In this connexion the question naturally arises, In what way do the
progress and expansion of mechanical art affect the power and province
of fine art? The great practical movement of the world in our age is a
movement for the development of mechanical inventions and multiplication
of mechanical products. So far as these inventions are applied to
purposes purely useful, and so far as their products to not profess to
offer anything delightful to contemplation, this movement in no way
concerns our argument. But there is a vast multitude of products which
do profess qualities of pleasantness, and upon which the ornaments
intended to make them pleasurable are bestowed by machinery; and in
speaking of these we are accustomed to the phrases art-industry,
industrial art, art manufactures and the like. In these cases the
industry or ingenuity which directs the machine is not fine art at all,
since the object of the machine is simply to multiply as easily and as
perfectly as possible a definite and prescribed impress or pattern. This
is equally true whether the machine is a simple one, like the engraver's
press, for producing and multiplying impressions from an engraved plate,
or a highly complex one, like the loom, in which elaborate patterns of
carpet or curtain are set for weaving. In both cases there exists behind
the mechanical industry an industry which is one of fine art in its
degree. In the case of the engraver's press, there exists behind the
industry of the printer the art of the engraver, which, if the engraver
is also the free inventor of the design, is then a fine art, or, if he
is but the interpreter of the invention of another, is then in its turn
a semi-mechanical skill applied in aid of the fine art of the first
inventor. In the case of the weaver's loom there is, behind the
mechanical industry which directs the loom at its given task, the fine
art, or what ought to be the fine art, of the designer who has contrived
the pattern. In the case of the engraving, the mechanical industry of
printing only exists for the sake of bringing out and disseminating
abroad the fine art employed upon the design. In the case of the carpet
or curtain, the fine art is often only called in to make the product of
the useful or mechanical industry of the loom acceptable, since the eye
of man is so constituted as to receive pleasure or the reverse of
pleasure from whatever it rests upon, and it is to the interest of the
manufacturer to have his product so made as to give pleasure if it can.
Whether the machine is thus a humble servant to the artist, or the
artist a kind of humble purveyor to the machine, the fine art in the
result is due to the former alone; and in any case it reaches the
recipient at second-hand, having been put in circulation by a medium not
artistic but mechanical.
Perfected machines: are they works of fine art?
Again, with reference not to the application of mechanical contrivances
but to their invention; is not, it may be inquired, the title of artist
due to the inventor of some of the astonishingly complex and
astonishingly efficient machines of modern-times? Does he not spend as
much thought, labour, genius as any sculptor or musician in perfecting
his construction according to his ideal, and is not the construction
when it is done--so finished, so responsive in all its parts, so almost
human--is not that worthy to be called a work of fine art? The answer is
that the inventor has a definite and practical end before him; his ideal
is not _free_; he deserves all credit as the perfector of a particular
instrument for a prescribed function, but an artist, a free follower of
the fine arts, he is not; although we may perhaps have to concede him a
narrow sphere for the play of something like an artistic sense when he
contrives the proportion, arrangement, form or finish of the several
parts of his machine in one way rather than another, not because they
work better so but simply because their look pleases him better.
Fine arts called a kind of play.
Returning from this digression, let us consider one common observation
more on the nature of the fine arts. They are activities, it is said,
which were put forth not because they need but because they like. They
have the activity to spare, and to put it forth in this way pleases
them. Fine art is to mankind what play is to the individual, a free and
arbitrary vent for energy which is not needed to be spent upon tasks
concerned with the conservation, perpetuation or protection of life. To
insist on the superfluous or optional character of the fine arts, to
call them the play or pastime of the human race as distinguished from
its inevitable and sterner tasks, is obviously only to reiterate our
fundamental distinction between the fine arts and the useful or
necessary. But the distinction, as expressed in this particular form,
has been interpreted in a great variety of ways and followed out to an
infinity of conclusions, conclusions regarding both the nature of the
activities themselves and the character and value of their results.
The play idea as worked out by the English associationists.
