CHAPTER 20 – As the Twig is Bent

You are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.

THE WAYS OF MEN
106
CHAPTER 20 – As the Twig is Bent
I KNEW, in my youth, a French village far up among the Cevennes
Mountains, where the one cultivated man of the place, saddened by the
unlovely lives of the peasants around him and by the bare walls of the
village school, organized evening classes for the boys. During these
informal hours, he talked to them of literature and art and showed them his
prints and paintings. When the youths’ interest was aroused he lent them
books, that they might read about the statues and buildings that had
attracted their attention. At first it appeared a hopeless task to arouse any
interest among these peasants in subjects not bearing on their abject lives.
To talk with boys of the ideal, when their poor bodies were in need of food
and raiment, seemed superfluous; but in time the charm worked, as it
always will. The beautiful appealed to their simple natures, elevating and
refining them, and opening before their eager eyes perspectives of
undreamed-of interest. The self- imposed task became a delight as his
pupils’ minds responded to his efforts. Although death soon ended his
useful life, the seed planted grew and bore fruit in many humble homes.
At this moment I know men in several walks of life who revere with
touching devotion the memory of the one human being who had brought
to them, at the moment when they were most impressionable, the gracious
message that existence was not merely a struggle for bread. The boys he
had gathered around him realize now that the encouragement and
incentive received from those evening glimpses of noble works existing in
the world was the mainspring of their subsequent development and a
source of infinite pleasure through all succeeding years.
This reference to an individual effort toward cultivating the poor has
been made because other delicate spirits are attempting some such task in
our city, where quite as much as in the French village schoolchildren stand
in need of some message of beauty in addition to the instruction they
receive, – some window opened for them, as it were, upon the fields of art,
that their eyes when raised from study or play may rest on objects more
inspiring than blank walls and the graceless surroundings of street or
schoolroom.

THE WAYS OF MEN
107
We are far too quick in assuming that love of the beautiful is confined
to the highly educated; that the poor have no desire to surround themselves
with graceful forms and harmonious colors. We wonder at and deplore
their crude standards, bewailing the general lack of taste and the gradual
reducing of everything to a commonplace money basis. We smile at the
efforts toward adornment attempted by the poor, taking it too readily for
granted that on this point they are beyond redemption. This error is the
less excusable as so little has been done by way of experiment before
forming an opinion, – whole classes being put down as inferior beings,
incapable of appreciation, before they have been allowed even a glimpse
of the works of art that form the daily mental food of their judges.
The portly charlady who rules despotically in my chambers is an
example. It has been a curious study to watch her growing interest in the
objects that have here for the first time come under her notice; the delight
she has come to take in dusting and arranging my belongings, and her
enthusiasm at any new acquisition. Knowing how bare her own home was,
I felt at first only astonishment at her vivid interest in what seemed beyond
her comprehension, but now realize that in some blind way she appreciates
the rare and the delicate quite as much as my more cultivated visitors. At
the end of one laborious morning, when everything was arranged to her
satisfaction, she turned to me her poor, plain face, lighted up with an
expression of delight, and exclaimed, “Oh, sir, I do love to work in these
rooms! I’m never so happy as when I’m arranging them elegant things!”
And, although my pleasure in her pleasure was modified by the discovery
that she had taken an eighteenth-century comb to disentangle the fringes
of a rug, and broken several of its teeth in her ardor, that she invariably
placed a certain Whister etching upside down, and then stood in rapt
admiration before it, still, in watching her enthusiasm, I felt a thrill of
satisfaction at seeing how her untaught taste responded to a contact with
good things.
Here in America, and especially in our city, which we have been at
such pains to make as hideous as possible, the schoolrooms, where
hundreds of thousands of children pass many hours daily, are one degree
more graceless than the town itself; the most artistically inclined child can

THE WAYS OF MEN
108
hardly receive any but unfortunate impressions. The other day a friend
took me severely to task for rating our American women on their love of
the big shops, and gave me, I confess, an entirely new idea on the subject.
“Can’t you see,” she said, “that the shops here are what the museums
abroad are to the poor? It is in them only that certain people may catch
glimpses of the dainty and exquisite manufactures of other countries. The
little education their eyes receive is obtained during visits to these
emporiums.”
If this proves so, and it seems probable, it only proves how the humble
long for something more graceful than their meagre homes afford.
In the hope of training the younger generations to better standards and
less vulgar ideals, a group of ladies are making an attempt to surround our
schoolchildren during their impressionable youth with reproductions of
historic masterpieces, and have already decorated many schoolrooms in
this way. For a modest sum it is possible to tint the bare walls an attractive
color – a delight in itself – and adorn them with plaster casts of statues and
solar prints of pictures and buildings. The transformation that fifty or sixty
dollars judiciously expended in this way produces in a school-room is
beyond belief, and, as the advertisements say, “must be seen to be
appreciated,” giving an air of cheerfulness and refinement to the dreariest
apartment.
It is hard to make people understand the enthusiasm these decorations
have excited in both teachers and pupils. The directress of one of our large
schools was telling me of the help and pleasure the prints and casts had
been to her; she had given them as subjects for the class compositions, and
used them in a hundred different ways as object-lessons. As the children
are graduated from room to room, a great variety of high-class subjects
can be brought to their notice by varying the decorations.
It is by the eye principally that taste is educated. “We speak with
admiration of the eighth sense common among Parisians, and envy them
their magic power of combining simple materials into an artistic whole.
The reason is that for generations the eyes of those people have been
unconsciously educated by the harmonious lines of well-proportioned
buildings, finely finished detail of stately colonnade, and shady

THE WAYS OF MEN
109
perspective of quay and boulevard. After years of this subtle training the
eye instinctively revolts from the vulgar and the crude. There is little in the
poorer quarters of our city to rejoice or refine the senses; squalor and all-
pervading ugliness are not least among the curses that poverty entails.
If you have a subject of interest in your mind, it often happens that
every book you open, every person you speak with, refers to that topic. I
never remember having seen an explanation offered of this phenomenon.
The other morning, while this article was lying half finished on my
desk, I opened the last number of a Paris paper and began reading an
account of the drama, LES MAUVAIS BERGERS (treating of that
perilous subject, the “strikes”), which Sarah Bernhardt had just had the
courage to produce before the Paris public. In the third act, when the
owner of the factory receives the disaffected hands, and listens to their
complaints, the leader of the strike (an intelligent young workman),
besides shorter hours and increased pay, demands that recreation rooms be
built where the toilers, their wives, and their children may pass
unoccupied hours in the enjoyment of attractive surroundings, and cries in
conclusion: “We, the poor, need some poetry and some art in our lives,
man does not live by bread alone. He has a right, like the rich, to things of
beauty!”
In commending the use of decoration as a means of bringing pleasure
into dull, cramped lives, one is too often met by the curious argument that
taste is innate. “Either people have it or they haven’t,” like a long nose or a
short one, and it is useless to waste good money in trying to improve
either. “It would be much more to the point to spend your money in giving
the poor children a good roast-beef dinner at Christmas than in placing the
bust of Clytie before them.” That argument has crushed more attempts to
elevate the poor than any other ever advanced. If it were listened to, there
would never be any progress made, because there are always thousands of
people who are hungry.
When we reflect how painfully ill-arranged rooms or ugly colors affect
our senses, and remember that less fortunate neighbors suffer as much as
we do from hideous environments, it seems like keeping sunlight from a
plant, or fresh air out of a sick-room, to refuse glimpses of the beautiful to