orthodox Love of Nature to another generation. One may present the
triumph of scholastic nature-teaching, by the figure of a little child
hurrying to school along the ways of a busy modern town. She carries a
faded cut-flower, got at considerable cost from a botanical garden, and
as she goes she counts its petals, its stamens, its bracteoles. Her
love of Nature, her "powers of observation," are being trained. About
her, all unheeded, is a wonderful life that she would be intent upon
but for this precious training of her mind; great electric trains loom
wonderfully round corners, go droning by, spitting fire from their
overhead wires; great shop windows display a multitudinous variety of
objects; men and women come and go about a thousand businesses; a
street-organ splashes a spray of notes at her as she passes, a hoarding
splashes a spray of colour.

The shape and direction of one's private observation is no more the
schoolmaster's business than the shape and direction of one's nose. It
is, indeed, possible to certain gifted and exceptional persons that
they should not only see acutely, but abstract and express again what
they have seen. Such people are artists--a different kind of people
from schoolmasters altogether. Into all sorts of places, where people
have failed to see, comes the artist like a light. The artist cannot
create nor can he determine the observation of other men, but he can,
at any rate, help and inspire it. But he and the pedagogue are
temperamentally different and apart. They are at opposite poles of
human quality. The pedagogue with his canon comes between the child and
Nature only to limit and obscure. His business is to leave the whole
thing alone.

If the interpretation of nature is a rare and peculiar gift, the
interpretation of art and literature is surely an even rarer thing.