Bellini - Page 2

slightly flattened at the poles. The proof of this seemingly
pessimistic remark, made by a hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the
fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the
business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions
ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger
medal than the Poet Laureate, so do we pay our teachers the same as
coachmen and coal-heavers, giving them a plentiful lack of
everything but overwork.

I will never be quite willing to admit that this country is
enlightened until we cease the inane and parsimonious policy of
trying to drive all the really strong men and women out of the
teaching profession by putting them on the payroll at one-half the
rate, or less, than what the same brains and energy can command
elsewhere. In this year of our Lord, Nineteen Hundred Two, in a time
of peace, we have appropriated four hundred million dollars for war
and war-appliances, and this sum is just double the cost of the
entire public-school system in America. It is not the necessity of
economy that dictates our actions in this matter of education--we
simply are not enlightened.

But this thing can not always last--I look for the time when we
shall set apart the best and noblest men and women of earth for
teachers, and their compensation will be so adequate that they will
be free to give themselves for the benefit of the race, without
apprehension of a yawning almshouse. A liberal policy will be for
our own good, just as a matter of cold expediency; it will be
Enlightened Self-interest.

With the rise of the Bellinis, Venetian art ceased to be provincial,
blossoming out into national. Jacopo Bellini was a teacher--mild,
gentle, sympathetic, animated. His work reveals personality, but is
somewhat stiff and statuesque: sharp in outline like an antique
stained-glass window. This is because his art was descended from the
glassworkers; and he himself continued to make designs for the
glassworkers of Murano all his life. Considering the time in which
he lived he was a great painter, for he improved upon what had gone
before and prepared the way for those greater than he who were yet
to come. He called himself an experimenter, and around him clustered
a goodly group of young men who were treated by him more as comrades
than as students. They were all boys together--learners, with the
added dignity which an older head of the right sort can lend.

"Old Jacopo" they used to call him, and there was a touch of
affection in the term to which several of them have testified. All
of the pupils loved the old man, who wasn't so very old in years,
and certainly was not in heart. Among his pupils were his two sons,
Gentile