DEVELOPMENT OF ART INSTINCT. 469 
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ing : ““ Tam never more classic than when rue fo myself,” and still another 
French critic adding : <“ We foreigners like you best for what is sincerely 
“yours ’—not second-hand ‘ours.”” 
While some teachers blame the students or the times for this superfi- 
siality, and others excuse themselves by claiming “art cannot be taught, 
but technique alone can,” yet all of us are doubtless conscious that art 
instincts are enormously influenced for good or ill by educational condi- 
tions and ideals, and should be sympathetically befriended (by parental 
teachers, not alien stepmothers) into wholesome consciousness and natural 
axpansion before the media of expression can take proper meaning—just 
as we bring up our children into wholesome conditions of life, with legiti- 
mate motives and desires, before we expect of them perfection in speech 
or writing. These last are perfected into personal character by life-long 
practice, while the first are essential at the very start. 
So that the great Blake’s warning seems true, that ‘inappropriate exe- 
sution is but nauseous foppery,” as language when without inspiration, or 
words without thought ; and we are wisely reminded that feathers spring 
rom birds, not birds from their feathers (much less other birds’ feathers, 
which constantly change to environment). So that tons of imported 
obelisks and thousands of alien technicalities and technicians are not 
worth the self-respecting, self-consistent, and harmonious development of 
aational genius in sympathy with universal nature and her universal prin- 
ciples of beauty. I think, therefore, that we can honestly claim that any 
art system which does not cultivate our artists primarily, and somebody 
else’s ‘‘technicians” secondarily, is like Hamlet without Hamlet, or 
Christianity without Christians. 
Now, right here it is interesting to note the surprising charm and 
seauty of some of the more organic and instinctive work of our own 
ndians at the Exhibition, and the modest but magnificent art effects 
among Japanese, Javanese, and Arabian colonies in complete sympathy 
with themselves and nature, and, shall I add, the delightful suggestive- 
ness of much of our own unused material, relative to more pretentious 
foreign imitations. 
The earlier poems of Burns, when charged with the virility of his high- 
lands and redolent with mountain daisies as with the color of his native 
lialect, were incomparably purer poetry than his later more labored and 
artificial English ones; even as the pith and point of Plato and Socrates 
were truer philosophy than the dialectics of the sophists. And even at 
this hour, when the divine spirit of old Japanese work is being broken 
and vulgarized by this very demon of cheap affectation and imitation, a 
sincere and faithful spirit lingers in the village schools, which during 
recess send the children to the river banks or carp pools, that on return 
they may draw from memory the fresh impressions of form, color, motion, 
and setting, before being taught traditional methods of adapting these