and intimate tradition which also descends to us out of the past, - a tradition so familiar and native to the brain that we forget its origin. We almost believe that our feeling for art is original with us. We are tempted to think there is some personal and logical reason at the back of all grammar, whether it be the grammar of speech or the grammar of architecture, - so strong is the appeal to our taste made by traditional usage. Yet the great reason of the power of art is the historic reason. 'In this manner have these things been expressed; in similar manner must they continue to be said.' So speaks our artistic instinct.

Good usage has its sanction, like religion or government. We transmit the usage without pausing to think why we do so. We instinctively correct a child, without pausing to reflect that the fathers of the race are speaking through us. When the child says 'Give me a apple,' we correct him. "You must say an apple." What the child really means, in fact, is an apple.

All teaching is merely a way of acquainting the learner with the body of existing tradition. If the child is ever to have anything to say of his own, he has need of every bit of this expressive medium to help him do it. The reason is, that, so far as expressiveness goes, only one language exists. Every experiment and usage of the past is a part of this language. A phrase or an idea rises in the Hebrew, and filters through the Greek or Latin and French, down to our own time. The practitioners who scribble and dream in words from their childhood up,- into whose habit of thought language is kneaded through a thousand reveries, these are the men who receive, reshape, and transmit it. Language is their portion: they are the priests of language.

The same thing holds true of the other vehicles of idea, - of painting,

architecture, religion, etc.; but since we have been speaking of language, let us continue to speak of language. Expressiveness follows literacy. The poets have been tremendous readers always, - Petrarch, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Byron, Keats; those of them who possessed not much of the foreign languages had a passion for translations. It is amazing how little of a foreign language you need if you have a passion for the thing written in it. We think of Shakespeare as of a lightly-lettered person; but he was ransacking books all day to find plots and language for his plays. He reeks with mythology; he swims in classical metaphor; and, if he knew the Latin poets only in translation, he knew them with that famished intensity of interest which can draw the meaning through the walls of a bad text. Deprive Shakespeare of his sources, and he could not have been Shakespeare.

Good poetry is the echoing of shadowy tongues, the recovery of forgotten talent, the garment put up with perfumes. There is a passage in the Tempest which illustrates the freemasonry of artistic craft, and how the weak sometimes hand the torch to the mighty. Prospero's apostrophe to the spirits is, surely, as Shakespearean as anything in Shakespeare and as beautiful as anything in imaginative poetry.

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves;

And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him,
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pas-
time

Is to make midnight mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
(Weak masters though ye be) I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous
winds,

And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak

With his own bolt: the strong-based promontory Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck'd up The pine and cedar: graves, at my command, Have waked their sleepers; oped, and let them forth

By my so potent art.

Shakespeare borrowed this speech from Medea's speech in Ovid, which he knew in the translation of Arthur Golding; and really Shakespeare seems almost to have held the book in his hand while penning Prospero's speech. The following is from Golding's translation, published in 1567,

Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone,

Of standing Lakes, and of the Night, approche ye everychone, Through helpe of whom (the crooked bankes much wondring at the thing)

I have compelled streames to run cleane backward to their spring.

By charmes, I make the calme Seas rough, and make the rough Seas plaine

And cover all the Skie with Cloudes, and chase them thence againe.

By charmes I rayse and lay the windes, and burst the Vipers jaw,

And from the bowels of the Earth both stones and trees doe drawe.

Whole woods and Forestes I remove: I make the Mountaines shake,

And even the Earth it selfe to grone and fearfully to quake.

I call up dead men from their graves: and thee O lightsome Moone

I darken oft, though beaten brasse abate thy perill soone.

Our Sorcerie dimmes the Morning faire, and darkes the Sun at Noone.

The flaming breath of firie Bulles ye quenched for my sake.

And caused there unwieldie necks the bended yokes to take.

Among the Earthbred brothers you a mortall war did set

And brought a sleepe the Dragon fell whose eyes were never shet.

There is, and is to be, no end of this reappearance of old metaphor, old trade secrets, old usage of art. No sooner has a masterpiece appeared, that summarizes all knowledge, than men get up eagerly the next morning with chisel

and brush, and try again. Nothing done satisfies. It is all in the making that the inspiration lies; and this endeavor renews itself with the ages, and grows by devouring its own offspring.

The technique of any art is the whole body of experimental knowledge through which the art speaks. The glazes of pottery become forgotten and have to be hit upon over again. The knack of Venetian glass, the principle of effect in tiles, in lettering, in the sonnet, in the fugue, in the tower, all the prestidigitation of art that is too subtle to be named or thought of, must yet be acquired and kept up by practice, held to by constant experiment.

