II. _Of the Fine Arts severally._

Modes in which the five greater arts have been classified.

_Architecture_, _sculpture_, _painting_, _music_ and _poetry_ are by

common consent, as has been said at the outset, the five principal or

greater fine arts practised among developed communities of men. It is

possible in thought to group these five arts in as many different orders

as there are among them different kinds of relation or affinity. One

thinker fixes his attention upon one kind of relations as the most

important, and arranges his group accordingly; another upon another; and

each, when he has done so, is very prone to claim for his arrangement

the virtue of being the sole essentially and fundamentally true. For

example, we may ascertain one kind of relations between the arts by

inquiring which is the simplest or most limited in its effects, which

next simplest, which another degree less simple, which least simple or

most complex of them all. This, the relation of progressive complexity

or comprehensiveness between the fine arts, is the relation upon which

Auguste Comte fixed his attention, and it yields in his judgment the

following order:--Architecture lowest in complexity, because both of the

kinds of effects which it produces and of the material conditions and

limitations under which it works; sculpture next; painting third; then

music; and poetry highest, as the most complex or comprehensive art of

all, both in its own special effects and in its resources for ideally

calling up the effects of all the other arts as well as all the

phenomena of nature and experiences of life. A somewhat similar grouping

was adopted, though from the consideration of a wholly different set of

relations, by Hegel. Hegel fixed his attention on the varying relations

borne by the idea, or spiritual element, to the embodiment of the idea,

or material element, in each art. Leaving aside that part of his

doctrine which concerns, not the phenomena of the arts themselves, but

their place in the dialectical world-plan or scheme of the universe,

Hegel said in effect something like this. In certain ages and among

certain races, as in Egypt and Assyria, and again in the Gothic age of

Europe, mankind has only dim ideas for art to express, ideas

insufficiently disengaged and realized, of which the expression cannot

be complete or lucid, but only adumbrated and imperfect; the

characteristic art of those ages is a symbolic art, with its material

element predominating over and keeping down its spiritual; and such a

symbolic art is architecture. In other ages, as in the Greek age, the

ideas of men have come to be definite, disengaged, and clear; the

characteristic art of such an age will be one in which the spiritual and

material elements are in equilibrium, and neither predominates over nor

keeps down the other, but a thoroughly realized idea is expressed in a

thoroughly adequate and lucid form; this is the mode of expression

called classic, and the classic art is sculpture. In other ages, again,

and such are the modern ages of Europe, the idea grows in power and

becomes importunate; the spiritual and material elements are no longer

in equilibrium, but the spiritual element predominates; the

characteristic arts of such an age will be those in which thought,

passion, sentiment, aspiration, emotion, emerge in freedom, dealing with

material form as masters or declining its shackles altogether; this is

the romantic mode of expression, and the romantic arts are painting,

music and poetry. A later systematizer, Lotze, fixed his attention on

the relative degrees of freedom or independence which the several arts

enjoy--their freedom, that is, from the necessity of either imitating

given facts of nature or ministering, as part of their task, to given

practical uses. In his grouping, instead of the order architecture,

sculpture, painting, music, poetry, music comes first, because it has

neither to imitate any natural facts nor to serve any practical end;

architecture next, because, though it is tied to useful ends and

material conditions, yet it is free from the task of imitation, and

pleases the eye in its degree, by pure form, light and shade, and the

rest, as music pleases the ear by pure sound; then, as arts all tied to

the task of imitation, sculpture, painting and poetry, taken in

progressive order according to the progressing comprehensiveness of

their several resources.

Place of the minor or subordinate fine arts.

The thinker on these subjects has, moreover, to consider the enumeration

and classification of the lesser or subordinate fine arts. Whole

clusters or families of these occur to the mind at once; such as

_dancing_, an art subordinate to music, but quite different in kind;

_acting_, an art auxiliary to _poetry_, from which in kind it differs no

less; _eloquence_ in all kinds, so far as it is studied and not merely

spontaneous; and among the arts which fashion or dispose material

objects, _embroidery_ and the weaving of patterns, _pottery_,

_glassmaking_, _goldsmith's work_ and _jewelry_, _joiner's work_,

_gardening_ (according to the claim of some), and a score of other

dexterities and industries which are more than mere dexterities and

industries because they add elements of beauty and pleasure to elements

of serviceableness and use. To decide whether any given one of these has

a right to the title of fine art, and, if so, to which of the greater

fine arts it should be thought of as appended and subordinate, or

between which two of them intermediate, is often no easy task.

No one classification final or sufficient.

