170 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION.
to specialtics, so deeply do they feel the love of country and divine
the principles that sustain “essential art.” This at least is beginning
““right end foremost,” and must be ever the directest as it is the sincerest
method.
My appeal would therefore be to turn at the start directly away from
present mechanical, materialistic, and imitative processes, to the vital and
wwolutionary methods of nature, of all best art, and of the great and grow-
ing spirit of Froebel in the kindergarten—that we divert nof our scholars
at the start from home to foreign gods or the dead forms of other days
(no matter how good for those days), but protect their freshness of inspira-
tion; quicken, not pervert, spontaneity ; strengthen new observations at
new fountains of a mew national power; develop personal faculties in
selection, measure, arrangement, etc., by contrast, proportion, control, bal-
ance, harmony, ete., analyses and syntheses from our own superabundant
and delightful nature ; at least till strong foundations are laid in fortified
judgment and personality that must grow the wings of creative genius far
better than the mimetic or even coldly eclectic spirit.
This vigorous development of faculties should come for art, as for
other education, before they are enslaved to specialty or burdened with the
ineubus of endless precedent ; for so alone will later comparisons profit,
shat otherwise drop sterile upon suppressed and servile natures. With
principle as a fulerum and national genius as the power, students will
readily open the nutshells of antiquated tradition and assimilate what of
nutriment be within ; or, better far, discover new nuggets of beauty and
surprise in native soil, the poetry and history of their own hearts and
hearthstones.
In closing, then, and specifically : As I find my children’s home affec-
sion (when worth much to me or themselves) must spring from genuine
natures, colored, of course, by temperament, and needing encouragement
without trammel (save from a few principles of home regimen, or domestic
facilities for effecting good intentions), so we make our Institute for Artist-
Artisans, at New York, an art family, not an art machine.
All, on entrance, obtain a bird’s-eye view of the field before them, so far
as mere orderly and consecutive steps of growth are concerned, and the
natural sequences or relations of thought in different departments (from
central root to varied branches, leaving the trunk gradually, and kept in
steady sympathy with all). For this we utilize much wall space for
orderly examples, not of foreign productions, but graduated developments
of student faculties and unfolded principles. These are accompanied by
constant experiment, illustration, and reference to nature.
The metric powers of the mind are exercised, and those constant equa-
tions of number and measure studied that are so mysterious and universal.
For this, every jointed reed, vine, or skeleton leaf may be an excellent and
interesting example ; the point relations and line divergencies in struct-