Good artistic expression is thus not only a thing done: it is a way of life, a habit of breathing, a mode of unconsciousness, a world of being which records itself as it unrolls. We call this world Art for want of a better name; but the thing that we value is the life within, not the shell of the creature. This shell is what is left behind in the passage of time, to puzzle our after study and make us wonder how it was made, how such complex delicacy and power ever came to coexist. I have often wondered over the Merchant of Venice, as one wonders over a full-blown transparent poppy that sheds light and blushes like a cloud. Neither the poppy nor the play was exactly hewn out: they grew, they expanded and bloomed by a sort of inward power, unconscious, transcendent. The fine arts blossom from the old stock, — from the poppy-seed of the world.

I am here thinking of the whole body of the arts, the vehicles through which the spirit of man has been expressed. I am thinking also of the sciences, whose refractory, belligerent worshipers are even less satisfied with any past expression than the artists are, for their mission is to destroy and to rearrange. They would leave nothing alive but

themselves. Nevertheless, science has always been obliged to make use of written language in recording her ideas. The sciences are as much a part of recorded language as the arts. No matter how revolutionary scientific thought may be, it must resort to metaphysics when it begins to formulate its ultimate meanings. Now, when you approach metaphysics, the Greek and the Hebrew have been there before you; you are very near to matters which perhaps you never intended to approach. You are back at the beginning of all things. In fact, human thought does not advance, it only recurs. Every tone and semitone in the scale is a key-note; and every point in the universe is the centre of the universe; and every man is the centre and focus of the cosmos, and through him passes the whole of all force, as it exists and has existed from eternity; hence the significance which may at any moment radiate out of anything.

The different arts and devices that time hands to us are like our organs. They are the veins and arteries of humanity. You cannot rearrange them or begin anew. Your verse-forms and your architecture are chosen for you, like your complexion and your temperament. The thing you desire to express is in them already. Your labors do no more than to enable you to find your own soul in them. If you will begin any piece of artistic work in an empirical spirit and slave over it until it suits you, you will find yourself obliged to solve all the problems which the artists have been engaged on since the dawn of history. Be as independent as you like, you will find that you have been anticipated at every point; you are a slave to precedent, because precedent has done what you are trying to do, and ah, how much better! In the first place the limitations, the horrible limitations of artistic possibility, will begin

to present themselves: few things can be done; they have all been tried; they have all been worked to death; they have all been developed by immortal genius and thereafter avoided by lesser minds, - left to await more immortal genius. The field of endeavor narrows itself in proportion to the greatness of the intellect that is at work. In ages of great art every one knows what the problem is and how much is at stake. Masaccio died at the age of twentyseven, after having painted half a dozen pictures which influenced all subsequent art, because they showed to Raphael the best solution of certain technical questions. The Greeks of the best period were so very knowing that everything appeared to them ugly except the few attitudes, the few arrangements, which were capable of being carried to perfection.

Any one who has something to say is thus found to be in one sense a slave; but a rich slave who has inherited the whole earth. If you can only obey the laws of your slavery, you become an emperor; you are only a slave in so far as you do not understand how to use your wealth. If you have but the gift of submission, you conquer. Many tongues, many hands, many minds, a traditional state of feeling, traditional symbols, the whole passed through the eyes and soul of a single man, such is art, such is human expression in all its million-sided variety.

II

I have thrown together these remarks in an elliptical and haphazard way, hoping to show what sort of thing education is, and as a prologue to a few reflections upon the educational conditions in the United States.

It is easy to think of reasons why the standards of general education should be low in America. Almost every influ

ence which is hostile to the development of deep thought and clear feeling has been at the maximum of destructive power in the United States. We are a new society, made of a Babel of conflicting European elements, engaged in exploiting the wealth of a new continent, under conditions of climate which involve a nervous reorganization for Europeans who come to live with us. Our history has been a history of quiet colonial beginnings, followed by a national life which from its inception has been one of social unrest. And all this has happened during the great epoch of the expansion of commerce, the thought-destroying epoch of the world.

