Print, the English teacher can take pleasure in remembering,

Print, the English teacher can take pleasure in remembering, is a potential gateway to all the arts. For print is the vehicle of criticism, in Eliot's sense of the mediation that puts the reader into an increasingly complete possession of the work of art. So the custodian of print--i.e., the English teacher--has the unparalleled privilege of providing ever-deepening perspective on man's symbolic life.

It is entirely unnecessary, and perhaps an indictment of the smallness of our purposes, that we have limited our custodianship of print to providing criticism of only the verbal arts- fiction, poetry, drama, essay--those symbolic modes closest to our central commitment to language. The current catalog of the John Marin Memorial Exhibition (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1956, $1.50; 15 color plates, 36 black and white plates, narrative, text, and bibliography) brings to mind the narrowness of our refusal to use print in the widest possible way in the public schools.

If we feel it is important to introduce our students to the rugged, uncompromising sensibility of a Robert Frost, how can we refuse to accord equal academic status to a major painter like John Marin?

The only possible reason I can see for such curricular injustice is that our technicians learned how to produce words on the printed page long before they discovered how to reproduce color cheaply and faithfully. When will we catch up with them, now that they have learned to reproduce a painting as easily as a poem ? John Marin would be a good painter to begin the catching up. For one thing, he is his own best explicator: "Painting is like Golf, the fewer strokes I take, the better the picture."

Critics go way over par trying to explain as vividly Marin's economy of execution. And he has a shrewd way of appraising other painters, for example, Mondrian: "Curious, isn't it--there's a man with an exceptionally fine head--making a series of fine uprights and horizontals--as supports for things to grow--Yet nothing grows thereon."

But the most important thing about this handsome catalog is its effectiveness as criticism--its power to put you back into more enriched contact with Marin's paintings: "I was laying off in my boat, and there was a schooner under full sail coming toward me. I made about 20 drawings, none near perfect, but the sight as she loomed up, a thing of life changing with every second, I couldn't begin to describe the wonder of it."

This poetic sense of life suggests the tactical reason for assembling a classroom library from the growing number of such ludicrously inexpensive monographs on painters: on the periphery of the curriculum, both we and the students can get used to examining the plastic poetry of non-verbal arts, recently democratized by cheap four-color reproduction. Gradually, thereby, will we become ready to bring those arts to the center of discussion where they belong.