due fidelity the
more palpable qualities of colour and form. In this endeavour he
must bring many faculties into play. He must observe closely and
attentively. He must reflect on what he observes. He must reflect on
what he himself is doing. He must compare his work with the original,
and try to discover how far he has succeeded, and where he has gone
astray. The more faithfully he tries to reproduce what he has seen,
the clearer and surer will be his insight into the less palpable
properties of things,--into those details, those aspects, those
qualities, which do not reveal themselves to the first careless
glance, but which will gradually reveal themselves to those who will
take the trouble to discover them. When he is asked to reproduce
things which are intrinsically beautiful--flowers, branches, buds,
shells, butterflies, and the like--he begins to realise that if his
work is to be successful, he must do justice to many impalpable,
though not imperceptible, details which go to the making up of
beauty. So the sense of beauty, the feeling for it, the desire to
bring it into his work, grows up in his heart; and a new kind of
fidelity--fidelity to _feeling_ rather than to _fact_ (if I may speak
for the moment in the delusive language of dualism)--begins to weave
itself into his artistic consciousness.

If there is any school in England in which fidelity to feeling has
evolved itself out of fidelity to fact, that school is in the village
of Utopia. Some ten or twelve years ago a decree went out from
Whitehall that Drawing was to be taught in all the elementary schools
in England. Egeria at once took the children into her confidence, and
said to them: "You have now got to learn to draw: you don't know how
to draw, and I don't know how to draw, but we must all set to work
and see what we can do." A few years later the school was visited by
the inspector to whose zeal as a prophet, and skill as an expositor
and teacher, the transformation in the teaching of drawing which is
gradually taking effect in all parts of the country, has been largely
due. Here is the report[18] that he wrote after his visit--

"In this school the teaching of Drawing reaches the highest
educational level I have hitherto met with in our elementary schools,
and the results are the genuine expression of the children's own
thoughts. Flat copies are not used, and the scholars evolve their
own technique, for the Head Teacher is not strong herself in this