168 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION.
from the fires of national and personal experience, as where, of Dante’s
ode, the poet writes :
“ Ah, from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultation trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate victory of a soul in pain,
Jprose this poem of the earth and sky—
This medieval miracle of song!”
And you have only to consult the lives of such professional leaders as
Phidias, M. Angelo, Cellini, Palissy, Delacroix, Jean Frangois Millet,
ate., to find how essentially this is true of all vital art work and workers.
Taine shows conclusively that far from art emanating as the product
of servile imitation or speculative importation, the great arts of all ages
sprang as the florescence of each nation’s heroism ; as after Marathon in
Greece, the new liberty of the Italian republics, the victories of Moors, the
expulsion of Spaniards from the Netherlands, ete. So that while certain
data and devices are occasionally exchanged (as between neighbors), yet
these were ever refined in the alembic of national life ; and we ourselves
are never interested, nor is true art generated, by plausible reproductions,
but ever by what Goethe calls ““ reconquered principles” freshly appre-
hended, reassimilated, and reapplied to fresh, virile, organic conditions.
I regret to say that on all sides, among candid minds (corroborated by
such able statements as John Lafarge’s in the July Century, Charles
DeKay’s in the Cosmopolitan, and the New York 77ibune letters from
the Fair), strong objection is expressed to present art methods of educa-
lion, in that principles are no¢ properly understood or applied, an organic
‘““ American” art is no? being officially developed or expressed (being
left to isolated and sporadic struggle), while merely external and imitative
methods intrude most injuriously into public and even professional schools,
substituting sterile process for vital spark, veneer for reality, the bor-
rowed plumes of other days, ideas, and even personalities, for the sincere
expression of the student’s self ; the tricks of trade, the pride and surprise
of performance, the very process of photography (and, they add, even
“brutality and bravado”) for fine artistic faculties and sensibilities
proper, for subjective powers of originality, taste, ideality, and native feel-
ing. In short, official systems are too mimetic, not germinal, and so must
beget monkeys and not men ! :
I will not stop to inquire how far such conditions may have moral
causes in the exploitation of art instead of its sincere love and life, or of any
social, official, and even professional barriers of self-interest that block
the way of national education, but I do join my hearty regret with theirs
at the ridicule put upon American art by foreigners, and the chidings
of even the truest and most disinterested foreign artists, that America
should affect their manner, not divine their souls + Millet himself exclaim-
