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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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