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HARDING'S LESSONS ON ART.*
As an artist, Mr. Harding is distinguished by excessive ease and quick- ness, brilliancy of touch, and dexterity of composition, which leave an impression of great natural and acquired aptitude, but somewhat un- real, mannered, and unsubstantial. As a teacher, he is a rigid main- tainer of the necessity of positive knowledge, and regular systematic pro- gression, of which each single step must be reasoned out and accounted for. This twofold character may at first appear to be in contrast with it- self. From a rapid and facile designer people are prone to expect " bold" examples, the advocacy of " effect," and a royal road to knowledge. It is not difficult, however, to see how the reverse may very well be the case, as in this instance. Mr. Harding draws so fast because he is so sure of being right. He knocks up a composition of scenery as deftly as a child builds its card castle, because he is thoroughly familiar with every detail in it. Perhaps the comparatively unsubstantial look of his pictures, to which we have alluded, is due to his not going in all cases direct to Na- ture, on the ground that he knows her by heart already, and that, having universal laws at his finger-ends, he need not look too curiously into the accidents of a particular subject. Hence, picturesqueness without strong individuality. The author, in a circular issued with this second edition of his Lesson'', expresses his intention to be, that they should revolutionize the whole art of teaching drawing. . He scouts the principle of imitation. To pro- duce something like something else, goes for nought; the thing required is to ascertain the facts and the laws of visible nature, and to gain the power of representing them with the hand and to the eye, instead of with the mouth and to the ear. Principles must be learned first as such, and applied afterwards ; not merely involved in the lesson, and left to be dis- covered or not according to the pupil's acumen. A mental operation must precede every manual operation. Each copy and each step of it must not only be right, but must be proved to be so ; and proved not be- cause it is like the example, but because it has observed the same law which guided that. To carry out this plan of art-education, a strict ad- herence to the prescribed course of instruction in its several stages, and frequent and close viva voce examinations, are required; and consequently the Lessons on Art and the Guide and Companion are intended for use by the master with a pupil or a class rather than for self-tuition ; although. they may be made available in a minor degree for that also. In contrast with his own system of teaching, which he offers to others after having found it abundantly efficacious in his own hands, here is Mr. Harding's picture of the current method : no untrue one, as most of those who have "learned drawing at school" can testify. " Let us enter the room where a drawing-class is seated ready for the lesson. The ages of the pupils are various; so are their talents. The teacher, to accommodate himself to these varieties, gives from his portfolio straight lines to one, to another a stile, to another a house, to another a head, to an, other a tree, to another an animal, to another something in paints' : each has his example before him to imitate. The pupils do not trace the remotest connexion of one example with another. Each, viewing his own example, would never imagine himself on the road to what be sees before another. No one gains a hint or an idea from his neighbour : all are required to pro- duce a good copy. The teacher's attentions are claimed to help the pupils over every difficulty : here, to turn the features of a head into something human ; there, to and in preventing a tree from assuming the impending character of a birch-broom; in one place, to correct an error—in another, to hinder its perpetration; in one case, to remedy where he can—in another, when he can. All this is doubly embarrassing when one tongue is to urge the idle and the listless, and to encourage the diligent and the emulous ; one pair of hands and eyes have to remedy what is done by the careless, or to restrain what is about to be dune by the incapable or the impatient. Pa- rents have to be satisfied, and the pupils kept in good humour. Neither ob- ject is gained if something pretty' is not to be seen by both parties. The teacher has brief time to make or mend ; or to observe that nere a line is falling, or is there too high, too low, too short, too long, too Wick, too thin, too light, too dark. In despair at a task beyond his powers, he leaves the pupil to the chance of being able to correct an error,—so called not because what has been done is said to be unlike nature, but because the original has not been imitated. The pupils know no other reason why their drawings should be like the example except that they are told to make them as nearly
• Lessons on Art. By J. D. Harding., Author of "Elementary Art," "The Prin- ciples and Practice of Art," Sic. Second edition. The Guide and Companion to the "Lessons on Art." By J. D. Harding. Published by Day and Sons.
