ART.
CHILDREN'S DRAWINGS AT THE KNICIHTSBRIDCH GALLERY.
[Oman TILL DECEMBER NTH.] TROUGH painters and educationists vie with each other in their admiration for the work of Professor Clink's class of children, it is perhaps only the painters who are surprised at it. The feeling of the educationist about this work and the work of the Oxford children who make linoleum woodcuts is more that ot the enchanter who has brought off a ticklish spell before a scep- tical audience. There is the marvel tangible before us. There is the eternal fountain of life made visible before our eyes, the limpid, ever-renewed, ever-pure, ever-vigorous spring. We feel that the world can never grow old, for here is the virginal Inspiration, the power, humour, and beauty, the naivete of cave. man's drawings or the Italian Primitives. You will not find Fra Angelico there. The children have not the monks power over their materials. But they have completely his joy in move- ment and colour, his sly, good-humoured amusement at ironic things, his charming sentiment and love of life. That is to say, when they have not a tragio power of expression for the terrible— they are children from the famine area. The children range in age from ten to sixteen. Girls and boys seem to have an equal facility, and they work in a great variety of mediums, charcoal, water-colour, coloured paper (a local tradition), sampler work, oils, modelling-clay, or wood. There is one picture of a boy and goats which is full of the special qualities for which Professor MA's class is remarkable. The colour is cheerful, but the drawing seems to have been the artist's chief concern. A boy is running off with a kid through a meadow full of flowers, the mother-goat hard at his heels, prancing and butting. The whole flock of goats, the very clouds in the sky, have been roused, and goats, clouds, and boy are racing along. "Such vigour, such movement, such rhythm," and. the Professor might have added, such bold fore-shortening, such virtuosity and anatomical knowledge. The whole thing is a piece of delicious, humorous bravura. But I am not qualified to speak of the technical merits of the pictures, to anatomize the marvels of pattern, of movement, or of fancy that they display. The reader who has visited the exhibition will be in no doubt of the positive as well as relative merit of the children's work. He will almost certainly feel that Professor Cizek is too modest. For their teacher's attitude is to emphasize the subjective aspect of the work. All children have something to express, and it is the effect on them and on their development that is important and not the finished product. That is why I never allow them to keep thei: own work." Miss Francesca Wilson visited the clam, and has recorded her impressions in that admirable paper, the Teacher's World. and in a little pamphlet which is on sale at the
exhibition. Professor Cizek works on the most approved modern lines ; he "does nothing to hamper the children's free expression," they have no models, and very little precept.
They have instead a certain amount of criticism and abundant rather serious sympathy, and above all praise.
"'How do you do it ? ' we asked at last, when we had looked at some hundreds of the productions of Prof. Cizek's pupils, each more delightful and original than the last.. 'But I don't do,' he protested with a kind of weary pity for our lack of under- standing. 'I take off the lid, and other art masters clap the lid on—that is the only difference." But you must show them some things,' continued the unbelievers. The technique of so many of these pictures is so marvellous for such young children ; you must at some time have pointed out to them their mistakes in proportion. To take one instance, here, for example, is a baby with a very long body and a mother with quite lifeless arrns--quite as in an Italian Primitive. Don't you point it out so that the child should learn and improve ? " But on the contrary,' sighed the Professor. 'I like these long bodies and all these disproportions. Children have their own laws which they must needs obey. What right have grown-ups to interfere ? People should draw as they feel,' he continued musingly. 'If they feel that the head is large, they should draw it large ; if they feel that the limbs are lifeless, they should draw them lifeless." But what about Nature ? ' we queried. ' Ah, Nature, Nature,' he exclaimed almost angrily. 'Is it not enough that der lithe Gott created Nature, that Man must be always trying to ape Him ? ' "
Perhaps to the outsider the most encouraging thing about the " new education" is the comparative unanimity of its exponents and the nature of its early practitioners. This simple doctrine of encouragement and freedom has been the thing that has distinguished the best educators of all ages, Roger Ascham, Froebel, Pestalozzi, Montessori, to mention only a few.
What distinguishes the scholastic profession of this era from that of any other is not so much the presence of its one or two great educators as the admirable receptiveness to new ideas of the general body of teachers of the young. A. W.-E.
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