Art: The Nourishment of Childhood

Art is an expression that its practitioners have shaped, each according to his view of it. The poet composed it into odes that immortalized his name; the musician set it into melodies and heavenly airs at which the eyes brim with emotion; and the painter rendered it into canvases that people flocked to behold and whose riddles they sought to read. Generations have passed and ages have folded away while the civilized peoples vied in fostering art and giving it the place befitting it — in the home, in the school, and in society. It accompanies them through every stage of their lives. What, then, is the place we have assigned to it in our country, and what is its value among us?

If there were measures and tests for assessing art, and the proportion of its presence in people, and they were imposed on all the sons of our country, the result would prove an utter failure! What is the reason? Is it a weakness in the artistic gifts we inherited from our fathers and forefathers? Or is it the artistic barrenness of the surroundings in which we grew up? The reason is neither the one nor the other, for our heritage is rich in art, and our mothers tell us charming stories of our children awakening to it from their first months. And our country is among the most enchanting spots on earth, and among the richest in art! What, then, is the reason?

The reason for our artistic decline goes back to the deficiency in our cultural guidance: first in our home, and second in our school. The child who grows up in a home where art is tended and nourished is not the child who grows up in a home whose most important feature is its kitchen!

1 — Said, a child newly entered in the kindergarten, dawdles and lags in attending every morning. His mother wished to entice him, so she promised him five piasters to buy sweets with whenever he was early in getting ready for school.

Rashid is a child afflicted with the same dawdling; but his mother, instead of tempting him with five piasters to buy sweets, prepares for him a lovely bouquet of flowers to carry to his teacher, who had already agreed with the mother on a plan laid out in advance. The teacher would receive him at the door, welcoming him, dwelling on the beauty of his bouquet, thanking him for it, and asking him to help her arrange the flowers in the vases and distribute them among the various rooms...

Only days pass before everyone marvels at the transformation that has come over Rashid: he hurries to the kindergarten early, and he is most particular about choosing the bouquet of flowers himself, to prove the soundness of his taste. This mother of Rashid sees the necessity of guiding her child artistically, so she makes of art a means of enticement toward a matter of real importance, and thereby raises art to the lofty station that befits it — while we see the mother of Said, the first child, an ordinary woman who believes that bread alone gives man life; and so she cannot think of any method of enticement that does not come by way of the mouth, and her child grows up understanding no language but the language of the mouth!

Music is one of the manifestations of art; it is among the influences most powerful upon the soul, and it plays a great part in the life of the child... Often music suggests to the gifted child a picture to draw or a story to tell his companions...

Singing is another kind of music. It paves the way for children to lay upon their inventive childish doings a bewitching artistic touch, and it helps children to express their thoughts and their experiences. Whoever watches the movements and gestures of children at play hears them singing as they play: some sing songs learned at home or at school, while others sing snatches picked up here and there of which they rarely understand a thing — and yet, even so, a child will repeat them dozens of times, feeling that his singing is the greatest spur to his activity and his delight in play.

2 — Twins were born to a musician. Fate willed that the mother die in childbirth, and the father was obliged to send one of the two children to live with his aunt on her farm, keeping the second with him. This one grew up surrounded by art and music — and this inclination was strong in him from the first — so he excelled, and wonders came forth from him. As for the other, despite his strong inclination toward music, he was directed along athletic and agricultural lines, and the faculty of music grew weak in him. When the two brothers grew up, it became hard to believe that they were twins. Had their mother not died, and had the two lived together with art sheltering them under its spreading wings, the outcome would have been other than it was.

Guidance from early childhood, with persistence in it, has the greatest effect upon the artistic image that is imprinted in our subconscious mind. It takes root in our senses and alerts us to whatever music it selects for us. This is why our understanding and appreciation of classical music have grown weak: we did not hear it as children, and so our ears never grew familiar with it; instead we heard much of other kinds of music that bear no relation to art, and we chewed them over and reckoned them art, blind to their true nature, because our subconscious mind prompted us to it.

It behooves us, then, to attend to the artistic guidance of our children, and to begin this guidance from the first years of their childhood, by providing them with all the means that lead to the raising of their artistic level.

1 — Let us take care that in their hours of leisure they hear the finest kinds of the world's classical music, and let us help them distinguish it from the debased music that is unlike it; in this way we cultivate in them sound taste and the power to appreciate true art.

2 — Let us strive to make of our little home an exhibition of pictures possessing artistic value — or of copies of them — and let us enlighten our children with all that their understanding can digest about the lives of the great painters and about the artistic values by which modern art is measured...

And on the fifth anniversary of his birth, let our gift to him be a bundle of colored pencils and a great big notebook on which the child may express the fancies of innocent childhood crowding his mind. With practice, the power of observing the harmony and clash of colors grows in him, and his taste is refined.

And when his birthday comes round for the tenth time, and we sense in him an overflowing eagerness to inquire into the secrets of beauty, let us seize this unique opportunity and present him with a miniature collection of the best of the world's artists; he will pore over this collection, coming to understand it, studying its lines, its colors, and its artistic significance.

And whenever we are invited to view an exhibition of paintings or of artistic statuary, let us encourage our children to accompany us. Thus they will have the good fortune, from time to time, of enjoying the finest pictures; they will acquire the power to form their own opinion of them, and the boldness to criticize them artistically should the need arise. They will then have taken a swift step along the road of art — that road which was once rugged going, until we lifted the stones from its edges with our own hands, so that it became broad and spacious in its reaches, and our children make their way along it in complete ease. Their lives become rich in meanings and in values, and are gradually freed from the artistic barrenness that has taken hold of us.