committed the same fault. We have brought Mr. Dickinson's criticism on our own heads. We must profit by that criticism, and return to Goethe's ideal. Some steps to be taken are obvious. First of all we must fully satisfy the democratic desires of the Zeitgeist by making pure democracy prevail in all matters of politics and economics. Then, when democracy shall have received its due, it must no longer seek to lay its hand on literature, art, higher education, pure science, philosophy, manners. And then, - when the mass of men are politically and economically free, we must preserve the sacred fire of intellectual light by setting apart a priesthood, a body of intellectual men who shall worship the God of truth and him alone. Our professors at Harvard, Yale, and elsewhere constitute, or should constitute, such a

priesthood; but the public is not satisfied to have them serve the sacred flame: the public wishes them to apply that sacred flame to furnaces and dynamos. We do need, as Mr. Dickinson implies, intellectual traditions of generations of educated men; those traditions should be taught as a sacred cult; and their priests should be held in special reverence. Those priests should be most honored when they serve intellectual concerns, in which the public sees no profit, such as philosophy and the classics. We do need, as a quickening fountain, in the midst of us, a spirit of reverence for intellectual beauty. Had such a spirit of reverence existed among us, should we have been so exposed to Mr. Lowes Dickinson's criticisms, and should we now be almost as remote from Goethe as from Dante or Plato?

I

IN what I have to say about music for children I am not unmindful of the diversity of American life, and of the prevalent idea that Americans do not pay much attention to music (or to any other form of beauty) because they live in a new country in which the greater part of their energy is devoted to subduing nature and carving their fortunes. As a nation we are said to be too diverse to have evolved any definite æsthetic practice, and we suppose ourselves too busy with the practical

things in life to pay much attention to it.

While it is doubtless true that there. are numberless prosperous American families in which the words 'art' and 'literature' mean nothing whatever, this condition is due, in most cases, not to lack of time, but to lack of inclination. We, like other people, do what we like to do. No real attention is paid to the cultivation of a love of the beautiful in childhood; very little attention is paid to it in the educational institutions where we are trained; so we grow up and enter upon life with a

desultory liking for music, with a distinct lack of appreciation for poetry, and with almost no interest in painting or sculpture.

And this condition is likely to increase rather than diminish as time goes on, until, having finally arrived at moments of leisure and finding that neither our money nor any other material possession gives us any deep or permanent satisfaction, we turn to beauty only to be confronted with the old warning: 'Too late, ye cannot enter now.' For we have arrived at the time when, in Meredith's phrase, 'Nature stops, and says to us, "Thou art now what thou wilt be." For this capa"For city for understanding and loving great books and paintings and music has to grow with our own growth and cannot be postponed to another season. The average American man is supposed to have no time for these things. He has time, but he refuses to turn it into leileisure which means contem

sure,

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plation and thoughtfulness, though he very likely knows that this has been accomplished over and over again by men who have saved out of a busy life for that purpose a little time every day.

One recalls Darwin's pathetic statement wherein he describes his early love for poetry and music, and the final complete loss of those faculties through neglect. The loss of these tastes,' he says, 'is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.'

The intellect of man, in itself, is never supreme or sufficient. Feeling or instinct is half of knowledge. 'Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy,' says Whitman, 'walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.' Of any man, American or otherwise, who lives his life unmindful of all beauty we may

justly say, as Carlyle said of Diderot, 'He dwelt all his days in the thin rind of the Conscious; the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious whereon the other rests and has its meaning was not under any shape surmised by him.'

Must not the education of children in beauty begin, then, with their parents? Must they not be aroused, at least, to an intellectual conviction of its value, even though they have missed its joy? Can the matter be safely left to the jurisdiction of the schools themselves, whose curricula are already overcrowded with methods of escape from this very thing? Does not the school answer the general conception of education obtaining among the fathers and mothers of the school-children? Can it be expected - is it possible for it to rise far above that conception? Our object is therefore to suggest, first, that the perception of beauty is, in the highest sense, education; second, that music is especially so, because it is the purest form of beauty; and, third, that music is the only form of beauty by means of which very young children can be educated, because it is the only form accessible to them.

