely unitary character. Of course the notion of a 
 " unit " is relative, for one unit may exist within 
 another. Single quotations of even a few words 
 separated from their context may, because of their 
 compactness of thought and perfection of language, 
 be quite legitimately regarded as units. 
 
 "The gods are just and of our innocent vices 
 Make instruments to plague us." 
 
 "As flies to wanton boys so we to the gods; 
 They kill us for their sport." 
 
 Although these passages would be immensely bene- 
 fited by having their context supplied, they possess a 
 relative unity of their own, and no one but a pedant 
 would forbid a senior pupil to learn them without 
 learning the whole of King Lear. In other cases, a 
 single stanza may be legitimately regarded as a unit.^ 
 When, therefore, it is affirmed that the teacher should 
 employ only poetical imits, the advice must be inter- 
 preted broadly and sensibly. 
 
 In my schooldays, long before the "lesson in appreciation," 
 and long before principles of "first impression" and "total 
 impression" had been worked out, we were required to learn 
 one hundred lines of poetry every year. In fact, our regular 
 name for this work was not poetry, or literature, but "lines." 
 One selected poem was Macaulay's Horatius. But, instead 
 of the teacher's reciting the whole inspiring work, resonant 
 with splendid names like "Cortona" and "Pampeluna," and 
 
 1 See examples for Arnold and Whittier, p. 37.
 
 70 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 subsequently allowing us to select passages for personal recita- 
 tion, he was so bent upon getting the one hundred lines securely 
 lodged in our memories, that he read or recited nothing of the 
 first third of the poem, and after a mere hint of the Etruscan 
 invasion, commenced with the unpromising word, "but." 
 
 "But the consul's brow was sad. 
 And the consul's speech was low." 
 
 It is surely obvious that we cannot work up con- 
 trasts, climaxes, or other effects of consecutiveness if 
 we " tear and hack the poem " into disjecta membra. 
 Consider, in The Wreck of the Hesperus — a beautiful 
 ballad, almost universally ignored by teachers in 
 England on the ground of its being " hackneyed " 
 and not so well known as it should be in America — 
 the three stanzas in which the girl appeals to her 
 father in a crescendo of anxiety. She has heard the 
 church bells ; she has heard the sound of the guns ; 
 she sees a gleaming light. To keep these stanzas 
 in isolation from each other is to lose completely the 
 chmax to which the poet has so artfully worked up. 
 
 Of course the temptation to break a poem into 
 fragments is not so powerful at this stage as at a later 
 and more famihar stage, when the pupil is directed 
 to learn the poem by heart, as I had to learn Horatius. 
 Reading or reciting to a class is even now a rare thing 
 in English schools and only a Httle less rare in America. 
 But the warning may not be wholly useless even at 
 this place in the discussion.
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 7 1 
 
 The " flavor " of words and the cause of it. — Not 
 only should we preserve the artistic unities, but we 
 should scrupulously preserve — we should sometimes 
 seek to intensify — the flavor of words. This does 
 not refer to the associational devices discussed under 
 the head of positive preparation and illustrated by 
 words Uke " rack " ; the reference here is to the " flavor " 
 of words as such — apart from their meaning. 
 
 From causes deeply rooted in our nervous organiza- 
 tion, certain sounds and combinations of sounds strike 
 us as pleasant and certain others as neutral or un- 
 pleasant. Most people would admit that words Hke 
 "Paradise," " Perugino," "Arabia," "Urania," 
 " Daphne," "Leonardo," "Mozambique," "Orontes" 
 " Alabama," " Minnehaha," " Cahfornia," are beauti- 
 ful words. What makes them beautiful? It is 
 sometimes hard to answer this question, but generally 
 we find that beautiful words contain Hquid sounds 
 {I and r) and long vowels ; also perhaps nasal sounds 
 (w, m) and soft soothing sounds (z, th). Vaguely 
 we can see the principle of non-distraction operative 
 here ; awkward, difl&cult consonantal combinations 
 (sts, ct, etc.) are not beautiful. 
 
 And what makes a phrase or a verse beautiful from 
 this point of view? Partly the presence of beautiful 
 words but also the presence of alHterative and asso- 
 nantal combinations of words. AlHteration is the 
 repetition of a certain consonant (usually at the begin-
 
 72 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 ning of a word) and assonance is the repetition of a 
 vowel. 
 
 Repetition. — We here alight upon a most funda- 
 mental principle of aesthetics, — as important in 
 music as in poetry and in plastic ornament as in music. 
 An element of expectation, an element of " I told you 
 that was coming," adds notably to the pleasure of 
 life, and when it is combined with the element of 
 ease supplied by repetition, it explains much of the 
 pleasure of poetr>'. Rhyme itself is one form of 
 repetition, so is rhythm, and so is the " parallelism " 
 of Hebrew poetry as in the passage above quoted : — 
 
 " God is gone up with a shout, 
 The Lord with the sound of a trumpet." 
 
 Time after time we find that a Une or phrase which 
 has struck our fancy owes its charm to repetition in 
 one or another of these forms. 
 
 It is said that a small boy, on being asked which verse of 
 the Bible he liked best, voted for 
 
 "That ancient river, the river Kishon." 
 
 No doubt the charm of the line was due in part to its four r's. 
 My own youthful fancy was impressed by the line, 
 
 "Is not this great Babylon that I have built ?" 
 
 The word "Babylon" seemed to me a magnificent word, and 
 its 6's are further alliterated in the word "built." A friend of 
 mine was as a boy greatly impressed by Dryden's couplet : — 
 
 "War, he sung, is toil and trouble, 
 Honor but an empty bubble."
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 73 
 
 Maybe, in addition to the alliterated t and b, some haunting 
 memory of Shakespeare's 
 
 "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble," 
 
 may have reinforced the charm of the couplet, for such rein- 
 forcements are of large importance in aesthetics as shown at the 
 end of Chapter IV. 
 
 The " refrain," often of a liturgical or semi-liturgical 
 character, is one among the many effective forms of 
 repetition. Hiawatha is full of it — the " Hi-aw-ha " 
 and " Way-ha-way " of the chorus in Section XV is 
 one example among many. And in the following 
 passage from Bernard Shaw its effectiveness in prose 
 is seen to be as great as in poetry : — 
 
 "In my dreams [heaven] is a country where the State is 
 the Church and the Church the people : three in one and one 
 in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and 
 play is life : three in one and one in three. It is a temple in 
 which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the wor- 
 shipped : three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in 
 which all life is human and all humanity divine : three in one 
 and one in three." ^ 
 
 Milton's mastery of words. — Milton had a keen 
 sense for the flavor of words. Satan's approach to 
 Eden is thus described : — 
 
 "As, when to them who sail 
 Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past 
 Mozambic, off at sea northeast winds blow 
 
 1 John BulVs Other Island. Close to the end.
 
 74 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 Sabean odors from the spicy shore 
 
 Of Araby the Blest, with such delay 
 
 Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league 
 
 Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles." 
 
 Note the alliteration in the fourth and fifth verses 
 and the soft rich words, " Mozambic," " Sabean," 
 " Araby." The very words seem to " blow odors," 
 and one can almost see Milton with the liquid and 
 alliterative phrase " Araby the Blest " in his mind, 
 resolved to use it. I am inclined to believe, contrary 
 to the common view, that large portions of Paradise 
 Lost, if read to our school classes in the way such a 
 poem should be read, would prove impressive and 
 that we should find many children wishing to learn 
 generous extracts from it. 
 
 Note, too, the subtle alliteration in the noble 
 closing lines of the passage in which Milton pours out 
 his sorrow and his hopes : — 
 
 "Fallen on evil days, 
 I On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, 
 
 i In darkness and with dangers compassed round, 
 
 And sohtude ; yet not alone, while thou 
 Visitst my slumbers nightly, and while Mom 
 Purples the East. Still govern thou my song, 
 Urania, and fit audience find, though few." 
 
 In the following passage descriptive of Paradise, 
 we find again a deliberate exploitation of beautiful 
 words, mostly words that are rich in nasal, liquid, 
 sibilant, and vowel sounds : —
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 7$ 
 
 "Not that fair field 
 Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers, 
 Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis 
 Was gathered — which cost Ceres all that pain 
 To seek her through the world — nor that sweet grove 
 Of Daphne, by Orontes and the inspired 
 CastaUan spring, might with this Paradise 
 Of Eden strive ; nor that Nyseian isle, 
 Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham, 
 Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Libyan Jove 
 Hid Amalthea, and her florid son, 
 Young Bacchus, from his stepdame Rhea's eye; 
 Nor where Abassin Kings their issue guard. 
 Mount Amara (though this by some supposed 
 True Paradise) under the Ethiop Une. . . ." 
 
 In the following passage, Milton again shows his 
 love of impressive geographical names : — 
 
 "Harder beset 
 And more endangered than when Argo passed 
 Through Bosphorus betwixt the justhng rocks, 
 Or when Ulysses on the larboard shunned 
 Charybdis, and by the other whirlpool steered." 
 
 Certainly if we teach poetry at all, we must de- 
 liberately seek to produce and emphasize alliterative 
 and other effects, and in order to do this we must 
 know, so to speak, what the words " taste Hke " 
 in advance ; we must explore them, exploit them, 
 exhaust them. Strong metaphors are necessary here, 
 and so I shall say, Let us make the reading of our 
 poetry ' voluptuous.'
 
 76 THE LESSON ESf APPRECIATION 
 
 We must never forget, in short, that there is such a 
 thing as pure aesthetic pleasure quite independent of 
 intellectual or moral elements. We like to beat time 
 with our feet to a march tune ; we like to repeat sono- 
 rous even if meaningless phrases ; we love recurrence, 
 for the familiar has a certain fascination of its own. 
 
 The poetry of Swinburne. — The study of Swin- 
 burne is here particularly valuable. The sensuous 
 beauty of his poetry richly compensates — so far as 
 anything can compensate — for the occasional poverty 
 of thought, the occasional lack of the highest moral 
 vision. True, there is little in Swinburne correspond- 
 ing to Milton's absolute perfection of phrase ; there 
 is a wild luxuriance of language, a love of words for 
 their own sake, a repetition of the same metaphor in 
 three or more forms only verbally distinguishable ; 
 and yet this very luxuriance and license may be ex- 
 tremely valuable for the somewhat tongue-tied 
 teacher — brought up, perhaps, on the doctrine that 
 the meaner and cruder a sentence is, the better it is. 
 Above all, Swinburne is a master of the anapest, 
 a metrical foot singularly Httle used by our poets, 
 but, when used, rarely without strong effects, — ■ 
 witness Byron's Destruction of Sennacherib, or witness 
 the stanzas from Swinburne himself descriptive of the 
 Roman arena : — 
 
 "On sands by the storm never shaken, 
 Nor wet from the washing of tides ;
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 77 
 
 Nor by foam of the waves overtaken, 
 Nor winds that the thunder bestrides ; 
 
 But red from the print of thy paces, 
 
 Made smooth for the world and its lords, 
 
 Ringed round with the flame of fair faces, 
 And splendid with swords. 
 
 "There the gladiator, pale for thy pleasure, 
 
 Drew bitter and perilous breath ; 
 There torments laid hold on the treasure 
 
 Of limbs too delicious for death ; 
 When thy gardens were ht with live torches ; 
 
 When the world was a steed for thy rein ; 
 When the nations lay prone in thy porches, 
 
 Our Lady of Pain." ^ 
 
 There are most of Swinburne's faults here, — the 
 same metaphor repeated three if not four times 
 (lines I to 4), and the passion for aUiteration, often 
 resulting in the use of obviously artificial words 
 (treasure, delicious) ; and yet there is a rush in the 
 stanzas that almost takes one's breath away, and when 
 the whole poem is read aloud at a sitting, it leaves the 
 heart beating and the brain afire. It is not the mere 
 wickedness of the poem (if, indeed, it is a wicked poem 
 and not a passionately moral one) that is the cause of 
 its astonishingly exciting quality; it is rather the 
 sensuous music of its words and rhythms. Swinburne, 
 then, is a good master for those teachers who have 
 never felt the power of words ; he is probably a very 
 
 ^ Dolores.
 
 78 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 bad master for those who have already felt or over- 
 felt it. 
 
 Rhythm and meaning. — Rhythm often has a close 
 bearing on meaning. An example is found in The 
 Slave's Dream of Longfellow, where a sudden change is 
 made from iambic to anapaestic : — 
 
 "And then at furious speed he rode 
 
 Along the Niger's bank, 
 His bridle-reins were golden chains, 
 
 And with a martial clank, 
 At each leap he could feel his scabbard of steel 
 
 Smiting his stallion's flank." 
 
 The reason for the change in the fifth line is, of course, 
 to suggest powerfully the galloping of the horse, which 
 needs a triple rhythm (dactyUc or anapsestic) such as 
 Wagner employs in his Ride of the Valkyries music. 
 In the next stage of the lesson in appreciation such 
 points as these will be discussed by the teacher with 
 his class, as will also the onomatopoeic quaUty of 
 such words as " clank " and " smiting," but in the 
 present stage of the lesson it is the teacher's task 
 simply to recite the poem in such a way that it will 
 produce a "clear and colored" impression, so that 
 the very maximum of effect may be extracted from 
 the words he employs. 
 
 The function of the pause. — Violent effects, how- 
 ever, would sometimes be out of place. Consider 
 the masterly Uttle poem of Cowper, The Loss of the
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 79 
 
 Royal George. Here the poet has dehberately given 
 
 us a hint in his extraordinarily short lines. Why did 
 
 he make them so short ? Simply to suggest the solemn 
 
 tolling of a bell. Such a poem should be taken, on the 
 
 average, five times as slowly as it is commonly read. 
 
 Great pauses should break it up : — 
 
 "Toil for the brave! 
 
 The brave that are no more ! 
 All sunk beneath the wave, 
 Fast by their native shore." 
 
 Whether every stanza of the poem should be taken 
 equally slowly may be left to the judgment of the 
 reader. In The Wreck of the Hesperus, too, a vast 
 pause should ensue after the agonized reference to the 
 " gleaming light." 
 
 The long pause, indeed, is not used so frequently 
 in teaching poetry as it should be. It is one of the 
 most effective devices known to poetical and musical 
 art and should not be shortened and thus weakened. 
 Wordsworth introduces a particularly impressive 
 one in Lucy Gray just before the verses, — 
 
 "Yet some maintain that to this day 
 She is a living child." 
 
 In one of Hamlet's sohloquies, we find the two words, 
 
 "Yet I " 
 
 Standing alone as a single verse, " poised for the four 
 whole rhythm pulses," where the purpose of the
 
 8o THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 poet is to suggest that the utter self-loathing of the 
 prince has almost choked the channels of expression,^ 
 In Macbeth there is a passage which, unless broken 
 up by pauses of quite abnormal length, loses much of 
 its supreme dramatic quality : — 
 
 Macbeth. My dearest love, 
 
 Duncan comes here to-night. 
 Lady Macbeth. And when goes hence ? 
 
 Macbeth. To-morrow as he purposes. 
 
 After the word "to-night" her eyes and his make eloquent 
 play. Both of their faces are books where an observer could 
 read strange matters. Macbeth knows perfectly well what is 
 passing in his wife's mind. Words are almost superfluous, and 
 when they come they are as few as may be. 
 
 "And when goes hence ?" 
 
 Again comes the play of the eyes through twenty seconds, at 
 the end of which he falters out his last pretense of not under- 
 standing : — 
 
 "To-morrow " 
 
 Whereupon the mask of silence and ambiguity, too ridiculous 
 to be kept up longer, drops from both. Macbeth knows that 
 Duncan will never leave the castle alive, and adds, in routine 
 homage to the brutal truth : — 
 
 " as he purposes." 
 
 She, less hypocritical, bursts out with, — ] 
 
 "O never shall sun that morrow see." 
 Then, after a jest at his eager, doubtful mien, she falls back, 
 womanlike, upon the practical details of the plot about which 
 not one word has yet been said by either of them, either in writing 
 or by word of mouth. 
 
 * Mark Liddell, Introduction to Poetry.
 
 THE HOUR OF APPRECIATION 8l 
 
 Of the pause in music more will be said later on, 
 but it is worthy of note that this device is effective 
 even in painting ! "A cumulative gradation which 
 suddenly stops has the same force in light and shade 
 as a long line which suddenly changes into a short Kne 
 of the opposite direction. They are both equivalent 
 to a pause in music, awakening an attention at such 
 a point, and only to be employed where there is some- 
 thing important to follow." ^ (Poore.) 
 
 Other rhetorical effects. — Not only should the 
 inherent qualities of words be brought out by the 
 teacher, and not only should rhythms and rhetorical 
 effects receive due attention, but all of the resources 
 of climax and anticlimax, including crescendos and 
 diminuendos, should be employed. Macaulay's 
 Horatius seems admirably adapted for school use 
 because of its powerful and obvious rhetorical devices. 
 The concluding stanzas, with their recurrent " when " 
 and their climax, are admirable ; and the single 
 stanza which describes the emergence of Horatius 
 from the water is a hardly less impressive crescendo : — ■ 
 
 " And now he feels the bottom, 
 
 Now on dry earth he stands, 
 Now round him throng the fathers 
 
 To press his gory hands ; 
 And now with shouts and clapping 
 
 And noise of weeping loud, 
 He enters through the river-gate 
 
 Borne by the joyous crowd."
 
 82 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 There should be rising inflection almost to the extent 
 of an octave in reciting this stanza, and toward the 
 end the voice should slightly fall to convey the im- 
 pression of finality, — crossing a summit or reaching 
 a goal. The word " enters " should perhaps rep- 
 resent the highest voice pitch in the stanza. 
 ******* 
 
 But jam satis! It is conceivable that, in the years 
 to come, the teacher will have so well learned the lesson 
 conveyed by this chapter that the educationist's 
 duty will be to hold him in, to tell him to be less ex- 
 pressive in his vivid and exciting renderings of poetry. 
 That time is not yet. For the present he had better 
 follow Wagner's plan d propos of the Ninth Symphony 
 and seek to produce " as clear and colored an im- 
 pression " as possible.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE FINAL STAGES 
 
 Dangers in " stages." — That there are dangers in 
 laying much stress on " stages " or " steps " in the 
 learning process can hardly be doubted. Indeed the 
 real value of the Herbartian " formal steps " has been 
 largely obscured by the fanatical rigidity with which 
 they have been employed by some teachers who have 
 imagined that every lesson should be forced into the 
 same mold, and that omissions or modifications 
 to suit particular exigencies should not be permitted. 
 Implicitly it was assumed that there was no place for 
 tact, personal judgment, native artistry, novel experi- 
 ment, and the like. The scheme was made into an 
 
 idol. 
 
 The dangers of dividing the appreciation lesson into 
 steps or stages are at least two. In the first place, 
 the teacher may be so impressed by the idea of a 
 temporal sequence that he will not allow himself 
 to alter their order or to blend two stages. In the 
 second place, he may not realize the extent to which 
 different types of subject-matter may call for different 
 treatment. A poem like Browning's Pied Piper 
 
 83
 
 84 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 is different in every respect from Swinburne's A 
 Match; ^ the former contains a prosaic lesson in civics, 
 and should be treated from the point of view of 
 rational thought, with a flash or two of humor thrown 
 in ; the latter, with its rich alliterations and circular 
 form, appeals almost wholly to our power of sensuous 
 or aesthetic appreciation. 
 
 In many respects, therefore, it would be preferable to 
 speak, not of " stages " or " steps," — for these words 
 imply a fixed sequence, — but rather of " phases." 
 The teacher would then deal first with whatever 
 phase of his topic called for first treatment, and would 
 then pass to the next most natural phase, always 
 adapting his procedure to the needs of the occasion. 
 Still, I think that the stages proposed in these chapters 
 may correspond fairly well to the order of pedagogical 
 events commonly called for in the lesson in apprecia- 
 tion. In any case, the young teacher needs some 
 guidance, and although it is probable that the stages 
 here proposed will need a thorough overhauling in 
 the light of further experience, they may serve as a 
 temporary guide pending the construction of a more 
 effective scheme. 
 
 Stage five : aesthetic discussion. — Provided that 
 
 the reader will keep in mind these warnings against 
 
 a formal and mechanical application of the principles 
 
 here laid down, he may ask, What stage (or phase) 
 
 ' See a stanza from this poem, pp. 19-20.
 
 THE FINAL STAGES 8$ 
 
 of the appreciation lesson should ordinarily follow 
 the presentation of the poem to the class? Negative 
 preparation, positive preparation, — of these we took 
 care long before the lesson itself was given ; immediate 
 preparation, presentation, — of these we have taken 
 care during the lesson itself ; what should come 
 now? 
 
 I believe that the next step to take is something 
 that we may rather clumsily call " aesthetic discussion." 
 The impression of the poem as a whole is still fresh in 
 the pupils' minds : wonderful words, rhymes, and 
 rhythms still echo in their memories ; before the echoes 
 die down, the teacher should therefore ask, " What 
 lines, what words, what phrases, do you like best? " 
 
 There is here a large opportunity for experiment and 
 research of a most interesting kind. Let the teacher 
 banish all chance of mutual suggestion among the 
 pupils ; let him get them to state in writing the lines 
 or words that have pleased them most ; let him also 
 get them to report, if they can, their reasons for their 
 choice (although this demand should not be made 
 too formal or too exigent, for reasons will be hard to 
 give in most cases) ; let him then collect the results 
 and proceed with the lesson. Of course, if he is not 
 experimenting but simply teaching, he need not ask 
 the class to write down their preferences ; he may 
 simply ask for them orally in the mass. But if he 
 cares to take the former course, he may be assured
 
 86 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 that there is here an ahnost uncharted region of 
 educational investigation. 
 
 It may be advisable for the teacher first to experiment on 
 his adult friends before trying the children. I am inclined 
 to think that, while the more subtle and fK)\verful metaphors 
 will remain unappreciated by children because of their lack 
 of the experience which alone can give meaning to the meta- 
 phors, the situation will be quite different in matters of rhythm, 
 rhyme, alliteration, and other sensuous factors. Here the 
 tastes of the child may be found to approximate closely to 
 those of the unspoiled adult. I once asked a class of girls from 
 rather poor homes whether they liked the word "Armada." 
 At first, of course, they did not understand the drift of the 
 question, but after I had thoroughly and deliberately paralyzed 
 all of their tendencies to "docility" (and this is particularly 
 necessary with girls, who will greedily take a "cue" from the 
 teacher or from some one of their companions), I asked the 
 question again, and found that they did like the word. I 
 followed this up with "Barcelona" and other words appearing 
 in the poem, and the class finally came to the conclusion that 
 Spanish words were uncommonly pleasing and melodic. I 
 think adults would have come to the same conclusion. If 
 Sir Henry Wotton's famous hymn, — 
 
 "How happy is he born and taught 
 That seeketh not another's will. ..." 
 
 were read to a group of adults and then to a class of children, 
 
 which line would be preferred? With the adults, the answer 
 
 is,— 
 
 "Lord of himself though not of lands" ; 
 
 and I suspect that the children would again agree with this 
 choice. The alliterated / settles the matter, though most of
 
 THE FINAL STAGES 87 
 
 us may not realize that alliteration is present at all. The 
 charm and quotability of the closing lines of Ophelia's speech 
 to Laertes are, no doubt, due to the same factor : — 
 
 "Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads 
 And recks not his own rede." 
 
 Of course there will be dislikes as well as likes. Many of 
 Browning's rhymes, as we have seen, are shockingly poor. In 
 Webster's Duchess of Malfi occurs the passage, — 
 
 "Naught made me e'er go right but Heaven's scourge stick," 
 
 where the sibilants of the last three words are awkward to utter, 
 and such awkwardness, being "distracting," tends to destroy 
 appreciation. I am not suggesting that either The Gram- 
 tnarian's Funeral or the Duchess of Malfi should be used in 
 school, nor that poems with similar defects should not be used. 
 I am simply urging the importance of noting, recording, and 
 discussing with the pupils their dislikes as well as their likes, 
 their prejudices as well as their appreciations. 
 
 The induction of esthetic principles. — At first 
 these Hkes and disHkes should be merely collected 
 and recorded by the teacher ; it would be a mistake 
 to infer or expound aesthetic principles from a very 
 few cases. But after a while the inferences would 
 begin to clamor for recognition. " Armada," " Bar- 
 celona," for example, are rich in long vowels and in 
 liquid and nasal sounds ; " Lord of himself though 
 not of lands " has a trace of alHteration ; thus by a 
 process of quite genuine induction, — far more genuine 
 than much of the " reasoning " that we try to stim- 
 ulate in connection with grammar and arithmetic,
 
 88 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 — the class will arrive at certain aesthetic principles, 
 and particularly at the all-important principle of 
 repetition. 
 
 But beauty is a dehcate and puzzling thing, and 
 sometimes it arises from the operation of factors 
 quite the opposite of repetition. Why does Kipling 
 call one of his books, not Three Soldiers, but Soldiers 
 Three ? Why does John Bunyan tell us, not about 
 the Beautiful House, but about the House Beautiful? 
 It is not a rhythmic nor an alliterative principle 
 that is at work here, for, curiously, the rhythm of 
 '' three soldiers " is near to that of " house beautiful " 
 and that of " soldiers three " to that of " beautiful 
 house." It is just the reversal of the usual order of 
 words that gives to our minds a pleasant shock, a 
 tiny thrill of romance, akin, perhaps, to the effect 
 provided by the unexpected short line in Swin- 
 burne's Dolores} The teacher may very well ask the 
 class which form of words they prefer ; and though 
 they may be unable to infer that unfamiliarity is 
 sometimes pleasant, they will at least have had their 
 minds opened to problems and subtleties of art which 
 usually escape notice. Other means of presenting 
 " problematic situations " (almost always an effective 
 means of arousing attention and insuring intellectual 
 interest) will be readily devised by the resourceful 
 teacher. 
 
 1 Above, p. 77.
 
 THE FINAL STAGES 89 
 
 For example : Tell the class that a young woman in great 
 trouble once uttered these words : — 
 
 "Is there sitting in the clouds 
 
 That sees into the bottom of my grief ? " 
 
 The blanJk space may be filled up in one or another of three 
 ways, — by the word "compassion"; by the words "no 
 mercy" ; or by the words "no pity." Which way is the most 
 effective? It should be noted that in problems or experi- 
 ments of this type the reading that comes first has a slight 
 advantage for reasons that will be fairly obvious from the pre- 
 ceding discussion. I have experimented with this problem 
 only on so small a scale that I have obtained no verdict worth 
 recording either for or against Shakespeare's form of Juliet's 
 words ; but it is probable that a definite verdict would be forth- 
 coming if we tried a sufficient number of cases. Obviously 
 "compassion" is better than "mercy" so far as meaning is 
 concerned, for "mercy" implies that an offense has been com- 
 mitted. But the word "pity" is better even than "compas- 
 sion," and its assonance with the word "sitting" is also in its 
 favor. 
 
 Another example may be instanced with reference to meta- 
 phors — and metaphors, of course, represent a higher type of 
 aesthetic device than the almost wholly verbal ones hitherto 
 considered in this chapter. As an experiment, I wrote on the 
 blackboard the "rack" passage from King Lear, and, side by 
 side with it, the following modified form : — 
 
 "O let him pass ; he hates him. 
 That would amid the griefs of this sad world 
 Delay him longer." 
 
 I found that, in general, both children and youths, when 
 tested on these two passages, preferred Hayward to Shake- 
 speare. Hayward was prosy, obvious, commonplace; Shake-
 
 QO THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 speare introduced the jarring and unfamiliar word "rack." 
 As one girl quite naively said, "There are more harsh words 
 in the other [Shakespearean] piece." I venture to say that a 
 little experiment like this will introduce a class to the very 
 heart of aesthetic criticism, for "harshness," of a sort, is the 
 very thing the poet meant to produce. 
 
 After an analysis of the kind I have indicated the 
 teacher v^ill do well to read or recite the whole passage 
 again. The discussion he has had with the class will 
 bring into existence a new kind of interest ; the allit- 
 eration and the assonance v/ill now be consciously 
 noticed, the appositeness of the metaphors will be 
 better appreciated, and so on. We are still on the 
 plane of aesthetic appreciation, but the appreciation 
 is more discerning, intelligent, and detailed.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE FINAL VIEW OF THE LESSON 
 
 The sixth and last stage that now follows will be 
 a comparatively easy one for most teachers. They 
 can cease to be anxious about " appreciation " in the 
 narrower sense. Indeed, the opportunity for it is 
 over. The child has either been impressed or has 
 failed to be impressed by the poem. The fire from 
 heaven has descended — or it has not ; and, in the 
 latter case, it will be useless for the disappointed 
 ministrants to leap upon the cold altar and gash 
 themselves with knives. 
 