Let us take a rapid glance at our own past. In the beginning we were settlers. Now, the settlement of any new continent plays havoc with the arts and crafts. Let us imagine that among the Mayflower pilgrims there were a few expert wood-carvers, a violin-player or two, and a master architect. These men, upon landing in the colony, must have been at a loss for employment. They would have to turn into backwoodsmen. Their accomplishments would in time have been forgotten. Within a generation after the landing of the pilgrims there must have followed a decline in the fine arts, in scholarship, and in certain kinds of social refinement. This decline was, to some extent, counteracted in our colonial era by the existence of wealth in the colonies and by the constant intercourse with Europe, from which the newest models were imported by every vessel. Nevertheless, it is hard for a colony to make up for its initial loss; and we have recently seen the United States government making efforts on a large scale to give to the American farmer those practices of intensive cultivation of the soil which he lost by becoming a backwoodsman and

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has never since had time to recover for himself.

The American Revolution was our second serious set-back in education. So hostile to culture is war that the artisans of France have never been able to attain to the standards of workmanship which prevailed under the old monarchy. Our national culture started with the handicap of a sevenyears' war, and was always a little behindhand. During the nineteenth century the American citizen was buffeting the waves of new development. His daily life was an experiment. His moral, social, political interests and duties were indeterminate. Nothing was settled for him by society. Was a man to have an opinion? Then he must make it himself. This demands a more serious labor than if he were obliged to manufacture his own shoes and candlesticks. No such drafts upon individual intellect are made in an old country. You cannot get a European to understand this distressing over-taxing of the intelligence in America. Nothing like it has occurred before, because in old countries opinion is part of caste and condition; opinion is the shadow of interest and of social status.

But in America the individual is not protected against society at large by the bulwark of his class. He stands by himself. It is a noble idea that a man should stand by himself, and the conditions which force a man to do so have occasionally created magnificent types of heroic manhood in America. Lincoln, Garrison, Emerson, and many lesser athletes are the fruits of these very conditions which isolate the individual in America and force him to think for himself. Yet their effect upon general cultivation has been injurious. It seems as if character were always within the reach of every human soul; but men must have become homogeneous before they can produce art.

We have thus reviewed a few of the causes of our American loss of culture. Behind all these causes, however, was the true and overmastering cause, namely, that sudden creation of wealth for which the nineteenth century is noted, the rise all over the world of new and uneducated classes. We came into being as a part of that world-movement which has perceptibly retarded culture, even in Europe. How then could we in America hope to resist it? Whether this movement is the result of democratic ideas, or of mechanical inventions, or of scientific discovery, no one can say. The elements that go to make up the movement cannot be unraveled. We only know that the world has changed: the old order has vanished with all its charm, with all its experience, with all its refinement. In its place we have a crude world, indifferent to everything except physical well-being. In the place of the fine arts and the crafts, we have business and science. Business is, of course, devoted to the increase of physical well-being; and science is, in all except its highest reaches of thought, a mere extension of business. Science is the theory of world-business, race-business, cosmic business. Science saves lives and dominates the air and the sea, science does a hundred wonders, and all of us are incredibly in debt to science, and we should not be ungrateful. But science does not express spiritual truth. It neither sings nor jokes, it neither prays nor rejoices, it neither loves nor hates. It respects only its own language and its own habits of thought, and puts trust only in what is in its own shopwindow.

'What is science?' you ask. Now, science is anything which the scientific men of the moment are studying. In one decade science means the discussion of spontaneous variation, in the next of plasm, in the next of germs

or of electrodes. I do not undervalue the accomplishments of science; but I deprecate the contempt which science expresses for anything that does not happen to be called science. Imperial and haughty science proclaims its occupancy of the whole province of human thought; yet, as a matter of fact, science deals in a language of its own, in a set of formulæ and conceptions which cannot cover the most important interests of humanity. It does not understand the value of the fine arts, and is always at loggerheads with philosophy. Is it not clear that science, in order to make good her claim to universality, must adopt a conception of her own function that shall leave to the fine arts and to religion their languages? She cannot hope to compete with these languages, nor to translate nor to expound them. She must accept them. At present she tramples upon them.

There are, then, in the modern world these two influences which are hostile to education, the influence of business and the influence of science. In Europe these influences are qualified by the vigor of the old learning. In America they dominate remorselessly, and make the path of education doubly hard. Consider how they meet us in ordinary social life. We have all heard men bemoan the time they have spent over Latin and Greek, on the ground that these studies did not fit them for business, business, as if a thing must be worth less if it can be neither eaten nor drunk. It is hard to explain the value of education to men who have forgotten the meaning of education: its symbols convey nothing to them.

The situation is very similar in dealing with scientific men, - at least with that large class of them who have little learning and no religion, and who are thus obliged to use the formulæ of modern science as their only vehicle of thought. These men regard hu