TEXT C The conditions of art
should be simple. A great deal more depends upon the heart than upon the head.
Appreciation of art is not secured by any elaborate scheme of learning. Art
requires a good healthy atmosphere. The motives for art are still around about
us as they were round about the ancients. And the subjects are also easily found
by the earnest sculptor and the: painter. Nothing is more picturesque and
graceful than a man at work. The artist who goes to the children’s playground,
watches them at their sport and sees the boy stoop to tie his shoe, will find
the same themes that engaged the attention of the ancient Greeks, and such
observation and the illustrations which follow will do much to correct that
foolish impression that mental and physical beauty are always
divorced. To you, more than perhaps to any other country, has
Nature been generous in furnishing material for art workers to work in. You have
marble quarries where the stone is more beautiful in color than any Greeks ever
had for their beautiful work, and yet day after day I am confronted with the
great building of some stupid man who has used the beautiful material as if it
were not precious almost beyond speech. Marble should not be used save by noble
workmen. There is nothing which gave me a greater sense of barrenness in
traveling through the country than the entire absence of wood carving on your
houses. Wood carving is the simplest of the decorative arts. In Switzerland the
little barefooted boy beautifies the porch of his father’s house with examples
of skill in this direction. Why should not American boys do a great deal more
and better than Swiss boys There is nothing to my mind more
coarse in conception and more vulgar in execution than modern jewellery. This is
something that can easily be corrected. Something better should be made out of
the beautiful gold which is stored up in your mountain hollows and strewn along
your river beds. When I was at Leadville and reflected that all the shining
silver that I saw coming from the mines would be made into ugly dollars, it made
me sad. It should be made into something more permanent. The golden gates at
Florence are as beautiful today as when Michelangelo saw them.
We should see more of the workman than we do. We should not be content to
have the salesman stand between us--the salesman who knows nothing of what he is
selling save that he is charging a great deal too much for it. And watching the
workman will teach that most important lesson--the nobility of all rational
workmanship. Art would create a new brotherhood among men by
furnishing a universal language. Under its beneficent influences war might pass
away. Thinking this, what place can I ascribe to art in our education If
children grow up among all fair and lovely things, they will grow to love beauty
and detest ugliness before they know the reason why. If you go into a house
where everything is coarse, you find things chipped and broken and unsightly.
Nobody exercises any care. If everything is dainty and delicate, gentleness and
refinement of manner are unconsciously acquired. When I was in San Francisco I
used to visit the Chinese Quarter frequently. There I used to watch a great
hulking Chinese workman at his task of digging, and used to see him every day
drink his tea from a little cup as delicate in texture as the petal of a flower,
whereas in all the grand hotels of the land, where thousands of dollars have
been lavished on great gilt mirrors and gaudy columns, I have been given my
coffee or my chocolate in cups an inch and a quarter thick. I think I have
deserved something nicer. We can infer from the passage that sculptors can find subjects for their work out of all the following EXCEPT______.
A.men loading or unloading a stately ship B.women drawing water from the well C.idle saunterers walking in the street D.cattle-drivers with their lasso lifted