light colors or dark ones, of sheltered windows or exposed ones, to obtain the expression of mood desired. This requires expert skill.

When all the people of a city or of a community are thinking of these things and, as art amateurs trained in the public school, have become awake to art pleasure, what beautiful architecture will result!

What can the art teacher do to bring about this result of national importance, a civilization in which taste prevails? The art teacher has most of the task to accomplish. The schools must always furnish and spread widely the best ideals. I hope to show how this may be done effectively and even speedily in art matters.

In an eastern state a bright teacher became superintendent of schools in a remote and unprogressive county. He was received with hostility. He encouraged the boys of the schools to plant each a plot of ground with seed potatoes which had first been treated with a certain chemical solution. The result was that the boys harvested, from their gardens, crops of potatoes free from scab; while the untreated seed in their father's fields had produced crops of scabby potatoes. That was effective teaching. The boys learned the lesson and so did the fathers and uncles of the boys-a lesson in applied science of which they stood in need. Mark how the teaching was done: by carrying the demonstration into the home. The proof did not rest upon the teacher's word, nor upon the authority of a textbook, but upon the clean skins of the pota toes which the boys dug from their own gardens.

We teachers of art need to make clear demonstrations in the homes of our several communities. And what opportunities are ours in the advan'tages for display which our product affords!

The school superintendent could not the first year control the planting of the fields, but he could influence some garden plots. So can we control a small part of each pupil's home.

The need for the practice of good art in each community is more needed than the raising of clean potatoes. Vulgarity is now generally practiced and it is more expensive than beauty, whether measured in cash or in terms of spiritual enjoyment. Money is being wasted on useless bric-a-brac, on cheaply designed and stickily varnished furniture, on gaudy wall paper, on band-sawed and machine-made mouldings, made by buzz-saw-minded mechanics, who, if rightly trained and occupied, might just as well have been lovers of beauty. Stoves are covered with glistening nickeled contortions, carpets and rugs are woven in meaningless medleys of line and color mixtures. Rugs and tables are placed criss-cross in rooms, and dress is ruled by fashions in novelty, rather than by principles of beauty and adaptation to personality.

The waste is not only of the money, foolishly expended, but waste of the people who produce ugly articles.

Cities and villages which would be beautiful if made on consistent

plans of beauty, are thoughtlessly laid out in offices, with T squares, into uniform blocks; instead of being studied with reference to natural advantages of site, with some streets as main arteries converging toward centers of marketing, or of banking, or of manufacturing, or of living; with quiet withdrawal places near these centers affording retreats from hurrying and crowding. Each district should have its own individual charm, with variety in sizes and shapes of blocks and with distinct features. I can think of nothing more oppressively inartistic than the miles of uniformity in certain streets of large cities. To change this requires community consciousness and action.

All people of our land: rulers, laborers, buyers, makers, and sellers need to learn the lessons of artistic values, that thought, design, appropriateness, adaptation to individual conditions, alone make worth; and not speed of production, nor mass of population, nor magnitude of duplication, nor recentness of style, nor glittering prominence of material, nor mechanical "system." The very people who most frequently waste money and leisure in cheap vulgarity are the very ones who have the least money and leisure to waste. But the idle rich people who have means but who have not the culture to use it waste also.

There are enlightened people who live beautifully, as there were enlightened people who knew how to prevent potato scab years ago, but the farmers of the remote country learned it only when the schoolman forced the lesson upon them.

I am afraid that in art matters the numbers of the unenlightened predominate. This lesson of beauty in life will not have national and civic proportions until it reaches the wage-earners, who form 96 per cent of the whole population. The sales of our large stores are to these, and in the stock exposed, tawdry furnishings predominate still. We must not be complacent while this is so. Our privilege is to train the whole community into a love of the beautiful. If it seems appalling to think of giving to specific individuals, to "Old Bill Jones" or to "Aunt Sally Brown," souls which crave art, remember that the school superintendent spent one season in getting potatoes planted in the gardens. And one "Old Bill Jones" came to him to buy the secret of the chemical. He was told that the "secret" was free to all who read agriculture bulletins.

One school girl was encouraged by her teacher to stencil some window curtains for her sleeping-room. The mother, a cultured woman, was nevertheless incredulous, and furnished, at first, only material for a woodshed window; but the result was so pleasing that richer material than had at first been asked for was furnished for the chamber windows.

In order to convince the community it must be reached in all ways: thru the factories which make things, thru the stores which sell them, thru the woman's clubs and societies, thru societies of architects and artists, thru lectures in public halls, thru exhibitions of paintings, drawings, and

photographs. These are all agencies which may be utilized in a propaganda of education. The pupil will receive benefit in these collateral agencies if he is made to have a part in them.

Hints have been given as to the spirit and breadth of application of art ideals. In organizing art instruction what shall the method be? What shall be the backbone around which to group instruction? This question can only be answered here briefly. Drawing must be taught, of course, that pupils may learn to handle pencil, pen, and brush with graphic facility, but in this, possibly, drawing teaching has concerned itself too much with abstract expression and not enough with the expression of vital, interesting ideas. I say emphatically the central idea of art teaching should be applied art, the art of dress, of home-building and furnishing, of civic art.

There is not time now to consider each of these, indeed they overlap, but what instruction in home-building and in civic art may be, can be briefly hinted at in the time remaining.

In the study of home art; house-plans need brief consideration, next the art of an interior, the production of unity by arrangement of emphatic lines and a controlling color scheme, the disposition of draperies, the rugs, the stencilling possibly of a pattern for a frieze, or for parts of window panes and window curtains. (Effects similar to those of leaded windows may be made by painting the designs on thin paper and then fastening them to the glass by varnish.) The space design of each side of the room should be taken up in turn, with places for pictures, for doors and windows, for furniture, and the relative emphasis of casings and bands as the elements to be bound into a space design.