 Stage six : intellectual discussion or the exposition 
 of meaning. — But if a certain measure of success 
 has attended, so far, the lesson in appreciation, some- 
 thing very important and indeed very lengthy, in 
 many cases, remains to be done, and although that 
 something does not fall under the category of appre- 
 ciation, in the aesthetic sense, it is closely related to 
 appreciation. The teacher must now begin his analysis 
 or exposition of the meaning of this or that phrase, 
 and — what is still more important — his analysis or 
 exposition of the meaning of the poem as a whole. 
 
 91
 
 92 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 He is here on familiar ground, — the familiar and 
 prosy ground of intellect, not the mystery-haunted 
 realm of feeling. Let him go his way boldly. His 
 usual methods will be, for the most part, sound enough 
 now. Hjs mistake has hitherto been to introduce 
 these methods, not at the end, but at the beginning 
 of his lessons in appreciation. The pupils have been 
 given no time to savor the poetry presented to them. 
 The teacher, in fact, has been far too intellectual, 
 far too analytical, far too fond of detail. But now 
 is his hour. He has done his best to insure the ap- 
 preciation of a thing of beauty ; now he can analyze, 
 explain, interrogate, interpret to his heart's content. 
 
 Almost everything that has been said regarding 
 the earlier stages of the appreciation lesson must be 
 reversed or at least revised when applied to the in- 
 tellectual side of the task.^ For example, distractions 
 which are fatal to appreciation may be stimulants to 
 concentrated thought ; psychology has proved that 
 we think better if there is a little noise in a room than 
 if we are surrounded by an absolutely dead silence. 
 Again, the presence of a " problematic situation," 
 while not conducive to appreciation, is the very life 
 
 1 In a later discussion of pictorial appreciation, the intellectual 
 aspects will be emphasized. But that is because pure aesthetic appre- 
 ciation is much harder to obtain in this case than in the case of 
 poetry and music. The sensuous beauty of sounds appeals more to 
 children than the sensuous beauty of form and color. This, at least, 
 is my belief.
 
 THE FINAL VIEW OF THE LESSON 93 
 
 and soul of the lessons that have an intellectual bear- 
 ing. Poetry would not be a suitable medium for 
 detective stories, and many of our other lessons should 
 certainly be detective lessons, or, to use the orthodox 
 term, " heuristic " lessons. In them the teacher can 
 be, if he likes, vernacular, sleuth-like, incalculable, 
 inscrutable, tantalizing; he may, if he choose, use 
 that favorite formula of his condemned in a previous 
 
 connection, What is the meaning of ? But in 
 
 dealing with poetry and music, if he cannot keep 
 problems out he must at least take care that they 
 do not spoil the purely appreciative stage of the lesson. 
 He may, perhaps, store them up for another time, 
 or for the end of the lesson when, shot at the class, 
 they may give quite a new interest to the passage 
 that has been studied. There are exceptions to this 
 rule, no doubt ; in the study of a drama it is often 
 good to state problems quite early ; but the nearer 
 the lesson approaches to a pure appreciation lesson, 
 the more the teacher should keep problems, for a long 
 time, out of sight. The time for them is here at the 
 close of the lesson, — in what we may call Stage Six, 
 or the stage of intellectual discussion. This stage will 
 not be sharply differentiated from the preceding one, 
 that of (Esthetic discussion, but it is well to recognize 
 that there is a difference between them. 
 
 Reading by pupils. — Some points remain. " Are 
 the pupils," some one will ask, " never to be called
 
 94 THE LESSON IN APPREaATION 
 
 upon themselves to read the piece aloud, or to sing the 
 song ? Is the reading or the singing to come from the 
 teacher alone? " The reply is that the teacher should 
 be rather more cautious than he has usually been 
 about permitting this kind of thing in the earlier 
 stages of the lesson, or before the pupils have acquired 
 a distinct liking for the piece, — and certainly the 
 finer the literature, the more cautious he should be. 
 We do not want a fine impression to be spoiled. Better, 
 on the whole, that the pupils should hear the piece 
 again from the teacher in a week's time and hear 
 it yet again from him in another week's time than 
 that they should hear it from another pupil's stumbling 
 lips. If the material is of inferior quality there is 
 little need to be so fastidious, but if it is a front rank 
 piece one cannot be too careful with its presentation. 
 And there is no doubt that when pupils are to be 
 called upon to read an immortally great passage, a 
 choice of pupil should be made, and he who can do the 
 passage the greatest measure of justice should be the 
 one first chosen. Furthermore, he should be fore- 
 warned of the honor that will devolve upon him, and 
 preparation of a special sort should be expected. If we 
 adults need preparation before we can do justice to a 
 poem, how much more does the child need such prepa- 
 ration ! 
 
 Learning by heart. — " How far," it may be asked, 
 " should we expect children to learn by heart the
 
 THE FINAL VIEW OF THE LESSON 95 
 
 poems to which they have been introduced through 
 the appreciation lesson?" One thing is certain. 
 The old-fashioned prescription of the English Board 
 of Education requiring the learning of a hundred or 
 two hundred lines by an entire class is open to many 
 objections. The rapid learners were wearied by the 
 endless repetitions made necessary through the slow- 
 ness of their companions, and the necessity that the 
 knowledge of the piece should be word-perfect prac- 
 tically meant that no poems were taught from the 
 standpoint of appreciation pure and simple. The 
 whole atmosphere was ''examinational," not aesthetic. 
 On the other hand, the teacher should not, in re- 
 action from the examinational standpoint, rest con- 
 tent with making the lesson in appreciation one of 
 " chalk and talk " only, — one from which no def- 
 inite result on the pupil's part is assumed. Every 
 child may fairly be expected to learn (Stage Seven) 
 a certain number of lines, self-chosen, or sometimes, 
 perhaps, chosen by the teacher or with his advice. 
 In some cases a pupil will willingly learn hundreds 
 or even thousands of lines ; in others a single line or 
 a short passage must suffice. 
 
 It will be an interesting question whether the pupils will 
 voluntarily select the passages that they have heard from the 
 teacher, or whether they will choose new pieces for themselves. 
 If the arguments of the present book are valid, the former 
 ought generally to be the case ; yet I have no doubt that some-
 
 96 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 times an entirely novel piece (provided that the technical 
 difliculties of reading are not too great) will strike the fancy 
 of the child. Such an instance may be full of instruction to 
 the teacher. He will infer his own failure of judgment in 
 selecting pieces for appreciation ; he will wish to know why he 
 has failed in the presentation of them ; he will wonder whether 
 he has produced tedium by excess of repetitions. . . . 
 
 Reference to the printed book. — There is no reason 
 whatever why the child in repeating a piece should 
 be deprived wholly of the printed book. The principle 
 here, of course, is quite different from that of the "first 
 impression " discussed in a preceding chapter. Dep- 
 rivation of the book means an increase of nervous- 
 ness and timidity, — a fatal thing both for apprecia- 
 tion and for committing to memory, — and it may 
 mean, too, the establishment of a number of false 
 associations that will be difficult to unlearn. 
 
 This last point needs some elucidation in view of recent 
 investigations in the field of memory. If, as experimental 
 psychologists have shown, a poem can be learned most ex- 
 peditiously when learned as a whole, not in fragments, the 
 policy of prescribing one verse for one week and another for 
 the next is wholly wasteful. The reasons for this are two. 
 First, there is the lessened interest in learning a fragment, the 
 lessened ability to work up contrasts, climaxes and so on ; in fact, 
 the lower temperature of the whole process. Secondly, there 
 are mechanical or quantitative reasons. When we read a piece 
 through consecutively, we establish the right associations be- 
 tween every word and the word that follows ; for example, 
 the last word of the first stanza is linked to the first word of
 
 THE FINAL VIEW OF THE LESSON 97 
 
 the second stanza, just as it should be. If, however, we learn 
 each stanza in separation from others, we fail to establish any 
 Unks between the individual stanzas ; these links have sub- 
 sequently to be forged by special practice, — a wasteful pro- 
 cess. Nay, as the first stanza is followed by a repetition of 
 itself a number of times, an erroneous association is established 
 between its last word and its first, instead of with the first word 
 of the following stanza. It is obvious, therefore, that a poem 
 of reasonable length should be learned as a whole. 
 
 Now let us consider the practice of depriving the pupil of 
 his book before he is quite sure of the poem. He comes to a 
 halt at a certain point. Our aim should be to prevent such 
 halts ; to make his ideas and words flow unbrokenly. But if 
 he has no book to which to refer, his halt becomes long and 
 embarrassing. He loses contact with the lines that he has 
 just uttered. He repeats some of the words in a vain attempt 
 to regain the lost thread. A tide of emotion and anxiety surges 
 into his mind. 
 
 This is not the way either to obtain enjoyment from recita- 
 tion or to obtain fluency in the process. It is a good rule for 
 the teacher, therefore, to allow as few disturbances of the 
 associational process as possible. He should not ask pupils 
 to recite from memory until the associations are pretty firmly 
 estabUshed, and even when they are pretty firmly established 
 he should allow books to be close at hand to supply confidence 
 and minimize the periods of halt. 
 
 Summary. — I have now brought to an end my 
 outline scheme of a lesson in poetical appreciation. 
 The word " lesson " as here used will sometimes 
 mean a lesson in the strictest and narrowest sense, — 
 a thirty or forty minute period filled with systematic
 
 98 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 pedagogical activity proceeding from a definite start 
 to a definite finish. In many cases, however, the 
 lesson will be distributed over a number of periods 
 perhaps widely separated from each other ; reproduc- 
 tion, in particular, — learning by heart, — will require 
 time in abundance. 
 
 With this proviso, the " lesson in appreciation " 
 itself may be said to consist of five stages — or four if 
 (mistakenly, I think) we regard (5) and (6) as one — 
 which themselves are often to be preceded by two 
 other vastly important stages of a preparatory nature. 
 The scheme of such a lesson will, therefore, be some- 
 what as follows and it will be seen to resemble closely 
 the five steps set out in Chapter V. 
 
 Stages or phases preliminary to the lesson proper: — 
 
 (i) Negative preparation. 
 
 (2) Positive preparation. 
 
 The lesson proper : — 
 
 (3) Immediate preparation. 
 
 (4) Presentation. 
 
 (5) Discussion (aesthetic), followed by Re-presentation. 
 
 (6) Discussion (factual or intellectual), followed by Re- 
 presentation. 
 
 (7) Reproduction (learning by heart).
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 POSSIBILITIES 
 
 The biographical element in appreciation. — Brief 
 mention was made in a preceding chapter of the 
 possibility of awakening interest in literature by means 
 of biography. The American child who knows the 
 story of the composition of The Star Spangled Banner 
 feels an added interest in the poem or song itself. Dur- 
 ing the Napoleonic war, Campbell was arrested as a 
 " traitor " and, when brought before the court, handed 
 a manuscript poem to the magistrate and was immedi- 
 ately declared to be " not a traitor " on the strength of 
 that stirring piece. The English child who is familiar 
 with these facts will feel an added interest in Ye 
 Mariners of England. Most people, American or 
 English, would the more keenly appreciate the Fifty- 
 first Psalm if they knew that it was the consolation 
 of both Sir Thomas More and Lady Jane Grey on the 
 scaffold ; that Savonarola, after being tortured, wrote 
 a meditation on it with his one available arm ; that 
 Saint Teresa died repeating the tenth, eleventh, 
 and seventeenth verses, and Arnold of Rugby re- 
 peating the twelfth verse. Even the fact that the 
 
 99
 
 TOO THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 first verse was the " neck verse " of the Middle Ages, 
 which, if successfully read by a criminal, showed him 
 to be a " clerk " and gave him the " benefit of clergy," 
 adds interest to the psalm. 
 
 Such an interest, being " added," is not purely 
 aesthetic, and the question arises whether aesthetic 
 interest is the teacher's only concern. The question 
 thus put seems almost too absurd to require an answer, 
 but in point of fact there are people who regard the 
 purely artistic side of things as the only one of real 
 inportance. Whether Campbell was really a " traitor " 
 or not matters very little to them ; they are concerned 
 only with the form and style of his poem. They are, 
 in short, the advocates of "art for art's sake" to whom 
 reference was made in Chapter III. The poet's 
 (painter's, musician's) only business — in their judg- 
 ment — is to produce beautiful things ; and our busi- 
 ness — in their judgment, apparently — is to admire 
 beauty and ignore everything else. 
 
 Art for art's sake? — Long has been the battle 
 between the advocates of this doctrine and those 
 other controversialists who consider that art should 
 stand, not in isolation from the rest of life, but in 
 a most intimate and moral relation to it. Among 
 the most emphatic proponents of the latter view may 
 be mentioned, besides Wagner in the realm of music, 
 Watts in the realm of painting, and Ruskin and Shaw 
 in the realm of criticism. These men are " didactic "
 
 POSSIBILITIES lOI 
 
 artists ; they preach and teach. " For ' art's sake ' 
 alone," says Shaw, " I would not face the toil of 
 writing a single sentence." The proponents of the 
 former view are found in the greatest number in 
 France; in England, Oscar Wilde gave expression 
 to it, and, incidentally, to various sneers at the ex- 
 pense of " morality." ^ 
 
 There are, however, two elements of truth in the 
 " art for art's sake " notion. Every human task, 
 to be achieved successfully, demands a certain amount 
 of specialization and concentration. We have to 
 turn aside temporarily from the other things. It is 
 so with discovery ; it is so with invention ; it is so 
 with art. If the scientific discoverer were compelled 
 at every moment to think about other things than 
 science and discovery he would be so paralyzed in 
 his efforts that he would discover little or nothing. 
 So, too, if the artist were compelled to consider at 
 every moment the purely moral or political aspects 
 of his work, he would probably become an ineffective 
 artist without becoming a useful moralist or politician. 
 In all affairs of hfe we must, to some extent, " stoop 
 to conquer " ; we must do one thing at a time and 
 temporarily ignore many other things in doing the one. 
 
 iThat France has begun to learn the folly of the "art for art's 
 sake" notion is shown by various signs, — among others, by the 
 article of M. Cousinet from which I have so copiously borrowed, and 
 by the wide popularity of such a book as RoUand's Jean Christophe.
 
 I02 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 And as with methods, so with results. The other 
 element of truth in the " art for art's sake " notion 
 is that bad art is not saved from its badness by con- 
 sideration of its moral, poHtical, or other excellences. 
 If a picture is badly designed or badly colored we 
 have no right to call it a good picture, although it 
 may possess important non-artistic merits. The 
 advocates of " art for art's sake " have thus done 
 good service in making our notions of merit precise. 
 
 But on the whole their influence has been per- 
 nicious. Just as the vivisector has justified his 
 tortures on the ground that knowledge is an end in 
 itself, the artists of this school have justified frivolous, 
 meaningless, or positively debasing products of their 
 activity on the ground that art is independent of the 
 rest of life, and has no call to consider anything but its 
 own interests and supposed principles. And Nemesis 
 has followed ! Art in France, as M. Cousinet points 
 out, has, while becoming subtler, become feebler and 
 more bloodless, become more and more remote from 
 the common man, and become the property and play- 
 thing of a coterie of ineffective aesthetes. Having 
 nothing to say to men, it loses the power to say it. 
 
 Whatever may be the right and wrong of " art 
 for art's sake " from the standpoint of the artist, 
 there ought to be no doubt as to the attitude which 
 the educationist should adopt. His concern is em- 
 phatically life as a whole, not merely the ideals of the
 
 POSSIBILITIES 103 
 
 specialist in art or science or business. He must 
 teach the appreciation of beauty but also that of 
 goodness; he must think of the pupils' leisure, but 
 also of the pupils' livelihood in the widest sense. 
 Narrow dogmas such as the one just discussed are 
 therefore, for him, heresies of a most damnable kind. 
 The advantage of multiplying significances. — 
 The above remarks have been made because, in urging 
 that the teacher should tell his pupils something about 
 the lives of artists, I have departed from the purely 
 aesthetic side of appreciation. The advocate of 
 I "art for art's sake" will tell us — has repeatedly 
 'told us — that the artist's life has nothing to do with 
 the artist's work. The educationist can hold no such 
 view. Everything for him is significant, though 
 significant in varying degrees; and if the life of an 
 artist is full of personal or social interest, that in itself 
 is a reason why his works should be studied. Two 
 significances are better than one, and three than two ; 
 the " grouping of ideas " together, the " reenforcing 
 of admiration with a crowd of intellectual elements 
 (interpretations, memories, comparisons)," which M. 
 Cousinet regards as important in the training of 
 appreciation, extends even to the manipulation of 
 biographical facts. When we hear a great poet 
 giving utterance, in immortal words, to the hope that 
 he will 
 
 " Fit audience find, though few,"
 
 I04 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 we may dwell aesthetically upon the alliterative beauty 
 of the line, but if we cannot summon up in all its 
 vividness the image of the blind and disappointed 
 Milton, we miss far more than we receive. And if, 
 in hearing the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, 
 we obtain, from the three quavers followed by a minim, 
 
 g 
 
 ±^ 
 
 E5l=i5: 
 
 f4 
 
 merely a sense of something impetuous, and do not 
 hear the hammer-strokes of Fate knocking at Bee- 
 thoven's door and saying, " You shall suffer — suffer 
 — suffer, — you shall be deaf as a stone, — you shall 
 never know domestic joys, — you shall be pursued by 
 Me even to the portals of the grave," — if we hear 
 nothing of this, and our appreciation of the symphony 
 is merely the appreciation of its musical make-up, we 
 miss much that it is a thousand pities to miss. 
 
 Works of art differ very much in this respect. In 
 the case of some, the biographical element is wholly 
 negligible ; mere beauty of line, color, phrase, or tone 
 is their only — and perhaps their sufficient — claim 
 to our admiration. But the educationist should 
 rejoice whenever, accompanying the beauty, there is 
 a wider significance too. 
 
 Proportion in dealing with biographical materials. — 
 But the manipulation of biographical materials is
 
 POSSIBILITIES lOS 
 
 not always successfully achieved by the teacher. 
 Too often he thinks that if he narrates an adequate 
 number of biographical episodes in the order of their 
 occurrence, a biography will result. Experience 
 shows, however, that such details are almost wholly 
 forgotten within a few days of their being presented, 
 so slight is the impression they produce. Whether 
 Milton was " born at London " or " bom at Sowerby, 
 Lincolnshire " ; whether Tennyson was educated at 
 " Christ's College, Cambridge " or at " St. Paul's 
 School, London," really matters very little, and the 
 child, apparently, feels that it matters very Httle and 
 forgets such things as soon as possible or confuses one 
 biography with another. 
 
 What is important is that the teacher should go to 
 the very heart of a poet's or a musician's life. A few 
 examples will show what I mean. 
 
 Concrete illustrations: Milton, Dante, Cervantes. 
 — Milton's life consisted of four tragedies : First, 
 the postponement, at the call of political duty, of 
 his early ambition to write a great poetical work such 
 " as men should not wiUingly let die." Second, his 
 marriage into a Cavalier family and his temporary 
 desertion by his wife. (Fortunately this tragedy 
 turned out less tragic than seemed probable at first, 
 but it left permanent traces in the Adam and Eve 
 parts of Paradise Lost.) Third, his blindness. 
 Fourth, — the worst tragedy of all, — the failure of
 
 lo6 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 republicanism in 1660. Against the Restoration of 
 the King he fought almost frantically; to the last 
 after the Restoration it is a wonder that he escaped 
 the gallows, and no wonder that he lived in discontent 
 and gloom or that he consoled himself by writing 
 Samson Agonistes. 
 
 Here, in about a hundred words, has been expressed 
 everything that is really of biographical moment in 
 Milton's Hfe. No mention is made of his '' education 
 at Christ's College, Cambridge," or of his being called 
 the "boy bachelor" or the "lady of Christ's"; 
 for these things are not vital. 
 
 The life of Dante can be treated in much the same 
 way. He loves and admires Beatrice, but she marries 
 some one else ; first blow. He continues to worship 
 her from afar; she dies; second blow. He will im- 
 mortalize her ; but meanwhile he throws himself into 
 Florentine affairs, fights in the army of the city, 
 becomes a magistrate, and seeks to check the faction 
 struggles by banishing the heads of the two parties ; is 
 himself banished under pain of death ; third blow. An 
 exile now, brooding over the disunited condition of 
 Italy, he dreams of the rule of the Holy Roman 
 Emperor becoming a reality ; his dream seems near 
 realization ; the Emperor Henry VII dies ; fourth and 
 last blow. Fame at last comes to him on the pubHca- 
 tion of his Divine Comedy. 
 
 And the life of Cervantes similarly. One ambition
 
 POSSIBILITIES 107 
 
 after another is thwarted. Fate hammers at his 
 door, as it hammered at Beethoven's, almost to 
 the end. He aims at literary or dramatic success; 
 Lope de Vega obtains it, he does not. He aims at 
 military distinction and obtains it in the great fight 
 of Lepanto, but he is maimed for Hfe, and soon after 
 the battle is captured by the Moors and retained as 
 a prisoner while the best years of his Hfe slip away. 
 Renewed efforts to obtain literary renown fail; 
 efforts to obtain official preferment fail almost equally ; 
 a small appointment in connection with the equip- 
 ment of the Armada does not save him from a debtor's 
 prison. Don Quixote is " born in a jail," but with 
 its birth comes the one gleam of light in the Hfe of 
 Cervantes, now drawing to an end. What a Quixote 
 he had indeed been all his life ! 
 
 These are grand, heroic figures, it will be said, and 
 ah poets are not such. No, and in some instances it 
 is quite profitless to employ the biographical device. 
 But a touch of biography here and there is rarely 
 a mistake. It is true that Longfellow's domestic 
 griefs, Whittier's antislavery record, this or that 
 author's unfortunate deaHngs with pubHshers, or 
 the titanic griefs of men like Dante and Cervantes 
 are not capable of being brought to the child's inner 
 comprehension in any very vital way. The chasm 
 of age and experience is probably wider than any chasm 
 of nationality, sex, or even genius, and there is a
 
 lo8 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 distinct danger in so taking the freshness and the 
 flavor out of grand biographical material that when 
 adolescence comes — the age of hero worship when 
 biography is all-important — the life of a great man 
 may appear flat, stale, and unprofitable. A touch 
 of biography, then, is all that in most cases should 
 be given by the teacher. That can do no harm to 
 a fuller biographical treatment and may, indeed, pave 
 the way for it. 
 
 The teaching of epics and dramas. — In the chapters 
 that precede I have been keeping in mind the teaching 
 rather of lyrics than of epics and dramas, and though 
 I have drawn many examples (of metaphor and the 
 like) from Shakespeare and Milton, they have been 
 employed to illustrate the teaching of short rather 
 than long pieces. What is to be said about the 
 latter ? 
 
 The first thing to say is that none of us knows the 
 possibihties of such teaching. It is quite possible 
 that eighteenth century rhyming poetry, e.g. Pope's 
 Homer's Iliad, would appeal profoundly to our pupils. 
 The matter should be put to test. There was no 
 need to carry the romantic reaction from classicism 
 so far as wholly to exclude classic poetry from our 
 schools. I know that, before I was fourteen, I ap- 
 preciated the parting of Hector and Andromache 
 in the Iliad. Again, as I have said above, it is 
 quite possible that even Paradise Lost, if read or
 
 POSSIBILITIES 109 
 
 recited impressively to a class, would powerfully 
 attract some at least of the pupils. Certainly Milton 
 cannot be made a popular poet so long as the eye 
 for printed matter is the means of introduction to 
 the poet, but if the ear for rich rhythms and allitera- 
 tions is the means, a very different result may be 
 expected. 
 
 As to Shakespeare, a word should be said with regard 
 to the " dramatic method of teaching," recently ex- 
 pounded in England by Miss Findlay Johnson. There 
 is no question as to the folly of emplojdng purely sit- 
 still methods in connection with Shakespeare, and, as 
 Miss Johnson has shown, not only literary and histor- 
 ical lessons but even geographical, can be enormously 
 enhvened by the emplo>Tnent of dialogue. Obviously, 
 too, the acquisition of facts goes side by side with 
 the employment, often in self-expressional forms, of 
 language; " composition " and " geography " are be- 
 ing learned simultaneously. 
 
 One or two dangers, however, suggest themselves in con- 
 nection with the dramatization of Shakespeare in schools. 
 
 The teacher should not entirely neglect the old reposeful, 
 sit-still literature lesson in favor of the more demonstrative 
 methods now in vogue. This neglect is quite possible; in- 
 deed something of the kind is taking place at present in another 
 connection, for we see the popularity and the possibilities of 
 the cinematograph expelling from the mind of the teacher and 
 school administrator the fact that there are quiet museums 
 and beautiful galleries possessing far more permanent signif-
 
 no THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 icance. Dramatic literature should not be entirely an affair 
 of bustle and action ; there are subtle elements in it, moral 
 and aesthetic, that demand quieter treatment. 
 
 Again, though the employment of silvered cardboard for 
 armor, of chain-mail made out of twisted string, and of togas 
 improvised out of nightgowns undoubtedly adds interest to 
 a Shakespearean recital, there is some danger of the improvised 
 properties, because of their occasional squalor or absurdity, 
 involving the method in criticism and ultimately exposing it 
 to reaction. Conceivably, too, these "properties" may be 
 implanting wrong ideas in the children's minds, but I am more 
 concerned with their effect upon the somewhat stupid minds 
 of adult people. I have seen in England too many fads ex- 
 ploited for a time only to be dropped in five years and laughed 
 at as old-fashioned in twenty by the successors of the faddists, 
 to be quite wholehearted in my sympathy with the latest 
 enthusiasm. In the interest of the dramatic method itself, 
 therefore, let us use it in moderation or we shall find, in a few 
 years, that people will be tired of it. 
 
 It is obvious that a Shakespearean " lesson in 
 appreciation " must take a more diffused form than 
 when the single lyric is concerned, though many of the 
 remarks in Chapters I-V hold good still. The advice 
 to exclude " problems " is, however, inapplicable 
 to the study of dramatic literature. Was Hamlet 
 mad? Which was the cleverer man, and which was 
 the better man, Brutus or Cassius? Assuming that 
 Shakespeare wrote King Henry the Eighth, do his 
 sympathies appear to have been with the Protestant 
 or the Roman Catholic side? Was Lear "more
 
 POSSIBILITIES 111 
 
 sinned against than sinning " ? These large problems, 
 flanked by a few smaller ones, will give an enormous 
 enhancement to the interest in the drama under 
 study ; even by a class of mediocre children many 
 passages will be discovered which " prove " one thing 
 or another, and splendid material for essay writing 
 as well as for class discussion will be provided. 
 
 The policy of ear before eye, all-important in con- 
 nection with beautiful lyrics, is of considerable im- 
 portance here also, but it need not be carried out in 
 an undeviating manner. All the finest passages — 
 those that are most poetical or those that are most 
 dramatically expressive — should, I think, come to the 
 pupil through his ear, particularly as the language 
 often contains antiquated constructions which cause 
 far more " distraction " when seen in printed form 
 than when heard in their explanatory context; but 
 there are considerable tracts of dialogue in Shake- 
 speare, including, perhaps, his comic scenes, about 
 which the teacher need not be fastidious. 
 
 The whole realm of comedy and humor is, however, 
 educationally an unexplored one, deserving a treatise 
 all to itself. Where a really immortal joke is con- 
 cerned the teacher may, legitimately, pioneer it him- 
 self and not leave it to be interpreted by the stumbling 
 efforts of a school class. Just as metaphors are 
 unmeaning unless their dual basis is appreciated, 
 so a joke is unmeaning unless it moves against its
 
 112 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 own background. The child who does not know 
 what " odious " means and what " odorous " means 
 cannot laugh at the famous confusion between them 
 which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Dogberry. 
 As in the case of metaphors, too, it is almost useless 
 to try to make up for lost opportunities by ** explana- 
 tions " after the joke has fallen flat.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC 
 
 I SHALL have less to say about music than about 
 poetry, and I shall make no attempt to work out a 
 scheme of pedagogical stages. Sooner or later the 
 world will have such a scheme, but at the present 
 moment, even if it could be formulated, it would 
 probably do more harm than good. Music is making 
 such rapid advances in the direction of intellectuaUty 
 and complexity that contrasts between it and poetry 
 are a little dangerous ; indeed the two arts are rather 
 closely akin to each other and obey, at several points, 
 the same laws. Broadly, it is true to say that simple 
 musical appreciation is easier to awaken than poetical 
 appreciation. The higher forms of musical apprecia- 
 tion, however, make demands to which, at present, 
 the school cannot very well respond — subtle forms 
 of " preparation " corresponding to the " pioneering " 
 of metaphors discussed in Chapter IV. Some of 
 these demands will be indicated in the chapters that 
 follow, but I am mainly concerned for two things : 
 first, to encourage our more ambitious teachers to 
 work at the technique of the lesson on musical ap- 
 I 113
 
 114 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 preciation ; and, secondly, to point out some common 
 errors in procedure. 
 