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Need we point out that there has never been a time in the history of mankind when human beings have not paid tribute to beauty? In their attempt to escape what may be called the traffic of life and to rise above its sordid limitations, have they not always and everywhere created for themselves some sort of detached ideal by means of which they justified themselves in an otherwise unintelligible world? This ideal may have been a god of stone, but it figured for them a perfect absolution. Surrounded by brutal forces about which they knew nothing, subject to pestilence, to war, to starvation, to the fury of the elements,

unable safely to shelter their bodies, they built for their souls a safe elysium. This ideal was always one of order and beauty; every civilization has possessed it, and it was to each civilization not only religion, but also what we call 'art.'

I have spoken in a former article 1 of that quality in art which consists in its 'holding a mirror up to nature,' and thus focusing our attention. Browning expresses this in 'Fra Lippo Lippi,' where he says,

For, don't you mark, we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.

But the highest office of art is not so much to attract our attention to beautiful objects as to make us realize through the artist's skill what the objects signify. It is the artist who so depicts life as to make it intelligible to us; it is he who sees all those deeper relations which underlie all things; he, and he only, can so present human aspirations and human actions as to lift them out of the maze and give them order and sequence. Through all the welter of political theories, of philosophies, of dogmas insisted on at the point of excommunication; amid the discoveries of science and the tendency to make life into a mechanically operated thing, the still small voice of the poet rises always supreme supreme in wisdom, supreme in insight, the seer, the prophet, the philosopher; when all else has passed he remains, for beauty is the only permanence. To eliminate beauty from education is to destroy its very soul.

From the law of gravity to Shelley's 'To a Skylark,' beauty is the central element. In physics, in mathematics, in astronomy, in chemistry, there is the same perfection of order and se

1 'What is Music?' in the Atlantic Monthly for February.

quence, the same correlation of forces, the same attraction of matter which, operating in the fine arts, brings about what we call 'painting,' 'sculpture,' 'poetry,' and 'music.' The whole of nature is a postulate of this doctrine, and there is no subject taught from kindergarten to college, which may not be taught as in accord with it. There is a rhythm of beauty in all things animate and inanimate - an endless variety around a central unity. The individuality in nature and in human life is as a rhythmic diversity to a divine and central unity. The leaves of a maple tree are all alike and all different; the difference between the mechanical arts and the fine arts is a difference of rhythmic flexibility: one is fixed in rhythm in accordance with physical laws, and acts in perfect sequence and regularity; the other is a free individualized rhythmic play around a fixed centre. The painter may not dispose the objects on his canvas as he pleases · nature allows him only a certain freedom; the sculptor may distribute his weights and his rhythms around the axis with only so much freedom from the demands of nature as his particular purpose justifies; even the strain of music, which seems to wander so much at will that it is often called a 'rhapsody,' - it, too, is merely a play of rhythms and contours around a fixed centre, and conforms to a common purpose just as a maple leaf does. A machine acts in mechanical synthesis, a melody acts in aesthetic synthesis; neither is free. So we say there is no such thing as an isolated fact, or subject, or idea.

Thus everything taught to children can be taught as beauty, and if it is not so taught, its very essence must dissolve and disappear. "The mean distance from the earth to the moon is about two hundred and forty thousand miles'; 'two and two make four'; 'an island is a body of land entirely sur

rounded by water';

so a child learns his lesson in what are called facts (the most deceptive and soulless things in the world). To him 'the moon' and 'a mile' are little more than words; 2 + 2 are troublesome hieroglyphics; 'an island' is, perhaps, merely a word in a physical geography book; but to you all these objects and quantities are, perhaps, beautiful; for you

The moon doth with delight Look around her when the heavens are bare; for you numbers have come to have that significance which makes them beautiful; an island may have touched your imagination as it has Conrad's, who calls it 'a great ship anchored in the open sea'; you have seen that beauty which lies behind facts when they fall, as with a click, into the mechanism of things. So must children be taught to realize at the very beginning something of that great unity which pervades the world of thought and of matter. Some comprehension must be given to them of that marvelous sense of fitting together, of perfect correspondence, which all nature reveals and which is ultimately beauty. It is this quality, residing in every subject, which constitutes the justification for our insistence on beauty as a part of education.