The question of pictures which are available and desirable will arise. Information may be given as to what reproductions of the masterpieces in architecture, in painting, and sculpture and the lesser arts may be purchased. The work of local artists should be studied also.

Wood stains and finishes will need consideration, likewise the choice and design of furniture, chairs, tables, light-fixtures, door hardware, the use and abuse of bric-a-brac, the making of pottery for dishes and fireplace tiles. The subject expands inevitably. Probably too much of the time in applied art has heretofore been occupied in making unrelated, or “faddish," articles. Copper corners for blotting pads, for example, are not as essential as a design of family significance, sawed or etched into the key and knob plate of a door. Art-in-place is the goal to be attained.

While drawing may serve as the chief vehicle in considering and in studying these ideas, it is not the only vehicle. An experimental room of the school building, possibly a lunch- or rest-room, may be furnished and decorated in various color schemes and with various textiles, as a demonstration. Even draperies hung on rods may illustrate many ideas. The furnishing stores welcome visits from classes, and give their services in arranging floor coverings and hangings to go suitably with them.

The exterior of the house is just as fascinating and fertile in study of the beauty it affords: first comes a study of unity in massing of the house, in the sky line, and its placing on the lot in reference to its surroundings; then the consideration of different materials, their textures as rough or smooth, and the suitability of their treatment. As in the interior, the arrangement of openings and emphasis of leading lines is nothing but an application of the principles of space design.

A few types of houses should be studied: Colonial, Bungalow, English, Mission. These pupils will all build some day. We want them to build intelligently.

Drawings of the yard-plan and sketches showing the composition of house and trees from various points of view are useful here. Door-yards should be arranged to contain broad lawn surfaces with planting beds of flowers and shrubs subordinated to them, or placed toward the margins, rather than in the centers of conspicuous ovals. The composition and breadth of the Japanese gardens may give lessons in this. I have at hand a photograph of a garden in America filled with Japanese "properties"—a pond, a stork, a lantern, a foot-bridge, a path, a hill; but it is a jumble, a junk shop. Also, at hand, I have a photograph of a real Japanese garden as it exists and has existed, perhaps for one thousand years. It has the "properties" of the imitation, but it has them arranged with art. It has breadth and comprehensiveness of purpose, which the imitation lacks. From every point of view it affords pictures of unity with details subordinated.

If there are hillsides in the community, inspiring problems may consist in developing the possibilities of building sites on both the upper and lower sides of the roadways, with plans for treatment of yards in provision for walks, steps, porches, and outlook. In these problems drawings and sketches will again serve as vehicles of ideas.

Just at hand is a photograph of a bridge which connects two parts of the city of Würzburg, Germany. Four huge stone lions guard the abutments of this bridge, so nobly conceived and placed that the purpose of the bridge is intensified. The bridge affords the wayfarer more than a means of crossing. To me it is one of the most pleasant experiences of a summer's trip. Those lions would not have the same interest on pedestals in a museum. Just such opportunities are waiting to be realized all over our country. Beautiful bridges and lions (or something else) are needed over many streams. Why shall not the art teachers by tactful use of photographs, in showing what has been done, and by the assignment of such problems as the design for a bridge, or for a city-hall park, or an approach or plaza to the railway station, or the beautifying of embankments, roadways, and piers, of cities and towns; and not thru the beautifying merely, but thru the positive inspiration and instruction which refined civic architecture and sculpture and painting can give: why not in such

ways as these shall the art teachers guide, prepare for, and control the future civic art of our country?

The task of the drawing teacher has become enlarged. Yes, and it has become real! The teachers of industrial arts and domestic science are now overlapping our work and assisting in it.

If all the work suggested is carried out will there not be superficiality? The remedy is to insist that some of the work shall be intensely done, the rest can be suggested. This cannot all be done in the grades, perhaps not in the secondary schools. The fact that figures—draftsmen, and landscape artists are usually good craftsmen also, is encouraging; in mastering one art they gain some power in all.

In many parts of the work outlined other ideals than those of art are involved and should be considered: ideals of social efficiency, of community interest, of utility, of sanitation, of cost. The art teacher who believes in symmetrical development should consider them all. Other instruments than drawing and paper are useful. The materials themselves-fabrics, clay, tile, brick, wood-stains-may be handled; photographs of buildings and cities should be studied. Visits to museums and local stores and factories should be made.

But let the art teacher remember that tho dealing with many interests, the teaching of art principles and taste, a love for and understanding of order and beauty in the world is in her keeping. To preserve art from falling into the hands of the mere dilettanti, a plaything for the idle, and to make it the saving inspiration of all who labor: this is the trust of the art teacher. By the fulfillment of this trust shall the state be developed and the lives of its citizens become enr ched.

ART'S SERVICE AS A BASIS FOR CLASSIFIED KNOWLEDGE (SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT)

CHESHIRE L. BOONE, DIRECTOR, DEPARTMENT OF ART AND HANDWORK, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, MONTCLAIR, N.J.

We, as a people, pride ourselves upon a number of qualities which are held to be virtues. Perhaps they are in kind. We claim to be practical, business-like, and true prophets of the trend of the times, inventive in a useful way, and we are above all proud of our industrial growth. There are good grounds for such claims and such pride, but on the other hand, the qualities enumerated lead to at least one rather sordid result. In a comparatively new country, with seemingly unlimited resources, with a rapidly growing population making incessant demands upon the manufacturer for more and yet more and still cheaper products, it is increasingly evident that the business acumen and inventive skill of every artist, artisan, and industrial chief is applied to one end-the accumulation of business and profit.