The weak point of all classifications of the kind of which we have above

given examples is that each is intended to be final, and to serve

instead of any other. The truth is, that the relations between the

several fine arts are much too complex for any single classification to

bear this character. Every classification of the fine arts must

necessarily be provisional, according to the particular class of

relations which it keeps in view. And for practical purposes it is

requisite to bear in mind not one classification but several. Fixing our

attention, not upon complicated or problematical relations between the

various arts, but only upon their simple and undisputed relations, and

giving the first place in our consideration to the five greater arts of

architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry, we shall find at

least three principal modes in which every fine art either resembles or

differs from the rest.

First classification: the shaping and the speaking arts.

1. _The Shaping and the Speaking Arts_ (_or Arts of Form and Arts of

Utterance, or Arts of Space and Arts of Time)_.--Each of the greater

arts either makes something or not which can be seen and handled. The

arts which make something which can be seen and handled are

architecture, sculpture and painting. In the products or results of

all these arts external matter is in some way or another manually put

together, fashioned or disposed. But music and poetry do not produce

any results of this kind. What music produces is something that can be

heard, and what poetry produces is something that can be either heard

or read--which last is a kind of ideal hearing, having for its avenue

the eye instead of the ear, and for its material, written signs for

words instead of the spoken words themselves. Now what the eye sees

from any one point of view, it sees all at once; in other words, the

parts of anything we see fill or occupy not time but space, and reach

us from various points in space at a single simultaneous perception.

If we are at the proper distance we see at one glance a house from the

ground to the chimneys, a statue from head to foot, and in a picture

at once the foreground and background, and everything that is within

the four corners of the frame. There is, indeed, this distinction to

be drawn, that in walking round or through a temple, church, house or

any other building, new parts and proportions of the building unfold

themselves to view; and the same thing happens in walking round a

statue or turning it on a turntable: so that the spectator, by his own

motions and the time it takes to effect them, can impart to

architecture and sculpture something of the character of time arts.

But their products, as contemplated from any one point of view, are in

themselves solid, stationary and permanent in space. Whereas the parts

of anything we hear, or, reading, can imagine that we hear, fill or

occupy not space at all but time, and can only reach us from various

points in time through a continuous series of perceptions, or, in the

case of reading, of images raised by words in the mind. We have to

wait, in music, while one note follows another in a theme, and one

theme another in a movement; and in poetry, while one line with its

images follows another in a stanza, and one stanza another in a canto,

and so on. It is a convenient form of expressing both aspects of this

difference between the two groups of arts, to say that architecture,

sculpture and painting are arts which give shape to things in space,

or, more briefly, shaping arts; and music and poetry arts which give

utterance to things in time, or, more briefly, speaking arts. These

simple terms of the _shaping_ and the _speaking_ arts (the equivalent

of the Ger. _bildende und redende Kunste_) are not usual in English;

but they seem appropriate and clear; the simplest alternatives for

their use is to speak of the _manual_ and the _vocal_ arts, or the

arts of _space_ and the arts of _time_. This is practically, if not

logically, the most substantial and vital distinction upon which a

classification of the fine arts can be based. The arts which surround

us in space with stationary effects for the eye, as the house we live

in, the pictures on the walls, the marble figure in the vestibule, are

stationary, hold a different kind of place in our experience--not a

greater or a higher place, but essentially a different place--from the

arts which provide us with transitory effects in time, effects capable

of being awakened for the ear or mind at any moment, as a symphony is

awakened by playing and an ode by reading, but lying in abeyance until

we bid that moment come, and passing away when the performance or the

reading is over. Such, indeed, is the practical force of the

distinction that in modern usage the expression fine art, or even art,

is often used by itself in a sense which tacitly excludes music and

poetry, and signifies the group of manual or shaping arts alone.

Intermediate class of arts of motion.

