This principle applies, of course, to the appreciation of any artistic object whatsoever. One cannot appreciate Whistler’s portrait of his mother by merely realizing that the subject looks like a typical Victorian dame, any more than one can appreciate Whitman’s “To the Man-of-War-Bird” by locating Senegal. Whistler’s idea is expressed through composition, drawing, and color, and each of these qualities has a subtlety of its own; the pose of the figure is a thing of beauty in itself; the edge of the picture-frame just showing on the wall, the arrangement of curves and spots on the curtain, the tone of the whole canvas--all these make the picture what it is, and all these we must comprehend and take delight in. Whitman’s poem is a thing of space and freedom; the sky is the wild bird’s cradle, man is “a speck, a point on the world’s floating vast”; the poet’s imagination ranges through the whole created universe and flashes back over vast reaches of time as if to incarnate again man in the bird. So this music, which reaches our consciousness through rhythms, melodies, and harmonies, through form and style, through the delicate filigree of violins, or the triumphant blare of horns; which says unutterable things by means of silence; which means nothing and yet means everything,--this Ariel of the arts,--this, in all its quality,must find echo within us. Observation, discrimination, reflection; cultivating the memory for musical phrases and melodies, disciplining the senses, enlarging the scope of the imagination, nurturing the sense of beauty--these are the means and the objects of musical education for children. By such a process we attain in some measure to that joy which is one of the chief objects of art, and of which our present situation almost completely deprives us. So let me say finally that I wage war here against patent nostrums, against enforced and joyless music-teaching, against the development of technical proficiency without taste or understanding; and that I uphold here a process of musical education which has for its object “being musical,” and which takes into its fold every child, boy or girl, and keeps them there as man and woman. FOOTNOTE: [4] G. Stanley Hall. CHAPTER III PUBLIC SCHOOL MUSIC I. IDEALS OF PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION