174 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
Romani ii 
teeling which words do not convey, or which the language of sensuous media conveys 
and carries home much more effectively, there are also forms of artistic thought which 
can be followed and set forth in language. We could go further and say there are 
artistic productions which require such exposition. The artist may have addressed a 
oublic supposed to know and feel facts and emotions not common to all mankind. 
Most of the famous sculptures of antiquity, many of the admirable religious paintings 
of the Italian Renaissance, have this quality ; pictures of historical personages and 
svents commonly have it outside of narrow, local limits of information and patriotic 
radition. 
Again, there is a legitimate field for exposition where an artist has struggled to express 
amotions, to depict occurrences to which the poetic muse has given a more intelligible 
form ; that is to say, a form more subject to step-by-step analysis. Some of the pictures 
of the English pre-Raphaelite school have this quality. Shall the pupil wait until he 
can copy all the masterpieces before even considering their import ? This road to the 
enjoyment and understanding of the more difficult and complex works of art is plain, 
but too long. 
The speaker here referred with feeling to his own early efforts in modeling the ordi- 
nary clay of the roadside into semblances of toothsome confectionery little appreciated 
by his elders, and in drawing upon his slate his own particular breed of horses, whose 
convenient virtue it was always to conceal their off legs behind their nea, so that the 
artist was often compelled to deliver brief explanatory lectures to unintelligent onlook- 
ers ; pleading guilty also to leaving several ‘‘ complete courses of drawing” uncom- 
pleted for the allurements of china painting, which the fact of the work being so erasable 
before and so indestructible after firing, with the additional circumstances of its being 
its own frame, and of the ease with which a large amount of it can be stowed out of 
sight after completion, stamps as the ideal artistic exercise for amateurs. The speaker 
ventured to suspect that his aggregate effort in practical art study exceeded the average 
cecord of the unprofessional student. Yet it was clear that but a minimum basis for 
critical studies, none for a critical judgment of masterpieces, and no faculty whatever 
for the successful reproduction of them, had been attained. 
The appreciation of the contemporary public being the postulate and only working 
basis of normal artistic production, it is of every importance to educate the actual and 
prospective public as well as the artists. The relatively untalented, the preoccupied, 
and the adult whose minds are more plastic and docile than their fingers, are not a neg- 
ligible quantity. Their artistic education must depend either entirely on their reading 
speculative discussions such as, for example, Schiller’s series of essays ‘On Pathos,” 
**On Charm and Dignity,” “On the Sublime,” ‘“ On Limitations in the Use of Beautiful 
Gowns,” ‘“ On the Cause of Pleasure in Tragic Subjects,” ¢ On Size and Space in Asthetic 
Estimation,” ‘On the Asthetic Education of Mankind,” together with the more popu- 
lar illustrated manuals, or on training under competent guidance in accordance with the 
idea of the proposition formulated in the thesis. For, in the words of Schiller himself, 
“works of the imagination have the peculiarity of not permitting idle enjoyment, but 
of stirring into activity the minds of those who contemplate them.” 
In conclusion, and on the basis of his own experience as a teacher of wsthetic criti- 
cism, in its necessary conjunction with classical archeology, the speaker contended that 
here was danger, through an excessive emphasis of the great masterpieces, of over- 
looking the immediate needs of beginners in critical study. 
To do justice to the great masterpieces passes the power both of language and of the 
antrained mind. There is an absurdity in commendation of Raphael or praise of Velas- 
juez from an immature critic. Also, the great masterpieces have been too much com- 
mented to serve as a natural basis for the formation of independent opinion. 
In his own work with advanced college students, of whom it is fair to expeet some