As between three of the five greater arts and the other two, the

distinction on which we are now dwelling is complete. Buildings,

statues, pictures, belong strictly to sight and space; to time and to

hearing, real through the ear, or ideal through the mind in reading,

belong music and poetry. Among the lesser or subordinate arts,

however, there are several in which this distinction finds no place,

and which produce, in space and time at once, effects midway between

the stationary or stable, and the transitory or fleeting. Such is the

_dramatic_ art, in which the actor makes with his actions and

gestures, or several actors make with the combination of their

different actions and gestures, a kind of shifting picture, which

appeals to the eyes of the witnesses while the sung or spoken words of

the drama appeal to their ears; thus making of them spectators and

auditors at once, and associating with the pure time art of words the

mixed time-and-space art of bodily movements. As all movement

whatsoever is necessarily movement through space, and takes time to

happen, so every other fine art which is wholly or in part an act of

movement partakes in like manner of this double character. Along with

acting thus comes _dancing_. Dancing, when it is of the mimic

character, may itself be a kind of acting; historically, indeed, the

dancer's art was the parent of the actor's; whether apart from or in

conjunction with the mimic element, dancing is an art in which bodily

movements obey, accompany, and, as it were, express or accentuate in

space the time effects of music. _Eloquence_ or oratory in like

manner, so far as its power depends on studied and premeditated

gesture, is also an art which to some extent enforces its primary

appeal through the ear in time by a secondary appeal through the eye

in space. So much for the first distinction, that between the shaping

or space arts and the speaking or time arts, with the intermediate and

subordinate class of arts which, like acting, dancing, oratory, add to

the pure time element a mixed time-and-space element. These last can

hardly be called shaping arts, because it is his own person, and not

anything outside himself, which the actor, the dancer, the orator

disposes or adjusts; they may perhaps best be called arts of motion,

or moving arts.

Second classification: the imitative and non-imitative arts.

2. _The Imitative and the Non-Imitative Arts._--Each art either does

or does not represent or imitate something which exists already in

nature. Of the five greater fine arts, those which thus represent

objects existing in nature are sculpture, painting and poetry. Those

which do not represent anything so existing are music and

architecture. On this principle we get a new grouping. Two shaping or

space arts and one speaking or time art now form the imitative group

of sculpture, painting and poetry; while one space art and one time

art form the non-imitative group of music and architecture. The mixed

space-and-time arts of the actor, and of the dancer, so far as he or

she is also a mimic, belong, of course, by their very name and nature,

to the imitative class.

The imitative functions of art according to Aristotle.

It was the imitative character of the fine arts which chiefly occupied

the attention of Aristotle. But in order to understand the art

theories of Aristotle it is necessary to bear in mind the very

different meanings which the idea of imitation bore to his mind and

bears to ours. For Aristotle the idea of imitation or representation

(_mimesis_) was extended so as to denote the expressing, evoking or

making manifest of anything whatever, whether material objects or

ideas or feelings. Music and dancing, by which utterance or expression

is given to emotions that may be quite detached from all definite

ideas or images, are thus for him varieties of imitation. He says,

indeed, _most_ music and dancing, as if he was aware that there were

exceptions, but he does not indicate what the exceptions are; and

under the head of imitative music, he distinctly reckons some kinds of

instrumental music without words. But in our own more restricted

usage, to imitate means to copy, mimic or represent some existing

phenomenon, some definite reality of experience; and we can only call

those imitative arts which bring before us such things, either

directly by showing us their actual likeness, as sculpture does in

solid form, and as painting does by means of lines and colours on a

plane surface, or else indirectly, by calling up ideas or images of

them in the mind, as poetry and literature do by means of words. It is

by a stretch of ordinary usage that we apply the word imitation even

to this last way of representing things; since words are no true

likeness of, but only customary signs for, the thing they represent.

And those arts we cannot call imitative at all, which by combinations

of abstract sound or form express and arouse emotions unattended by

the recognizable likeness, idea or image of any definite thing.

Non-imitative character of music.

Now the emotions of music when music goes along with words, whether in

the shape of actual song or even of the instrumental accompaniment of

song, are no doubt in a certain sense attended with definite ideas;

those, namely, which are expressed by the words themselves. But the

same ideas would be conveyed to the mind equally well by the same

words if they were simply spoken. What the music contributes is a

special element of its own, an element of pure emotion, aroused

through the sense of hearing, which heightens the effect of the words

upon the feelings without helping to elucidate them for the

understanding. Nay, it is well known that a song well sung produces

its intended effect upon the feelings almost as fully though we fail

to catch the words or are ignorant of the language to which they

belong. Thus the view of Aristotle cannot be defended on the ground

that he was familiar with music only in an elementary form, and

principally as the direct accompaniment of words, and that in his day

the modern development of the art, as an art for building up

constructions of independent sound, vast and intricate fabrics of

melody and harmony detached from words, was a thing not yet imagined.

That is perfectly true; the immense technical and intellectual

development of music, both in its resources and its capacities, is an

achievement of the modern world; but the essential character of

musical sound is the same in its most elementary as in its most

complicated stage. Its privilege is to give delight, not by

communicating definite ideas, or calling up particular images, but by

appealing to certain organic sensibilities in our nerves of hearing,

and through such appeal expressing on the one part and arousing on the

other a unique kind of emotion. The emotion caused by music may be

altogether independent of any ideas conveyable by words. Or it may

serve to intensify and enforce other emotions arising at the same time

in connexion with the ideas conveyed by words; and it was one of the

contentions of Richard Wagner that in the former phase the art is now

exhausted, and that only in the latter are new conquests in store for

it. But in either case the music is the music, and _is like nothing

else_; it is no representation or similitude of anything whatsoever.

