Various

“ The true object of art-teaching is very much like that of all education—to inform the mind, while you give skill to the hand—not to impose certain rigid rules, or fixed recipes and methods of work, but while giving instruction in definite methods and the use of materials, to allow for the individual development of the student and enable him to acquire the power to express himself through different media without forgetting the grammar and alphabet of design. ”

“ Then, again, we may regard art more from its social aspect as an essential accompaniment of human life, not only for its illustrative and depicting powers, but also and no less for its pleasure-giving properties, its power of awakening and stimulating the observation and sympathy with the moods of nature, its power of touching the emotions, and above all of appealing to our sense of beauty. ”

“ The whole people devoted itself thereupon to professional soldiering, particularly in the French service, and though their monopoly of mercenary employment lasted a short time only, they continued to furnish regiments to the armies of France, Spain and the Pope up to the most modern times. But their efficiency was thoroughly sapped by the growth of a mutinous and insubordinate spirit, the memory of which has survived in the proverb Point d’argent, point de Suisse, and inspired Machiavelli with the hatred of mercenaries which marks every page of his work on the art of war. ”

“ While war (as a whole) was not yet an art, fighting (from the individual’s point of view) had certainly become a special function; after Charlemagne’s time the typical feudal army, composed of well-equipped cavalry and ill-armed peasantry serving on foot, rapidly developed. Enemies such as Danes and Magyars could only be dealt with by mounted men who could ride round them, compel them to fight, and annihilate them by the shock of the charge; consequently the practice of leaving the infantry in rear, and even at home, grew up almost as a part of the feudal system of warfare. ”

“ Hannibal chose his fighting ground whenever possible with a view to using their full power, first to defeat the hostile cavalry, then to ride down the shaken infantry masses, and finally to pursue au fond. At Cannae, the greatest disaster ever suffered by the Romans, the decisive blow and the slaughter were the work of Hannibal’s line cavalry, the relentless pursuit that of his light horse. But a professional long-service army has always the greatest difficulty in making good its losses, and in the present case it was wholly unable to do so. ”

“ In practice, conscription invariably produces a professional long-service army in which each soldier is paid to discharge the obligations of several successive conscripts. Such an army is therefore a voluntary long-service army in the main, plus a proportion of the unwilling men found in every forced levy. The gravest disadvantage is, however, the fact that the bulk of the nation has not been through the regular army at all; it is almost impossible to maintain a large and costly standing army and at the same time to give a full training to auxiliary forces. ”

“ Here we are concerned only with the peculiar position of the chief of staff under a system in which the sovereign is the actual commander-in-chief. It is obvious in the first place that the sovereign may not be a great soldier, fitted by mental gifts, training and character to be placed at the head of an army of, perhaps, a million men. Allowing that it is imperative that, whatever he may be in himself, the sovereign should ex officio command the armies, it is easy to see that the ablest general in these armies must be selected to act as his adviser, irrespective of rank and seniority. ”

“ But intellect, judgment, culture and study of great poets may do much towards enabling a prose-writer to write what must needs be called good poetry. What they cannot enable him to do is to produce those magical effects which poets of the rarer kind can achieve by seizing that mysterious, suggestive power of words which is far beyond all mere statement. Notwithstanding the exquisite work that Arnold has left behind him, some critics have come to the conclusion that his primary impulse in expression was that of the poetically-minded prosateur rather than that of the born poet. ”

“ In the first years of the war, William the Silent had to depend, for field operations, on mutinous and inefficient mercenaries and on raw countrymen who had nothing but devotion to oppose to the discipline and skill of the best regular army in the world. Such troops were, from the point of view of soldiers like Alva, mere canaille, and the ludicrous ease with which their armies were destroyed (as at Jemmingen and Mookerheyde) , at the cost of the lives of perhaps a dozen Spanish veterans, went far to justify this view. ”

“ Some schools of painting, sculpture and architecture have preserved fine and noble traditions which yet allowed for individuality. Such traditions may be said to have been characteristic of the art of the middle ages. It often happens, too, when many streams of artistic influence meet, there may be a certain domination or ascendancy of the traditions of one art over the others, which is injurious in its effects on those arts and diverts them from their true path. The domination of individualistic painting and sculpture over the arts of design during the last century or two is a case in point. ”

“ And Fontenelle, speaking in the language not of poetry but of science:—“Most animals—as, for instance, bees, spiders and beavers—have a kind of art peculiar to themselves; but each race of animals has no more than one art, and this one has had no first inventor among the race. Man, on the other hand, has an infinity of different arts which were not born with his race, and of which the glory is his own.” ”

“ Standing Armies.—Nine years after Nördlingen, the old Spanish army fought its last and most honourable battle at Rocroi. Its conquerors were the new French troops, whose victory created as great a sensation as Pavia and Creçy had done. Infusing a new military spirit into the formal organization of Gustavus’ system, the French army was now to “set the fashion” for a century. France had been the first power to revive regular forces, and the famous “Picardie” regiment disputed for precedence even with the old tercios. ”

“ Enough that when we use the term Art of any action, it is because we are thinking of properties in the action from which we infer, whether justly or not, that the agent voluntarily and designedly puts forth skill for known ends and by regular and uniform methods. If, then, we were called upon to frame a general definition of Art, giving the word its widest and most comprehensive meaning, it would run thus:—Every regulated operation or dexterity by which organized beings pursue ends which they know beforehand, together with the rules and the result of every such operation or dexterity. ”

“ It was at this stage that the general 689 introduction of the rifled musket put an end, once for all, to the artillery tactics of the smooth-bore days. Infantry, armed with a far-ranging rifle, as in the American Civil War, kept the guns beyond case-shot range, compelling them to use only round shot or common shell. In that war, therefore, attacking infantry met, on reaching close quarters, not regiments already broken by a feu d’enfer, but the full force of the defenders’ artillery and infantry, both arms fresh and unshaken, and the full volume of their case shot and musketry. ”

“ The machine production of an industrial century had laid its iron hands upon what had formerly been the exclusive province of the handicraftsman, who only lingered on in a few obscure trades and in forgotten corners of England for the most part. The ideal of mechanical perfection dominated British workmen, and the factory system, first by extreme division of labour, and then by the further specialization of the workman under machine production, left no room for individual artistic feeling among craftsmen trained and working under such conditions. ”

“ So, too, the art gallery, recalling the gentler associations of the past amidst surroundings of harmonious beauty and its attendant sense of comfort, is essentially a place of rest for the mind and eye. In the more famous galleries where the wealth of paintings allows a grouping of pictures according to their respective schools, one may choose the country, the epoch, the style or even the emotion best suited to one’s taste. ”

“ But the word Art, becoming appropriated to the fine arts, has been treated as if it necessarily carried along with it, and as if works to be called works of art must necessarily possess, the attributes of free individual skill and invention, expressing themselves in ever new combinations of pleasurable contrivance, and seeking perfection not as a means towards some ulterior practical end but as an ideal end in itself. ”