For instance, starting from this saying that the aesthetic activities
are a kind of play, the English psychology of association goes back to
the spontaneous cries and movements of children, in which their
superfluous energies find a vent. It then enumerates pleasures of which
the human constitution is capable apart from direct advantage or
utility. Such are the primitive or organic pleasures of sight and
hearing, and the secondary or derivative pleasures of association or
unconscious reminiscence and inference that soon become mixed up with
these. Such are also the pleasures derived from following any kind of
mimicry, or representation of things real or like reality. The
association psychology describes the grouping within the mind of
predilections based upon these pleasures; it shows how the growing
organism learns to govern its play, or direct its superfluous energies,
in obedience to such predilections, till in mature individuals, and
still more in mature societies, a highly regulated and accomplished
group of leisure activities are habitually employed in supplying to a
not less highly cultivated group of disinterested sensibilities their
appropriate artistic pleasures. It is by Herbert Spencer that this view
has been most fully and systematically worked out.
By Plato.
Again, in the views of an ancient philosopher, Plato, and a modern poet,
Schiller, the consideration that the artistic activities are in the
nature of play, and the manifestations in which they result independent
of realities and utilities, has led to judgments so differing as the
following. Plato held that the daily realities of things in experience
are not realities, indeed, but only far-off shows or reflections of the
true realities, that is, of certain ideal or essential forms which can
be apprehended as existing by the mind. Holding this, Plato saw in the
works of fine art but the reflections of reflections, the shows of
shows, and depreciated them according to their degree of remoteness from
the ideal, typical or sense-transcending existences. He sets the arts of
medicine, agriculture, shoemaking and the rest above the fine arts,
inasmuch as they produce something serious or useful ([Greek:
spoudaionti]). Fine art, he says, produces nothing useful, and makes
only semblances ([Greek: eidolopiike]), whereas what mechanical art
produces are utilities, and even in the ordinary sense realities
([Greek: autopoietike]).
By Schiller.
In another age, and thinking according to another system, Schiller, so
far from holding thus cheap the kingdom of play and show, regarded his
sovereignty over that kingdom as the noblest prerogative of man.
Schiller wrote his famous _Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man_ in
order to throw into popular currency, and at the same time to modify and
follow up in a particular direction, certain metaphysical doctrines
which had lately been launched upon the schools by Kant. The spirit of
man, said Schiller after Kant, is placed between two worlds, the
physical world or world of sense, and the moral world or world of will.
Both of these are worlds of constraint or necessity. In the sensible
world, the spirit of man submits to constraint from without; in the
moral world, it imposes constraint from within. So far as man yields to
the importunities of sense, in so far he is bound and passive, the
subject of outward shocks and victim of irrational forces. So far as he
asserts himself by the exercise of will, imposing upon sense and outward
things the dominion of the moral law within him, in so far he is free
and active, the rational lord of nature and not her slave. Corresponding
to these two worlds, he has within him two conflicting impulses or
impulsions of his nature, the one driving him towards one way of living,
the other towards another. The one, or sense-impulsion (_Stofftrieb_),
Schiller thinks of as that which enslaves the spirit of man as the
victim of matter, the other or moral impulsion (_Formtrieb_) as that
which enthrones it as the dictator of form. Between the two the
conflict at first seems inveterate. The kingdom of brute nature and
sense, the sphere of man's subjection and passivity, wages war against
the kingdom of will and moral law, the sphere of his activity and
control, and every conquest of the one is an encroachment upon the
other. Is there, then, no hope of truce between the two kingdoms, no
ground where the two contending impulses can be reconciled? Nay, the
answer comes, there is such a hope; such a neutral territory there
exists. Between the passive kingdom of matter and sense, where man is
compelled blindly to feel and be, and the active kingdom of law and
reason, where he is compelled sternly to will and act, there is a
kingdom where both sense and will may have their way, and where man may
give the rein to all his powers. But this middle kingdom does not lie in
the sphere of practical life and conduct. It lies in the sphere of those
activities which neither subserve any necessity of nature nor fulfil any
moral duty. Towards activities of this kind we are driven by a third
impulsion of our nature not less essential to it than the other two, the
impulsion, as Schiller calls it, of Play (_Spieltrieb_). Relatively to
real life and conduct, play is a kind of harmless show; it is that which
we are free to do or leave undone as we please, and which lies alike
outside the sphere of needs and duties. In play we may do as we like,
and no mischief will come of it. In this sphere man may put forth all
his powers without risk of conflict, and may invent activities which
will give a complete ideal satisfaction to the contending faculties of
sense and will at once, to the impulses which bid him feel and enjoy the
shocks of physical and outward things, and the impulse which bids him
master such things, control and regulate them. In play you may impose
upon Matter what Form you choose, and the two will not interfere with
one another or clash. The kingdom of Matter and the kingdom of Form thus
harmonized, thus reconciled by the activities of play and show, will in
other words be the kingdom of the Beautiful. Follow the impulsion of
play, and to the beautiful you will find your road; the activities you
will find yourself putting forth will be the activities of aesthetic
creation--you will have discovered or invented the fine arts.
