their subordinates, make their own reports on Tuesdays, and on Friday afternoons the council could sit. Except for enforcing the rules there would be no work or thought required of the pupils during any but the time now wasted in the mornings while waiting on the half hour on Friday when a part of the pupils are now allowed to go home early.

Such is the scheme as it was described to me in New York. It seemed quite the most original and promising project that I came across in my hurried visit to the New World. I, therefore, lose no time in describing it for the benefit of my readers at home, and in the colonies, where I hope that its intrinsic merits will commend itself to those who are practically interested in the teaching of children and the training of our future citizens for their duties to the city and the State.

CHAPTER XII.

THE STUDY OF ART AND LITERATURE IN SCHOOLS.

By W. T. HARRIS.

CONTENTS: I. Why Art and Literature Ought to be Studied in Elementary Schools. - II. Beauty in Art v. Beauty in Nature.-III. The Educational Value of the Tragic as Compared with the Comic in Literature and Art.-IV. The Esthetic Element in Education.

I.

WHY ART AND LITERATURE OUGHT TO BE STUDIED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.1

All questions relating to the course of study in the schools must be taken first into the court that decides on educational values, and next into the court that settles the order of sequence. The former investigates the meaning of the proposed study in the light of civilization, and the latter the place of its introduction into the school programme. The first proceeding is to place the question in the light of all human learning, and the second is to place it in the light of educational psychology.

Our present question, therefore, must be examined with a view to see what art and literature mean in our civilization-what they have meant in the past, and what they must necessarily mean in the future that shall be. Then, having settled its degree of importance, we may turn to educational psychology and ask where, in the education of man, can this profitably be introduced, what stages of growth it presupposes as already attained, and what methods are best for the results we wish to accomplish.

Dy the term art I designate sculpture, painting, architecture, and music. By literature I mean chiefly poetry-epic, dramatic, and lyric. I include also such prose writings as critical miscellanies which furnish reflections on the same general themes that poetry treats. Above all I include the novel, the romance, or the story. While the epic poem has for its theme the conflict of nations, the novel treats of conflicts in civil society and in the family, and has been called the epic of the bourgeois.

In order to see what we have to do with in art and literature, let us look for a moment at its place among the fundamental activities of the soul. (Parenthetically I explain that I group together art and literature under one definition as the province of æsthetics; and hence I sometimes use the pronoun it or its to refer to them.)

The highest idea that man reaches is his thought of the divine as the first principle of the universe. There are three forms in which he attempts to express this idea. First, in religion; second, in art; third, in philosophy. This highest idea appears necessarily as the good, the beautiful, and the true. We call the effort

Read before the Department of Superintendence of the National Educational Association at Indianapolis, February, 1897.

to celebrate the divine and realize it in good deeds religion; the effort to give visible forms or audible forms to it gives us the various branches of the fine arts and literature. The attempt to explain the world by the divine idea and to comprehend ultimate truth is philosophy. Thus we are to regard art and literature as having the same theme as religion and philosophy. The idea that sculpture and painting, music and poetry have no other use than amusement must give way to the view which regards them as among the most serious and worthy occupations of the human soul.

All that man does contributes to a revelation of human nature in its entirety, but art and literature lead all other branches of human learning in their capacity to manifest and illustrate the desires and aspirations, the thoughts and deeds of mankind. Hence the educative value of these things. In the presence of the conflict of moral ideals, the struggle of passion against what is rational, the attacks of sin and crime on the divine order of the world, all that is deepest in human character is manifested. Art and literature portray these serious collisions, and like the mountain upheavals that break and tilt up the strata of the crust of the earth and reveal to the geologist the sequence of the formations from the most primitive to the most recent, so these artistic situations reveal to all men the successive strata in the evolution of human emotions, ideas, and actions. Thereby the single individual comes to know the springs of action of his fellow

men.

I have already named the four provinces of art-architecture, sculpture, painting, and music; and the three general divisions of poetry-epic, lyric, and dramatic. There are, moreover, three great historical epochs of art and poetry, corresponding to the three great stages of advancement of the nations of the world into conscious freedom. For the art and literature of a people reflects its degree of enlightenment and is, in fact, next to religion, the chief means by which its civilization is preserved. We accordingly have as the lowest stage the art of nations that have reached only the freedom of the social world without reflecting it in the individual. The citizen is buried beneath a mass of customs and usages, laws, and prescriptions which he has had no hand in making and yet can not refuse to obey. This form of civilization is only a little above a condition of slavery for its citizens. Its art accordingly does not create forms of free movement, but represents by appropriate symbols the crushing out of individuality. Such is the art of the great nations of Egypt, Eastern Asia, East India, Persia, and Western Asia. It has been described by Hegel, whose Esthetik is by far the most satisfactory philosophy of art, as symbolic art. Its works of art adumbrate or hint at what they do not adequately express.