 The social significance of musical appreciation. — 
 When we lift our eyes from the classroom and fix 
 them on our emptying rural districts and our swarm- 
 ing urban areas where dull toil is followed by crude 
 and feverish pleasure ; when we think of the possi- 
 bilities of music in public parks and concert rooms, in 
 family circles and national festivals ; we realize at 
 once that the question of musical appreciation pos- 
 sesses an importance far greater than most questions 
 of pedagogics. How is the problem thus presented 
 to be grappled with? 
 
 We must, in the first place, study child nature, 
 adolescent nature, and adult nature. Observation 
 of others, memory of our own experiences, and the 
 study of biography will all help us here. If such or 
 such a song or musical phrase is reported to have 
 impressed an individual at a certain period or at a 
 certain crisis in his life, it is our duty to investigate 
 the circumstances and to try to deduce from it some 
 hints for future guidance. 
 
 We must, secondly, study the methods of presen- 
 tation successfully adopted by great artists. The 
 passage already quoted from Wagner will show what 
 is here meant. 
 
 In the third place, we must study works of art 
 themselves and try to find out the devices by which
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC 
 
 115 
 
 various musical effects are produced. At some stage 
 or other we shall have to discuss these devices with 
 our pupils (juvenile, adolescent, or adult) just as, in 
 Stage Five of the lesson in poetical appreciation, we 
 have to discuss poetical structure ; but before we 
 discuss them, we must know them ourselves. 
 
 It is from this third standpoint that I proceed to 
 summarize the musical principles exemplified in the 
 nine symphonies of Beethoven, borrowing the ex- 
 position from the well-known work of Grove. ^ 
 
 The principle of repetition. — This principle, — 
 basal, as we have seen, in poetry, — is probably the 
 most basal of all in music. Repetition is never 
 absent long from any piece of music. It may be 
 noticeable within a single bar as in this instance of 
 likeness with difference : — 
 
 P^^ 
 
 Dvorak. Neu World Symphonu. 
 
 or within two bars, as in the opening of the Fijth 
 Symphony. 
 
 /T» 
 
 Beethoven. 
 
 1 Sir George Grove, Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Also 
 Beethoven and his Nine Symphonies.
 
 Il6 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 It may be a mere whisper of repetition, so delicate 
 that the ear is hardly conscious of it at all, or it may 
 persist through many bars, as in the passage whose 
 beginning has just been given. 
 
 Repetition, carried to excess, becomes monotonous. 
 Is monotony unpleasant ? Not always ; now and 
 then it is exactly the effect which a musician desires 
 to produce. An example of it is found in the first 
 movement of the Sixth (or Pastoral) Symphony. 
 The '' constant sounds of nature, the monotony of 
 rustling leaves and swaying trees and running brooks 
 and blowing wind," are here suggested to the mind 
 (not, in the strict sense, imitated directly, though in 
 the Symphony there are some examples of deliberate 
 imitation) ; and the resultant effect is one of " monot- 
 ony which is never monotonous." The " forest 
 murmurs " in Wagner's Siegfried and Siegfried Idyll 
 are much like Beethoven's movement. 
 
 In the second movement of the Second S>Tnphony 
 there are also " endless repetitions." " But who," 
 asks Grove, " ever wished them curtailed? " 
 
 Still, monotony is usually disagreeable, and the 
 musician must seek to avoid it. " La nature est 
 bonne a imiter, mais non pas jusqu'a I'ennui." ^ 
 The musician, therefore, introduces changes of various 
 kinds. 
 
 The principle of contrast. — In other words, to 
 * D'Alembert, quoted by Grove, p. 196.
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC II7 
 
 make repetition aesthetically impressive it must be 
 heightened by the exactly opposite principle of con- 
 trast, and here again the change may be deUcate, 
 hardly recognizable at all, or obvious, perhaps even 
 violent and overwhelming. 
 
 Nowhere is the real greatness of a musician better 
 seen than in his control over the resources of contrast. 
 It is easy to use them to excess and thus lose hold 
 of all the coherence and continuity, all the famiHar- 
 ity, all the sense of being " at home," that come from 
 repetition. The great musicians steer successfully 
 between this danger and the opposite danger of 
 monotony. Beethoven, for example, gives us, in 
 his Second Symphony, " changes both sudden and 
 suitable such as at once to rouse the attention, and, 
 with all their oddity, to convince the reason and 
 satisfy the taste." Some of these changes, from loud 
 to soft, from full orchestra to single instrument, from 
 one instrument to another, from one key to another, 
 from legato to staccato, from regular time to syncopa- 
 tion and broken accents, gave great offense to the 
 conventional musicians of his age, who saw in them, 
 no doubt, the complete destruction of the opposite 
 and equally necessary principle. And, indeed, art 
 is always oscillating between the extremes of rigid 
 obedience to rules, on the one side, and freedom of 
 invention on the other, and great excesses have been 
 committed in the interests of both causes. The
 
 Il8 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 battle, as already pointed out, is commonly known 
 as that between the " classic " and the " romantic." 
 
 Contrasts are usually apparent between the " first 
 subject " of a symphony movement and the " second." 
 Not only is the first usually vigorous and the second 
 tender, but while the first is on the key note the 
 second is usually on the dominant. There is, too, 
 strong contrast between the four movements, the 
 usual order being Fast, Slow, Fast (Minuet or Scherzo). 
 Very Fast. 
 
 In some cases, too, the musician gives us what seems like 
 absolute chaos — "irreconcilable discords and stubborn dis- 
 arrangements of the rhythm " — in order to convey the impres- 
 sion of obstinacy, fury, and the like as, for example, in the first 
 movement of the Eroica Symphony, in which a struggle be- 
 tween the great hero and the difhculties he had to overcome 
 are supposed to be represented. 
 
 Violent changes of all kinds really go beyond mere con- 
 trast, for contrast usually implies a certain underlying resem- 
 blance. We do not contrast bright days with tall buildings 
 but with dark days. When, therefore, Beethoven, in the last 
 movement of the Eighth Symphony, introduces a terrific and 
 sudden outburst which breaks the whole continuity, we feel 
 that we are straining the language to speak of "contrast" at 
 all. A soft C natural is followed by a roaring C sharp on the 
 "up beat," the weak portion of the bar. It is made "as un- 
 bearable as possible." "It comes upon the artless passage 
 which it so rudely interrupts like a sudden stroke of fate on 
 the life of some gentle child." 
 
 If, as Grove insists, this C sharp is a huge and almost brutal 
 joke — a mere cry or noise which does not affect the music —
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC II9 
 
 it would almost seem to be illegitimate. We are in the realm 
 of humor not of aesthetics. 
 
 Repetition alone, then, is monotonous ; change 
 alone is mere noise. The methods by which these 
 two can be combined is the problem for the musician. 
 There is pleasure in mere repetition, there is pleasure 
 in mere contrast, but when the two are skillfully 
 combined the pleasure not only, as a rule, is greater 
 but is, so to speak, on a higher plane, more complex 
 and less unsophisticated. 
 
 Humanly speaking, there is no limit to the possible 
 sources of pleasure thus opened up. 
 
 Variety in repetition. — Repetition may predomi- 
 nate, with only a Httle contrast ; or the repetition 
 may be so slight as to be hardly noticeable and yet 
 do its perfect work all the time. Or there may be 
 qualitative differences ; a melody may be transferred 
 from violin to flute. . . . 
 
 One particularly effective combination of repeti- 
 tion with contrast is the return, after an excursion, 
 to an original theme. Mr. Macpherson calls this 
 ABA arrangement — using a homely metaphor origi- 
 nally provided by a child — the " sandwich " prin- 
 ciple. It is employed in many songs {e.g. " Charlie 
 is my Darling ''), in the majority of marches, and, 
 in still more noble forms, in sonatas and symphonies. 
 A good many of the " airs " by Handel, Gluck, and 
 Mozart consist of three stanzas, the third of which is
 
 I20 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 identical with the first, and this recurrence is pleasur- 
 able in the extreme. Beethoven was particularly great 
 " in his power of first leading away from the original 
 theme of his symphonic movement and then ' es- 
 caping back ' to it in various original ways." 
 
 Another form of combined contrast and similarity 
 is that known as " contrary motion," one voice (or 
 one instrument) moving up the scale, while another 
 voice (or instrument) moves down, as near the open- 
 ing of the Fifth Symphony. Another is the device 
 of " Augmentation," the repetition of a phrase at 
 less than its original speed. 
 
 Another form of " likeness in difference " is occa- 
 sionally employed. Usually the four movements of a 
 symphony are absolutely different from each other 
 in the material employed. But now and then a musi- 
 cian allows a phrase or a rhythm to be present in 
 more than one movement. A good example of this 
 is found in the Fifth Symphony. The rhythm of 
 the famous and vigorous first subject (see above, 
 p. 104) is preserved in the second movement. A 
 less striking instance is in the First Symphony, first 
 movement. Here Subject II borrows its arpeggio 
 from Subject I. One might almost say that in these 
 cases the principle of association (to be presently 
 discussed) is being employed ; the memory of the 
 earlier phrase is being utilized for the sake of the 
 pleasurable sense of familiarity.
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC I2l 
 
 The folly of " tearing and hacking " a poem was 
 pointed out in Chapters V and VI. The aesthetic 
 value of repetitions and contrasts depends on the fact 
 that they are repetitions and contrasts, that is to say, 
 that each does not stand in isolation from the others. 
 It is hardly necessary to say that this principle re- 
 ceives many fine exemplifications from music. In 
 the Scherzo of the Fifth Symphony occurs a passage 
 which consists of nothing but " an insignificant chord 
 continuously held by low strings and a pianissimo 
 rhythmic beat of the drum. Taken out of its con- 
 text it would be perfectly meaningless. As Beethoven 
 has used it, it is infinitely . . . impressive." Towards 
 the end of the preceding movement, too, there are 
 rests full of " imspeakable emotion." Like the pauses 
 in Toll for the Brave, these rests must be exploited 
 to the uttermost. 
 
 Yet artists of genius can take great liberties even 
 with the imity of their work. Nothing is more 
 characteristic of Beethoven than his frequent intro- 
 duction of unexpected " episodes," sometimes of 
 " little sallies of fim and humor," which, to the 
 more rigid musicians of his time, were forms of sheer 
 indecorum. The finale of the Second Symphony is 
 a case in point ; another case was referred to above 
 in connection with the Eighth Symphony. 
 
 The principle of association. — Beauty arises from 
 association as well as from repetition and contrast.
 
 122 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 One idea summons up another which, being itself a 
 happy idea, reenforces the former and bathes it in a 
 pleasant atmosphere. Even if the second idea is 
 not markedly pleasant, the summoning up remains 
 pleasant, because of the recognition of similarity, 
 the feeling of familiarity. Thus, though a thunder- 
 storm is not pleasant, there is pleasure in hearing a 
 thunderstorm represented in music. Ruskin's dis- 
 cussion of " ideas of imitation " early in Modern 
 Painters has reference to this kind of pleasure of our 
 " animal nature." It is closely connected with the 
 pleasure of mere repetition and yet the two are not 
 identical. There is an element of " deception " in 
 imitation ; we know that we are not listening to a 
 real thunderstorm or a real cuckoo in the Sixth Sym- 
 phony and the fact that we know this is the very 
 reason for the pleasure we experience. 
 
 The " leitmotif." — Shghtly more complex than 
 these two forms of pleasure, which are both, in a 
 sense, associational, is that which arises from the em- 
 ployment of leitmotifs by Wagner and most modem 
 musicians. One of the most famous and effective 
 is the Siegfried motif: — 
 
 m 
 
 Hz 
 
 =E 
 
 lr\ 
 
 Der Ring (Us Niebelungen. 
 
 This is always associated with the appearance of 
 Siegfried on the stage, but it receives some modifica-
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC 
 
 123 
 
 tions according to circumstances, and in the funeral 
 march it loses all its youthful gayety and becomes 
 tragic. The resources of music here are very great; 
 it can exploit the laws of mental association in ways 
 that probably no other art can do. Something cor- 
 responding to metaphors is here employed; in the 
 midst of gayety and triumph we hear the ominous 
 " curse " motif : — 
 
 =9^tf 
 
 v-^ 
 
 15>- 
 
 :P± 
 
 ii^ 
 
 -(5^ 
 
 -# P- 
 
 e 
 
 Der Ring des Niebdungen. 
 
 or in the midst of tragic gloom the memory of the 
 joyous youth of the hero can be recalled. An amusing 
 instance of something very similar to a leitmotif occurs 
 towards the end of H. M. S. Pinafore where the res- 
 onant chorus in praise of the " Englishman " reminds 
 us of the strains of Rule Britannia. There is a dis- 
 tinct pleasure in recognizing familiar strains and 
 familiar ideas in a new setting. 
 
 The importance of the introduction. — The teacher 
 can learn much from the musician on the subject of 
 " introducing " a lesson. " The beginning," said Schu- 
 mann, " is the great thing " — one appHcation of the 
 Principle of the First Impression. In Beethoven's 
 symphonies introductions in one. form or another are 
 often of considerable importance. The musician 
 rarely plunges into his main theme straight away.
 
 124 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 The First Symphony has a short introduction, the 
 Second, Fourth, and Seventh each a long one. 
 
 Sometimes the piece opens with a " discord " — 
 not an inharmonious combination of notes, as un- 
 sophisticated people might imagine from the word, 
 but a combination of notes that awakens a feeling 
 of incompleteness or expectation. This is the case 
 with the First Symphony and was originally the case 
 with the Third. We have here a process somewhat 
 parallel with what has been described in Chapter IV 
 as " preparing the mind and mood." 
 
 In one case, at least, a movement is made to open 
 mysteriously. By omitting to use the " third " of 
 the chord the composer leaves us uncertain for a 
 while as to whether the chord is major or minor. 
 Such is the device Beethoven employs at the begin- 
 ning of his Ninth Symphony. The reader may again 
 recall some of the remarks in Chapter IV. 
 
 Sometimes the introductory notes have to perform 
 what seems at first a mere humdrum function. The 
 musician wishes to mark the key of his chief subject 
 and accordingly starts with an emphatic common 
 chord. Examples are found in the second movement 
 of the First Symphony and the first movement of 
 the Third (Eroica). Generally speaking, indeed, 
 Beethoven is fond of simple passages based on the 
 common chord. 
 
 Intermediate and concluding passages. — If the
 
 SOME PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC 1 25 
 
 beginning of a progressive work of art is of vast 
 importance, the ending is hardly less so. In the 
 days of oratory, the " peroration " was highly es- 
 teemed. Beethoven, more perhaps than other musi- 
 cians, seems to have felt the need of something cor- 
 responding to a peroration in his symphonies ; con- 
 sequently his codas or tail pieces frequently assumed 
 large proportions, as in the end of the first movement 
 of the Choral {Ninth) Symphony. 
 
 Passages sometimes look forward as well as back- 
 ward. Early in the Fourth Symphony there comes 
 a passage intermediate between the first and second 
 subject and full of syncopations. " The notes seem 
 almost to be tumbling over one another in their 
 eagerness to get to the second subject, or rather the 
 group of melodies which form it." Now and then, 
 too, " effects of inconclusion " are aimed at, as in the 
 second movement of this same symphony ; a subject 
 here ends on the fifth of the key instead of the key 
 note, so that one is left with a hope that " its loveli- 
 ness may go on for ever." 
 
 So much for orchestral music. When music is 
 " married to immortal verse " we have vocal music. 
 The ideas or feelings called up by the words may 
 reenforce or, conceivably, interfere with the ideas or 
 feeUngs called up by the music. But there is no new 
 principle involved. 
 
 Now it is out of such raw discussions as that set
 
 126 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 forth above, and out of such hints as those contained 
 in the record of Wagner's Dresden experiences, that 
 the technique of the lesson in musical appreciation 
 has to be elaborated. But only a few hints, mainly 
 of the nature of warnings, will be here contributed to 
 the theme.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 THE TEACHING OF MUSIC 
 
 A FUNDAMENTAL bliuider has been made in connec- 
 tion both with poetry and with music. This is the 
 assumption that appreciation can be left to look after 
 itself and that the teacher's only task is to confer 
 execution or technique. In England, at any rate, 
 we seem to have taken for granted that the aim of 
 the teaching of music is to make musicians, just as 
 we seem to have taken for granted that the aim of 
 the teaching of poetry is to make reciters. The as- 
 sumptions may never have been formulated, and 
 indeed our very small success in producing either 
 musicians or reciters is some evidence that we have 
 never been thoroughly under the influence of the 
 assumptions in question, otherwise we should long 
 ago have felt dissatisfied with the results of our ef- 
 forts ; but certainly we have never been influenced to 
 any important extent by the notion of appreciation. 
 A solitary school teacher here and there may have 
 reaHzed, dimly or clearly, that something was missing, 
 but our system as a whole has been concerned with 
 execution or technique and with nothing else. 
 
 The evil of formalism in teaching music. — Indeed, 
 such changes as have taken place in England have 
 been distinctly away from the appreciation standpoint. 
 
 127
 
 128 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 " Singing by ear " has been driven out by " singing 
 by note " and is now regarded everywhere as crude 
 or old-fashioned. Quite recently, too, " voice train- 
 ing " has received more and more official patronage. 
 Both these changes are in the same direction — the 
 improvement of technique, the making of professional 
 musicians ; neither of them can substantially influence 
 appreciation. 
 
 Relatively to the needs of the time and the possi- 
 bihties of the primary school, I think all this is a 
 mistake. Instead of driving " singing by ear " out 
 of schools in favor of the teaching of musical nota- 
 tion it should have been made the basis of the kind 
 of musical instruction now advocated by Shaw, Mac- 
 pherson, and Stanley Hall. Pupils should have been 
 encouraged to recognize the influence of major and 
 minor modes and of difTerences of speed, the all-im- 
 portant principle of repetition, the principle of vari- 
 ety or difference, and, if possible, also the tones of 
 the various orchestral instruments. The pianola, as 
 Hall has suggested, and even the gramophone might 
 have been used to familiarize pupils with great works. 
 This program may sound ambitious ; in point of fact 
 it represents a method considerably easier and im- 
 measurably more interesting and culture-giving than 
 " singing by note " ; it would be accompanied by 
 very simple discussions on matters of taste : " Which 
 phrase do you Hke best? " " What does that song
 
 THE TEACHING OF MUSIC 
 
 129 
 
 call up in your mind? " and so on; and gradually, 
 from this matrix of varied enjoyment, principles 
 would begin to stand out. 
 
 But the wrong road was taken ; the printed book 
 was thrust between the pupil and the fairy world of 
 sound that might have been his ; and every song was 
 henceforward introduced to him through the eye. 
 
 Absurdities of the " time " and " tune " tests. — 
 In other details also our policy has been wrong. 
 Consider, for example, the employment of so-called 
 " time tests." 
 
 On what is musical " time " based? On the fact 
 emphasized in the preceding chapter that certain 
 phrases repeat themselves after a while in their orig- 
 inal or some modified form. Consider, for example, 
 the beautiful song from Gluck's Orpheus, Che Faro 
 (" Have I lost thee, love, forever? "). 
 
 ^fF^=^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 4=±U=t 
 
 :• — ^* 
 
 r T r ^^ 
 
 
 S 
 
 S 
 
 ^siit: 
 
 :f=it 
 
 ^— # 
 
 m 
 
 • s 
 
 ^ 
 
 d==: 
 
 -^^- 
 
 f • r 
 
 s 
 
 -^-^ 
 
 -^ -&-
 
 130 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 The first nine notes form a definite musical phrase. 
 The next eight notes represent this phrase sHghtly 
 modified — an excellent instance of "likeness in differ- 
 ence " ; there is about as close a resemblance between 
 them as between two Gothic windows in the same 
 church, and almost as close a resemblance as between 
 the two sides of a vase. Consequently the first note 
 and the tenth note occupy identical positions in the 
 piece. Wherever we draw our '' bars " we must draw 
 them in identical positions relative to these two notes. 
 If we draw a bar immediately after the second note, 
 we must also draw one immediately after the eleventh 
 note. We have no choice. The rhythm of the piece 
 compels this division ; we cannot impose time upon 
 the musical phrases supplied by the musician. The 
 time is inherent, because recurrence or repetition is 
 inherent. 
 
 Simpler examples now follow. The third phrase 
 and the fourth, each consisting of six notes, are 
 identical. The two beautiful descents that follow 
 exemplify likeness in difference. Once again our 
 " bars " must obviously be drawn through identical 
 parts of the various phrases. We are driven, there- 
 fore, to mark our piece *' Common Time." To call 
 it I, f , or any other form of " time " except " com- 
 mon " is simply out of the question. 
 
 Now, keeping the fact in mind that time is some- 
 thing inherent in music because music consists in
 
 THE TEACHING OF MUSIC 131 
 
 recurrent phrases, that time is not something super- 
 imposed on music, let us realize the significance, or 
 rather the grotesque folly and futility, of what is 
 called a " time test." 
 
 Here we have no phrases at all ; we have one note, 
 and one note only, repeated with certain arbitrary 
 variations of length. Scattered among the printed 
 symbols of these sounds some one places a number 
 of " bars " and informs us that the test is written in 
 " three-pulse measure," or " three-four time," or 
 " common time." Or, possibly, the bars are written 
 first and the doh, doh, doJts, or the lah, lak, lah's, are 
 scattered by the aforesaid eccentric person between 
 the bars. But on what principle is the " time " 
 determined? On none whatever. He has thrown 
 his bars and his doh's exactly where he liked ; indeed 
 he can, if he choose, use the same veteran row of 
 doh's for a half dozen different kinds of time. In 
 other words, he has taken away the most essential 
 element in music, — recurrent phrases of melody, 
 amid which certain homologous points establish 
 themselves — and then he has imposed upon the 
 featureless monotony which is left whatever " time " 
 his fancy dictated to him, or whatever " time " he 
 wished to teach his pupils. 
 
 And, then, having destroyed the soul of the thing, 
 he must needs put a new soul into it. Having ban- 
 ished melodic recurrence, he must introduce vocalic
 
 132 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 recurrence — for recurrence of some kind there must 
 be if we are to talk of " time " at all. This is the 
 form the thing now takes : — 
 
 I Ta : fa I te : f e | ta : fa | te : f e | ta : etc. 
 
 It is this scheme of nonsense syllables which now 
 constitutes the backgroimd of an English child's notion 
 of "time." The ear is laboriously trained to think of 
 this; it is not trained to note the glorious recurrences 
 of Che Faro or of the thousand other melodies which 
 genius has given to the world ! 
 
 The reader can here scarcely fail to recall the fact 
 that the warfare of the school against rhythm has been 
 waged in connection with poetry as well as music. 
 
 Hardly less absurd than " time tests," hardly less an 
 outrage on music, are the tests in " tune " of which so 
 large a part of English school lessons consists. And the 
 reason is the same. If the reader will examine an or- 
 dinary " tune test," he will find that it consists of notes, 
 but never of music. There is no thematic recurrence ; 
 no phrase repeats itself, either changed or unchanged. 
 In fact, the composer of tune tests would think him- 
 self at fault if he allowed any such recurrence, for 
 the child would begin to feel that there was music 
 in the test, that a phrase was familiar, and thus its 
 closing notes would be anticipated without a slavish 
 perusal of the printed symbols. The composer of 
 the tests must prevent this at all costs, and he does
 
 THE TEACHING OF MUSIC I33 
 
 it by using as many impossible and utterly unexpected 
 intervals as possible. 
 
 The place of technique in musical appreciation. — 
 But here a word of warning or qualification is called 
 for. There must, presumably, be some teaching of 
 musical technique in schools. Though the teaching 
 of music through the ear is the fundamental kind of 
 teaching and should be the starting point of every- 
 thing, it is hardly probable that an adequate system 
 of musical education could be entirely based on the 
 ear. The thing might, or might not, be possible; 
 I am prepared to hear, at any moment, of a splendid 
 new system of teaching music from which tech- 
 nique, in the present sense of the word, is wholly 
 absent. But I am also willing to grant that a 
 place for technique may have to be assigned in 
 perpetuity. I speak as a nonspeciahst and there- 
 fore refuse to dogmatize as to future possibilities 
 and probabihties. But it is quite indisputable that 
 the point of view of appreciation is more im- 
 portant for primary schools than the point of view of 
 execution ; that the ear is more important than the 
 eye ; and that all forms of " time tests " and " tune 
 tests " that destroy the essence of music are to be 
 looked upon with the gravest suspicion. 
 
 The principle of the first impression. — As with 
 poetry, this principle is all-important in connection 
 with music. The pupil's first acquaintance with a
 
 134 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 beautiful song should be made through hearing the 
 song sung in a beautiful manner ; it should never be 
 made through a series of symbols printed in a book 
 or chalked on the blackboard. His second acquaint- 
 ance with the song should be made in the same way, 
 and his third also. After that it matters little what 
 happens. He will have learned to love the song and 
 his love will be hard to destroy. 
 
 Who is to sing the song so as to make this powerful 
 "first impression"? There is very little doubt 
 about the answer ; the best singer in the school will 
 have to sing it, and in most cases this means one of 
 the teachers, who, for the present purpose, may have 
 to move from one class to another, singing in each the 
 selected song. In a few cases a pupil who can sing ex- 
 ceptionally well may be trained by the teacher in ad- 
 vance, and the rendering of the song to the class maybe 
 done by him.^ But on the whole the " lesson " notion 
 had better be divorced, largely at any rate, from the 
 notion of appreciation. As I have emphasized more 
 than once, where beautiful songs or beautiful poems 
 are concerned our ordinary concepts of classroom toil 
 are utterly inappropriate. Several classes may join 
 together to hear the songs or the poems, and perhaps 
 special places, times, and conditions — a hall with 
 color decorations, flowers, etc. — may be arranged. 
 
 1 With the improvement of the graphophone, the difl6culty here 
 referred to may be readily solved.
 
 THE TEACHING OF MUSIC 135 
 
 Precautions against the distraction enemy. — 
 Warnings against distraction are even more impor- 
 tant in connection with music than in connection 
 with poetry. The common practice of so construct- 
 ing a time-table as to allow several classes to shout 
 their songs against each other through the walls and 
 partitions of the school would be absolutely impos- 
 sible if the notion of appreciation had ever made 
 any headway. The plan is grotesquely stupid for 
 at least two reasons. First, it is uneconomical. One 
 class gets no profit from hearing (even through the 
 walls or partitions) the songs sung by another class, 
 whereas this is one of the most obvious ways in which 
 a hearing acquaintance with songs might be made.. 
 Second, and perhaps more important : the effect of 
 the songs sung by the class itself is spoiled by the 
 noise from neighboring rooms. Herbartian psycholo- 
 gists have pointed out that, as a rule, the worst 
 possible kind of interference is interference of " con- 
 trary " ideas, that is, of ideas different from each 
 other and yet belonging to the same class of ideas ; 
 two colors, e.g., cannot be thought of simultaneously 
 and in the same connection, whereas a color and a 
 sound may form a peaceful complex. Now, by the 
 plan of assigning the same hour to music in several 
 classes we set up the maximum of interference ; 
 sounds interfere with sounds : flattening will, there- 
 fore, occur, keynotes be lost, and, above all, the
 
 136 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 pleasurable effect of one song will be utterly spoiled 
 by the strains of one or more other songs mixing with 
 it from neighboring rooms. Wagner was ridiculed 
 for having, in the overture to the Meister singers, 
 combined three simultaneous strains into a grand 
 finale ; our schools have out-Wagnered Wagner. 
 
 Too much stress should not be laid upon the proposal that 
 one class should become familiar with the songs sung by another 
 class as a result of hearing them through walls and partitions. 
 There is no objection to this plan and there are some advantages 
 in it, but it is not dignified enough to be regarded very seriously 
 or to be employed in a dehberate and elaborate way. As 
 already indicated, the ver>' notion of one class devouring 
 one plateful of songs and another class devouring another 
 must largely give place to the communal notion of music 
 as a social fimction in which as many people as possible are 
 simultaneously to share. Further, many songs and many 
 instrumental pieces will never be rendered by the pupils at 
 aU, either as a united school or in single classes ; they will simply 
 be listened to as portions of a fixed ritual or as items on red- 
 letter occasions devoted specifically by half the school or the 
 whole of the school to appreciation ; enjoyed, discussed, and 
 remembered. For convenience, however, I shall continue to 
 speak of the "class teacher" and the "class" and to assume 
 that the "singing lesson" will continue for a long time to 
 flourish, though with far more time devoted to appreciation 
 than at present. 
 