"Midway"--these are Schiller's own words--"midway between the formidable
kingdom of natural forces and the hallowed kingdom of moral laws, the
impulse of aesthetic creation builds up a third kingdom unperceived, the
gladsome kingdom of play and show, wherein it emancipates man from all
compulsion alike of physical and of moral forces." Schiller, the poet
and enthusiast, thus making his own application of the Kantian
metaphysics, goes on to set forth how the fine arts, or activities of
play and show, are for him the typical, the ideal activities of the
race, since in them alone is it possible for man to put forth his whole,
that is his ideal self. "Only when he plays is man really and truly
man." "Man ought only to play with the beautiful, and he ought to play
with the beautiful only." "Education in taste and beauty has for its
object to train up in the utmost attainable harmony the whole sum of the
powers both of sense and spirit." And the rest of Schiller's argument is
addressed to show how the activities of artistic creation, once
invented, react upon other departments of human life, how the exercise
of the play impulse prepares men for an existence in which the
inevitable collision of the two other impulses shall be softened or
averted more and more. That harmony of the powers which clash so
violently in man's primitive nature, having first been found possible in
the sphere of the fine arts, reflects itself, in his judgment, upon the
whole composition of man, and attunes him, as an aesthetic being, into
new capabilities for the conduct of his social existence.
The strong points of Schiller's theory.
Our reasons for dwelling on this wide and enthusiastic formula of
Schiller's are both its importance in the history of reflection--it
remained, indeed, for nearly a century a formula almost classical--and
the measure of positive value which it still retains. The notion of a
sphere of voluntary activity for the human spirit, in which, under no
compulsion of necessity or conscience, we order matters as we like them
apart from any practical end, seems coextensive with the widest
conception of fine art and the fine arts as they exist in civilized and
developed communities. It insists on and brings into the light the free
or optional character of these activities, as distinguished from others
to which we are compelled by necessity or duty, as well as the fact that
these activities, superfluous as they may be from the points of view of
necessity and of duty, spring nevertheless from an imperious and a
saving instinct of our nature. It does justice to the part which is, or
at any rate may be, filled in the world by pleasures which are apart
from profit, and by delights for the enjoyment of which men cannot
quarrel. It claims the dignity they deserve for those shows and pastimes
in which we have found a way to make permanent all the transitory
delights of life and nature, to turn even our griefs and yearnings, by
their artistic utterance, into sources of appeasing joy, to make amends
to ourselves for the confusion and imperfection of reality by conceiving
and imaging forth the semblances of things clearer and more complete,
since in contriving them we incorporate with the experiences we have had
the better experiences we have dreamed of and longed for.
Its weak points.
One manifestly weak point of Schiller's theory is that though it asserts
that man ought only to play with the beautiful, and that he is his best
or ideal self only when he does so, yet it does not sufficiently
indicate what kinds of play are beautiful nor why we are moved to adopt
them. It does not show how the delights of the eye and spirit in
contemplating forms, colours and movements, of the ear and spirit in
apprehending musical and verbal sounds, or of the whole mind at once in
following the comprehensive current of images called up by poetry--it
does not clearly show how delights like these differ from those yielded
by other kinds of play or pastime, which are by common consent excluded
from the sphere of fine art.
Kinds of play which are not fine art.
The chase, for instance, is a play or pastime which gives scope for any
amount of premeditated skill; it has pleasures, for those who take part
in it, which are in some degree analogous to the pleasures of the
artist; we all know the claims made on behalf of the noble art of
venerie (following true medieval precedent) by the knights and woodmen
of Sir Walter Scott's romances. It is an obvious reply to say that
though the chase is play to us, who in civilized communities follow it
on no plea of necessity, yet to a not remote ancestry it was earnest; in
primitive societies hunting does not belong to the class of optional
activities at all, but is among the most pressing of utilitarian needs.
