From the very first the school is essentially one of memory, the impress of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and memory of which may long give his stamp to the work of his followers.  The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention, is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the general lapse of appreciation of environment.  Most serious of all is the fixation of habit and custom, so that at length “custom lies upon us with a weight heavy as death, and deep [Page 81] almost as life.”  This continual fixation of fashionable standards as moral ones is thus a prime explanation of each reformer’s difficulty in making his moral standard the fashionable one, and also, when his doctrine has succeeded, of the loss of life and mummification of form which it so speedily undergoes.

Of conventional “education,” considered as the memorisation of past records, however authoritative and classic, the decay is thus intelligible and plain, and the repetition of criticisms already adequately made need not therefore detain us here.

For this process is there no remedy?  Science here offers herself—­with senses open to observe, and intellect awake to interpret.  Starting with Place, she explores and surveys it, from descriptive travel books at very various levels of accuracy, she works on to atlas and gazetteer, and beyond these to world-globe and “Geographie Universelle.”  With her charts and descriptions we are now more ready for a journey; with her maps and plans we may know our own place as never before; nay, rectify it, making the rough places plain and the crooked straight; even restoration may come within our powers.

Similarly as regards Work.  Though mere empiric craft-mastery dies with the individual, and fails with his successors, may we not perpetuate the best of this?  A museum of art treasures, a collection of the choicest examples of all times and lands, will surely raise us from our low level of mechanical toil; nay, with these carefully observed, copied, memorised, and duly examined upon, we shall be able to imitate them, to reproduce their excellencies, even to adapt them to our everyday work.  To the art museum we have thus but to add a “School of Design,” to have an output of more and less skilled copyists.  The smooth and polished successes of this new dual institution, responding as they do to the mechanical elements of modern work and of the mechanical worker-mind, admitting also of ready multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pass onwards from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and certificated art-mastery.  Our School of Design thus becomes a School of Art, a length a College, dominating the instruction of the nation, to the satisfaction not only of its promoters, but of the general public and their representatives, so that annual votes justly increase.  Lurking discontent may now and then express itself, but is for practical purposes negligible.