 Suggestions. — What can the class teacher do to cul- 
 tivate the appreciative powers of his pupils? One 
 thing that he can do — it would come under the category
 
 THE TEACHING OF MUSIC 137 
 
 of "positive preparation " and correspond to the teach- 
 ing of " quotations " in poetry — is to familiarize 
 his class in advance with some of the musical phrases 
 which will be heard in their fuller context during the 
 appreciation lesson itself. Perhaps this suggestion 
 is more pertinent to the appreciation of orchestral 
 than to that of vocal music though there is no saying 
 how far it might be applicable to the latter. The 
 appreciation of a complex work like a symphony is 
 greatly enhanced if we know some, at least, of the 
 various " subjects " or " themes " and can therefore 
 recognize them as they occur in their original or in 
 some modified form. Indeed, most people's first 
 hearing of a symphony fails of much of its aesthetic 
 effect because of their unfamiliarity with its mate- 
 rials ; their second and third hearings are usually 
 more successful. The failure would not occur if the 
 form of " preparation " above discussed had a place 
 in musical education. The " first impression " — 
 always the most important impression unless we 
 allow distractions to spoil or weaken it — would 
 then come to its own. The teacher should remember, 
 however, that excessive familiarity is almost as in- 
 jurious to enjoyment as unfamiliarity. 
 
 I hesitate somewhat to approve of the suggestion 
 that, in such teaching of technique as we may retain 
 in our class instruction, we should make use of beau- 
 tiful phrases from the great musicians, instead of
 
 138 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 the customary and outrageous time tests and tune 
 tests. Some teachers can, no doubt, employ such 
 phrases with great effect, but there are two objections 
 to the plan, and in some cases these are fatal objec- 
 tions. A thing of beauty should be a " joy," and, if 
 possible, " a joy forever " ; it should be loved for 
 its own sake, or as a means to some greater end ; 
 if, then, we use it for the purpose of teaching technique, 
 we seem to be prostituting it, diverting it from the 
 purpose for which it is designed. Secondly, in so 
 diverting it we place it in a new atmosphere, an 
 atmosphere of effort and toil, perhaps of drudgery 
 and disgust. This is contrary to the principle of 
 the first impression, and it is a direct challenge to 
 " distraction " to do its worst. 
 
 Still, it is possible that the gap between the lesson 
 in technique and the appreciation lesson may, some 
 day, be bridged. At present I am just as con- 
 cerned to distinguish sharply between them as I am 
 concerned to distinguish between the appreciation 
 lesson in literature and the lesson in grammar. But 
 once our schools have grasped the significance of 
 appreciation, all kinds of possibilities may open up, 
 and, therefore, even in the lesson in musical technique, 
 the teacher may be able to make much use of phrases 
 from classical music for purposes of illustration and 
 practice before the classical music itself has been 
 heard. After it has been heard and appreciated,
 
 THE TEACmNG OF MUSIC 139 
 
 they may, of course, be used with considerable 
 freedom. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, I am inclined to say that 
 when classical pieces of the first rank, in wholes or in 
 fragments, are employed, they should be employed ap- 
 preciatively only, not for purposes of technical practice 
 in time or tune. The teacher may point out their struc- 
 ture, how this phrase or that recurs, how it is contrasted 
 with another phrase, and so on ; all this is a part of 
 the appreciation lesson. But when practice is in 
 question the teacher should employ pieces of a less 
 classical kind, but always music, not the nonmusical 
 tests that have hitherto been in use. 
 
 In one other way the teacher may enhance the 
 appreciation of music. This is by narrating the 
 biographies of the great musicians and showing how, 
 in many cases, the music was an expression of their 
 lives. Perhaps the biographical reference should 
 usually precede the presentation of the composer's 
 music and constitute a form of " preparation " such 
 as was suggested in connection with poetry. But 
 the function of " preparation " is really less impor- 
 tant here than in the former case, since the appeal of 
 music to the soul is less complex.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 PRINCIPLES OF PICTORIAL ART 
 
 The pictorial arts exemplify some of the principles 
 already discussed in connection with poetry and 
 music, and some others which are new. The principle 
 of " balance," for example, has not been mentioned 
 in the preceding chapters, for the reason that it is 
 more negligible in the arts which appeal to the 
 ear, while in the arts which appeal to the 
 spatial perception of the eye it is all-important. 
 A brief outline of the various principles that are 
 exemplified in these latter arts (such as painting, 
 sculpture, architecture, carving, pottery) will here 
 be given with primary reference to pictures and, as 
 the primary source, Mr. Poore's book. Pictorial 
 Composition. 
 
 The principle of unity or principality. — Most 
 fundamental, perhaps, is the principle of unity or 
 " principahty." An old precept says that " there 
 should be two principal lights in a picture," and many 
 painters adopt a kind of diagonal arrangement (for 
 example, Whistler's portraits of his mother and of 
 Carlyle) which presents one half of the picture dark 
 
 140
 
 PRINCIPLES OF PICTORIAL ART 141 
 
 (with a patch of Hght) and the other light (with a 
 patch of dark). In any case, one part of a picture 
 must have comparatively high light or one figure in 
 the picture must be made prominent by being placed 
 in the foreground. Rembrandt, in painting his 
 Night Watch, got into trouble because he gave more 
 prominence to two of the burghers than to the rest. 
 Again, with regard to the mutual relationship of land- 
 scape and figures, one or the other should be pre- 
 dominant ; the painter must either paint a landscape 
 with figures, or figures in a landscape ; if he tries to 
 be equally just to both he will prevent the mind of 
 the observer from concentrating upon anything. As 
 already pointed out in connection with poetry, art 
 must accentuate contrast. Principality is lacking in 
 some pictures, such as Botticelli's Allegory of Spring, 
 the figures of which are independent of one another. 
 
 Devices for insuring the effect of unity. — In order 
 to emphasize the principality of one figure, the painter 
 has at his command a series of devices additional to 
 those involving a manipulation of colors and lights. 
 The less important figures may be looking expectantly 
 or admiringly toward the principal figures (as in the 
 attitude of Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara in the 
 Sistine Madonna) ; or they may be in motion toward 
 the principal figure (as in Guido Reni's Aurora) ; 
 or the figures may be so arranged that certain Hues, 
 architectural and other, may converge on the prin-
 
 142 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 cipal figure. One of the most famous examples of 
 this convergence is the Last Supper of Leonardo da 
 Vinci, a picture which also illustrates the principle 
 of very formal balance, with two groups of three 
 figures each placed on one side of the principal figure. 
 Often, too, a "pyramidal" arrangement is adopted. 
 
 It is a complaint against many Renaissance artists that 
 they frequently painted for their Annunciations settings so 
 elaborate that the eye was carried right out of the picture, 
 the interest in the subject itself was divided and weakened, 
 and distraction was produced, with the usual fatal results. 
 Thus there may be a long perspective stretching back between 
 the two principal figures. Rembrandt, on the other hand, 
 usually avoided this fault. He "clogged the vision" of the 
 observer by means of darkness. 
 
 But the foreground also may be "clogged" ; may be made 
 tame and dark. This may be done quite legitimately. "Let- 
 ting the eye into the picture over a foreground of subdued 
 interest, or of no interest, is one of the most lime-honored 
 articles of the picture-maker's creed." But the foreground 
 should not usually be blocked by horizontal lines, for ex- 
 ample, the lines of a waU ; though even here a good painter, 
 by putting the foreground out of focus, may carry the observer 
 across the obstruction. A horizontal obstruction in the middle 
 distance is almost as bad as one in the foreground. 
 
 Pictures, in fact, like lessons in poetical apprecia- 
 tion, differ in their invitingness. " Some admit you 
 into their confidence . . . ; into others you have to 
 climb over a barrier or a lot of useless detail." " Mys- 
 tery, subtlety, and evasive charms are all in place,
 
 PRINCIPLES OF PICTORIAL ART 143 
 
 but should not stand on the threshold. One spot . . . 
 there should be toward which, through the suppression 
 of other parts, the eye is led at once. . . . One item 
 after another, in sequence, the visitor should then be 
 led to," — so that the eye travels in a more or less 
 circular, elliptical, or spiral manner over the picture. 
 
 When the picture is one of deep perspective, the en- 
 trance is sometimes made by angular lines similar to 
 those of a skater's zigzag movement, as in other cases 
 various lines in the picture lead inwards toward the 
 central figure that occupies the apex of a pyramid. 
 
 Unity may be destroyed by excess of detail. — 
 " The untutored mind always sees details." The 
 exact amount of detail suitable for a work of art 
 depends upon the character of the work. Excess of 
 detail may distract the mind and destroy the char- 
 acter of the picture. People once complained that 
 Millet omitted the wrinkles from his peasants' 
 breeches. But there should be none of that care- 
 lessness for detail as to compromise the thing repre- 
 sented in the picture. 
 
 Occasionally the actual suppression of an apparently 
 necessary detail is in itself suggestive. Grief has 
 been shown by a face entirely covered. The actual 
 moment of some violent action may not be the most 
 suggestive for the painter ; some preceding or suc- 
 ceeding moment may be preferable. An idea may 
 thus be suggested " stretching on into infinity."
 
 144 THE LESSOxN IN APPRECIATION 
 
 The principle of balance. — Only seemingly in 
 opposition to the principle of Unity is the Principle 
 oj Balance. 
 
 An artist at work will look at his picture in all 
 kinds of ways, reversing it by means of a mirror, 
 turning it upside down, etc. He will do this in order 
 to ascertain whether its parts " balance " well. 
 
 The picture, if a good one, has a central point and, 
 on both sides of this, various components fall like 
 weights hanging to a lever, and the forces on the 
 two sides are equal. This applies also to a less ex- 
 tent to the upper and lower halves of the picture. 
 
 Many persons consider, however, that formal 
 balance of the kind shown in Leonardo's Last Supper, 
 though suitable for devotional or decorative purposes, 
 is not altogether sound ; it is too perfect ; the picture 
 is divided too obviously into two halves, neither of 
 which has precedence. Some pictures are still more 
 obviously formal ; the center may be actually va- 
 cant. " In all forms save the classic decoration, it 
 should be the artist's effort to conceal the balance 
 over the center." Usually when there are two figures, 
 one of them is put in a higher light or in a slightly 
 more favorable place than the other ; or one is 
 animated while the other is still. When three figures 
 are present, one of these may be balanced against 
 the other two. Thus the principle of unity or prin- 
 cipaUty is preserved after all.
 
 PRINCIPLES OF PICTORIAL ART 145 
 
 The balancing, however, may not be necessarily 
 on the principle of a pair of scales with weights equi- 
 distant from the fulcrum. The arms may be of un- 
 equal length, but still the balance of forces may be 
 complete. An object far from the center, and par- 
 ticularly if well isolated, will attract powerfully. A 
 notable instance is supplied in Gerome's picture of 
 The Death of Ccesar. At first it seems unbalanced ; 
 on the left is the dead Caesar, two imposing statues, 
 and the excited assassins; on the right the empty 
 benches of the Senate House. But at the extreme 
 right will be found a sleeping senator! His position 
 and his isolation give him such weight as to balance 
 the left side of the picture. 
 
 It is sometimes found that the foreground is too 
 *' aggressive." This is an instance of lack of balance. 
 The figures in the distance should have been more 
 prominent than they are. Conversely, the sky should 
 not, as a rule, be aggressive : it should harmonize with 
 the landscape, and not cause divided interest. 
 
 Variety in unity. — Of great importance is the 
 preventing of monotony or, in other words, the pro- 
 vision of variety. *' The simplest definition of pictur- 
 esqueness is variety in unity." It is for this reason 
 that in most pictures the artist avoids an excess 
 either of horizontals or of verticals. A mantel has 
 a standing figure near it. A line of men is not allowed 
 to stretch uninterruptedly across the canvas. The
 
 146 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 two principles here referred to are opposition and 
 transition. Opposition is the meeting of one line by 
 another at an angle ; transition is the recovery of 
 one line after it has crossed another line or space. 
 One is reminded of musicians' protests against " con- 
 secutive fifths " and the like. 
 
 In Rembrandt's Syndics the line of four men is 
 broken by the two other men, one in front and the 
 other behind. It is a case of transitional line or of a 
 circular composition. 
 
 Contrast and variety are also supplied by chiaro- 
 scuro or light and shade. An effect of light is produced 
 by adding darks. A low toned and impure white 
 appears bright if darkness surrounds it. Here again 
 the principle of balance comes in, A middle tint is 
 the fulcrum upon which are balanced the opposites of 
 light and dark ; or it may sometimes act as the arm 
 of the balance, of which the other consists of the two 
 extreme colors. Thus one side of the picture may 
 be gray, the other side black and white. 
 
 Vertical lines have great force and often grandeur, 
 serenity, solemnity. They may be crossed by hori- 
 zontals, and points of contact with the frame be made, 
 with the result that the effect is stable and satisfying. 
 The lack of horizontals in Raphael's The Beautiful 
 Gate and in Botticelli's Allegory of Spring is, in each 
 case, a defect. 
 
 Diagonal or curved lines, on the other hand, suggest
 
 PRINCIPLES OF PICTORIAL ART 147 
 
 motion. The " line of beauty " — so named by 
 Hogarth — has somewhat the shape of the letter S, 
 or, more angularly, Z. The human back and the 
 calf of the leg have this shape ; the mouth curve has 
 the same, doubled, so have Cupid's bow and a flame. 
 Many figure compositions are so arranged, e.g. 
 Rubens's Descent from the Cross, or, in more angular 
 fashion, a stream or a coastline may be made to 
 adopt this sweep. 
 
 Other principles : repetition, symmetry, radiation, 
 interchange. — Unity or Principality and Balance 
 are the two. most important principles illustrated in 
 pictorial art. When, however, pure ornament is 
 taken into consideration other principles emerge. 
 Repetition, for example, is here all-important ; a 
 wall pattern consists of a series of forms and colors 
 repeated over and over again ; a cornice may be 
 decorated by " bead-and-reel " ornament, and so on. 
 Symmetry is also important and is a stricter form of 
 the principle of balance already discussed ; the 
 acanthus ornament is one famous kind of symmetrical 
 ornament. Radiation from a center is one form of 
 sjrmmetry. Interchange is the combination of like- 
 ness with difference on a basis of repetition ; the 
 bead " interchanges " with the reel along the cor- 
 nice of a building. 
 
 I ought to add that many painters of the present 
 day set many of these principles at defiance.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION 
 
 It is far easier to collect together, as in the preced- 
 ing chapter, a number of artistic principles than to 
 give concrete suggestions for the teaching of artistic 
 appreciation. I welcome, therefore, two contribu- 
 tions to the subject and proceed to summarize them. 
 
 M. Cousinet's principles. — The articles by M. 
 Cousinet ^ have already been referred to. His con- 
 clusions with reference to the appreciation of art are 
 mainly two : — 
 
 (i) Appreciation must be cared for directly. Pic- 
 tures hanging silently on the walls of the classroom do 
 not necessarily generate a spontaneous appreciation 
 of their merits. 
 
 (2) The child's appreciation of art is predominantly 
 intellectual, realistic, and dynamic. This principle 
 is of great practical importance. Cousinet, as we 
 have seen, regards the child between the ages of three 
 and thirteen as noncontemplative or nonapprecia- 
 tive, mainly because he is then busily engaged in 
 (" distracted " by) the acquisition of language and 
 the learning of facts and of the laws of social activity. 
 
 ' In L'Educaleur Moderne. 
 148
 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION 149 
 
 Are we, then, to set aside as hopeless the task of cul- 
 tivating aesthetic taste in the young child? 
 
 No ; for the child has, after all, certain interests 
 which can be employed. Is it true that the child 
 does not "contemplate" or ''appreciate"? In a 
 sense he is contemplative par excellence. He notes 
 everything — but he does not note things cesthetically. 
 Sensuous beauty does not now appeal to him, though, 
 a few years before, it appealed to him strongly. His 
 attitude is intellectual ; he looks at an object not 
 to enjoy the vision of it, but to learn about it, and 
 particularly to learn its use. Again, his observation 
 is of real rather than of esthetic objects ; statues and 
 even decorative advertisements do not make so 
 powerful an appeal to him as do animals, ma- 
 chines, and the like. Above all, perhaps, he Ukes 
 moving things, — hence the appeal of the cinemato- 
 graph. The child's appreciation is, in short, " intel- 
 lectual, realistic, dynamic." 
 
 M. Cousinet therefore suggests that, as a rule, the 
 teacher of the child should employ natural objects 
 rather than works of art for his lesson in appreciation, 
 and, above all, that the appeal to the intellect through 
 the use of analysis should be encouraged. 
 
 What does this last and unsuspected proposal 
 mean ? Cold intellect in matters of taste ! Are 
 we once again to "murder to dissect"? Yes, if 
 nothing else is possible.
 
 150 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 M. Cousinet's method. — The actual method 
 employed by M. Cousinet was to have children 
 recognize and catalogue (in literary essays or " com- 
 positions ") the various elements present in painting, 
 with the cataloguing done, first, in logical order, and 
 then, later on, in painter's order, — that is, in the 
 order of artistic importance. In the case of a por- 
 trait, the main things for the child to ascertain were, 
 first, the most characteristic element, and, secondly, 
 the way in which the painter subordinated other 
 elements to this. (Here we see the recognition of 
 the principle of unity or principality.) Esthetic 
 education in this sense is possible with young children ; 
 but anything more ambitious, any attempt to summon 
 up a more purely aesthetic appreciation, is likely to 
 fail, and should be postponed to adolescence at the 
 earliest. 
 
 We are here really on very uncertain ground. In a lecture ^ 
 at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dr. Axson 
 warned the teacher against the "fact method" supposed to 
 be represented by Dickens's Gradgrind. Referring to the 
 beautiful Botticelli in the Museum, Dr. Axson said that the 
 teacher should try to make the teaching center about the purity 
 of color and clarity of outline shown in the picture, not about 
 the biography of BotticeUi or the subject matter of the picture. 
 But, if M. Cousinet is right, this color appreciation will hardly 
 be possible with children. What is possible with them is the 
 cataloguing of a few analytic impressions gathered from the 
 
 ' Embodied in Art Museums and Schools (New York, Scribner's).
 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION 151 
 
 subject matter of the picture and from the painter's method 
 of treatment. Perhaps, after all, Dr. Axson means much the 
 same as M. Cousinet, for he elsewhere lays stress on the bio- 
 graphical element suggested by many of the paintings in the 
 Metropolitan Museum, — for example, Piombo's Columbus. 
 Certainly I do not think that we can easily exaggerate the 
 importance of subject matter with children ; however much 
 the artist may object, it is the subject matter that appeals 
 most to them — if not, indeed, to the majority of adults as 
 well.i And this, presvunably, is because the subject matter 
 is usually dynamic, — it is suggestive of human life and human 
 interests. 
 
 Professor De Garmo's theory of teaching apprecia- 
 tion. — It is at this point that Professor De Garmo's 
 ^Esthetic Education'^ attaches itself to M. Cousinet's 
 articles. The book emphasizes particularly the beauty 
 of modern tools and machinery. The author is also 
 evidently of the opinion that the child's if not the 
 adult's aesthetic appreciation is " intellectual, realistic, 
 and dynamic," — represented typically by an interest 
 in hammers, steam engines, and the like, — and there 
 is, therefore, nothing surprising in his revival of the 
 old and plausible doctrine that beauty and utility 
 are related at least as closely as twin brothers. 
 
 Accepting Von Hartmann's six stages of formal beauty, — 
 the Sensuous, the Mathematical (or Proportionate), the Decora- 
 
 1 It has been said that, face to face with a picture, men are at- 
 tracted most by its tone, women by its color, and children by its form 
 and subject matter. 
 
 ''Syracuse, N.Y., C. W. Bardeen, 1912.
 
 152 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 tive, the Vital, and the Typical, — Professor De Garmo works 
 out the second of these in detail. "There is an actual, possibly 
 a necessar>', correlation between mechanical efficiency and 
 Eesthetic proportion. As a tool or a machine increases in 
 all-round efficiency, there is a corresponding increase in the 
 aesthetic quality of its proportions." The axe handle, for 
 illustration, has become curved into Hogarth's "line of beauty" ; 
 but the curvature was intended to secure the "maximum of 
 ease and vigor of stroke." The saw (with its etched band 
 along the top of the blade balancing the notched cutting edge 
 below), the plane, the brace and bit, the typewriter, the loco- 
 motive, the automobile, have, with increasing efficiency, shown 
 advance toward aesthetic proportions. 
 
 It seems often difficult to establish a relationship 
 between beauty and mechanical utility ; where, for 
 example, is the mechanical utihty of a Venus de Milo ? 
 But advocates of the utility theory can easily show 
 that the beauty of the human form is a sign of health 
 and efficiency, and so the hoary argument proceeds 
 on its zigzag course. 
 
 Utility versus beauty in the teaching of appre- 
 ciation. — The important point for the teacher is 
 that he should not ignore in the interests of the 
 " fine arts " the claims of the " appHed arts." It is 
 around the latter, in the opinion of the two writers 
 whom we have quoted, that the interests of the child 
 and of the busy man tend to cluster, — although the 
 adolescent may have a glimmering appreciation of 
 non-utilitarian things. The life of William Morris
 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION 153 
 
 was largely devoted to the task of bridging the gap 
 between " art " and " Hfe," and showing that fire 
 shovels, coal scuttles, houses, and machines were 
 fitting subjects of aesthetic appreciation, provided that 
 their ornamentation was integral and not merely 
 " stuck on," — hke the floral decorations of a cash 
 register. " Beauty," as De Garmo reminds us in 
 quoting from Emerson, " must come back to the 
 useful arts," and it is perhaps true, as he suggests, 
 that " the distinction between the fine and useful 
 arts should be forgotten." " Attempts to develop 
 the aesthetic nature of children by relying on the art 
 of other periods usually fail. . . . The place for 
 romantic and classic art is in historical correlation, 
 and they should not be presented until the pupil has 
 an apperceiving basis for them." 
 
 With these warnings in mind, we shall not be likely 
 to overestimate the possibilities of our lessons in 
 pictorial appreciation ; we shall, indeed, be incHned 
 rather to distrust than to exaggerate our pedagogical 
 powers. With M. Cousinet's words, " dynamic " 
 and " analytic," ringing in our ears, let us proceed 
 to examine what the teacher can do. 
 
 Practical suggestions : the biographical treatment 
 and symbolism. — If an artist's life was one of in- 
 tense (tragic or other) interest, that fact gives in- 
 terest to the products of his activity. In the case of 
 pictures one biographical law of great importance
 
 154 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 seems to stand out. Poverty, or at any rate, humble 
 origin — not wealth or social status — makes great 
 painters. The perusal of any catalogue of artists 
 will confirm this statement. It would seem as if, 
 for success in certain kinds of art, the life of the 
 artist must be an intense life, a life in contact with 
 the poignancies of existence. The teacher may oc- 
 casionally make use of this fact in his discussions; 
 but whether he does so or not he should certainly 
 mention any biographical details of real significance 
 in connection with this or that artist, confident that 
 these details will add greatly to the interest in the 
 artist's work. 
 
 Closely akin to this exploitation of biography is 
 the exploitation of symbolism if the symboHsm has a 
 specific bearing on the artist's Hfe. It is legitimate 
 to see in Ulysses Defying Polyphemus, Turner's own 
 defiance of the one-eyed men around him, and in his 
 Fighting Temeraire a kind of elegy written on him- 
 self before his powers had begun to decay. 
 
 Sometimes the symbolism has no reference to the 
 artist's hfe, but concerns only his subject. " Analy- 
 sis " here comes to our aid. In The Boyhood oj 
 Raleigh, the toy ship in the foreground may be taken 
 as a symbol of the future career of the two boys, 
 just as in Turner's picture of Dido building Carthage 
 we are showm a group of children saiHng toy boats. 
 A class has first to be introduced to such touches as
 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION 1 55 
 
 these in rather straightforward ways; at any rate, 
 only a very skillful teacher could " educe " the 
 symboHsm of Millais's picture ; but once this mode 
 of treatment has been made familiar by a couple of 
 examples, the cleverer children will be able to make 
 very good shots at interpretation ; the cleverer chil- 
 dren only, of course. For example, after discussing 
 The Boyhood of Raleigh with a class of socially very 
 poor boys, I showed them a print of The Fighting 
 Temeraire, briefly explained what the picture stood 
 for, and then asked them to find a second meaning 
 in it. Second meanings, some very pertinent and 
 some very wild, were forthcoming from several boys. 
 The blood-red sky suggested Trafalgar to one. 
 
 More remote and, in no disparaging sense, more 
 conventional, is the kind of symbolism exempHfied 
 in the Beata Beatrix of Rossetti ; the sundial, point- 
 ing to the hour of her departure, the white poppy, 
 symbol of sleep and death, and a multitude of other 
 details. It is doubtful whether this kind of symbolism 
 should receive much attention in a school class ; but 
 some slight indication of its existence is legitimate 
 enough ; and certainly children will not object to the 
 process of " analysis " involved, though they may miss 
 the elements of beauty and pathos in the picture. 
 
 Probably most visitors to the galleries of London or 
 New York feel more interest in the modern pictures 
 than the mediaeval ones with their statuesque Saints
 
 156 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 and Madonnas. But some knowledge of the symbol- 
 ism employed by the late mediaeval painters will add 
 interest to their works. Red was symbolic of love, 
 blue of truth, green of hope ; St. Joseph carries a 
 lily, St. Catherine leans against her wheel, St. Francis 
 shows his stigmata. With a few facts like this at 
 our disposal, we can easily interpret a mediaeval 
 picture without looking at its title. 
 
 Interpretations and problems. — In other cases 
 it is not so much symbolism as straightforward in- 
 terpretation that can be sought. In connection with 
 Yeames's picture, When Did You Last See Your 
 Father? the question may be asked, " Is the boy's 
 father near or far away?" The anxiety on the 
 mother's face will supply an answer. The faces of 
 the Puritan inquisitors also supply food for reflection. 
 
 In other cases little problems, geographical, histori- 
 cal, etc., can easily be devised on the basis of pictures, 
 particularly photographic pictures. " Are we look- 
 ing to the north, the south, the east, or the west in 
 this picture? " (There is a church in it which should 
 settle the matter.) " Is that the sun or the moon 
 shining over the fishing fleet? " " In what latitude 
 is this piece of seashore scenery to be located ? " 
 " In what century did this bewigged man probably 
 live?" 
 
 It is obvious that we have here been deviating, some- 
 what widely, from pure appreciation. This matters
 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION 157 
 
 little if M. Cousinet is right; still, the teacher 
 should not entirely ignore the aesthetic aspects of a 
 work of art ; indeed, it is one part of his duty to intro- 
 duce his pupils to some of the principles of artistic 
 design. And here, again, " analysis " is his weapon. 
 
 The color distribution of pictures presents interest- 
 ing problems, but how far we can or ought to introduce 
 these problems to children is a doubtful matter. 
 An oft-quoted case is that of Titian's Bacchus and 
 Ariadne with its expanse of cold blue and warm red, 
 the former relieved by the red scarf of Ariadne and 
 the latter by a Httle blue on a Bacchante. 
 
 In connection with After Waterloo; Sauve qui peut 
 (Gow), the teacher may ask his pupils why the terrified 
 throng of soldiers, who are jostUng each other to death, 
 do not invade the empty field in the foreground. Wild 
 answers will be forthcoming; but on one occasion 
 I received a correct answer from a boy who was 
 notoriously of an artistic temperament ; the painter 
 had left the foreground blank in order to give the 
 figure of Napoleon a central and prominent position. 
 It is a matter of design. 
 
 Foreigners see in English paintings a tendency to 
 excess of minuteness and a corresponding lack of 
 breadth or total effectiveness. The principle of 
 Unity or Principality is not recognized as it should 
 be. The Pre-RaphaeKtes, particularly Holman Hunt 
 and MiUais (in his earHer years), carried this charac-
 
 158 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 teristic to an extreme point. Hunt's method " tended 
 to arouse too great interest in the parts and so to 
 detract from the impression of the whole." Many of 
 the Dutch painters, e.g., Van Mieris and Gerard Dow, 
 commit the same fault : " we feel as though we were 
 with a troublesome cicerone, who will not let us look 
 at things with our own eyes, but keeps intruding him- 
 self at every touch and turn." 
 
 Some critics have objected to Raphael's Ansidei 
 Madonna on the ground that the figures seem unre- 
 lated to each other and unconscious of each other's 
 existence, and The Mill of Claude was, in an oft- 
 quoted passage, fiercely assailed by Ruskin as a 
 hotchpotch of details having no principle of unity. 
 
 In contrast may be mentioned the power of Ford 
 Maddox Brown to convey " one single thought " 
 with " startHng evidence of reality," and the very 
 similar power of Orchardson " to seize on dramatic 
 situations or psychological moments." Millais him- 
 self lost his early preoccupation with detail and in 
 such pictures as The North West Passage made the 
 central figure dominate the scene. Among the 
 many pictures in the National Gallery illustrating 
 unity of design may be mentioned Piombo's Raising 
 of Lazarus and Copley's Death of Chatham. In a 
 very different department of art we find Turner 
 making war on detail — " indistinctness is my forte " 
 — in the interests of some atmospheric effect.
 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION 1 59 
 
 Various other principles of criticism will emerge. Face to 
 face with a picture by Rubens the pupQ will understand and 
 possibly reject the painter's claim that "exuberance is beauty." 
 Some painters have erred in the opposite direction ; G. D. 
 Leslie "scarcely permits himself, even in flesh, color enough 
 for life." 
 