But this reply loses much of its force since we have learnt how many of
the fine arts, however emancipated from direct utility now, have as a
matter of history been evolved out of activities primarily utilitarian.
It would be more to the point to remark that the pleasures of the
sportsman are the only pleasures arising from the chase; his exertions
afford pain to the victim, and no satisfaction to any class of
recipients but himself; or at least the sympathetic pleasures of the
lookers-on at a hunt or at a battle are hardly to be counted as
pleasures of artistic contemplation. The issue which they witness is a
real issue; the skilled endeavours with which they sympathize are put
forth for a definite practical result, and a result disastrous to one of
the parties concerned.
What then, it may be asked, about athletic games and sports, which hurt
nobody, have no connexion with the chase, and give pleasure to thousands
of spectators? Here the difference is, that the event which excites the
spectator's interest and pleasure at a race or match or athletic contest
is not a wholly unreal or simulated event; it is less real than life,
but it is more real than art. The contest has no momentous practical
consequences, but it is a contest, an [Greek: athlos], all the same, in
which competitors put forth real strength, and one really wins and
others are defeated. Such a struggle, in which the exertions are real
and the issue uncertain, we follow with an excitement and a suspense
different in kind from the feelings with which we contemplate a
fictitious representation. For example, let the reader recall the
feelings with which he may have watched a real fencing bout, and compare
them with those with which he watches the simulated fencing bout in
Shakespeare's _Hamlet_. The instance is a crucial one, because in the
fictitious case the excitement is heightened by the introduction of the
poisoned foil, and by the tremendous consequences which we are aware
will turn, in the representation, on the issue. Yet because the fencing
scene in _Hamlet_ is a representation, and not real, we find ourselves
watching it in a mood quite different from that in which we watch the
most ordinary real fencing-match with vizors and blunt foils; a mood
more exalted, if the representation is good, but amid the aesthetic
emotions of which the fluctuations of strained, if trivial, suspense and
the eagerness of sympathetic participation find no place. "The delight
of tragedy," says Johnson, "proceeds from our consciousness of fiction;
if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more." So
does the peculiar quality of our pleasure in watching the fencing-match
in _Hamlet_, or the wrestling-match in _As You Like It_, depend on our
consciousness of fiction: if we thought the matches real they might
please us still, but please us in a different way. Again, of athletics
in general, they are pursuits to a considerable degree definitely
utilitarian, having for their specific end the training and
strengthening of individual human bodies. Nevertheless, in some systems
the title of fine arts has been consistently claimed, if not for
athletics technically so called, and involving the idea of competition
and defeat, at any rate for gymnastics, regarded simply as a display of
the physical frame of man cultivated by exercise--as, for instance, it
was cultivated by the ancient Greeks--to an ideal perfection of beauty
and strength.
The play theory in the light of anthropological research.
But apart from criticisms like these on the theory of Schiller, the
Kantian doctrine of a metaphysical opposition between the senses and the
reason has for most minds of to-day lost its validity, and with it falls
away Schiller's derivative theory of a _Stofftrieb_ and a _Formtrieb_
contending like enemies for dominion over the human spirit, with a
neutral or reconciling _Spieltrieb_ standing between them. Even taking
the existence of the _Spieltrieb_, or play-impulse, by itself as a plain
and indubitable fact in human nature, the theory that this impulse is
the general or universal source of the artistic activities of the race,
which seemed adequate to thinkers so far apart as Schiller and Herbert
Spencer, is found no longer to hold water. The tendency of recent
thought and study on these subjects has been to abandon the abstract or
dialectical method in favour of the methods of historical and
anthropological inquiry. In the light of these methods it is claimed
that the artistic activities of the race spring in point of fact from no
single source but from a number of different sources. It is admitted
that the play-impulse is one of these, and the allied and overlapping,
but not identical, impulse of mimicry or imitation another. But it is
urged at the same time that these twin impulses, rooted as they both are
among the primordial faculties both of men and animals, are far from
existing merely to provide a vent whereby the superfluous energies of
sentient beings may discharge themselves at pleasure, but are
indispensable utilitarian instincts, by which the young are led to
practise and rehearse in sport those activities the exercise of which in
earnest will be necessary to their preservation in the adult state. (The
researches of Professor Karl Groos in this field seem to be conclusive.)
