industries; to demonstrate the possibility of successfully developing in any country, by definite educational processes, the taste and skill requisite to the profitable prosecution of such artistic industries; to urge the importance, both of commencing the elementary training needed at an early age, and of making the rudiments of this industrial education as universally a part of the training of every child in the community, as the knowledge of the alphabet is now made; to illustrate the possibility of doing this, as shown by the recent educational history of different countries and communities; to point out the imperative need of begin. ning this training at once; to call attenton to the extraordinary facilities possessed by the communities of the United States in their public school systems, for the most rapid and successful introduction of this training; and to emphasise the direct bearing of such wide spread instruction upon the industries and arts of the whole people.

So much for the practical, industrial, material, side of the argument; while, in like manner, the relations of art to the civilization of a people are illustrated by many American and foreign writers, who are entitled to speak with authority.

The value of the study of art in the colleges and universities, as an element of general culture, and the importance of a knowledge of the arts and architecture of the Greeks and Romans, as illustrating the classic writers; the uses of museums of archæology, art, and industrial art; the added charm given by beauty of form and of color, to the buildings and objects that environ our daily life; the refining and ennobling mission of art; and, first and last, the absolute unity of all art, whether applied to the adornment of some object of common use, or to the expression of some grand thought of a mighty master; are each, in turn, suggested.

CONCLUSION.

Finally, to urge the practicability and advisability of introducing industrial art education throughout these United States;-to show the intimate relation of this movement to the prosperity of a manufacturing people; and to enumerate the resources and instrumentalities now available in this country for the development of industrial and high art; sum up, in briefest words, the purposes and contents of this Report.

ART AND INDUSTRY.

THE DEMOCRACY OF ART.

PRELIMINARY PAPERS

UPON THE

RELATIONS

OF

ART

ΤΟ

EDUCATION, INDUSTRY,

AND

NATIONAL PROSPERITY.

BY

ISAAC EDWARDS CLARKE, A. M.

"I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few or freedom for a few.” WILLIAM MORRIS.

"No system of education is truly solid and sound and democratic which does not make it possible for the child of superior merit, however poor, to mount to the highest round of the educational ladder." JOHN D. PHILBRICK.

XXXI

THE DEMOCRACY OF ART.

The words of the poet artist voice the purpose of this volume and explain the title of these preliminary papers, while Dr. Philbrick's statement of the purpose of free public education suggests the intimate connection between the liberties and the education of a people-Art once dependent on the patronage of popes and kingsThe association of the arts in the minds of the Puritans, with the "Restoration" and "the Papacy," the cause of their antagonism to them-This ancestral prejudice against the arts, inherited and widely extended throughout the United StatesThe causes of this prejudice long since extinct-This prejudice, already weakened by the influence of the Centennial Exhibition, must soon disappear Art in the great ages always democratic-Art always greatest when secure of the sympathy of the people-Edward Everett on the favorable influences of a Republic on the development of literature and the arts-Art in the Republics of Greece and in the mediæval Republics of Italy-The Campanile of Giotto in Florence-The Monument to Washington, in Washington City, D. C.

The words of William Morris, the English Poet Artist, set on the title page of these papers, express the motive of this Report, while they may also serve to illustrate and justify the title of these introduc tory essays; for, I am well aware that the title under which these pre liminary papers are grouped, will doubtless seem to many if not paradoxical at least ill chosen.

In the strictest limitation of the words, "Democracy" and "Aristoc racy," designate simply two different and antagonistic forms of government. In the course of centuries, however, these words, though adopted bodily from a dead language into a living one, have partaken of the vicissitudes common to all living languages, and so, either by the processes of analogy, by the tendency of the mind to multiply synonyms, and to designate some one thing by a word often originally applied to an entirely different thing, or, by the contrary tendency, to burden words with meanings whereby one word serves many uses, the terms have come to imply in the popular understanding, whether as yet recog nized by dictionary makers or not, much more than the mere technical designations of particular forms of government; for which they were first invented.

The word democracy or its derivatives may be applied to anything re

lating to the people, anything in which the common people, or the people as a whole as distinguished from classes of the people are concerned, though such things may have no special reference to a form of government.

In the present application of the word to art, it will be found applicable if held to strictest limitation. The democratic governments, the socalled "Republics," both in ancient times and during the middle ages, were always the great and inspiring patrons of art. The term is also here used in its broader, more general sense, as referring to something which concerns, in countless ways, the interests of all the people.

By placing on the title page, beside the significant words of William Morris, the comprehensive expression, by Dr. Philbrick, of the ideal purpose of free education in a Republic, the topics necessarily consid ered in these preliminary essays are suggested, as well as the intimate relations which must of necessity exist between the art, and the education of a free people.

It would not, however, be strange if many persons should still consider that a more truthful title would have been the "Aristocracy of Art" since, for some centuries, the works of the artists have been almost exclusively in the possession of royal, noble, or priestly personages, who in the early period of the Renaissance, were necessarily almost the sole patrons of art, the chief employers of the artists. The Church was, in fact, the great patron of art before and immediately subsequent to its first "revival," so that many of the most famous works of the great masters of the Renaissance, and their immediate predecessors, were done in the service of the Church; in the building and adorning of cathedrals, churches and monasteries. Right royally have the humble artists repaid their debt to these once powerful patrons; for the Popes, Sovereigns, and lordly Abbots who were so fortunate and so enlightened as to secure their services, would now hardly be remembered but that to them the world is indebted for some of the noblest of the chef d'œuvres of Cimabue, Giotto, Bellini, Massaccio, Perugino, Titian, Lionardo, Angelo, Raphael, Corregio, Cellini, Veronese, Velasquez, Murillo, and many another.

It was doubtless largely owing to this association in the minds of the first colorists of New England with Royalty and with Papacy, that what seems to have been a positive aversion to art was engendered. The whitewash of the iconoclastic puritans and reformatory zealots in England, Scotland and Switzerland, which, in church and cathedral,