 There is obvious and perhaps overdone symmetry in Luini's 
 Christ and the Pharisees, in the less known work of Giovenone, 
 Madonna and Child with Saints (No. 1295 in the National 
 Gallery) , and in a score of other sacred pictures both in London 
 and New York. 
 
 In many pictures one specific color is used to stand out 
 conspicuously from a background ; Isaac von Ostade and 
 Wouwerman introduce a white horse, Constable, a patch of 
 red in the form of a saddle, a boy's jersey, or some other object. 
 
 The characteristics of Rembrandt's style will be obvious; 
 color is sacrificed to chiaroscuro. 
 
 All, or almost all, of the above matters may be 
 quite within the scope of children's inteUigence, but, 
 so far as employed by the teacher, pictures should be 
 employed chiefly because of the significance of their 
 subject matter. 
 
 The appreciation of ornamentation. — Pure orna- 
 ment, however, falls under another category; there 
 is no " subject matter " at all ; beauty and beauty 
 only is concerned. There can be no doubt that the 
 teacher will here find an interesting and novel depart- 
 ment of work. And the guiding idea is again " analy- 
 
 sis." 
 
 A small experiment of my own may be recorded.
 
 l6o THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 A class had divided a square into four triangular 
 portions and had filled two triangles — opposite ones 
 — with identical designs. I then asked whether 
 we should fill the remaining two with the same designs 
 or v;hether we should introduce a difference. I found 
 that both plans received strong support, and this still 
 held good after I had deliberately destroyed, as far 
 as possible, the influence of mutual suggestibility and 
 had forced each boy to rely on his own judgment. 
 
 Now, the fact that some boys preferred uniformity 
 and others diversity was an excellent starting point 
 for a discussion on the principles of ornament, for 
 ornament mainly consists of various combinations of 
 similar with different material. This was easily illus- 
 trated by the iron stove which faced the boys ; in a 
 more elaborate room it might have been illustrated 
 by the cornice below the ceiling. A few references 
 to the common forms of classical ornament, egg-and- 
 tongue, bead-and-reel, acanthus, anthemion, and the 
 like, would then suffice to give the class observant 
 eyes for ornament everywhere, and before many days 
 had elapsed reports would come in to the teacher that 
 the egg-and-tongue ornament had been noticed on a 
 lift or elevator, and the acanthus ornament on an 
 electric standard. Wall papers, carpets, and a thou- 
 sand other objects will supply material for the further 
 discussion of aesthetic principles, and even the old- 
 fashioned " freehand copy " may, at last, receive
 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION l6l 
 
 sympathetic consideration and be restored to a place 
 in the curriculum. 
 
 The drawing lesson itself will be regarded with 
 different eyes when appreciation is not, as at present, 
 ignored. 
 
 The appreciation of statuary.' If it is found inadvisable to 
 give separate instruction in statuary, the subject may be dealt 
 with in a course that will include ornament and architecture. 
 But if separate treatment is attempted, the subject should prob- 
 ably be linked closely to history, particularly in the case of 
 Greece. Appreciation in some of its forms is largely a matter 
 of "historical perspective." 
 
 As London students are, for the most part, ignorant of Greek 
 history and, therefore, unable to put the work of Phidias and 
 others into their relationship with the political and spiritual 
 fortunes of the nation, the first lessons on the subject of Greek 
 art might very well be frankly historical. The Persian invasion, 
 the rule of Pericles (patron of Phidias), and the Peloponnesian 
 War are subjects of unfailing interest. With the conflict 
 between the Greeks and the Persian "barbarians," barbarism 
 itself, in artistic if not other matters, took its flight from Greece, 
 the stiff grinning features of the "archaic" statues giving place 
 to the beauty and reserve of the Parthenon marbles. The 
 notion of a conflict between civilization and barbarism im- 
 pressed itself so deeply on the Greek mind that many of the 
 bas-reliefs that followed the Persian invasion dealt with it under 
 a mythological guise, e.g., the war between the Centaurs and 
 
 * I quote here some paragraphs from a document in the composi- 
 tion of which I took a part, namely, the Memorandum on Non- 
 Vocational Institutes, issued by the London County Council, Decem- 
 ber, 1913. 
 
 M
 
 l62 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 the Lapithae (Parthenon), between the Amazons and the Greeks 
 (Mausoleum), between the Titans and the Gods (Pergamon 
 frieze). Without this clew to their meaning the bas-reliefs 
 may fail to interest and the seriousness of Greek art go unrecog- 
 nized. 
 
 Having reached a state of perfect balance in the work of 
 Phidias, Greek plastic art underwent change of two chief kinds. 
 In Praxiteles it became effeminately beautiful almost to a fault, 
 and in the Pergamon frieze, the Laocoon, etc., violent. 
 
 In some respects the British Museum is the best place in the 
 world in which to study Greek statuary and bas-reliefs; in 
 some others it compares unfavorably with more modern mu- 
 seums, e.g., those at New York and Pittsburgh. In the latter 
 places there are no originals, but the limitations and the 
 arrangement of the exhibits is more convenient for the student. 
 Still, the Elgin marbles can scarcely fail to appeal, and the many 
 original specimens of "archaic" statuary will act as an excellent 
 foil. This is the point upon which, perhaps, the chief stress 
 should be laid — the marvelous florescence of the Greek spirit 
 during the fifth century B.C. Comparison with the statuary 
 and bas-reliefs of other ancient nations will also be suggestive, 
 Assyria and Egypt being particularly important in this connec- 
 tion. 
 
 Points of biographical interest should never be missed, e.g., 
 the alleged attack of the Athenians on Phidias ("a prophet is 
 not without honour save . . ."), the wifely devotion that led 
 to the erection of the Mausoleum, the struggle of Lord Elgin for 
 the possession and the recognition of his marbles, Byron's 
 attack on Lord Elgin in The Curse of Minerva. A few of the 
 leading Renaissance names, e.g., Verrocchio, Michael Angelo, 
 should awaken biographical memories. The competition be- 
 tween Ghiberti and Brunelleschi for the making of the famous 
 gate at Florence is an episode of great interest in the history of
 
 THE TEACHING OF ART APPRECIATION 163 
 
 bronze work ; both the episode and the gate (in an excellent 
 reproduction) can be studied in many museums. The fate of 
 Leonardo da Vinci's equestrian statue at Milan is well described 
 (as indeed is the whole life of that great man) in Merejkowski's 
 novel The Forerunner, one of the best introductions to Ren- 
 aissance history and ideas. The name of Rodin, of course, 
 stands out as that of the greatest contemporary sculptor, but 
 the names of modern sculptors (Stevens, Gilbert, Thornycroft, 
 etc.) should not remain unknown ; most of their work is to be 
 sought, not in museums, but in public places such as Piccadilly 
 Circus and the Victoria Embankment. 
 
 Applied art. — The distinction between the "fine" arts and 
 the arts of industry has sometimes been used to the disadvan- 
 tage of the latter, as if they occupied a comparatively low plane. 
 Unfortunately, too, the very name "artist" has acquired a 
 limited meaning. Yet centuries ago the distinction between 
 the two kinds of art did not exist, and many of the greatest 
 artists were "artificers" also. 
 
 Perhaps the teaching of appreciation has its very greatest 
 value in connection with the products of industry. Demand 
 reacts on supply and supply on demand in these matters, and 
 there is reason to believe that if there were a sounder apprecia- 
 tion of good craftsmanship by the general public, the status of 
 good craftsmen would be raised owing to the greater demand 
 for their work. This does not mean that machine-made goods 
 would be driven out of the market — there would be a legiti- 
 mate place for them — but that the market would not be, as at 
 present, monopolized by them to the injury of the true crafts- 
 man, who is either condemned to a life of poverty if he pursues 
 his ideals, or compelled to prostitute his gifts in order to make a 
 living. 
 
 Though wood carving, woodwork, and repoussi are well- 
 estabhshed subjects in London evening institutes, there is evi-
 
 164 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 dence that, like many other subjects, they have been taught 
 almost wholly from the standpoint of technique or execution, 
 and not of appreciation. Without any fundamental alteration 
 in present methods, this latter aspect should receive more stress 
 in the future. Facts in the history of the respective arts 
 should be referred to more frequently (e.g., the preeminence of 
 Mediaeval Germany in wood carving), and visits to museums 
 should be made with a view to seeing what has been done in the 
 past, and to gather hints for constructive work. 
 
 The fundamental aesthetic vice is a moral one ; a desire to 
 imitate those who have a larger income than ourselves, and can, 
 therefore, purchase (without necessarily appreciating) more 
 expensive things. Thus arises a demand for sham art, to which 
 the craftsman has to respond, instead of working creatively 
 along his own lines. The demand comes from both sexes, and 
 the present remarks have as much bearing on instruction in 
 needlework and domestic crafts as on instruction in woodwork, 
 etc. 
 
 Articles should be good in color, design, and suitability. 
 Examples of good craft should be permanently on show and be 
 frequently referred to. The name of William Morris is the 
 most notable one of all in this connection. The artistic impulse 
 has no connection with the money motive ; the good craftsman 
 has his "heart in his work," so much so that he even tries to 
 beautify his tools. One or more lectures illustrated by speci- 
 mens or the lantern might be given by a craft instructor to the 
 entire institute in order to awaken an interest in this important 
 side of educational work. 
 
 Various principles of ornament will, of course, be found exem- 
 pHfied in every form of applied art (architecture, needlework, 
 embroidery, etc.), and they can be more clearly perceived here 
 than in pictures, because in the latter there is a "subject" 
 calling for expression.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE MODERN DRAMA AND THE NOVTL 
 
 If the present book were concerned with the edu- 
 cation of adults, a good deal would have to be said 
 about the systematic and official exploitation of the 
 modern drama and the modern novel. ^ There is no 
 doubt that, by administrative methods, much valuable 
 work could be done in the direction of guiding popular 
 taste and making the task of the sincere and original 
 dramatist and novelist less hard than at present. 
 But our concern in this book is with the pedagogy of 
 a specific subject, i.e., with legitimate scholastic 
 devices for enhancing the appreciative powers, not 
 of adults, but of children and youths. 
 
 Even now the school employs Shakespeare's dramas both 
 as a classroom literature and as material for acting at school 
 gatherings. Novels, too, of the historical kind, are generally 
 recognized in both the elementary and secondary phases of 
 American education. But the characteristic modern drama 
 and modern novel are evidently out of the question in the case 
 of children. The problems dealt with in them are specifically 
 adult, demanding an experience of life of which no child, and 
 
 ^ Some suggestions to this end are contained in the author's Edu- 
 cational Administration atid Criticism. 
 
 165
 
 1 66 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 even no adolescent, can possibly be in possession. Further, 
 the main appeal in the modern drama and novel is not to 
 aesthetic appreciation, but to the reason ; the very word 
 "problem," used above, implies this, and, as we have seen, 
 problem solving is a deadly enemy to pure appreciation. By 
 general consent, therefore, the lesson in appreciation must 
 be mainly concerned with poetry, music, pictures, and the 
 applied arts. 
 
 If, then, I discuss briefly the modern arts of 
 drama and fiction, the reason will be that they 
 throw some indirect light upon the aesthetic principles 
 previously expounded, — the principles of unity, con- 
 trast, and the like. 
 
 The modern drama : abolition of the soliloquy. — 
 Changes have come over the drama of recent years. 
 Dramatists have realized more than ever that any- 
 thing which introduces a jarring note — for example, 
 a note of absurdity — into a drama spoils the aesthetic 
 effect. It is the doctrine of " distraction " over 
 again. Now " soliloquies " and " asides " were al- 
 ways a little absurd, for people do not, in ordinary 
 life, express their thoughts aloud to themselves ; 
 recent dramatic art, therefore, as represented by 
 Ibsen, has almost wholly abandoned these crude 
 devices and has learned how to make dialogue take 
 their place. A bosom friend, for example, is par- 
 ticularly useful when confessions and plots are pend- 
 ing. 
 
 But this salutary change has led to other difl&culties.
 
 THE MODERN DRAMA AND THE NOVEL 167 
 
 Students of the " principle of the first impression " 
 will understand how important it is that the first 
 scene should be successful, and yet dramatists have 
 to use this scene for the purpose of introducing a mass 
 of introductory matter, necessary to be known and 
 yet likely to be lacking in all dramatic interest. In 
 ancient times, one character was employed to make 
 a huge prefatory soliloquy, or, rather, a speech, 
 to the audience. A more skillful plan, still very 
 common, is to use a servant, a duenna, a bosom 
 friend, or a traveler just returned from the South 
 Seas as recipient of the latest news of the town. 
 There is no objection to this so long as these char- 
 acters are used as integral parts of the drama, but if 
 they are obviously dragged in for the one purpose 
 of getting the " story " started, the art is now re- 
 garded as bad. Thus the tendency has been, first 
 to abandon the soliloquy, and then to abandon the 
 dummy dialogue and dummy characters that took 
 the place of the soliloquy. Needless to say, these 
 undesirable elements are still all too common, but 
 they are being condemned more and more. 
 
 The dramatic unities. — A subject that, for cen- 
 turies, has awakened much discussion is whether the 
 drama should preserve the " unities " of time, place, 
 and action. According to Boileau and the neo- 
 classicists, the events of the play should be confined 
 to twenty-four hours, to one locality, and to one single
 
 1 68 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 plot or group of activities. This rule was fairly gen- 
 erally observed by French dramatists down to the 
 time of Victor Hugo and the " romanticists." Eng- 
 hsh drama has paid but small attention to the unities ; 
 and Shakespeare, in particular, has violated them in 
 most of his plays. Winters Tale shows the Shake- 
 spearean tendency in an extreme form, and The Tempest 
 stands at the other extreme as a solitary example of 
 preservation of, at any rate, the first two of the 
 " unities." It is a notable fact that some of the 
 greatest of the recent dramatists, such as Ibsen and 
 Strindberg, have moved back toward the unities, and 
 Strindberg has even advocated and exemplified the 
 employment of a greatly reduced number of stage 
 characters. 
 
 Unity, as was pointed out in connection with the other 
 arts, always includes diversity, else it becomes monotony. 
 In the case of the drama, this diversity may take various 
 forms, such as sub-plots and the interminghng of comic with 
 tragic elements ; but more essential than these is the progression 
 of the action toward and from a crisis of some sort. Almost 
 as much has been written about the "pyramidal" structure 
 of dramas as about the pyramidal structure of pictures, and 
 the main point to notice is that, after an "introduction" or 
 an "exposition," there normally occurs an "initial incident" 
 or a series of "initial incidents"; then a period of "rising 
 action," "growth," or "complication"; and then a "cHmax," 
 "crisis," or "turning point" (at which one of the contending 
 forces definitely asserts its mastery). This central point of 
 the drama is the apex of the alleged "pyramid," with the slope
 
 THE MODERN DRAMA AND THE NOVEL 169 
 
 on the further side consisting of "falling action," "resolution," 
 or "denouement," which passes rapidly, as a rule, to the "con- 
 clusion" or "catastrophe." The scheme is worth remember- 
 ing, for it fits fairly well the cases of the majority of dramas, 
 although many deviations are made in practice; the "crisis," 
 for example, may be nearer the beginning or (more com- 
 monly) nearer the end of the drama than is implied above. 
 
 For comedies, whose plots are usually slighter than those 
 of tragedies, and in which Avitty conversation may largely 
 take the place of structural development, the above scheme 
 is rather too elaborate. An indication of this is found in the 
 fact that a three-act arrangement is generally preferred to a 
 five-act. 
 
 Variety in unity. — Variety may be added to a 
 drama without destroying its unity by the introduc- 
 tion of characters or incidents that show similarity 
 or parallelism or marked contrast. These devices 
 may easily be employed in a mechanical way, and the 
 greater the dramatist, the subtler is his employment 
 of them. Dryden, dissatisfied with Shakespeare's 
 Tempest, composed an '' improved " version in which 
 a male Miranda (ignorant of the other sex) balanced 
 the real Miranda. 
 
 Comedy and Farce. — The distinction between comedy and 
 farce is not commonly well recognized. Comedy is essentially 
 a serious form of art in the sense that it deals with the genuine 
 problems of human nature, particularly with the moral in- 
 consistencies and obtusenesses of men. Bernard Shaw's 
 comedies are serious criticisms of life, as when, for example, 
 he shows us the vivisector and the military man each reproach-
 
 I70 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 ing the other for cruelty.' Farce, on the other hand, is merely 
 a collection of absurdly amusing situations.' 
 
 The novel. — The last century has seen a great in- 
 crease in the popularity of the novel. The main reason 
 for this, no doubt, is that the novel is portable and 
 can be taken up and put down at a moment's notice, 
 whereas no one can carry about with him a theater 
 and a troupe of actors. It should be noted, however, 
 that in Germany thousands of plays are read, just as 
 if they were novels, and there is a tendency in Anglo- 
 Saxon countries at the present day to write novels 
 around plays or base plays on novels. 
 
 Most of the remarks made concerning the drama 
 apply with equal force to the novel. The main dif- 
 ference lies in the fact that the novel can safely be 
 diffuse, while the drama, because of the limitations 
 of time of performance to two or three hours, must 
 
 ^ The Philanderer. 
 
 ' I have no claim to speak of the technical possibilities of the drama 
 of the future. (My only three-act comedy, Reform at the Board, 
 has never been acted, and I am assured that it is very, very bad 
 indeed, and that educational topics can never, never be made inter- 
 esting on the stage.) But I have sometimes thought that the exploi- 
 tation of the element of time might be carried further than it is. For 
 example, is a drama that works backward altogether impossible 
 — Act I, 1914; Act II, 1900; Act III, 1880? Again, if by some 
 mechanical device the future fate of each character were indicated in 
 advance, — "the man who will die in the runaway accident to-night," 
 "the woman who will be betrayed," and so on, — their action on the 
 stage might be full of either pathos or irony in a measure impossible 
 under present conditions !
 
 THE MODERN DRAMA AND THE NOVEL 171 
 
 be compact at all costs. Even novels, however, differ 
 in compactness. It is usual, for example, to distin- 
 guish between those in which the main concern is in 
 the plot and those in which the main concern is in 
 character. This distinction is only rough, as most 
 distinctions are, but clearly a novel like Wilkie 
 Collins's Moonstone or The Woman in White, in which 
 almost the whole interest lies in skillful construc- 
 tion, is very different from more rambling ones like 
 George Meredith's Egoist, in which the interest centers 
 in the mental struggles of Clara Middleton and Sir 
 Willoughby Patterne. Formerly there was a type of 
 novel in which the interest mainly lay in a string 
 of exciting or amusing incidents, — - Smollett's Roder- 
 ick Random, for example ; but the lack of unity or 
 structure — the absence of a real beginning, climax, 
 or end — in this type of art has caused it to go out of 
 fashion. In the psychological novel of the George 
 Meredith type, there is sometimes a positive shrink- 
 ing from exciting incident ; thus in Beauchamp's 
 Career the flogging of Dr. Shrapnel is merely referred 
 to, whereas in a cruder type of novel it would receive 
 a whole chapter to itself. 
 
 The deus ex machina of the old Greek drama finds 
 its place in the modern novel in the form of lucky or 
 unlucky accidents. Thus Meredith solves all diffi- 
 culties in the novel above mentioned by drowning 
 the hero, while Thomas Hardy, in working up his
 
 172 THE LESSON IN APPRECUTION 
 
 case against the President of the Immortals, in Tess 
 and in Jude the Obscure introduces coincidence and 
 accident over and over again. Whenever the sky 
 seems to be brightening for the baffled hero or heroine, 
 we may be sure that a disaster will come before 
 long, some strange miscarriage or miscalculation, 
 some delay, some unaccountable change of sentiment. 
 
 In the novel, the author is able to introduce his own 
 personality in the form of comments and opinions. 
 These will add to the length and diffuseness of the 
 novel and serve to distinguish it still further from 
 the drama. 
 
 The treatment of the novel in schools. — The way 
 to make use of a novel for educational purposes must 
 depend upon its nature. 
 
 A detective or mystery story stands on the plane 
 not of appreciation but of intellection, and its treat- 
 ment should follow scientific rather than aesthetic 
 laws. There is a large field of work here remaining 
 educationally unexplored ; I have no doubt that, be- 
 cause of its compactness and vividness, the detective 
 story could be extensively employed for the purpose 
 of introducing a class to the meaning of such words as 
 " hypothesis," " deduction," etc., and to a realization 
 of the need for improving the tools of thought gen- 
 erally. But, as already said, the detective story is 
 remote from the realm of aesthetic appreciation.^ 
 ' The present writer is planning a volume on this subject.
 
 THE MODERN DRAMA AND THE NOVEL 1 73 
 
 The problem element in novels. — Those portions 
 of novels that are akin to the detective story in being 
 purely problematic, intellectual, or informational may 
 be treated in the same way as science or information 
 is treated. They can be analyzed, summarized, 
 argued about, made the subject of factual questions, 
 and so forth ; and thus, particularly if they are of the 
 historical kind, can undoubtedly be made valuable 
 auxiliaries to the more formal school instruction. 
 Indeed, there are very few school lessons that cannot 
 receive elucidation from fiction, and every school 
 should have its catalogue of auxihary literature 
 arranged according to themes. Not in every case, of 
 course, should pupils be directed to read a whole book ; 
 sometimes a single chapter or even a paragraph will 
 be adequate ; but this limited amount of reading, 
 though all that is required for the immediate purpose, 
 may easily lead the pupil to an extended perusal of the 
 entire book or will at least make him familiar with it 
 by name. 
 
 The information extracted from novels should, to 
 some extent at least, be verified by an appeal to more 
 authoritative books, and if the author is found to have 
 distorted or omitted very pertinent facts, an attempt 
 should be made to decide how far he is culpable. A 
 certain amount of distortion is almost inevitable in 
 art, though in the novel there is less excuse for it than 
 in drama and painting.
 
 174 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 The more inward and psychological a novel is the 
 more carefully should the characters be studied from 
 the standpoint of their probability. Is it natural for 
 so-and-so to act as he did ? The oscillations of mood 
 and conviction which Hardy introduces, with tragic 
 effect, in his two gloomiest novels, Tess of the 
 D^Urheroilles and Jude the Obscure — are they natural, 
 are they likely, or are they likely to have taken place 
 quite in the diabolically fateful way that the novehst 
 represents ? No, says some one ; yes, says some one 
 else ; people have been bludgeoned by fate as remorse- 
 lessly as Tess and Jude : there was Beethoven, there 
 was some one I knew who . . . 
 
 Again, a considerable if not a maximum amount of 
 formal training value should be extracted from the 
 novels that are studied. Words that are unfamiliar 
 or difficult to soell should be collected in notebooks and 
 subsequently embodied in composition exercises. A 
 phrase that is peculiarly apt in style, a metaphor that 
 is exceptionally powerful in its originality or appro- 
 priateness, should be commented on and be made the 
 basis of attempts at imitation. The practice of teach- 
 ing parsing and analysis has largely gone out of fashion 
 (in England at least) as there is no evidence that it has 
 improved the pupils' knowledge of English or taught 
 them to think better ; but if used in direct connection 
 with the reading of a book, parsing and analysis may 
 have some value ; an obscure sentence may be
 
 THE MODERN DRAMA AND THE NOVEL 175 
 
 straightened out, a misleading word be classified as 
 a verb instead of a noun, and so on. The teacher, 
 however, will have to be careful to steer between 
 giving too little and giving too much attention to 
 these formal matters. 
 
 The aesthetic element in novels. — It is clear from 
 what has been said that so large and complex a form 
 of art as the novel appeals to other faculties than that 
 of appreciation. But when a passage or chapter 
 occurs in which the aesthetic factor is prominent, the 
 teacher should take care to observe the rules empha- 
 sized in the earlier pages of this book. Several 
 chapters in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by Meredith, 
 are lyric in their beauty, and should be presented to a 
 class through ear rather than eye, if, indeed, they are 
 to be presented at all to the youthful readers in our 
 schools. Generally, too, when a chapter embodies 
 something quintessential which can be easily lost or 
 debased by commonplace treatment, the teacher 
 should take the chapter out of the hands of the class 
 and make sure that the first impression is supremely 
 good ; in other words, he should read the passage him- 
 self in his very finest style. 
 
 The art of story-telling. — In connection with the 
 use of novels in school the question arises as to how 
 far the story of the novel should be known in advance. 
 In the case of a mystery story (and as already said, 
 I think the neglect of the mystery story by education-
 
 176 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 ists is a great mistake) it is obvious that the story 
 should not be known in advance ; every art of the 
 hypothesis maker or detective must be exploited before 
 the mystery is solved, and this exploitation, of course, 
 is impossible if the solution has once been supplied. 
 In other cases, however, it may be advisable to destroy 
 the mere story interest in a novel in order to allow of 
 concentration upon character, detail, or style; the 
 teacher may therefore tell the story in advance. 
 
 The art of story-telling is one in which all people do 
 not excel ; probably women are better at it than men, 
 though this apparent superiority may be merely the 
 result of practice. In any case, most story-tellers 
 will need to prepare carefully the story they intend to 
 employ and particularly to see that all necessary 
 details are given in the right order, so that they will 
 not need to say, " Oh, I forgot to tell you that ..." 
 Each specific point may advisably be jotted down 
 on paper in order to insure this consecutiveness. A 
 few striking climaxes, illustrations, etc., may also be 
 planned out in advance. Beyond this, however, the 
 teacher may not need to go in the matter of prepara- 
 tion. Unforeseen things (suggestions from children, 
 etc.) are sure to happen in the course of the story- 
 telling, thus compelling the best-laid schemes to be 
 partly set aside. Further, the teacher is sure to think 
 of new points and illustrations as the story progresses ; 
 they often come, indeed, with a flash, particularly
 
 THE MODERN DRAMA AND THE NOVEL 177 
 
 if the emotional temperature of the lesson is high. 
 Over and over again in conducting a lesson on litera- 
 ture or history, illustrations have suddenly occurred 
 to me which, if I had been seated in a lonely study 
 planning out lesson notes, would have failed to come at 
 my most urgent invitation. This subject of emotional 
 temperature is clearly of the greatest importance in 
 connection with all lessons and it concerns the pupils 
 as well as the teacher. 
 
 The best lessons in the art of story-telling may per- 
 haps be learnt from the great literary story-tellers. For 
 producing effects of a wesomeness few have ever excelled 
 Edgar Allan Poe, and an inexperienced teacher might 
 very well analyze the process adopted in The Fall oj 
 the House of Usher and similar tales. Changes in 
 the tone and speed of the voice are, of course, of the 
 greatest importance so as to suggest significances, 
 coming developments, etc. Something corresponding 
 to the " positive preparation " of Chapter IV may 
 also be desirable in many cases, in order that expecta- 
 tion may be aroused or some key fact receive its due 
 prominence. 
 
 N
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 
 
 The present book ought not to be brought to a 
 close without a reference to some of the controversial 
 aspects of the topic under discussion. Many good 
 teachers, long before the " appreciation lesson " was 
 christened, taught their pupils to see beauty in 
 poetry and in painting, in music and in sculpture. 
 But the recognition of " appreciations " as a desirable 
 outcome of teaching and the recognition of a school 
 exercise distinctively different from other exercises 
 as a means of insuring this outcome are comparatively 
 recent developments in educational theory. 
 
 The genesis of the appreciation lesson. — Professor 
 J. J. Findlay appears to have been the first educa- 
 tional writer to recognize the need of a specific lesson 
 in appreciation.^ Professor Strayer, following this 
 suggestion, devoted a chapter of his Teaching Process 
 to this lesson type. In 1909 Mr. Millward in the 
 pages of a teacher's textbook ^ which I edited put in 
 a word for " singing by ear." In 1910 Mr. Steward 
 
 * Principles of Class Teaching, p. 361 and passim. 
 
 * The Primary Curriculum. 
 
 178
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 170 
 
 Macpherson published his book on Music and its 
 Appreciation, and in 1910-1911 lectured to a large 
 number of London teachers on the subject. Similar 
 lectures were given by Professor Selwyn Image on 
 the appreciation of art. In 191 1 came Stanley Hall's 
 Educational Problems with an important chapter on 
 the teaching of music from the point of view of 
 appreciation, emphasizing the emplo>Tnent of the 
 pianola and the phonograph. In the autumn of 1912 
 the present writer gave in London a lecture — the 
 basis of the present book — on the " Lesson in Appre- 
 ciation," the most novel feature of which was the 
 employment of the Wagner passage quoted in Chapter 
 II, and the suggestion that metaphors and similes 
 should be prepared for long in advance of the poetry 
 lesson proper. In 1912-1913 appeared M. Cousinet's 
 articles in VEducateur Moderne. In 19 13 came 
 Professor De Garmo's Msthetic Education. 
 
