I knew, in my youth, a French village far up among the
Cevennes Mountains, where the one cultivated man of the place,
saddened by the unlovely lives of the peasants around him and by
the bare walls of the village school, organized evening classes
for the boys. During these informal hours, he talked to
them of literature and art and showed them his prints and
paintings. When the youths’ interest was aroused he
lent them books, that they might read about the statues and
buildings that had attracted their attention. At first it
appeared a hopeless task to arouse any interest among these
peasants in subjects not bearing on their abject lives. To
talk with boys of the ideal, when their poor bodies were in need
of food and raiment, seemed superfluous; but in time the charm
worked, as it always will. The beautiful appealed to their
simple natures, elevating and refining them, and opening before
their eager eyes perspectives of undreamed-of interest. The
self-imposed task became a delight as his pupils’ minds
responded to his efforts. Although death soon ended his
useful life, the seed planted grew and bore fruit in many humble
homes.
At this moment I know men in several walks of life who revere
with touching devotion the memory of the one human being who had
brought to them, at the moment when they were most
impressionable, the gracious message that existence was not
merely a struggle for bread. The boys he had gathered
around him realize now that the encouragement and incentive
received from those evening glimpses of noble works existing in
the world was the mainspring of their subsequent development and
a source of infinite pleasure through all succeeding years.
This reference to an individual effort toward cultivating the
poor has been made because other delicate spirits are attempting
some such task in our city, where quite as much as in the French
village schoolchildren stand in need of some message of beauty in
addition to the instruction they receive,—some window
opened for them, as it were, upon the fields of art, that their
eyes when raised from study or play may rest on objects more
inspiring than blank walls and the graceless surroundings of
street or schoolroom.
We are far too quick in assuming that love of the beautiful is
confined to the highly educated; that the poor have no desire to
surround themselves with graceful forms and harmonious
colors. We wonder at and deplore their crude standards,
bewailing the general lack of taste and the gradual reducing of
everything to a commonplace money basis. We smile at the
efforts toward adornment attempted by the poor, taking it too
readily for granted that on this point they are beyond
redemption. This error is the less excusable as so little
has been done by way of experiment before forming an
opinion,—whole classes being put down as inferior beings,
incapable of appreciation, before they have been allowed even a
glimpse of the works of art that form the daily mental food of
their judges.
The portly charlady who rules despotically in my chambers is
an example. It has been a curious study to watch her
growing interest in the objects that have here for the first time
come under her notice; the delight she has come to take in
dusting and arranging my belongings, and her enthusiasm at any
new acquisition. Knowing how bare her own home was, I felt
at first only astonishment at her vivid interest in what seemed
beyond her comprehension, but now realize that in some blind way
she appreciates the rare and the delicate quite as much as my
more cultivated visitors. At the end of one laborious
morning, when everything was arranged to her satisfaction, she
turned to me her poor, plain face, lighted up with an expression
of delight, and exclaimed, “Oh, sir, I do love to work in
these rooms! I’m never so happy as when I’m
arranging them elegant things!” And, although my
pleasure in her pleasure was modified by the discovery that she
had taken an eighteenth-century comb to disentangle the fringes
of a rug, and broken several of its teeth in her ardor, that she
invariably placed a certain Whister etching upside down, and then
stood in rapt admiration before it, still, in watching her
enthusiasm, I felt a thrill of satisfaction at seeing how her
untaught taste responded to a contact with good things.
Here in America, and especially in our city, which we have
been at such pains to make as hideous as possible, the
schoolrooms, where hundreds of thousands of children pass many
hours daily, are one degree more graceless than the town itself;
the most artistically inclined child can hardly receive any but
unfortunate impressions. The other day a friend took me
severely to task for rating our American women on their love of
the big shops, and gave me, I confess, an entirely new idea on
the subject. “Can’t you see,” she said,
“that the shops here are what the museums abroad are to the
poor? It is in them only that certain people may catch
glimpses of the dainty and exquisite manufactures of other
countries. The little education their eyes receive is
obtained during visits to these emporiums.”
If this proves so, and it seems probable, it only proves how
the humble long for something more graceful than their meagre
homes afford.
In the hope of training the younger generations to better
standards and less vulgar ideals, a group of ladies are making an
attempt to surround our schoolchildren during their
impressionable youth with reproductions of historic masterpieces,
and have already decorated many schoolrooms in this way.
