is need for one still more flexible and simple one that will enable me to include within the scope of fine arts two other branches of activity: dramatics and scholarship. For I hold that these departments of human labor are arts no less fine, no less essential, no less imaginative than the five that are more permanently established. And now to come to this definition. According to my notion art is that field of work which, by stimulating the imagination through the medium of the senses, creates for the time a new community of persons, of actions, and of things into which the individual may enter and of which he may become a member. This definition does away with any extended discussion of æsthetics or of absolute beauty in the abstract. I hold that this latter does not exist. When the "new community" is recognized, the individual enters it with the admission that the art is beautiful. We repay the artist for the effort of creation, we express our perception for the new community and our appreciation for it by telling him that he has created a beautiful thing. Let us test the definition by seeing if it answers to the needs of the seven arts which I have mentioned. Music, appealing to the sense of hearing, certainly opens up such a new community; for the imagination is stirred as we listen to it, and conjures up before us a world of delight or of pain, of exaltation or of depression, into which we are plunged and whose emotions actuate us for the time. Architecture may frequently open for us literally a new habitation in which we may dwell more happily, or through the medium of line or mass it may enable us to pass over the threshold of a new and richer life. Sculpture and painting, through the media of line and mass or line and color, present us with a new company of beings of familiar form, beings like ourselves, doing things that we ourselves do, obviously actuated by motives and experiencing sensations akin to our own, beings of whose company we become members, and who thus enlarge our acquaintance and our experience. Literature probably is even more effective than these other artforms in bringing the new community into being, for the poet or the novelist uses the same medium that we habitually use in our daily conversation-that is, familiar words with which he creates for us an emotional or a logical content in which we feel for the time vitally concerned and interested. Dramatics employs perhaps a still more intimate medium with which to open up the new community of interest and experience, for the actor creates the illusion of this new community by simulating the actual words, tones, gestures, and habits which we are daily employing ourselves. And intelligent scholarship certainly does not leave its devotee without providing for him a new world in which he may live and move; for the scholar (an historian or a scientist, let us say) creates with his research a conception of the past glories of mankind or a dream of the future possibilities of the race, which form, indeed, a veritable new earth. My attempted definition of art thus will be seen to cover the needs and the activities of what I have referred to as the seven fine arts. It is, then, a working hypothesis which may be used until it is thoroughly discredited; and that is about as far as one can go in defining art. With this I shall rest my case. I have tried to show that the artist is an essential part of society, using the same current coin that is necessary to create great businesses-imagination. I have tried to demonstrate that art is not a highbrow by-product, but an integral element in the necessary production of a well-developed race or of a living and active community. I have tried to point out that an interest in art is not an anaemic diversion for warped and sickly souls, but a normal activity for any vigorous and healthy mind, and an essential attitude for the creation of a great art. And I have tried to show that a person who lacks concern for art is not thereby indicating a wealth of common sense, but is passing by a remarkable opportunity to increase the pleasures of life. If I may succeed in convincing a few who will, therefore, try to make art more understandable, both to children and to adults, as well in schools as in homes and communities, my writing will not have been purposeless. B Critics of Milton's Tractate H. G. GOOD, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY. ECAUSE the Tractate stands within that small class of educational documents which belongs to literature in the strict sense, it has come about that the literary critics have given it their attention. But their work has had little influence upon educational thought. At least, if we may judge from the usual run of the histories of education, the educators, like specialized workers in general, have followed their own narrow groove. their bibliographies the literary critics do not appear.1 We here devote ourselves to a few of the greatest of those critics who have considered Milton's educational scheme: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), Vicesimus Knox (1752-1821), David Masson (1822-1907), and Richard Garnett (1835-1906). In Its The great poet and "most notable Englishman who ever kept a school" might be surprised to find himself counted among the educators. His Tractate is a mere sketch-a letter, in fact-written to satisfy an importunate friend. brevity is the less important a circumstance, since it is significant not only for what it is, but also for that to which it points, the English academy; and while it cannot be said that the dissenting academies followed just the lines drawn by Milton, yet his statement stands as a lofty expression of English realism and as an emphatic protest against the remoteness from life of the schools and universities that he knew so well. Milton's protest, although drawn from him by pressure, grew out of his own experience. Already a skilled Latinist, 1 Perhaps a special exception should be made of S. S. Laurie, "Studies in the History of Educational Opinion from the Renaissance," Cambridge, 1903. This has a good study of Milton and mentions Doctor Johnson's criticism. Professor Laurie makes the strange mistake of thinking that Doctor Johnson omits to notice the very large place assigned by Milton to moral and religious instruction. Doctor Johnson notices and commends this feature of the Tractate. he removed in his sixteenth year from St. Paul's School to Christ's College, Cambridge. He remained until he had taken a second degree (1632), but like some lesser poets, Lowell for example, he seems to have suffered rustication. This experience finds expression in some Latin lines which Cowper renders thus: "Tis time that I a pedant's threats disdain, And fly from wrongs my soul will ne'er sustain, Milton objected not only to the treatment accorded to him, but also to the education offered him amidst "the warfare of the schools." Ten years after leaving her, he spoke of Cambridge as a university "which, as in the time of her better health and mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now much less." One thinks unavoidably of the famous sentence which Gibbon directed at Oxford: "She will as cheerfully renounce me as a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother." In a final stroke, Milton concludes "the demonstration of what we should not do," and exhibits the miscarriages of university education by posting a list of the monsters to which it has given untimely birth: mercenary divines, litigious lawyers, fawning courtiers and rich dilettantes who live out their lives in ease and luxury, feast and jollity. "And these are the fruits of misspending our prime youth at the schools and universities as we do, either in learning mere words or such things as were better unlearnt." Perhaps the bitterness of his attack merely shows the depth of his interest in the cause of a truer education. He made one other approach to the guild. He wrote two school-books: a Grammar in the manner of Donatus2 and a Logic "according to the method of Ramus." Written as Masson believes, in the days of his pedagogy, they were pub 2 Wayland Johnson Chase, "The Ars Minor of Donatus," Madison, 1926, p. 21. lished much later; and this may show his continuing interest in the craft of his early years. On the Logic, Doctor Johnson remarks: "I know not whether even in this book he did not intend an act of hostility against the Universities; for Ramus was one of the first oppugners of the old philosophy, who disturbed with innovations the quiet of the schools." Milton was a poet and from his early years he regarded poetry as his province. Affairs, private and public, made him a great prose writer. And the prose of the Tractate stands in the critical editions beside that of the Areopagitica and the Defense of the English People. Masson has said: "Above all, the noble moral glow that pervades the Tract on Education, the mood of magnanimity in which it is written, and the faith it inculcates in the powers of the young human spirit, if rightly nurtured and directed, are merits everlasting." And now, upon remembering that Milton taught boys, that he wrote school-books, and that his discussion of education, a subject sometimes thought dull, displays an unquenchable faith in the young human spirit and a moral glow which has attracted readers for these three hundred years, upon remembering all this one is no longer so sure that he should not be numbered with the teachers. And these should claim him-they need, at all events, his faith in the young human spirit. We turn to the critics and first to the great eighteenthcentury Doctor, with his towering prejudices.3 "A pensioner is not likely to spare a republican," says Cowper. Milton returned from his travels in Italy "because he thought it proper to hasten home rather than pass his life in foreign amusements while his countrymen were contending for their rights.” But instead of entering into public employments he opened a school. "Let not our veneration for Milton," mocks Johnson, "forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens 3 George Birkbeck Hill [editor], Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets," Oxford, 1905, Vol. I. The quotations from Johnson are from this scholarly edition. See also, J. K. Spittal, "Contemporary Criticism of Dr. Samuel Johnson," London, 1923, passim. |