so as possible ; and, not knowing why any object in the example should be as they find it, they are not convinced of the existence of errors in their own drawings which they neither see nor comprehend. They are not interested and engaged in pursuit of an object and an end which they perfectly under-
stand : they therefore become weary and discouraged at their inevitable failures, md disheartened at their firequent commission, discovery, and enu- meration. They see not the justice of the complaint, because they know not
the reason or the extent of the error. Drawing is not so pleasant a pursuit as was expected: Hope is replaced by disappointment, or feebly sustained by the expectation of some easier or prettier example supplanting the one in hand. In some, the novelty of the moment has not lost its sustaining attrac- tions; in others, what had the charm in the last lesson has lost it in this,— and then again the example is no easier. Entreaty for change or assistance becomes frequent ; hope deferred has cooled, where it has not quenched their ardour. Whilst some are perhaps trying to be diligent, and to forget their disappointments and their errors in their renewed efforts, there are these whose hopes are dissipated, and others whose diligence and determina- tions have died away. A few try to be interested,—none have really bene- fited ; most, if not all, are weary: The lesson has been long. It is over ; all are glad; and no one feels the emancipation more than the teacher him- self; who, it may be, is painfully alive to the insuperable mischief which strikes at the root of all his labours, not merely rendering them wearisome to himself, but profitless of any contribution towards the general advance- ment of the minds of his pupils."
The details of Mr. Harding's plan, of which the principle has already been stated, are simple enough in their leading features. The master is to produce ;lathe or other example, and draw his own copy of it on the black board. All the pupils are to copy it, observing the same order of the lines. The master then selects one pupil and his drawing, and ex- amines him upon it step by step, requiring a reason for everything. The necessary alteration; reciprocal criticism; and so on, follow. The aid to be derived from the use and combination of the cubic section models is much insisted on, in the more advanced as well as in the early stages of instruction. Compasses and other such mechanical auxiliaries are to be used to only a very limited extent, as the object is to educate the mind and the eye to correct perceptions, and not merely to produce a straight line of a given length. Technical rules of perspective also are dispensed with at the first setting out, and simplified when subsequently intro- duced.
"The power either to draw," says Mr. Harding, "or to appreciate art and nature, is, and must be, the result of education- This power is still falsely considered to be an inborn faculty, which, if not possessed in some remark- able degree,. is not present in. any valuable degree. Were this true of the power to draw, it would be true of every other faculty. The faculties of mind called into action by the practice of art belong to all men in some degree : they are the same as those employed when the mind essays any other mental acquisition."
A little reflection will, we think, convince most unprejudiced persons that Mr. Harding's method, that of enlightening the understanding before the hand is set to record the impressions= of the eye, undisciplined until understood, is the only way in which drawing can be taught so as to de- serve the name of teaching. Nevertheless, he pushes too far the analogy which be affirms between tuition in art and in any other acquirement— such as language. "-An attempt to teach art by requiring the pupil pa- tiently and minutely-to copy the exampleset before him, leads him," it is stated, " as far astray from its attainment as he would be led from the attainment of the Greek language were his tutor first to require an exact copy of the characters of its alphabet, then of the word; and finally of a whole sentence. When able to do this without mistake, he would be as near to a knowledge of the language as the like means would bring him to a knowledge of art." Here is a very obvious fallacy. The signs of language are local and arbitrary; the signs of art, universal and positive or quasi-positive. The-word horse does not mean the thing horse more than the word cat does, until a nation has agreed that it shall do so : the image horse means the thing horse absolutely, the image cat a thing abso- lutely different, to all the world.
Nor is it the less true—which Mr. Harding omits to state if he does not practically negative—that the real artist is the man whose eye is his theory. He sees the laws of Nature in her facts; does not take them from authority or from science, but perceives them in herself; does not seek and find them on any a priori reasoning, but simply finds them ; assimi- lates them through eye and mind together, and as it were intuitively, not prepensely and by distinct steps. To him nature is beautiful and infinite, not because education teaches him the fact, but because his whole being feels it And a real artist will such a man continue to be though every work of his should violate certain truths palpable and ponderable. Any system or no system will not make him nor mar him ; while, on the other hand, the right method will make correct and cultivated draughtsmen of those who would otherwise draw incor- rectly or not at all, but will not elevate them into artists. On this last fact Mr. Harding, of course, proceeds, or he would not propose to make art a branch of general education ; but his zeal for supplying sound in- struction to those for whom spontaneous practice itself will not be in- struction has tended to make him keep the former fact in the background; and he more than once trembles on the verge of self-contradiction in con- sequence, or actually falls into it.
The present edition of the lessons is reduced in cost and more portable in size, and is accompanied by entirely new illustrative examples. The Companion is truly such ; based on and referring to the Lessons, and specially adapted for use-by the teachers who may wisely have recourse to them. The style of both works is emphatic, and to the point ; in- volving, and probably requiring for the purposes of practical tuition, con- siderable iteration and reinforcement of precepts and principles ; lapsing occasionally into " fine writing," and too often disfigured by faults of syn. tax. But, although Mr. Harding is fond of comparing the study of art with that of language, what we want here is not the syntax, but the art ; and we have no doubt that the works are capable of doing excellent ser- vice in that-cauae.
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