For a modest sum it is possible to tint the bare walls an
attractive color—a delight in itself—and adorn them
with plaster casts of statues and solar prints of pictures and
buildings. The transformation that fifty or sixty dollars
judiciously expended in this way produces in a schoolroom is
beyond belief, and, as the advertisements say, “must be
seen to be appreciated,” giving an air of cheerfulness and
refinement to the dreariest apartment.
It is hard to make people understand the enthusiasm these
decorations have excited in both teachers and pupils. The
directress of one of our large schools was telling me of the help
and pleasure the prints and casts had been to her; she had given
them as subjects for the class compositions, and used them in a
hundred different ways as object-lessons. As the children
are graduated from room to room, a great variety of high-class
subjects can be brought to their notice by varying the
decorations.
It is by the eye principally that taste is educated.
“We speak with admiration of the eighth sense common among
Parisians, and envy them their magic power of combining simple
materials into an artistic whole. The reason is that for
generations the eyes of those people have been unconsciously
educated by the harmonious lines of well-proportioned buildings,
finely finished detail of stately colonnade, and shady
perspective of quay and boulevard. After years of this
subtle training the eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and
the crude. There is little in the poorer quarters of our
city to rejoice or refine the senses; squalor and all-pervading
ugliness are not least among the curses that poverty entails.
If you have a subject of interest in your mind, it often
happens that every book you open, every person you speak with,
refers to that topic. I never remember having seen an
explanation offered of this phenomenon.
The other morning, while this article was lying half finished
on my desk, I opened the last number of a Paris paper and began
reading an account of the drama, Les Mauvais Bergers
(treating of that perilous subject, the “strikes”),
which Sarah Bernhardt had just had the courage to produce before
the Paris public. In the third act, when the owner of the
factory receives the disaffected hands, and listens to their
complaints, the leader of the strike (an intelligent young
workman), besides shorter hours and increased pay, demands that
recreation rooms be built where the toilers, their wives, and
their children may pass unoccupied hours in the enjoyment of
attractive surroundings, and cries in conclusion: “We, the
poor, need some poetry and some art in our lives, man does not
live by bread alone. He has a right, like the rich, to
things of beauty!”
In commending the use of decoration as a means of bringing
pleasure into dull, cramped lives, one is too often met by the
curious argument that taste is innate. “Either people
have it or they haven’t,” like a long nose or a short
one, and it is useless to waste good money in trying to improve
either. “It would be much more to the point to spend
your money in giving the poor children a good roast-beef dinner
at Christmas than in placing the bust of Clytie before
them.” That argument has crushed more attempts to
elevate the poor than any other ever advanced. If it were
listened to, there would never be any progress made, because
there are always thousands of people who are hungry.
When we reflect how painfully ill-arranged rooms or ugly
colors affect our senses, and remember that less fortunate
neighbors suffer as much as we do from hideous environments, it
seems like keeping sunlight from a plant, or fresh air out of a
sick-room, to refuse glimpses of the beautiful to the poor when
it is in our power to give them this satisfaction with a slight
effort. Nothing can be more encouraging to those who
occasionally despair of human nature than the good results
already obtained by this small attempt in the schools.
We fall into the error of imagining that because the Apollo
Belvedere and the Square of St. Mark’s have become stale to
us by reproduction they are necessarily so to others. The
great and the wealthy of the world form no idea of the longing
the poor feel for a little variety in their lives. They do
not know what they want. They have no standards to guide
them, but the desire is there. Let us offer ourselves the
satisfaction, as we start off for pleasure trips abroad or to the
mountains, of knowing that at home the routine of study is
lightened for thousands of children by the counterfeit
presentment of the scenes we are enjoying; that, as we float up
the Golden Horn or sit in the moonlight by the Parthenon, far
away at home some child is dreaming of those fair scenes as she
raises her eyes from her task, and is unconsciously imbibing a
love of the beautiful, which will add a charm to her humble life,
and make the present labors lighter. If the child never
lives to see the originals, she will be happier for knowing that
somewhere in the world domed mosques mirror themselves in still
waters, and marble gods, the handiwork of long-dead nations,
stand in the golden sunlight and silently preach the gospel of
the beautiful.