 The idea of a lesson in appreciation has thus been 
 of rapid and quite recent growth, and no single indi- 
 vidual can be held responsible for its inception. Edu- 
 cators in widely separated countries have been grop- 
 ing in a certain direction and at last an idea has 
 appeared. 
 
 A short account of my own conversion may here be added 
 as it is probably typical of the conversion of others. I started 
 like other English teachers from certain traditional and per- 
 nicious notions about "drawing out" knowledge from vacuous
 
 l8o THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 minds — notions entirely fatal to the teaching of appreciation. 
 Then came, like a gleam of light, the Herbartian maxim, 
 "Action springs out of the circle of thought" — much the 
 same, in its meaning, as the scholastic Nil est in intellectu quod 
 non prius jiierit in sensu ' — and it forbade me twelve or fifteen 
 years ago to regard the principle of developtnent from within 
 as the only or the last word of educational philosophy. Then 
 came an observational acquaintance with a misunderstood and 
 easily misunderstandable Froebelianism — a teacher encouraging 
 children to play at "cobbling" when they had never once in 
 their lives seen a cobbler at work, and so on. I made, too, an 
 observational acquaintance with the methods of teaching 
 "recitation" in senior schools, and slowly came to realize that 
 they were laborious, niggling methods destructive of all sense 
 of artistic totality. Gradually I arrived at the formula, so 
 simple and obvious, and yet so useful and illuminating, though, 
 again, not the last word on the subject, "Impression must 
 precede expression." Then, later still, I began, as a listener, 
 to make the acquaintance of orchestral music, and grave doubts 
 arose, in consequence, as to the usual methods of teaching both 
 instrumental and vocal music. Convinced at last, I discovered 
 that others had arrived at similar convictions and that the 
 time was ripe for a change in school methods. 
 
 The social need of training in appreciation. — 
 
 Simultaneously with this growth of purely pedagogical 
 opinion has occurred the triumph of the cinemato- 
 graph. Faced by this triumph — so different from 
 any of which education itself can boast — the educa- 
 tionist stands wondering and undecided. Is he 
 humbly to adopt the cinematograph, either in a port- 
 1 Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses.
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION l8l 
 
 able form within the school building or at certain 
 centers where blameless films will be shown to chil- 
 dren during school hours and less blameless ones to 
 adults in the evening? It seems at the present 
 moment almost as if he will, and undoubtedly the 
 cinematograph can be usefully employed for educa- 
 tional purposes, particularly in connection with 
 geography, nature study, engineering, and other 
 very objective branches of study. Indeed, even liter- 
 ature can be made to benefit from it, if, as is sometimes 
 done, the great stories of Homer, Vergil, and Victor 
 Hugo are told upon the screen. Broadly speaking, 
 however, as the cinematograph is avowedly or sup- 
 posedly imitative, it cannot, or does not at the present, 
 supply high forms of art, for high forms of art go far 
 beyond imitation. The question arises, therefore, 
 whether the school ought not to look in other direc- 
 tions than the cinematograph, or, at any rate, while 
 not ignoring it, ought not to take care that more per- 
 manent and significant forms of art receive their due 
 attention. There is a distinct danger that the very 
 word *' picture " may, in a few years' time from now, 
 have merely a cinematograph reference ; the youth 
 who is " going to see the pictures " goes not to the 
 Tate Gallery or the Metropolitan Museum, but to the 
 nearest ' ' Movy Palace. ' ' The whole problem has been 
 recently stated so lucidly by M. Cousinet that his ex- 
 position will, for a while, be followed point by point.
 
 1 82 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 M. Cousinet, in his 1912-1913 article, showed that 
 France had special reasons for encouraging and im- 
 proving aesthetic taste, inasmuch as that country's 
 economic preeminence in the arts of architecture, 
 furniture making, jewelry, wood carving, and house 
 decoration was being gravely threatened, since the 
 public was becoming content with cheap imitations 
 of older works, and artists were being given over, 
 when not to sheer imitation, to a straining after mere 
 eccentricity. Foreigners, less encumbered by an 
 artistic tradition, showed happier invention and the 
 results were seen in a largely increased production of 
 foreign work. It was for economic reasons like this 
 that, in 1906, a propaganda was commenced in favor 
 of education in design based on observation of real 
 things and against the practice of mere copying, some- 
 times the copying even of colorless and Hfeless plaster 
 models. 
 
 The gulf between modern artists and the masses. 
 — But, he adds, there were other influences at work, 
 leading the educators not only of France, but of other 
 countries, to see the need for esthetic training in 
 primary schools. 
 
 The fundamental trouble, M. Cousinet continued, 
 was the progressive separation of artists from the 
 public. The results of this separation were, and are, 
 that the taste of the latter is becoming more and more 
 base while that of the former is becoming more and
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 183 
 
 more refined and remote, with increasing stress ever 
 being laid by them on complicated and esoteric tech- 
 nique, clearly typified by the lengths to which the Fu- 
 turist movement has gone. Formerly artists were in 
 contact with the public, who were the only art critics. 
 But as states grew larger and more democratic there 
 grew up a demand among the half-educated public 
 for an art witliin their comprehension. In trying 
 to please this vast multitude of people possessing very 
 varied degrees of culture and many of whom desired 
 only some immediate sensuous satisfaction — a multi- 
 tude suffering from overwork, hurry, alcoholism, from 
 the pubKcity given to crimes, from overcrowding, nerv- 
 ous strain, and the like — artists could supply only 
 emotional excitement of an intense kind. We see 
 to what a level public taste has descended if we study 
 the cinematograph, with its mere shaking of the 
 nerves by laughter or fear. And, an American 
 might add, we find another extreme in the hide- 
 ous creations of the " comic supplements " of the 
 Sunday newspapers. 
 
 In all arts the separation of the artist from the public 
 has become pronounced, even the magnificent effort 
 of Berlioz to create a music for the people having 
 failed, and the modern musician having become more 
 and more esoteric, more and more a worshiper of 
 *' art for art's sake." Thus art, losing contact with 
 social life, has become thin and etiolated, and even
 
 1 84 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 literature and music have come to consist of tiny, 
 exquisite, insignificant pieces. There exists nothing 
 to-day between the two extremes of subtlety and gross- 
 ness. Hence has arisen the demand that a minimum 
 of aesthetic education should be given to all people 
 in the state. In this way alone can the public be 
 made to appreciate higher things, while, as a further 
 result, artists themselves may be brought into closer 
 contact with life, thereby having their taste enriched 
 while that of the pubhc is being " refined." " An age 
 of altruism should be able to insure to the artist 
 suflScient culture in his audience so that his language 
 be understood and that his speech be not reckoned 
 as an uncertain sound." ^ 
 
 But we must not mistake, M. Cousinet goes on to 
 say, the purpose of the present movement. We do not 
 expect to make all people artists or even enhghtened 
 amateurs, who prefer Beethoven to Manon, Rodin 
 to Pradier, an etching of Jourdain to a Hthograph, or 
 Dominique to Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre. The 
 aim is to unite afresh the artists and the public ; in fact, 
 to prepare a public for future artists by habituating 
 people to see things from the point of view of the 
 beautiful. ^Esthetic admiration is not at all a natural 
 senti?nent; what takes the place of it is generally the 
 immediate satisfaction of familiar things ; the thrill of 
 melodrama which demands no effort of thought; 
 
 ^Pictorial Composition, H. R. Poore, p. 226.
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 1 85 
 
 musical comedy; coarsely colored pictures; and 
 crude melody whose banal phrases can be easily fore- 
 seen. 
 
 For real appreciation, as distinct from the love of 
 these things, there must be a certain respect for the 
 work of art, a desire to penetrate to its meaning, a 
 contemplative state, prolonged for some minutes. 
 There must be a suspension, for the while, of the ego- 
 istic " will to live," there must be self-forgetfulness, 
 union with the thought of the artist, a state somewhat 
 analogous to the " catalepsy " in which Hindus put 
 themselves but distinct from it in that the mind is 
 still active. In this state a great number of ideas 
 group themselves together, associations are formed 
 and reenforce admiration with a crowd of intellectual 
 elements (interpretations, memories, comparisons). 
 
 Arguments against the attempt to " teach " appre- 
 ciation. — So far M. Cousinet. But the condition 
 of educational theory in England, at any rate, is so 
 unfortunate that every unfamihar proposal has at 
 once to face objections of a more or less childish kind. 
 Sound, philosophical objections are rarely or never 
 forthcoming ; we are not philosophers ; we thoroughly 
 despise clear thinking and we have a mute horror 
 of ultimate issues: but we are not, in consequence 
 of these facts, saved from " theory " and " dogma " ; 
 on the contrary, we are slaves to them, but slaves to 
 claptrap theory and cant dogma. The proposal that
 
 1 86 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 there shall be a " lesson in appreciation " may there- 
 fore be received by the educational world in exactly 
 the same way as the proposal that there shall be 
 lessons in morals or civics. We shall be told that 
 " beauty cannot be taught " (just as " virtue cannot 
 be taught "), that the beauty of things is learned 
 " indirectly," or " incidentally," or " unconsciously." 
 
 So far as there is a vital motive behind these con- 
 tentions it will be found to resolve itself mainly into 
 mental inertia on the part of the teacher, into an 
 unwillingness to see the school time-table (already 
 " overcrowded ") disturbed, and a fear that the 
 learning of a new technique will be rendered necessary. 
 
 Now the first objection has already been anticipated 
 and refuted in Chapter I. Whatever the lesson in 
 appreciation is to be it must not be toilsomely labo- 
 rious. There is something wrong about our lessons in 
 music and poetry if this element of toil, either for 
 teacher or for pupil, is allowed to intrude. The 
 truth is, We have never realized the significance and 
 the Junction of appreciation; we have confused it with 
 technique, and through this confusion we have destroyed 
 appreciation. 
 
 Such categories as " thoroughness," " tests," " re- 
 sults," and the Uke have no place whatever in the 
 philosophy of appreciation. In other parts of school 
 philosophy, they have a place ; we want more " thor- 
 oughness," more exacting " tests," more satisfactory
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 187 
 
 " results," here and there ; with arithmetic, for 
 example, and enunciation, and perhaps reasoning. 
 But these things and the lesson in appreciation are 
 as wide as the poles asunder. Arithmetic, whether 
 higher or lower than appreciation, is fundamentally 
 different from it. Now, in the average school, the 
 music or poetry lesson is not, in point of fact, widely 
 different from the arithmetic lesson, and the strain 
 and strenuousness of the latter largely belong to the 
 former; it would therefore not be surprising if the 
 teacher stood somewhat suspicious before the proposed 
 " lesson in appreciation." But he misunderstands. 
 If there is to be strain in this lesson, it will have to 
 be a very different kind of strain from that which 
 gives " neurasthenia " to teachers. And if ever the 
 dream of an imposing school ritual (or Hturgy) should 
 come true, — a ritual of songs, poems, and ceremonies, 
 — the present argument will be further strengthened, 
 for no one has ever objected that a ritual produces 
 worry or neurasthenia; it is a reposeful, routine 
 thing. 
 
 Not only do teachers commonly complain of an 
 " overcrowded curriculum," they complain with even 
 greater bitterness of the large size of their classes. 
 Indeed any reference to the latter question at a teachers' 
 meeting in England calls forth applause that now 
 verges on the automatic. Yet it is not difficult to 
 show that, for some subjects, large classes are an ad-
 
 1 88 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 vantage, inasmuch as, in small classes, enthusiasm 
 is not easy to work up. Among these subjects are 
 those that come under the present formula. I should 
 not be surprised to find lessons in appreciation being 
 given, in the near future, to classes of a hundred or 
 more pupils ; and certainly a stately and imposing 
 school ritual will be a thing for large, not for small, 
 groups of children. In short, the very idea of appre- 
 ciation is of something widely different from " a 
 lesson " in the usual sense. 
 
 And now to the second objection, the pseudo or 
 claptrap objection that " beauty cannot be taught." 
 
 This may mean that the teacher can take no sys- 
 tematic steps to enhance the child's powers of aesthetic 
 appreciation. If this is the meaning of the state- 
 ment, its refutation has already been supplied in 
 Chapters I-V, where, in connection with what is 
 called " Negative Preparation," it has been shown 
 that the teacher can do much to remove obstacles 
 to appreciation ; and, in connection with what is 
 called " Positive Preparation," it has been shown 
 that he can do much to supply the very machinery 
 for appreciation itself. The nature of that machinery 
 was briefly indicated above in the quotation from 
 M. Cousinet ; ideas have to " group themselves 
 together. ..." Now this machinery is quite within 
 the reach of educational influences. 
 
 Evidences of the need for aesthetic guidance. — If,
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 1 89 
 
 however, the statement means that every one, includ- 
 ing every child, perceives beauty without any assist- 
 ance from educational guides, such as teachers, the 
 statement is again wildly untrue. " ^Esthetic appre- 
 ciation is not a natural sentiment." 
 
 Some children were once standing before Holman 
 Hunt's Light of the World and speculating as to the 
 meaning of the figure (Christ) it contains. " Who's 
 that? " " Why, don't yer see? It's the devil and 
 that's the hole he's come out of." ^ 
 
 This grotesque misinterpretation m.ight be paral- 
 leled by countless others, individual and racial. The 
 grandeurs and the beauties of the Alps and the 
 Highlands pass unnoticed for generations; then 
 some one brings the discerning eye and removes the 
 scales from eyes that are not discerning; what was 
 formerly the spiritual wealth of one becomes the 
 currency of all. This truth applies not only to 
 aesthetic matters but to moral, and our controver- 
 siaHsts usually ignore it as much in the one case as 
 in the other. To people who imagine that the child 
 perceives moral and aesthetic principles by " a rapid 
 sort of first intellection," as Dr. Stanley Hall sarcas- 
 tically calls it,^ the existence of guide books to picture 
 galleries and of annotated programs to orchestral 
 
 * Episode narrated on the authority of Mr. Sharman, a well-known 
 London teacher. 
 2 Youth, p. 357.
 
 igo THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 concerts must prove a puzzling phenomenon. As 
 often happens, however, in professional matters, the 
 outsider may see truths which the insider, hypnotized 
 by professional claptrap, does not see. At any 
 meeting of teachers or educational officials it would 
 be easy to raise a cheer by proclaiming that the child 
 " unconsciously " perceives beauty or goodness and 
 by protesting against systematic attempts to educate 
 the aesthetic or moral judgment. But meanwhile 
 guide books exist, and from one of the best of them a 
 few quotations will here be given. 
 
 "Why," says Mr. E. T. Cooke in his Popular Handbook to 
 the British Museum, "is any guide necessary at all? The ob- 
 jection has high authority : — 
 
 " ' There needs no words nor terms precise 
 The paltry jargon of the marble mart. 
 When pedantry gulls folly : we have eyes.' 
 
 "We all have eyes, but we have not all the poet's eye. . . . 
 The trained eye, assisted by sympathy and imagination, 
 pierces through all obstacles to the true vision ; but there are 
 many of us . . . whom a first and uninstructed survey of the 
 Greek marbles in a museum leaves cold, careless, bewildered. 
 I do not think, therefore, that it is entirely superfluous ... to 
 give simple explanations of the nature of their excellence ; to 
 suggest to the eye what it should see; to cite appreciations 
 by competent authorities of past and present times." ' 
 
 To Mr. Cooke's statement the man in the street 
 will assent ; it is only the academic educationist who 
 
 ^ Popular Handbook, pp. xi-xii.
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 19I 
 
 will claim that the child should not be " stuffed " 
 with the opinions of other people or told what to see ; 
 it is the academic educationist who retains the " old 
 superstition that children have innate faculties of 
 such a finished sort that they flash up and grasp the 
 principles of things " ; ^ it is he who fails to recognize 
 that " our best thoughts and feelings never get into 
 currency, for lack of the bullion of words out of which 
 they must be minted " ; Mt is he, in short, who is, too 
 often, the enemy of any systematic education in 
 beauty and goodness. 
 
 Perhaps our controversialist may find some comfort on pages 
 14-15. For there an attack is made upon expounding and ex- 
 plaining works of art at the moment of their presentation. 
 "The very thing !" our critic may exclaim ; "just what I have 
 always advocated ! Let beauty exert its own influence on 
 the child undisturbed by the teacher's comments!" Well, 
 if the poHcy outHned in the present work is the one that aca- 
 demic opponents of aesthetic or moral education have always 
 been modestly advocating, if they have not, in point of fact, 
 been obsessed by "old superstitions" but have, all the time, 
 been advocates of a forward movement in matters of morals 
 and aesthetics they will, no doubt, welcome this book with 
 open arms. 
 
 I, at any rate, beheve emphatically in teaching 
 morals and teaching aesthetics, and not in leaving 
 them to chance. All the available psychology points 
 in the former direction. There is ample scientific 
 
 1 Stanley HaU, Youth, p. 357. » Meredith, The Egoist, Ch. li.
 
 192 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 evidence that the ear, for example, can be directly 
 trained to recognize absolute as well as relative pitch, 
 and that the other senses are also highly educable. 
 But more than this. The higher and more complex 
 forms of appreciation can be, so to speak, manufac- 
 tured and built up by processes of teaching. Though 
 some souls will prove more responsive than others 
 to the teaching and though the process of building up 
 aesthetic appreciation is one that demands more skill 
 and imagination in the teacher than many other school 
 processes, beauty can be taught and therefore ought 
 to be taught. 
 
 The doctrine of "inner growth." — To all this, 
 even when amplified and illustrated, an easy retort 
 can be made in the terms of Wordsworth's poem. 
 Are we always to be meddling with the child and 
 assuming that "nothing of itself will come"? Is 
 not the " aesthetic sense " a plant of delicate growth? 
 Are there not deep forces at work in the child ? 
 
 Of course. The school is only one agency among 
 many. The environment counts for much ; inner 
 development counts for much ; or, rather, inner 
 development reacting on environment and being in 
 its turn affected by it and thus becoming experience, 
 counts for much. A great deal of this is quite beyond 
 the teacher's power of control. Further, in the present 
 feeble state of the psychology and pedagogy of appre- 
 ciation, we can easily make mistakes ; in the very
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 1 93 
 
 enthusiasm of our conversion to " appreciative " 
 methods we may be oversubtle, overelaborate, over- 
 emphatic, or what not. It is hardly necessary to 
 make such admissions ; they are so obvious. But 
 they have nothing to do with the immediate question. 
 The school is only one agency out of many ; still we 
 must employ it. If we are morally certain to make 
 mistakes, we must learn, gradually, to make none. 
 Too often, these Wordsworthian objections resolve 
 themselves into apologies for doing nothing, or, at 
 best, for allowing beautiful pictures to hang disre- 
 garded on our schoolroom walls and for allowing 
 beautiful melodies to pass without a word of helpful 
 comment. 
 
 The by-product theory. — But the opponents of 
 the specific teaching of appreciation have yet another 
 argument. They will say, " Yes, we must teach 
 appreciation, but we must teach it as a kind of by- 
 product. So long as we ' teach singing,' ' teach 
 poetry,' and so on, we are actually teaching appre- 
 ciation in the only possible way. Appreciation 
 springs up of its own accord in connection with these 
 activities. There is no need to depute it to some 
 person as his special concern." 
 
 This is a familiar mode of argument, and it has 
 been used repeatedly in connection with morals as 
 well as aesthetics. M. Cousinet rightly brushes it 
 aside.
 
 194 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 There are, he says, two parts or aspects of aesthetic 
 education, — production (or execution) and contem- 
 plation (or appreciation), — and they cannot perform 
 each other's functions. The practice of an art may 
 make us more or less clever in execution, but it does 
 not necessarily make us good judges of the works of 
 others or even of our own ; often it makes us think too 
 highly of the mere overcoming of technical difficulties, 
 or too lowly of artists whose style is not the one we 
 prefer; its influence, in short, is egoistic, while the 
 influence of appreciation is altruistic; the latter 
 unites rather than separates men. 
 
 The practice of an art is not identical with real 
 culture. Contemplation or appreciation have to be 
 learned as such; they do not follow from a series of 
 aesthetic activities. 
 
 Here, of course, as M. Cousinet points out, we run 
 up against some of the darling dogmas of our edu- 
 cationists. The pupil has to " learn " everything 
 by " doing " ; there has been, in the past, " too much 
 preaching and lecturing by teachers," and so on. 
 Some of the bold American experiments in inducing 
 children actually to compose music are only the ex- 
 treme form of this tendency towards assigning to 
 " activity " the one and only role in education. But 
 there is an error, M. Cousinet urges, in all this. The 
 facts of Hfe go to show that appreciation has to be 
 taught as stick, at some time or another. It is not
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECMTION 195 
 
 an inevitable product or by-product of life experience 
 or even of specific training in art. 
 
 Direct versus indirect methods. — " And the teaching 
 of appreciation — what form will it take ? surely you 
 will not discuss with children the principles of beauty ? 
 Surely you will prefer to allow beautiful music, beau- 
 tiful pictures, to play upon the mind ? Even although 
 young children cannot interpret Holman Hunt's 
 pictures with the precise and instantaneous accuracy 
 of a trained critic, you will surely admit that some 
 influence is exerted by works of beauty apart from 
 any explanations of them that the teacher or textbook 
 may give ? And so with music, too ; will not ' beauty 
 born of murmuring sound ' pass into the face and 
 life without didactic intermediaries? Admitting the 
 value of specific instruction in aesthetics at some stage 
 or other in the child's, or the adolescent's, or the 
 adult's Hfe, surely there is much \drtue in the quieter, 
 more unconscious influence of beauty? " 
 
 It is necessary here to be modest. The exact 
 ratio and relation that should exist between indirect 
 and direct methods of teaching are beyond the power 
 of any present-day educationist to define or deter- 
 mine. We simply know little or nothing about the 
 subject. We have our prejudices, we have our clap- 
 trap formulae, and these do duty for msdom. 
 
 So far, however, as I can discover, and M. Cousinet 
 says the same, pictures hanging silently in a class-
 
 196 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 room, and music played without comment or discus- 
 sion have not much injiuence of any kind upon taste 
 and character. If, indeed, they exerted a very large 
 influence, the aesthetic outlook for modern nations 
 would be gloomy in the extreme ; for, presumably, 
 bad pictures and bad music would then also be tre- 
 mendously influential on taste and character, and the 
 sights of our ugly streets and the banal music of our 
 halls would be causing, every day, a fatal deteriora- 
 tion in taste. The advocates of the teaching of 
 appreciation (or " contemplation ") desire something 
 far more direct than the alleged education supphed by 
 pictures and music in " unconscious " ways. It is 
 true, as M. Cousinet asserts and as much experience 
 confirms, that artistic activity in the sense of technical 
 practice does not necessarily create artistic taste; 
 it is also true that artistic ^activity, in the sense of 
 " unconscious " learning, does not create it. 
 
 The reason is, of course, that the human mind has 
 to concentrate on one task at a time and that in doing 
 the one task it is bound, for a while, to neglect others. 
 It is this principle which, it seems to me, vitiates 
 almost all of the reasoning in a valuable book called 
 Suggestion in Education. The author ^ tells us that a 
 youth can best pick up moral truths while he is him- 
 self engaged in some alien but strenuous piece of school 
 work, e.g., solving problems in history. My beUef 
 ' Mr. M. W. Keatinge.
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 197 
 
 is that in matters of morals exactly the same principle 
 holds good as in matters of aesthetics. I believe that 
 here, too, there is need for " contemplation," that is, 
 for reflecting dispassionately on moral truths and 
 moral examples ; and that this cannot be done while 
 the attention is wholly engaged in the strenuous work 
 of school or life. 
 
 Of course the notion that we " learn by doing " is 
 a popular one among " practical " people and has much 
 to justify it in certain departments of life. It is, 
 indeed, a notion that many teachers badly need to 
 assimilate. There is Httle doubt that before long 
 they will have satisfactorily assimilated it in connec- 
 tion with such subjects as mathematics and science 
 and that training in English speech will also be revo- 
 lutionized by the influence of the same principle when 
 the excellent methods of teaching French and German 
 by means of the Holzel pictures and other practical 
 devices will be extended to the teaching of the mother 
 tongue ! 
 
 It is not too much to say that half the subjects 
 taught in the modern school (day and evening) are 
 taught too verbally or theoretically, and the other 
 half too practically. Hygiene is one, in addition 
 to those already mentioned, that falls under the 
 former category ; a " course " in hygiene means in- 
 variably a course of lectures. Physical exercises, 
 handicraft, and music are, on the other hand, too
 
 198 THE LESSON EST APPRECIATION 
 
 " practical " ; the teacher does not philosophize 
 enough ; the rationale of this or that muscular move- 
 ment, the teachings of WilUam Morris, the principles 
 of repetition and contrast, and the like, are rarely or 
 never referred to by the teacher of these three subjects. 
 
 I dismiss, therefore, with M. Cousinet, the dogma 
 that everything must be taught " practically." 
 There is a place for practice and there is a place for 
 theory — and "contemplation." 
 
 Experimental aesthetics. — During recent years the 
 realm of aesthetics has been invaded by the experi- 
 menter. 
 
 As is the usual way with that gentleman, he has 
 begun with comparatively simple problems, leaving 
 the complexities of composition in which the artist and 
 musician revel alone for the present. And so far he 
 has told us very little that we did not know before. 
 Still it is worth having our vague convictions confirmed 
 by experiment. 
 
 He has shown that the pleasure derived from certain 
 colors is not entirely the result of associations and ex- 
 perience ; some colors are pleasant and stimulating 
 from the first, even to such lowly animals as earthworms. 
 The warm colors may even exert marked, even if tem- 
 porary, influence on physical strength, increasing, for 
 example, the power of the hand grip. Further, there 
 is a primary pleasure derived from curves, etc., in- 
 dependently of associations (so far as we can tell).
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 199 
 
 Still, associations do exert a very great influence 
 on adult judgments and preferences. The " weight 
 principle " is of particular importance ; people like, as 
 a rule, to have saturated colors placed below, rather 
 than above, colors of a lighter shade, the idea being that 
 to place colors with more apparent substance above 
 those with less is to make a top-heavy arrangement. 
 But other considerations may come in also. 
 
 People, in fact, differ in their characteristic reactions 
 to colors, pictures, and art generally. The four chief 
 types of judgment are (i) the objective, attention is 
 concentrated upon the presented material itself ; 
 (2) the physiological, the material affects the bodily 
 sensations (" depressing " etc.) ; (3) the associative, 
 the material reminds us of something ; (4) the material 
 is personified as having a character {" treacherous," 
 " aggressive," etc.). 
 
 Confirmation of the principle of distraction. — 
 The principle of distraction, so often referred to in this 
 book, recurs again and again in experimental aesthetics. 
 People prefer larger to smaller areas of the lighter tints, 
 for " the indefiniteness of the color of an object, any 
 uncertainty as to its actual color-tone, is lessened by 
 an increase in the size of the colored area." " The 
 aesthetic enjoyment of color is lessened in so far as 
 attention is called away from the color to the effect it is 
 producing on the observer himself." (Valentine.) 
 
 Perhaps the most important example of the principle
 
 200 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 of distraction is contained in Helmholtz's great theory 
 that tonal discord and unpleasantness are due to the 
 interference or clashing of the sound wave set up by 
 certain notes. Thus C and D in the scale are discord- 
 ant because their waves do not coincide at any point ; 
 while C and C are harmonious, the vibrations of C 
 being exactly twice as numerous as those of C and 
 therefore reenforcing them ; similarly C and G (ratio 
 2 : 3) and C and F (ratio 3 : 4) are harmonious. 
 (Think of two people whose steps, as they walk side 
 by side, have these time relations. At very short 
 intervals they are absolutely in time with each other.) 
 When this principle is appHed to overtones, as Helm- 
 holtz applied it, an almost complete explanation of 
 the relative pleasantness of certain combinations is 
 given. 
 
 An attempt has also been made ' to extend this prin- 
 ciple to colors. There are seven notes in the scale and 
 seven colors in the spectrum. The [complementary] 
 colors that harmonize best stand in the simple ratio 
 {i.e., their vibration numbers do) of 3 : 4 : these colors 
 
 are : 
 
 carmine-red and bluish green 
 
 vermilion and turquoise-blue 
 yellowish green and violet 
 green and purple 
 On this theory, " these complementary colors influ- 
 
 ' Raymond, Esthetics, p. 377.
 