A third impulse innate in man, though scarcely so primordial as the
other two, and one which the animals cannot share with him, is the
impulse of record or commemoration. Man instinctively desires, alike for
safety, use and pleasure, to perpetuate and hand on the memory of his
deeds and experiences whether by words or by works of his hands
contrived for permanence. This impulse of record is the most stimulating
ally of the impulse of mimicry or imitation, and perhaps a large part of
the arts usually put down as springing from the love of imitation ought
rather to be put down as springing from the commemorative or recording
impulse, using imitation as its necessary means. Granting the existence
in primitive man of these three allied impulses of play, of mimicry, and
of record, it is urged that they are so many distinct though contiguous
sources from which whole groups of the fine arts have sprung, and that
all three in their origin served ends primarily or in great part
utilitarian. Examining any of the rudimentary artistic activities of
primitive man already mentioned: the decoration of the person with
tattooings or strings of shells or teeth or feathers had primarily the
object of attracting or impressing the opposite sex, or terrifying an
enemy, or indicating the tribal relations of the person so adorned; some
of the same purposes were served by the scratches and tufts and markings
on weapons or utensils; the _graffiti_ or outline drawings of animals
incised by cave-dwellers on bones are surmised to have sprung in like
manner from the desire of conveying information, combined, probably,
sometimes with that of obtaining magic power over the things
represented; the erection of memorial shrines and images of all kinds,
from the rudest upwards, had among other purposes the highly practical
one of propitiating the spirits of the departed; and so on through the
whole range of kindred activities. It is contended, next, that such
activities only take on the character of rudimentary fine arts at a
certain stage of their evolution. Before they can assume that character,
they must come under the influence and control of yet another rooted and
imperious impulse in mankind. That is the impulse of emotional
self-expression, the instinct which compels us to seek relief under the
stimulus of pent-up feeling; an instinct, it is added, second only in
power to those which drive us to seek food, shelter, protection from
enemies, and satisfaction for-sexual desires. According to a law of our
constitution, the argument goes on, this need for emotional
self-expression finds itself fully satisfied only by certain modes of
activity; those, namely, which either have in themselves, or impress on
their products, the property of rhythm, that is, of regular interval and
recurrence, flow, order and proportion. Leaping, shouting, and clapping
hands is the human animal's most primitive way of seeking relief under
the pressure of emotion; so soon as one such animal found out that he
both expressed and relieved his emotions best, and communicated them
best to his fellows, when he moved in regular rhythm and shouted in
regular time and with regular changes of pitch, he ceased to be a mere
excited savage and became a primitive dancer, singer, musician--in a
word, artist. So soon as another found himself taking pleasure in
certain qualities of regular interval, pattern and arrangement of lines,
shapes, and colours, apart from all questions of purpose or utility, in
his tattooings and self-adornments, his decoration of tools or weapons
or structures for shelter or commemoration, he in like manner became a
primitive artist in ornamental and imitative design.
The special qualities of pleasure felt and communicated by doing things
in one way rather than another, independently of direct utility, which
we indicated at the outset as characteristic of the whole range of the
fine arts, appear on this showing to be dependent primarily on the
response of our organic sensibilities of nerve and muscle, eye, ear and
brain to the stimulus of rhythm, (using the word in its widest sense)
imparted either to our own actions and utterances or to the works of our
hands. Such pleasures would seem to have been first experienced by man
directly, in the endeavour to find relief with limbs and voice from
states of emotional tension, and then incidentally, as a kind of
by-product arising and affording similar relief in the development of a
wide range of utilitarian activities. Into the nature of those organic
sensibilities, and the grounds of the relief they afford us when
gratified, it is the province of physiological and psychological
aesthetics to inquire: our business here is only with the activities
directed towards their satisfaction and the results of those activities
in the works of fine art. On the whole the account of the matter yielded
by the method of anthropological research, and here very briefly
summarized, may be accepted as answering more closely to the complex
nature of the facts than any of the accounts hitherto current; and so we
may expand our first tentative suggestion of a definition into one more
complete, which from the nature of the case cannot be very brief or
simple and must run somehow thus: _Fine art is everything which man does
or makes in one way rather than another, freely and with premeditation,
in order to express and arouse emotion, in obedience to laws of
rhythmic movement or utterance or regulated design, and with results
independent of direct utility and capable of affording to many permanent
and disinterested delight._