With our present systems of education all ideality is crushed, for this ideality is a personal quality, whereas all we are, we are in mass. 'You are trying to make that boy into another you,' said Emerson, some fifty years ago; 'one's enough.' Modern education, subject to constant whims, has become a capacious maw into which our children are thrown. Everything for use, nothing for beauty; for use means money, while beauty what is beauty good for? (a question which Lowell, in one of his essays, says 'would be death to the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage'). This is indeed an old

thesis, but never has it more needed stating than now. It applies everywhere. Literature taught as beauty is uplifting and joyful; taught as syntax it is dead and cheerless. All other forms of instruction lose their force if they are detached from that poetic harmony of which they are a part. Numbers, cities, machines, symphonies, the objects on your table, you yourself, all these are to be seen as belonging to this harmony, without which the world is Bedlam.

American children are musical, American adults are not, and the chief reason lies in the wasted opportunities of childhood. If the natural taste of our children for music were properly developed, they would continue to practice it and to find pleasure in doing so, and thus would avoid the fatal error of postponing their heaven to another time the great mistake of life and of the

ology.

So we deal chiefly in this article with the possibilities which music offers to children, not to a few children in playing the pianoforte, but to all children in love and understanding. It is obviously desirable to make them all love music, and, since few of them ever attain satisfactory proficiency in playing instruments, our chief problem lies in trying to develop their taste and thereby keeping their allegiance.

II

In a former article I discussed the qualities and properties of music as such music, that is, in its pure estate, unconnected with words as in songs, or with words, action, costume, and scenery as in opera. And now, in writing about children's music, it is still necessary to keep in mind that, even when music is allied to words, it has the necessities of its own nature to fulfill, and that the use of suitable or

even fine words in a child's song does not change this condition.

In beginning this discussion I propose to ignore for the moment the effect in after life of what we advocate for children, and I also discard (with a certain contempt) the common notion true enough in its way— that music is for them a rest and a change after burdensome tasks. For we must see music, in relation to children, as it really is. I go behind the psychologist' who says, ..the prime end of musical education

is to train the sentiments, to make children feel nature, religion, country, home, duty,... to guarantee sanity of the heart out of which are the issues of life'; for I say that music, by itself, cannot make children feel nature, religion, country, home, or duty, and that these sentiments are aroused by the heightened effect of words set to music, and not by the music itself. The prime end of music and of the other arts

is beauty. Song is not story, melodies have nothing to do with morals, and all the theories about music such as those of Darwin and Spencer

are wrong when they attribute to it any ulterior purpose or origin whatever. Music is an end, not a means.

Now this beauty which the soul of man craves, and always has craved, cannot be brought to little children in literary form, because they cannot read or because their knowledge of words is too limited; nor can it be brought to them in the form of painting, because they are not sufficiently sensitive to color-vibrations; nor of sculpture, for their sense of form is not sufficiently developed. In fact, their power of response is exceedingly limited in most directions. They can neither draw nor paint nor write nor read, so that this beauty which we value so highly seems shut out from them. This were so but for music.

1 G. Stanley Hall.

By singing, and by singing only, a little child of five may come in contact with a pure and perfect form of beauty. Not only that, but the child can reproduce this beauty entirely unaided, and in the process of doing so its whole being body, mind, heart, and soulis engaged. The song, for the moment, is the child. There is no possible realization of the little personality comparable to this. Here, in sounds, is that correlation of impulses in which the stars move; here is the world of order and beauty in miniature; here is a microcosm of life; here is a talisman against the cold unmeaning facts which are driven into children's brains to jostle one another in unfriendly companionship. Through this they can feel a beauty and order and sequence which their minds are incapable of grasping. The joy which a child gets in reproducing beautiful melodies is like no other experience in life. It is absolutely a personal act, for the music lends itself to the child's individuality as nothing else does. Music, in this sense, preserves in children that ideality which is one of the most precious possessions of childhood, and which we would fain keep in after life; which loves flowers and animals, which sees the truth in fairy stories, which believes everything to be good and is alien to everything sinister, which sees the moon and stars, not as objects so many millions of miles from the earth, and parts of a great solar system, but as lanterns hung in the heavens.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy. . .
At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the life of common way.

III

The prime object, then, of musical education for children is so to develop their musical sensibilities as to make them love and understand the best