The highest form of art is reached by the so-called classic nations-Greece and Rome. They arrived at the expression of freedom in the body-freedom in its pose and freedom in its action. This is properly called gracefulness. The limbs of the body are obedient to the will of the soul. When the limbs are in the way, when the soul does not know what to do with them, we have awkwardness as a result, and not gracefulness. The Greek artist would not paint a family group with their arms folded or their hands folded. Their hands and arms would be in action obedient to some purpose of the soul. But some Dutch painters would show us peasants embarrassed by their limbs, peasants who would evidently feel greatly relieved if their arms could in some way be detached from their bodiesperhaps unscrewed or unhinged in some way and hung up on the hatrack outside the room, with their overcoats and head covering. Greek art seizes for its theme some moment of life when all the limbs are required to express the purpose of the soul, as, for instance, in the Apollo Belvedere. If it takes for its theme a sitting figure-the Olympian Zeus-it poses the body in such a way that we see the full control of the will over the limbs. The sitting Zeus could rise instantly and hurl

his thunderbolt. The "classic repose" of which we hear is ever a graceful repose; graceful because the whole body is pervaded and controlled by the soul.

The third stage of art is Christian art; or, as Hegel calls it, romantic art, which at first is occupied in showing the superiority of the soul to the body, and for this purpose selects for its subjects examples of steadfastness under severe trialmartyrs, and especially the sufferings of Christ. It goes so far in this as to set itself in opposition to classic art, and sometimes indicates its contempt for gracefulness in order to accentuate its preference for inward freedom and spiritual elevation. It portrays freedom from the body, while Greek art shows freedom in the body. In the later development of Christian art we see the attempt to represent gracefulness without losing the expression of the predominance of the inner life of the soul over its corporeal life.

In Fra Angelico's paintings we see Christian martyrs with tortured bodies, but meekness and peace in their faces-a peace that passeth understanding; for they are at one with the divine. There is no longer the expression of the desires of the body, but only the religious longing for spiritual perfection. Classic art showed us the soul in the body and with bodily desires and passions, but purified by subordination to social restraints. Christian art shows, in this first stage, the opposite of Greek art-not freedom in the body, but the renunciation of the body. Then there is a second and later phase of romantic art, represented by such artists as Raphael, Murillo, Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Holbein, and Rubens.

Gracefulness has been more or less restored by these, but not the classic reposeof the Greeks, for there remains even in the latest forms of Christian or romantic art the portrayal of a longing or aspiration of the soul for something beyond what it has achieved.

Here we can pause for a moment and consider the reason for giving the rank of highest phase of art to the Greek.

We have seen that religion realizes the divine in the good, while philosophy defines it in a highest principle and attempts to explain all things by it, but that art manifests the divine in material forms, or at least by images of material beings; so that we may say that art is the union of the spiritual and the material, while religion is the emancipation from what is material.

Now, classic or Greek and Roman art is the perfect realization of this union of the material and spiritual, hence the highest type of art as art. Christian art, representing as it does the struggle of the soul against its physical environment, is a form of art that looks toward religion. It is therefore a transition from art to a higher form of the realization of reason; namely, religion. But art is not a mere transitory phase of human culture; it belongs to all subsequent ages of human history after it has once come into being. Moreover, the classic form of art will more and more come to be admired in all the future Christian ages because it portrays freedom in the form of gracefulness. The earliest Christian ages could not admire Greek art without falling back into sensuality. It had not yet attained. a persistent hold of the spiritual. But when the Christian idea had been evolved in history to a point where natural science could be pursued in a free and untrammeled manner, then came the age of inventions, labor saving and knowledge extending; inventions that enable us to conquer nature and emancipate ourselves from that drudgery which had been necessary for the sake of food, clothing, and shelter. We are now in this age of productive industry which is the sequel to inductive natural science. We see all about us the triumph of wealth. Wealth in the form of capital enables not only its possessors to obtain large shares of food, clothing, and shelter and means of access to knowledge, but it enables the unthrifty of the community, to the last man of them, to obtain a proportionately greater share in creature comforts and spiritual privileges. At the beginning of ED 99-44