 THE POLEMICS OF APPRECIATION 20I 
 
 ence the organs of the same retina without producing 
 any sensation of jolting or jarring . . . there is a free, 
 unrestrained vibratory thrill or glow." Quantity of 
 color (like loudness of tones in music) has nothing to 
 do with the harmony of effect : "all that is necessary 
 is that the form of vibration causing the one color, 
 be it much or Httle, should exactly coalesce with the 
 form of vibration causing the other color." 
 
 Thus we get an explanation of the pleasant effect 
 of " tonal pictures," i.e., those that are all of the same 
 color, varied only by differences of tint and shade. 
 The principle here is not antagonistic to the last, any 
 more than a loud C is inharmonious with a soft C in 
 music ; many people have been unnecessarily puzzled 
 at the fact that pleasant effects arise both from 
 " tonal " pictures and from complementary colors. 
 
 An attempt has been made to explain our pleasure 
 in curves as the result of easy eye movement in the 
 eye muscles. But in point of fact the eye does not 
 move in curves but in lines, jerking itself from one 
 point to another. This instance, therefore, has no 
 direct bearing on the principle of distraction. It may, 
 however, have an indirect bearing. 
 
 So, too, the argument of Fechner that the golden 
 section of a line is pleasant because the attention is 
 facihtated by the repetition of a mathematical prin- 
 ciple is based on the principle of distraction. (But 
 Fechner's view has recently been questioned. The
 
 202 THE LESSON IN APPRECIATION 
 
 golden section of a line is obtained by dividing it into 
 two parts so that 
 
 shorter part : longer part : : longer part : whole), 
 
 Ruskin's definition of composition (in painting) as 
 " the help of everything in the picture by everything 
 else " is another application of the principle of dis- 
 traction. 
 
 Appreciation of pictures. — Experiments on chil- 
 dren's and adults' appreciation of pictures have been 
 carried out by Schulze, Martin, and others. The 
 results are not very valuable. Children appreciate 
 details and have Httle sense of unity ; they appreciate 
 color more than form and chiaroscuro ; and they at- 
 tend Httle to the skill of the artist. 
 
 As a rule, a picture requires a fair number of seconds 
 for its appreciation, but an elementary kind of appre- 
 ciation is often possible with a 2 seconds' exposure. 
 " Familiarity ... is an essential element of the idea 
 of beauty." But excessive familiarity may produce 
 reaction or indifference except in the case of master- 
 pieces. For complex works of art, including pieces 
 of music, the first presentation is not enough for com- 
 plete appreciation.
 
 APPENDIX A 
 
 QUESTIONS, EXERCISES, AND QUOTATIONS 
 
 The following is not a systematic catechism based on the 
 preceding chapters; in some cases, indeed, nothing is given 
 but a quotation which, while suggesting thought, wiU find no 
 answer in the text. I have largely employed the works of 
 Omond and Saintsbury on meter, Parry on music, and Coffin 
 on American paintings, and the arrangement is roughly in that 
 order. 
 
 (i) Analyze, if you can, the charm of Matthew Arnold's fine 
 description of the Greek dramatist Sophocles : — 
 
 "Who saw Ufe steadily and saw it whole." 
 
 (2) Contrast the following and indicate the differences 
 between (a) and (b), and (b) and (c) : — 
 
 (a) " The life of D is extinct, and he is no longer affected 
 by the personal vicissitudes and dangers of government, such 
 as assassination, treason, rebellion, and foreign invasion, which 
 produce this anxiety in my [the king's] mind." 
 
 (b) " D Hes in his grave. Life that racks my soul with 
 
 succeeding ague-fits of fear for him is over and he sleeps in 
 
 peace beyond the reach of treason. The assassin's steel or 
 
 poisoned cup, secretly fomented strife at home, treacherously 
 
 assisted hostility from abroad — none of these can harm him 
 
 now." 
 
 " Duncan is in his grave ; 
 
 After life's fitful fever he sleeps well ; 
 
 Treason has done his worst : nor steel, nor poison, 
 
 203
 
 204 APPENDIX A 
 
 Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing 
 
 Can touch him further." (Macbeth.) 
 
 (i) and (2) from Liddell's Introd. to the Study of Poetry. 
 
 (3) When Macbeth speaks of "life's fitful fever" and of 
 Duncan's deliverance from it he uses a metaphor. Discuss its 
 appropriateness ("fitful"). 
 
 (4) Compare and contrast the two following verses from 
 Shakespeare's sonnets : — 
 
 (i) " When to the sessions of sweet silent thought." 
 (2) " When I do count the clock that tells the time." 
 
 (5) Compare Milton's words in Paradise Lost, I, — 
 
 "A shout that tore hell's conclave " 
 
 with the suggested form, — 
 
 "A cry which rent the vault of hell." 
 
 (6) In the verse from Shakespeare's 29th sonnet : — 
 
 "Like to the lark at break of day arising" 
 
 the rhythm movement is said to be divided into pulses that are 
 suggestive of lark flight. Is this so ? 
 
 (7) "Wherever the imagination plays about an object, 
 expanding it and relating it to what is significant and vital, 
 there the aesthetic faculty is at work." " This humdrum old 
 world of ours" can be made to "burst with beauty." (De 
 Garmo.) Do you think the aesthetic faculty could work on 
 such subjects as (i) a broken shoe, (2) a can of petrol, (3) a 
 snake ? 
 
 (8) Consider the case of a flower. Is it inherently beautiful ? 
 If so, can it take on new noninherent beauties from any source ? 
 
 (9) How would you prevent children from misunderstanding 
 fatally the usage of "become" in the sense of "suit" : — 
 
 " Those two mourning eyes become thy face."
 
 APPENDIX A 205 
 
 (10) Longfellow said of his own attempts at hexametric 
 verse that "the motions of the English Muse are not unlike 
 those of a prisoner dancing to the music of his chains." 
 
 (11) "The sounds of verse have constantly to effect a com- 
 promise between the tj^ical rhythm to which they are set and the 
 irregular stress — and time — variations of human speech. . . . 
 The fundamental principle of verse is that it sets up a new order 
 of progress which constantly conflicts with, yet without de- 
 stroying, the order of progress of common prose speech." (Dr. 
 Alden.) 
 
 (12) "EngHsh syllables do not by themselves create or con- 
 stitute rhythmical periods. They are, at most, set or adjusted 
 to such periods, often with perceptible coercion. This enforced 
 adjustment gives our verse its charm and character." 
 
 (13) Professor Scott makes prose rhythm depend mainly 
 on pitch, verse rhythm on stress or force. Professor Bright dis- 
 tinguishes pitch accent from force accent. Weigh these views. 
 
 (14) "Rhythm represents emotion and it gives rise to emo- 
 tion." (Dixon.) 
 
 (15) " English verse is ' decorated prose,' decoration involving 
 symmetry and proportion." (Browne.) Consider this. 
 
 (16) "In practice it is impossible fully to harmonize the 
 natural quantity and stress of a language with the artificial 
 quantity and stress of meter ; one or other must go to the wall. 
 . . . The stress groups of ordinary speech amount to nothing 
 more than prose ; to make them into feet we lengthen or shorten 
 syllables without scruple." (Sweet.) 
 
 (17) What kind of verse is this : — 
 
 " Nay, it is better thus, the Monarch piously answered." 
 
 (18) "Divorced from time, stress in'English has never proved 
 a sufficient basis of meter ; lines do not ' read themselves.' And, 
 divorced from time, no mere succession of prose accents will
 
 2o6 APPENDIX A 
 
 create an impression of verse. . . . Our word accent and, 
 still more, our sentence accent are too fugitive and capricious 
 to be made the sole basis of verse." 
 
 (19) "The laws of prosody . . . have one common purpose: 
 to keep aUve the opposition of two schemes simultaneously 
 followed. . . . The eccentric scansion of the group is an 
 adornment ; but as soon as the original beat has been forgotten 
 it ceases to be an adornment." (R. L. Stevenson.) 
 
 (20) Distinguish between rhythmical accent (or ictus) 
 Verbal emphasis, and syllable stress. 
 
 (21) Some writers claim that English verse is marked by a mid- 
 way pause which divides it into versicles or sections. (Guest.) 
 Consider this from a study of many blank verse passages, e.g., 
 
 "The glass of fashion and the mold of form." 
 
 (22) "No rhyme but a perfect rhyme is ever worth a poet's 
 while." (Lanier.) 
 
 (23) Rhythm consists in "stimulation at fixed degrees of 
 time," its essential quality being "continuous satisfaction of 
 expectation." (Gurney.) 
 
 (24) Meter is akin to music in that it contains "measured 
 rests, filling up the time required, as in bars of music.'" (Rus- 
 kin.) Steele was the first to treat pauses as factors of meter. 
 
 (25) " Rhythm is a national thing, meter can be trans- 
 planted." (From Earle.) 
 
 (26) "All exaltation is rhythmic." (Wadham.) 
 
 (27) "Blank verse, coming near to prose, is specially suitable 
 for narrative ; it is enough if an occasional line in strict measure 
 reminds us of the rhythm." (From Rev. W. Young.) 
 
 (28) "It would be a very 'wooden' verse in which word 
 accent and verse beat always coincided." 
 
 (29) "The metrical expression of emotion is an instinct, not 
 an artifice."
 
 APPENDIX A 207 
 
 (30) Consider whether there is a rhythmic arrangement in 
 the "poems" of Walt Whitman. 
 
 (31) Feet must be "made to occupy the same time." Nine 
 tenths of prosody " appertain to the mathematics." (E. A. Poe.) 
 
 (32) "In English verse accentuation usually reenforces 
 metrical ictus." 
 
 {33) "'Accent' with us does not necessarily imply either 
 elevation of pitch, or increase of loudness, or prolongation of 
 time. Normally we like to unite all three on one syllable. . . . 
 But it is possible to accentuate a syllable by lowering the voice, 
 by uttering it more softly, or by shortening its duration." 
 (Omond.) 
 
 (34) Some people contend that Pope's most regular hnes are 
 his weakest in point of versification, others contend the reverse. 
 Study this. 
 
 (35) Coleridge wrote Christabel on the principle of "counting 
 in each line the accents, not the syllables." Find out whether 
 he meant "accented syllables" in the ordinary sense, or accents 
 occurring at equal intervals of time, separating variable numbers 
 of syllables. 
 
 (36) Is there any rhythm in Milton's verse : — 
 
 " Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death." 
 
 (37) " Southey's hexametric verse (in his Vision ofJttdgment), 
 while having no claim to represent classic hexameter, is perfectly 
 admissible as an English form of verse. It is simply a triple 
 time six cadence line, with falling accent, and without rime." 
 
 (38) According to Saintsbury the amphibrach (v^ _ w) and 
 the paeon, especially the third paeon (vy ^ _ w), are peculiarly 
 prose feet. He quotes the following among many other 
 examples : — 
 
 I The spring of | his whole conduct | is fear ]
 
 2o8 APPENDIX A 
 
 This is "like advance and retreat, to gain momentum and 
 final impetus of a battering ram." Analyze passages of first- 
 class prose and see whether Saintsbury's dictum is correct. 
 
 (39) Deduce an aesthetic principle from Saintsbury's state- 
 ment that, in the case of Middleton, "the thrust and parry of 
 controversy and personal feeling infuse a rhythm of its own." 
 
 (40) Consider the various effects producible by rhythmic 
 
 devices in prose. A molossus ( ), three long syllables) 
 
 is alleged to be impressive in Berkeley's : — 
 
 " All these advantages are produced from drunkenness in the 
 
 vulgar way | by strong beer |." 
 
 Find also examples of alternation of long and short clauses, 
 of balance, of cumulation, of paralleHsm, and of step arrange- 
 ment {i.e. lengthening of clauses in succession). 
 
 (41) "The law of association makes realistic suggestion 
 inevitable wherever reference to things external is made in 
 connection with music. . . . The public are almost ready to 
 beheve the scale of C major is interesting if they are told that 
 it represents a rivulet, though the chances are that very few of 
 them would care about the rivulet if they saw one." (Parry.) 
 
 (42) "Style never can possibly exist of itself. It is ad- 
 mirable when it fulfils its purpose, which is to convey ideas. . . . 
 Overvaluation of style is a decisive indication of decadence." 
 
 (43) "The effect of the Teutonic instinct is to bring music 
 into touch with realities, to express something which is human 
 . . . not to leave the being merely in a pleasant state of in- 
 definite exaltation by abstract beauty." 
 
 (44) "Every one notices the tremendous volume of tone in 
 which recent composers take delight. But perhaps it is not 
 noticed that the effect of almost overpowering sound is mainly 
 produced by the ingenuity with which they reduce the sound 
 almost to nothing in other parts of their compositions."
 
 APPENDIX A 209 
 
 (45) " People talk of the richness of some modem works, and 
 overlook the fact that the texture is made up of commonplace 
 formulce of scales and arpeggios which are apt to the instru- 
 ments and say nothing to the mind ; mere superficial splutters 
 of pretended vivacity with no vitality in them." 
 
 (46) " In the early stages of {e.g. choral) music . . . there 
 was nothing which stood out decisively from the context to 
 lay hold of the mind . . . The music was all vague and in- 
 definite." 
 
 (47) "Romanticism is . . . the recognition of the close rela- 
 tion of music to humanity." 
 
 (48) "The leading note" (te) is the least independent note 
 in the scale, and leads naturally upwards to the tonic. Find 
 examples from popular and base music in which this note is 
 diverted to other uses (i.e. , in which it is made more independent 
 of the tonic, the voice going to any point in the scale rather than 
 to the latter) . Find in particular instances of the employment 
 of the tritone (te-fah) by good musicians and by composers of 
 base music. 
 
 (49) "The fact that 'consecutive fifths' are not met with 
 in any music which has any pretensions to decency is the reason 
 why it was adopted by the purveyors of new tunes for music 
 halls. . . . The result may fairly be called the ' music-hall 
 cadence ' consisting in most cases of a very stupid progression 
 in which the tune and the bass move in parallels of fifths." 
 
 (50) "The appreciation which is the result of mere excite- 
 ment is not truly artistic appreciation at all." 
 
 (51) "It is not in the competence of the very big pubUc to 
 encourage really first-rate men in any branch of art or Htera- 
 ture." 
 
 (52) "It has often been observed that the finest works of art 
 are only produced by those who have to experience hardship, 
 pain, and difiiculty."
 
 2IO APPENDIX A 
 
 (53) Consider and criticize the following passages from Mr. 
 H. G. Wells : — 
 
 (o) "Then he became aware that the church tower frothed 
 with his daughters." 
 
 (b) The "Soul." — "One might figure it, I suppose, as a pre- 
 posterous jumble animated by a will ; a floundering discon- 
 nectedness through which an old hump of impulse rises and 
 thrusts unaccountably ; a wild beast of purpose wallowing in a 
 back eddy of mud and weeds and floating objects and creatures 
 drowned." 
 
 (54) "Appreciation is largely a matter of imitative sym- 
 pathy." (Cloudsley Brereton.) 
 
 (55) What aesthetic principles are exemplified in the follow- 
 ing : — 
 
 "The passage, which the agent called the hall, was much 
 broader and more commodious behind the staircase than in 
 front, and she was able to banish out of sight of the chance 
 visitor all that Utter of hat stand and umbrella stand, letters, 
 boxes arriving and parcels to post, . . . and often her father's 
 well-worn and all too fatally comfortable house slippers . . . 
 which had always offended her eye at home. ... A good 
 effect at first is half the victory of a well-done house." (H. G. 
 Wells, Marriage, p. 230.) 
 
 (56) Deduce principles of appreciation from the following 
 passages from Bernard Shaw : — 
 
 (a) "I have seen the suburban amateurs of the Shakespeare 
 Reading Society, seated on the platform of a lecture hall, pro- 
 duce about sixty-six times as much effect by reading straight 
 through Much Ado About Nothing as [Sir Henry] Irving with 
 his expensively mounted and superlatively dull Lyceum 
 version." 
 
 (6) "Effects . . . which great players produce at a dramatic 
 climax by working up the scene, through sheer force of acting,
 
 APPENDIX A 211 
 
 to the pitch at which, when the crucial moment comes, the 
 effect makes itself, the artists' work being then over though 
 the audience is persuaded that some stupendous magnetic 
 explosion has taken place." 
 
 (f) "The actor who hurries reminds the spectators of the 
 flight of time, which it is his business to make them forget." 
 
 (d) "Mozart, in rushing an operatic movement to a spirited 
 conclusion, knew how to make it, when apparently already 
 at its utmost, seem to bound forward by a sudden pianissimo 
 and lightsome change of step, the speed and force of the execu- 
 tion being actually reduced instead of intensified by the change. 
 [It is a mistake] to carry through a long crescendo of excitement 
 by main force after beginning fortissimo." 
 
 (e) " There is nothing to be done with [such a dramatic sit- 
 uation] except prepare its effect by acting beforehand so as to 
 make the situation live, and then let it do its own work." 
 
 (/) "In the play we had first the inevitable two servants 
 gossiping about their employers' aflfairs . . . their real function 
 being to bore the audience sufi&ciently to make the principals 
 doubly welcome when they arrive." 
 
 (g) "It is just as impossible for a human being to study 
 and perform a new part of any magnitude every day as to play 
 Hamlet for a hundred consecutive nights." "The performers 
 [in the hundred nights' run of Hamlet] had passed through the 
 stage of acute mania, and were for the most part sleep walking 
 in sort of dozed blank- verse dream." 
 
 (h) ' ' Nine tenths of the charm of Chinatown lies in its novelty. ' ' 
 (i) " Cassius in the first act has a twaddling forty-line speech, 
 base in its matter and mean in its measure, followed imme- 
 diately by the magnificent torrent of rhetoric, the first burst of 
 true Shakespearean music in the play, beginning, 
 
 " ' Why man he doth bestride the narrow world 
 Like a Colossus.'
 
 212 APPENT)IX A 
 
 I failed to catch the sUghtest change of elevation or reenforce- 
 
 ment of feeling when Mr. passed from one to the other. 
 
 His tone throughout was dry ; and it never varied." 
 
 (57) George Inness learned that "the best art does not 
 consist in representing ever>'thing in sight but in discovering 
 what are the salient and essential characteristics and in setting 
 these down in a masterly summary." "Only he who has 
 learned to put in can be successful in leaving out." 
 
 Illustrate these statements from the paintings of George 
 Inness. 
 
 (58) "In nature it is not order but irregularity that prevails 
 and yet this disorder presents appearances of unity of effect." 
 The Japanese learned from it "a new kind of symmetry . . . 
 the result of careful calculation which gratified the eye with a 
 sense of unity, yet had the appearance of being the result of 
 accident." 
 
 (59) "The value of elusiveness in a work of art was one of the 
 great truths that Whistler's example teaches." 
 
 (60) The Landscape of Durand in the Lennox Collection, 
 New York, is "too big in size and too extensive in subject to be 
 embraced by a single vision." 
 
 (61) Edwin .\bbey in his frieze at Boston Public Library has 
 "ignored the function of a frieze, which is to counteract the 
 various interruptions down below ... by an effect above of 
 continuity. ... He has chopped it up." " Sargent in the 
 lunette and soffit of the arch in the same building has associ- 
 ated the forms with a great deal of abstruse symbolism ... so 
 that people miss the decorative intention of the paintings and 
 devote their studies to the printed key." 
 
 (62) Winslow Homer is the greatest American exponent of 
 realism in painting. Compare him with Albert H. Thayer. 
 
 (63) Extract the maximum amount of meaning from George 
 de Forest Brush's painting The Sculptor and the King.
 
 APPENDIX A 213 
 
 (64) Show how art can interpret science by the parallel 
 instance of Rembrandt's School of Anatomy and Thomas 
 Eakins's Dr. Gross' Surgical Clinic. 
 
 (65) Find skillful and unskillful instances in Shakespeare of 
 introductory speeches and introductory episodes, i.e., speeches 
 and episodes intended merely to give the play its setting. 
 
 (66) Consider Shakespeare's Winter's Tale from the stand- 
 points of " unity of time," " unity of place," and " unity of action." 
 Consider Ibsen's Doll's House from the same standpoints. 
 
 (67) Which of the three "unities" (time, place, and action) 
 do you consider the most important ? Give reasons for this 
 based on aesthetic principles. 
 
 (68) Criticize or justify the presence of "subplots" in a 
 drama, and also Milton's condemnation of " interweaving 
 comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity." 
 
 (69) Criticize or justify the length of Hugo's novel Les Mi- 
 ser able s. 
 
 (70) "Nearly aU the reaUy great novelists of the world have 
 been declared moralists." Illustrate or refute this statement. 
 
 (71) "The law of dramatic structure requires that there shall 
 be a well-marked central interest [in a drama] to which all other 
 interests are duly subordinated." Illustrate this principle 
 from the drama, from painting, and from other arts. 
 
 (72) Compare the policy of recent dramatists like Ibsen, 
 whose plays generally open just at the "beginning of the end," 
 with Shakespeare's method of representing on the stage the 
 actual antecedents of the final tragedy. 
 
 (73) Compare the novel with the drama as regards (i) 
 subtlety, (2) vividness. Extend the comparison to the cine- 
 matograph. 
 
 (74) Consider this : " Some kind of conflict is the datum and 
 very backbone of a dramatic story." ^ It has been alleged that 
 
 ^ Hudson, Introduction to the Study of Literature.
 
 214 APPENDIX A 
 
 this statement does not apply to Henry V and The Tempest. 
 Consider this also. 
 
 (75) Horace held that "things heard make a feebler impres- 
 sion than things seen." Is this true? 
 
 (76) "Uamlet is overloaded with matter which has httle 
 or no vital connection with the plot." Consider this. 
 
 (77) Criticize the deus ex machina device in ancient Greek 
 dramas and its equivalent in modem dramas {Love's Labour's 
 Lost, Tartuffe, etc.) 
 
 (78) Generally speaking, it is bad art to introduce important 
 new motives or new characters late in a play. Criticize or 
 justify (i) the conversions of Ohver and Proteus in As You Like 
 It and Two Gentlemen of Verona, and (2) the introduction of 
 Dr. Prell in Flachsmann als Erzieher. 
 
 (79) "The hills are shadows, and they flow 
 
 From form to form, and nothing stands ; 
 
 They melt Uke mist, the solid lands. 
 
 Like clouds they shape themselves and go." 
 
 (Tennyson, /« Memoriam.) 
 
 Is this "shadows" metaphor a tame or a bold one for (i) the 
 ordinary man, (2) the geologist ? 
 
 (80) "Prose fiction is the loosest form of literary art." 
 Consider this, and contrast prose fiction with drama. 
 
 (81) "The feehngs can never quite keep pace with the 
 intellect ; as a result of this, the poet is, in the average of cases, 
 conservative." Give examples of poets and artists who are the 
 reverse of "conservative" in (i) form, and (2) subject matter. 
 
 (82) "Scott's cumbrous and heavy introductory chapters 
 are almost enough to deter the reader on the very threshold of 
 his narrative." What sesthetic principle is here referred to by 
 implication ? 
 
 (83) "A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of
 
 APPENDIX A 215 
 
 revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral 
 ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life." (Matthew 
 Arnold.) Is there such a "poetry of revolt" as that here 
 referred to ? 
 
 (84) IMatthew Arnold held that modern subjects were "too 
 near ... to form a sufficiently grand, detached, and self- 
 sufficient object for a tragic poem." Consider this, and quote 
 the opinions of a great musician on the same question. 
 
 (85) Johnson pointed out that Milton's blank verse seldom 
 has two pure {i.e. quite regular) lines together. Is this an 
 advantage or a disadvantage ? Take the Une, 
 
 "Thus at the shady lodge arrived, both stood," 
 
 and consider in particular the last foot. 
 
 (86) "Ever since man has been man, all deep and sustained 
 feeUng has tended to express itself in rhythmical language, 
 and the deeper the feeUng, the more characteristic and decided 
 the rhythm." (Mill.) Consider this. 
 
 (87) Consider the following two of Bacon's statements, 
 namely, " that art is man added to nature" {ars est homo additus 
 naturce), and that the function of poetry is to lend "some 
 shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points 
 wherein the nature of things doth deny it." 
 
 (88) Is it possible to enjoy the rhythm of a language which 
 we do not understand ? 
 
 (89) "The vague and shadowy doctrine [of "art for art's 
 sake "] is . . . brought into contempt by the rank and standing 
 of those who inculcate it ; it is for the most part associated 
 with minor poets and dilettante critics. The really great 
 poets of the world have never taken any account of it." Men- 
 tion any representatives of this doctrine. 
 
 (90) The following passage is taken from G. A. Smith's 
 Historical Geography of the Holy Land:
 
 2l6 APPENDIX A 
 
 "As the supports of a great oak run up above ground, so the 
 gradual hills of Galilee rise from Esdraelon and the Phoenician 
 coast, upon that tremendous northern mountain. It is not 
 Lebanon, however, but the opposite range of Hermon, which 
 dominates the view. Among his own roots Lebanon is out of 
 sight ; whereas that long glistening ridge that stands aloof 
 always brings the eye back to itself." 
 
 What principle of aesthetics is illustrated here ? 
 
 (91) What view of art is implied in the following quotations 
 relative to late Greek sculpture : — 
 
 (a) The making of the statue of the Luck of Aniioch (300 B.C.) 
 "imphed that none of the gods was near enough or real enough 
 to be a protection to the city." 
 
 (b) "The 'golden age' of Greece had passed away . . . men 
 looked to art to redress the balance, and called for the works 
 which would wean them for a few moments from the dreary 
 truths of existence. The well-known 'Boy strangling a goose' 
 by Boethus is a delightful work which . . . is an instance of this 
 tendency." 
 
 (c) "The sculptor has attempted to crowd into his composi- 
 tion (the Luck of Antioch) more than sculpture can legitimately 
 express and we see with misgiving the first signs of . . . con- 
 scious cleverness." 
 
 {d) The bronze head of a boxer (late fourth century) in which 
 "the disheveled hair is represented with astonishing skill 
 [as also] the depraved, brutalized type of face, with its flattened 
 nose, battered and lowering brow . . . affords a sad contrast 
 to the clear-cut beauty of the ideal citizen athlete of the days 
 of Greek freedom. . . . The athletic training of the citizen 
 ceased to have any relation to the needs of real life and 
 athletics became a show and its exponents professional per- 
 formers." 
 
 {e) "The emotions we experience [on looking at the Laocoon]
 
 APPENDIX A 217 
 
 do not depend upon the sufferings of the priest of Neptune. 
 Laocoon is mankind himself." 
 
 (/) Relative to the Diadumenus of Polyclitus and the 
 Apoxyomenus of [the' school of] Lysippus : "A physique that 
 would serve the state in good stead at any moment was the 
 essential to the youth who posed for the Diadumenus. Above 
 all, there was no suggestion of training for a single event. The 
 Apoxyomenus, on the contrary, rather recalls the system of our 
 own day, in which particular muscle, rather than balanced 
 strength, is the prime desideratum." 
 
 (92) "On the vast canvas of recorded history one half cen- 
 tury has always stood out." What half century was that ? 
 
 (93) What principle is involved in Wagner's use of the follow- 
 ing phrase : — 
 
 -•- 
 -1= 
 
 
 Erda rising from below. {The Rheingold.) 
 
 (94) In a picture by Van Beers a fashionable woman has 
 seated herself in a park on a bench large enough for two. Just 
 above her is the statue of a man without a head but holding a 
 flute as if to play. In Reynolds's Portrait of Elliott the British 
 defender of Gibraltar is represented with a key and behind are 
 seen cannon pointed downwards. Interpret and if j^ou like 
 justify this kind of art. 
 
 (95) "It was in song that the crowds on Wall St., New York, 
 invariably expressed their first impressions during the American 
 Civil War when receiving news from the army." "Later . . . 
 the more excited the men were the more figurative their lan- 
 guage . . . ' like this or that ' . . . ' we must give them thunder 
 and lightning.'" Suggest some aesthetic laws underlying these 
 facts.
 
 2l8 APPENDIX A 
 
 (96) Consider the position, in the arts, of (i) oratory, (2) land- 
 scape gardening. (Cf. Poe's Domain of Arnheim.) 
 
 (97) What is the common significance in music of clash of 
 cymbals, rattle of kettle-drums, and shrill brass (cf. last act of 
 Don Giovanni) ; of bass drums and the lower hollow sounds of 
 wind or string instruments (cf. Siegfried's encounter with the 
 dragon). Consider also the effect produced by dark blue and 
 green in painting (cf. Dore's pictures illustrating Dante's 
 Inferno), and also of yellow (or red) combined with black. 
 
 (98) It is claimed by Raymond that the sounds au, ou, oi, 
 may be used to represent horror. Collect examples from 
 poetry. 
 
 (99) The same writer says that roundness of form represents 
 vital power, angularity mental power, length motive or enactive 
 power. Consider this in connection with the human face and 
 figure. 
 
 (100) Re\Tiolds says that in a picture there may be three 
 masses of light, but that one of these should be more prominent 
 than the other two. What principle does this exemplify ? 
 
 (loi) "Where the lights and darks are in small portions and 
 much divided the eye is disturbed and the mind rendered 
 uneasy." (Long.) What principle is involved ? 
 
 (102) "A dark picture with its single ray of relief, the stern 
 picture with only one tender group of lines, the soft and calm 
 picture with only one rock angle at its flank. . . . such com- 
 positions possess higher sublimity than those which are more 
 mingled in their elements." (Ruskin.) What principle(s) 
 are involved ? 
 
 (103) "As is the case with all methods . . . gradation in art 
 does not exist without its antithesis, which may be termed 
 abruptness. By this is meant a sudden change from one 
 theme, key, color, or outline to another." (Raymond.) 
 Collect instances exemplifying this.
 
 APPENDIX A 219 
 
 (104) Collect examples of rhythm in (i) the human body, 
 (2) in nature. 
 
 (105) What principles is Baldwin enunciating when he says : — 
 "Wherever there is union of elements readily and easily 
 
 brought about, wherever integration is effected without strain 
 to the organ stimulated, at the same time that the elements 
 preserve their individuality in a measure, we experience pleas- 
 ure. . . . The essential thing is . . . does the attention . . . 
 move easily ? that is, is the psycho-physical process impeded or 
 advanced ? " (Appendix to Raymond's /Esthetics.) 
 
 (106) "Variety, even apart from unity, is pleasing." (Sir 
 William Hamilton.) Epic art is "the illustrating of some great 
 and general idea." (Blair.) In your studies of aesthetics 
 investigate these two statements. 
 
 (107) What is the general effect in a picture of (a) curved 
 lines, (5) straight lines, (c) horizontal straight lines, {d) vertical 
 straight lines, {e) angular hnes. Compare the Greek statues 
 of Minerva with those of Venus. 
 
 (108) Warm colors cause an apartment to seem smaller and 
 more cosy, the cold colors exactly the opposite. Can any 
 reasons be suggested for this ? (What is the effect of distance 
 upon colors ?) 
 
 (109) What kind of meter, if any, is exemplified in the fol- 
 lowing : — 
 
 (o) "Oh, it was pitiful! 
 
 Near a whole city full." (Hood.) 
 
 ih) "Burnt after them to the bottomless pit." (Milton.) 
 
 (c) "Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of 
 death." (Milton.) 
 
 {d) "Roses are in blossom and the rills are filled with water- 
 cresses." 
 
 (e) "There came to the shore a poor exile of Erin."
 
 220 APPENDIX A 
 
 (no) "The essence of is regularity, and its ornament is 
 
 variety." (Dr. Johnson.) Fill in the omitted word in any 
 suitable way. 
 
 (in) Discuss the poetical devices employed in the following : 
 
 1(a) "The moan of doves in immemorial elms 
 
 And murmuring of innumerable bees. (Tennyson.) 
 
 (b) " Deliberate valor breathed, firm and unmoved." 
 
 (Milton.) 
 
 (c) "To plunge in cataract shattering on high blocks." 
 
 (Tennyson.) 
 
 (d) "On the bald street breaks the blank day." 
 
 (Tennyson.) 
 
 (e) "So he with difficulty and labor hard 
 
 Moved on, with difficulty and labor he." (Milton.) 
 
 (112) "One of my students disliked a greenish color when she 
 saw it as a greeny yellow, but liked it when she regarded it as 
 a very faded brown-green, such as one sees often on autumn 
 leaves. Another student, on hearing a chord, found it highly 
 interesting and pleasing. Then it suddenly occurred to him that 
 it was a discord, and immediately it appeared somewhat dis- 
 pleasing." (Valentine.) What principle is involved here ? 
 
 (113) " Mental activity is pleasant in so far as it is successful." 
 (Valentine.) Apply this to aesthetics. 
 
 (114) "The 'balance' we demand in a picture is no mere 
 geometrical symmetry or equality of mass of the objects on 
 either side, but . . . the more subtle influence of interest, and 
 attention, and possibly of suggested movement . . . are pre- 
 dominant." (Valentine.) Give examples. 
 
 (115) Analyze the principles of criticism incarnated by 
 Bernard Shaw in the four critics in the epilogue to Fanny's 
 First Play.
 
 APPENDIX A 221 
 
 (i i6) Compare the second with the eighth line or verse in the 
 following lyric and criticize the alteration of the order of words. 
 
 " Du bist wie eine Blume 
 So hold und schon und rein ; 
 Ich schau dich an, und Wehmut 
 Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein. 
 
 " Mir ist, als ob ich die Hande 
 Aufs Haupt dir legen sollt, 
 Betend, dass Gott dich erhalte 
 So rein und schon und hold." (Heine.) 
 
 (117) "Whoever compares the Grant Testament [of Villon] 
 with Hugo's Songs of the Streets and the Woods will grant that 
 the virtuosity of the modern master goes no further than 
 Villon's in varying the speed and shifting the pauses. He 
 knew also the need of varying the pace of thought, the value of 
 alternate leisureliness and density." (Eccles.) Comment. 
 
 (118) Express an opinion on the striking simile in the sonnet 
 Le dernier OcSan of Jean Richepin. The earth is represented 
 as gradually drying up : — 
 
 " Puis viendra I'heure ou vieille, edentee et sans crins, 
 EUe n'en aura plus qu'un haillon sur les reins, 
 Un lambeau d'Ocean, lourd, gras, frange de crasse; 
 Et dans le sale ourlet de ce pagne visqueux 
 Grouilleront les derniers survivants de ma race 
 Comme des pous colles a la loque d'un gueux." 
 
 (119) What is the meaning and the value of the reference to 
 "galleys " in the sonnet of Heredia entitled Antoine et Cleopdtre? 
 The sonnet ends thus : — 
 
 " Et sur elle courbe, I'ardent Imperator 
 Vit dans ses larges yeux etoiles de points d'or 
 Toute une mer immense ou fuyaient des galeres."
 
 222 
 
 APPENDIX A 
 
 (120) Discuss the legitimacy or otherwise of making music 
 imitate, directly or by suggestion, things in nature: e.g., frogs, 
 in Handel's Israel in Egypt: — 
 
 i^^^^fffrf?^ 
 
 ^^i^^" 
 
 ^S 
 
 gga^^g 
 
 5: 
 
 or the lapping of water on the crags, as in the Hebrides overture 
 of Mendelssohn : — 
 
 #t! M.n ""TfTtin^T!^ ^ 
 
 (121) What effects or emotions are suggested to you by the 
 three following phrases from well-known works ; — 
 
 (a) 
 
 
 (b) 
 
 S 
 
 ^ 
 
 ^/, 
 
 -<s^ 
 
 >•■ 
 
 n^ 
 
 "■^s^ 
 
 
 ^ I I
 
 APPENDIX A 
 
 223 
 
 I 
 
 sf 
 
 ==- pp 
 
 3 
 
 gi;^^^U g 
 
 -z? 
 
 =^ 
 
 -<s.t— 
 
 ?=j^ 
 
 -27 
 
 3 
 
 -z? 
 
 9 
 
 ■^ — >— t — ' — I — 
 
 -+-•- 
 
 -<s^ 
 
 t^r 
 
 -^V- ',/ *>- 
 
 (122) Discuss E. A. Poe's contention that as poetic excite- 
 ment does not last longer than half an hour, poems should be 
 short. Consider also the length of musical pieces {e.g. sym- 
 phonies) and the desirable length of lessons in appreciation. 
 
 (123) Read up E. A. Poe's views on the function of poetry 
 and his explanation of the structure of The Raven. Consider 
 in particular these statements of his : — 
 
 (a) "It is the business of the poet so to construct his line 
 that the intention must be caught at once." 
 
 (b) "Men have confined rhyme to the ends of lines . . . 
 when its effect is even better applicable elsewhere." 
 
 (c) "In most cases where a line is spoken of as 'forcible' the 
 force may be referred to directness of expression. ... In 
 short, as regards verbal construction, the more prosaic a poetical 
 style is, the better." 
 
 (124) Is there any chance of "distraction" arising here and 
 injuring the effect ?
 
 224 APPENDIX A 
 
 "How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways. 
 I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 
 My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 
 For the ends of Being and ideal grace. . . ." 
 
 (E. B. Browning. Sonnets from the Portuguese.) 
 
 (125) William Norris said that we should never allow any- 
 thing in a house that is not either beautiful or useful. Consider.
 
 APPENDIX B 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 There is very little literature dealing with the pedagogics of 
 appreciation, though various practical hints will be found 
 scattered through books on school methods. (Reference has 
 been made in Chapter XV to a few works that deserve mention 
 and study.) The numerous excellent books dealing with the 
 appreciation and interpretation of literature, music, pictures, 
 and statuary are written for adults and do not take into con- 
 sideration the needs of juveniles or adolescents collected in 
 classes. 
 
 Among books that have become "classic" expositions of 
 literary and artistic questions may be mentioned Edgar Allan 
 Poe's discussions on poetical principles, Ruskin's Sesame and 
 Lilies (fine analysis of Milton's Lycidas), the essays of Sainte- 
 Beuve, Matthew Arnold, and Carlyle and all of Ruskin's works 
 on painting (always stimulating though often needing revision). 
 
 Stobart's companion works, The Glory that was Greece and 
 The Grandeur that was Rome, are splendid historical expositions 
 of the progress of art and its relation to human life. 
 
 The various official guidebooks to the museums and art 
 galleries of the world contain useful information but are some- 
 times less helpful than unofficial guides. 
 
 A book that has had an enormous vogue is Reinach's Apollo 
 (Heinemann), which contains an enormous number of small 
 reproductions, of great pictures and statues and a reliable dis- 
 cussion of the progress of art throughout the ages. 
 
 Q 225
 
 2 26 APPENDIX B 
 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw's excursions into questions of art are 
 stimulating in the extreme; he is the most notable contem- 
 porary opponent of the "art for art's sake" doctrine. The San- 
 ity of Art is a reply to Max Nordau's claim that geniuses are 
 mad ; his Perfect Wagnerite is an exposition of Wagner's ideas 
 and musical methods; his Dramatic Opinions and Essays are 
 topical and diffuse, but contain many fine and helpful pas- 
 sages, including some of his famous attacks ( ?) on Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 The London County Council Memorandum referred to in 
 Chapter XIII deals mainly with "appreciations" and "per- 
 spectives," the latter being closely related to the former. 
 
 The following is a very imperfect list of other books dealing 
 with appreciation or contributory to it. 
 
 Pictures 
 
 The Story of American Painting. By C. H. Caffin. (London, 
 Hodder and Stoughton.) With nearly 150 reproductions 
 of pictures. 
 
 A Textbook of the History of Paifiting. By John C. Van Dyke. 
 (Longmans.) Comprehensive. A fair number of repro- 
 ductions. Strong on American pictures. 
 
 How to Look at Pictures. By R. C. Witt. (Bell and Sons, 
 London.) Well illustrated. 
 
 How to Study Pictures. By C. H. C.A.FFIN. (Hodder and 
 Stoughton, London.) Strong on recent as well as ancient 
 schools. 
 
 The English School of Painting. By E. Chesneau. (London 
 and New York, Cassell.) 
 
 Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. By 
 W. Holman Hunt. (London and New York, Mac- 
 millan.) Written by the leader of the Pre-Raphaelites.
 
 APPENDIX B 227 
 
 Pictorial Composition. By H. R. Poore. (New York, The 
 Baker and Taylor Co.) Discusses the various principles 
 (of "balance," etc.) and illustrates them largely from 
 American sources. 
 
 Art Museums and Schools. By Stockton Axson, Kenyon 
 Cox, G. Stanley Hall, and Oliver S. Tonks. (New 
 York, Charles Scribner's Sons.) Four lectures dealing 
 with the relation of Art Museums to the teaching of 
 English, Art, History, and the Classics. 
 
 Memorials of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. By G. Burne-Jones. 
 (Macmillan.) Remarkable letters showing the intimate 
 life of this great artist. 
 
 A Handbook of Greek Sculpture. By E. A. Gardner. (Mac- 
 millan.) An outline distinguishing the different schools 
 and periods and typical instances showing development of 
 each. Liberally illustrated. 
 
 Principles of Greek Art. By Percy Gardner. (Macmillan.) 
 This work sets forth the principles and deals with all im- 
 portant phases and products of Greek Art. Carefully 
 illustrated. 
 
 Renaissance and Modern Art. By W. H. Goodyear. (Mac- 
 millan.) An appreciation of the art of our own time and 
 country. Reproductions of typical works by American 
 artists. 
 
 Roman and McduEval Art. By W. H. Goodyear. (Mac- 
 millan.) An excellent introduction to the history of the 
 art of Western Europe. Half-tone illustrations. 
 
 Considerations on Painting. By John LaFarge. (Mac- 
 millan.) This volume consists of lectures given in the 
 year 1893 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
 
 Message of Greek Art. By H. H. Powers. (Macmillan.) 
 An attempt to interpret, through their Art, the Greek 
 personality, ideals, and experiences.
 
 2 28 APPENDIX B 
 
 History of American Sculpture. By Lorado Taft. (Mac- 
 millan.) A history of American art from 1725 to the 
 work of our still-living great men. Illustrated. 
 
 Sculpture 
 
 Greek Art and National Life. By Kaines Smith. (London, 
 Nisbet.) 
 
 A History of Sculpture. By E. H. Short. (London, Heine- 
 mann.) Both of these books are strong on the human 
 side of the subject and strive to show the relation between 
 art and life. Short's book brings the subject down to 
 present-day movements. 
 
 One Hundred Masterpieces of Sculpture. By G. F. Hill. 
 (London, Methuen.) Every "masterpiece" is shown in 
 clear reproduction and the letter press links them together. 
 
 A Text-book of the History of Sculpture. By A. Marquard and 
 A. L. Frothingham. (London and New York, Long- 
 man's.) Strong on American sculpture. 
 
 Music 
 
 How to Appreciate Music. By Gustav Kobbe. (London, 
 
 Sisley's.) A good popular account of what to expect and 
 
 listen for in orchestral music. 
 How to Listen to Music. By H. E. Krehbiel. (London, 
 
 Murray.) 
 What is Good Music? By W. J. Henderson. (London, 
 
 Murray.) 
 Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies. By Sir G. Grove. 
 
 (New York, The H. W. Gray Co.) 
 Music and Its Appreciation. By Stewart Macpherson. 
 
 (New York, G. Schirmer.) Plenty of musical illustrations 
 
 with exposition by one of the leaders of the appreciation 
 
 movement in England.
 
 APPENDIX B 229 
 
 Dictionary of Music and Musicians. (5 vols.) By Sir 
 G. Grove. (Macmillan.) The most authoritative musical 
 reference work of the day and intended for the general 
 reader as much as for the musician. 
 
 A Book of Operas. By H. E. Krehbiel. (Macmillan.) This 
 work is a study of the source, conception, history, musical 
 structure, and significance of each opera, with biographical 
 references to the composer and various singers who have 
 figured in the cast. 
 
 From Grieg to Brahms. By Daniel G. Mason. (Macmillan.) 
 A critical introduction to th,e appreciation of music, with 
 a study of the personality and work of six recent com- 
 posers. An epilogue is devoted to a study of the philosophy 
 of musical appreciation. Illustrated. 
 
 The Romantic Composers. By Daniel G. Mason. (Mac- 
 millan.) This book is a storehouse of facts dealing with 
 the inner lives of the old composers, describing the influ- 
 ence of their environments on their compositions. An in- 
 troductory chapter on the romantic school, as distinguished 
 from the classical, is included, together with a series of 
 monographs on the composers. 
 
 Modern Music and Musicians. By R. A. Streatfield. (Mac- 
 millan.) A book of studies of the great masters, musical, 
 critical, and aesthetic in its character, rather than bio- 
 graphical. 
 
 Literature 
 
 The Short Story. By E. M. Albright. (Macmillan.) This 
 book sets forth certain acknowledged principles and stand- 
 ards drawn from an analysis of the work of masters, and 
 illustrates how these principles are exemplified in their 
 stories. 
 
 American Literature. By K. L. Bates. (Macmillan.) An
 
 230 APPENDIX B 
 
 outline of American literary progress designed especially 
 to show how essentially American literature has been the 
 product of American national life. 
 
 The Interpretation of Literature. By William H. Crawshaw. 
 (Macmillan.) Illuminating discussions of the relations of 
 literature to life, the history of literature, its division 
 into classes, definition of literary terms. 
 
 Literary Interpretation of Life. By William H. Crawshaw. 
 (Macmillan.) A comprehensive treatment of the princi- 
 ples involved in literary interpretation with practical sug- 
 gestions which will give the reader the power to enjoy and 
 appreciate more intelligently the best in literature. 
 
 Studies and Appreciations. By L. E. Gates. (Macmillan.) 
 The author's aim is primarily not to explain and not to 
 judge or dogmatize, but to enjoy ; to realize the manifold 
 charm the work of art has gathered into itself from all 
 sources, and to interpret this charm imaginatively to the 
 men of his own day and generation. 
 
 Backgrounds of Literature. By Hamilton W. Mabie. (Mac- 
 millan.) A valuable collection of autobiographies, with 
 charming description of environment.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Adams, Professor John, 5. 
 
 Administration and Organization, 6, 
 47-8, no. 
 
 Adolescence, 22-3, 108, 115-26. 
 
 Esthetics, 72, 87, 166, 184, 198- 
 202. 
 
 Aim, Stating the, 55-6, 58. 
 
 Alliteration, 71-8, 86-7, 90, 103-4. 
 
 Analysis, 149-51. 
 
 Anticipatory Interest, 9-10. 
 
 Apperception, 55-6. 
 
 Applied Art, 163-4. 
 
 Appreciation v. Intellection, 1-2, 13, 
 
 76, 91-3, 100-103, 1 21-3, 148-9. 
 
 V. Technique, 20-2, 101-2, 127, 
 
 128-33, 137-8, 164, 194- 
 Possibilities of, 2, 48, 12 1-3. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 37. 
 
 Arnold of Rugby, 99. 
 
 Art for Art's Sake, Art and Morals, 
 Art and Life, Classicism v. Ro- 
 manticism, Method V. Subject 
 Matter, 22-7, 100-103, 108, 114, 
 117-18, 151, 152-3. 168, 173, 
 182-4. 
 
 Assonance, 71. 
 
 Aufgabe (Problem, Task), i, 13, 58, 
 8S-9, 92-3, iio-ii, 156, 166. 
 
 Axson, Dr. 150-1. 
 
 Bagley, Professor W. C, 58. 
 Balance, Principle of, 140, 142, 
 
 144-5, 146, 169. 
 Beauty and Utility, 151-2. 
 Beethoven, 10, 21, 26, 104, 115-126, 
 
 174- 
 Berlioz, 183. 
 
 Bible, 43-S, 64, 68, 72, 99-100. 
 Biography, 58, 99-108, 114, 139, 
 
 153-4- 
 Boileaii, 167. 
 Bosanquet, 27. 
 Botany, 31-2. 
 Botticelli, 141, 146, 150. 
 Brown, Ford M., 158. 
 Browning, 1-2, 17-18, 27, 64, 83- 87. 
 Bninclleschi, 162. 
 Bunyan, 88. 
 Byron, 76, 162. 
 
 Campbell, 99, 100. 
 
 Cervantes, 106-7. 
 
 Classicism v. Romanticism. See Art 
 
 for Art's Sake. 
 Claude, 158. 
 Cole, Thomas, 27. 
 Coleridge, 61-2. 
 Collins, Wilkie, 171. 
 Cooke, Mr. E. T., 190. 
 Copley, 158. 
 Cousinet, M ., 22-3, 39, loi, 102, 
 
 103, 148-51, 179, 181-5, r88, 
 
 193-5- 
 Contrast, Principle of, 78-82, 116- 
 
 21. 
 Cow per, 78-9. 
 Crothers, Samuel McChord, 4. 
 
 D'Alembert, 116. 
 
 Dante, 106, 107. 
 
 De Garnio, Professor, 27, 151-3, 179. 
 
 Dewey, Professor J ., 13. 
 
 Dickens, 38, 68, 150. 
 
 231
 
 232 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Distraction, Intellectual, 12-23, 39, 
 142, 148-Q, 166. 
 
 of Technique, 17-20, 53. 
 
 of Business, 22-3. 
 
 of Interference, 135-6. 
 Dow, Gerard, 158. 
 Dramas. See Epics. 
 Dryden, 58, 72-3, 169. 
 
 "Ear before Eye," 18-22, iii, 129, 
 
 175- 
 Elgin, Lord, 162. 
 Emerson, 153. 
 
 Epics and Dramas, 108-12, 165-70. 
 Ernst, Otto (Author of Flachsmann), 
 
 56-9. 
 Experiment, Educational, 85-7. 
 Expression. See Presentation. 
 
 Familiarity, 49-50, 122, 202. 
 Fechner, 201. 
 
 Findlay, Professor J. J., 178. 
 First Impression. See Impression. 
 Five Steps (or Stages). See Her- 
 
 bart. 
 "Flash" of Interpretation, etc., i, 
 
 13- 
 Fletcher, 33. 
 Fort, Paul, 38. 
 
 Geography, 44, 75, 109. 
 
 Girome, 145. 
 
 Ghiberti, 162. 
 
 Gilbert, 163. 
 
 Giovenone, 159. 
 
 Gluck, 119, 129-30. 
 
 Goethe, 21. 
 
 Gow, 157. 
 
 Grey, Lady Jane, 99. 
 
 Grove, Sir George, 115-26. 
 
 Hall, Professor Stanley, 128, 179, 189, 
 
 191. 
 HaUam, 42. 
 Handel, 119. 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 171-2, 174. 
 Herbart, Herbartians, the Five Steps, 
 
 13. 54-S. 83-98, 13s, 180. 
 Historj', 6. 
 Hogarth, 147, 152. 
 Homer, 33, 55, 181. 
 Hugo, Victor, 168, 181. 
 Hunt, Holman, 157, 189. 
 Hunt, William M ., 27. 
 Hypothesis-making, 13. 
 
 Ibsen, 166, 168. 
 
 Image, Professor S., 179. 
 
 Impression, Principle of First, 2-8, 
 
 13. 3Q. 133-4, 137, 167, 175- 
 Principle of Total, 68-70. See 
 also Unity. 
 
 Intellectual Elements in Apprecia- 
 tion, 39. See also Appreciation 
 V. Intellection. 
 
 Interchange, Principle of, 147. 
 
 Johnson, Miss Findlay, 109. 
 
 Keatinge, Mr. M . W ., 196. 
 Keats, 34, 52-3. 
 Kipling, 30, 64, 88. 
 
 Lancaster, 61. 
 
 Landscape, 141. 
 
 Learning by Heart, 53, 94-7. 
 
 Leit-motifs, 122-3. 
 
 Leonardo da Vinci, 142, 144, 163. 
 
 Leslie, G. D., 159. 
 
 Liddell, Professor Mark, 80. 
 
 Life and Art. See Art for Art's 
 
 sake. 
 Literature, 16, 19, 47. 
 
 Prose t'. Poetry, 27-38. 
 
 Lyrics, 36-7. 
 Longfellow, a, 49, 66-7, 67-8, 70, 
 
 73- 78, 79, 107. 
 Lope de Vega, 107. 
 Luini, 159. 
 Lyrics. See Literature.
 
 INDEX 
 
 233 
 
 Macaulay, 21, 67, 6g, 81-2. 
 McMurray, Professor, 13. 
 Macpherson, Professor, 119, 128, 179. 
 Maeterlinck, 31-2, 40. 
 Memorization, Laws of, 96-7. 
 Meredith, George, 171, i7S. 191 • 
 Merejkowski, 163. 
 Metaphors and Similes, 29-32, 40- 
 
 49, 90, 112, 123. 
 Meters and Feet. See Rhythm. 
 Michael Angela, 162. 
 Millais, 15s, 157, 158. 
 Millet, 143. 
 
 Millward, Mr. H., 178. 
 Milton, 19, 28, 34, 40, 46, SS. 73-5, 
 
 76, 103-4, 105-6, 108-9. 
 Mind and Mood, 57-9- 
 Morals and Art. See Art for Art's 
 
 Sake. 
 More, Sir Thomas, 99. 
 Morris, William, 152, 164, 198. 
 Mozart, 119. 
 
 Murray, Professor Gilbert, 53. 
 Music, 10, 16, 25, 49-50. 113-26 
 
 127-39- 
 Decorative v. Expressional, 25-7. 
 
 Novels, 170-5. 
 
 Orchardson, 158. 
 Originality, 63, 117-18. 
 Ornamentation, 159-61. 
 
 Painting and Sculpture, 29-30, 38, 
 
 92, 140-164. 
 Parallelism, 72. 
 Pericles, 161. 
 Phidias, 160, 162. 
 Piombo, 151, 158. 
 "Pioneering the Metaphor." See 
 
 Metaphors. 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 59, 177. 
 Poetry. See Literature. 
 Poore, Professor, 81, 140, 184. 
 Pope, 28, 108. 
 
 Praxiteles, 162. 
 
 Preparation of the Lesson, 9-12, 
 
 15-17, 57. 94- 
 
 Immediate, 51-60, 123-4. 
 
 Negative, 15-17. 39- 
 
 Positive, 39-50. 137. 139. 177- 
 Presentation, 53, 61-82. 
 Principality, Principle of. See 
 
 Unity. 
 Principle of the First Impression. 
 
 See Impression. 
 Problems. See Aufgabe. 
 Prose. See Literature. 
 Pyramidal Arrangement, 142, 168-9. 
 
 Radiation, Principle of, 147. 
 
 Raphael, 141, 146, 158. 
 
 Raymond, Professor, 200-1. 
 
 Red-letter Lessons, 4-8, 47-8, 136. 
 
 Refrain, 73. 
 
 Rembrandt, 141, 142, 146, 159. 
 
 Reni, 141. 
 
 Repetition, Principle of, 72-3, 89, 
 
 115-16, 130-1, 147- 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 14. 
 Rhyme, 72. 
 
 Rhythm, 32-8, 64-8, 72, 76. 78. 
 Ritual, a School, 47, 136, 187-8. 
 Rodin, M, 163. 
 Rolland, M. Romain, loi. 
 Rossetti, 155. 
 Rubens, 147, 159. 
 Ruskin, 40, 100, 122, 158. 
 
 Saintsbury, Professor, 38. 
 
 Savonarola, 99. 
 
 Schiller, 26. 
 
 Schumann, 123. 
 
 Science Teaching, 3-4, 6. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 33. 
 
 Shakspeare, 7, 26, 28, 32, 33, 34. 35. 
 36, 41-3. 45. 46, 63-4. 69, 73, 
 79-80, 87, 89, 109-12, 168. 
 
 Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 25, 63-4, 73, 
 loo-i, 128, 169.
 
 234 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Similes. See Metaphors. 
 
 Smollett, 171. 
 
 Sophocles (CEdipus), 43. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 19. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 33. 
 
 Stages or Steps in the Lesson. See 
 
 Herbart. 
 Statuar>', 161-3. 
 Slerens, 163. 
 Strayer, Professor, 178. 
 Strindberg, 168. 
 Substance v. Form. See Art for 
 
 Art's Sake. 
 Swinburne, 19-20, 27, 76-8, 84, 88. 
 Symbolism, 154-6. 
 Sj-mmetry, Principle of, 147. 
 
 Teacher. See Administration and 
 
 Red-letter Lessons. 
 "Tearing and Hacking." See 
 
 Unity. 
 Technique, place of, 20-2. See also 
 
 Distraction. 
 Tennyson, 59, 105. 
 Teresa, Saint, 99. 
 Tkorneycroft, 163. 
 Time Tests, 129-132. 
 Tiichener, Professor, i, 13. 
 Titian, 157. 
 Turner, 154, 158. 
 
 Unity of a Work of Art, Principle 
 of Unity or Principality, The 
 Unities, 13-14, 57, 121, 140- 
 S. ISO, 157. 167-70, 202. 
 
 Van Mieris, 158. 
 
 Van Ostade, Isaac, 159. 
 
 Variety, Principle of, 1 19-21. 
 
 Vergil, 33, 55, 181. 
 
 Verrocchio, 162. 
 
 Von Hartmann, 151. 
 
 Wagner, 7, 10, 12, 15-16, 20, 25, 26, 
 36, 51-2, S3, 78, 82, 100, 114, 
 116, 122, 126, 136. 
 
 Walts, George F., 21, loo. 
 
 Webster, 87. 
 
 WeUs, Mr. H. G., 30, 32. 
 
 Whistler, 140. 
 
 Whitman, Wall, 30, 38. 
 
 Whittier, 37, 107. 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, loi. 
 
 Words, Flavor of, 71-8. 
 
 Wordsworth, 79, 192. 
 
 Wolton, Sir Henry, 86. 
 
 Wouwerman, 159. 
 
 Ycames, 156. 
 ZiUtT, 54. 
 
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