An objection and its answer.

But does not instrumental music, it will be said, sometimes really

imitate the sounds of nature, as the piping of birds, the whispering

of woods, the moaning of storms or explosion of thunder; or does it

not, at any rate, suggest these things by resemblances so close that

they almost amount in the strict sense to imitation? Occasionally, it

is true, music does allow itself these playful excursions into a

region of quasi-imitation or mimicry. It modifies the character of its

abstract sounds into something, so to speak, more concrete, and,

instead of sensations which are like nothing else, affords us

sensations which recognizably resemble those we receive from some of

the sounds of nature. But such excursions are hazardous, and to make

them often is the surest proof of vulgarity in a musician. Neither are

the successful effects of the great composers in evoking ideas of

particular natural phenomena generally in the nature of real

imitations or representations; although passages such as the notes of

the dove and nightingale in Haydn's _Creation_, and of the cuckoo in

Beethoven's _Pastoral Symphony_, the bleating of the sheep in the _Don

Quixote_ symphony of Richard Strauss, must be acknowledged to be

exceptions. Again, it is a recognized fact concerning the effect of

instrumental music on those of its hearers who try to translate such

effect into words, that they will all find themselves in tolerable

agreement as to the meaning of any passage so long as they only

attempt to describe it in terms of vague emotion, and to say such and

such a passage expresses, as the case may be, dejection or triumph,

effort or the relaxation of effort, eagerness or languor, suspense or

fruition, anguish or glee. But their agreement comes to an end the

moment they begin to associate, in their interpretation, definite

ideas with these vague emotions; then we find that what suggests in

idea to one hearer the vicissitudes of war will suggest to another, or

to the same at another time, the vicissitudes of love, to another

those of spiritual yearning and aspiration, to another, it may be,

those of changeful travel by forest, field and ocean, to another those

of life's practical struggle and ambition. The infinite variety of

ideas which may thus be called up in different minds by the same

strain of music is proof enough that the music is not _like_ any

particular thing. The torrent of varied and entrancing emotion which

it pours along the heart, emotion latent and undivined until the spell

of sound begins, that is music's achievement and its secret. It is

this effect, whether coupled or not with a trained intellectual

recognition of the highly abstract and elaborate nature of the laws of

the relation, succession and combinations of sounds on which the

effect depends, that has caused some thinkers, with Schopenhauer at

their head, to find in music the nearest approach we have to a voice

from behind the veil, a universal voice expressing the central purpose

and deepest essence of things, unconfused by fleeting actualities or

by the distracting duty of calling up images of particular and

perishable phenomena. "Music," in Schopenhauer's own words, "reveals

the innermost essential being of the world, and expresses the highest

wisdom in a language the reason does not understand."

Definition of music.

Aristotle endeavoured to frame a classification of the arts, in their

several applications and developments, on two grounds--the nature of

the objects imitated by each, and the means or instruments employed in

the imitation. But in the case of music, as it exists in the modern

world, the first part of this endeavour falls to the ground, because

the object imitated has, in the sense in which we now use the word

imitation, no existence. The means employed by music are successions

and combinations of vocal or instrumental sounds regulated according

to the three conditions of time and pitch (which together make up

melody) and harmony, or the relations of different strains of time and

tone cooperant but not parallel. With these means, music either

creates her independent constructions, or else accompanies, adorns,

enforces the imitative art of speech--but herself imitates not; and

may be best defined simply as _a speaking or time art, of which the

business is to express and arouse emotion by successions and

combinations of regulated sound_.

Non-imitative character of architecture.

That which music is thus among the speaking or time-arts, architecture

is among the shaping or space-arts. As music appeals to our faculties

for taking pleasure in non-imitative combinations of transitory sound,

so architecture appeals to our faculties for taking pleasure in

non-imitative combinations of stationary mass. Corresponding to the

system of ear-effects or combinations of time, tone and harmony with

which music works, architecture works with a system of eye-effects or

combinations of mass, contour, light and shade; colour, proportion,

interval, alternation of plain and decorated parts, regularity and

variety in regularity, apparent stability, vastness, appropriateness

and the rest. Only the materials of architecture are not volatile and

intangible like sound, but solid timber, brick, stone, metal and

mortar, and the laws of weight and force according to which these

materials have to be combined are much more severe and cramping than

the laws of melody and harmony which regulate the combinations of

music. The architect is further subject, unlike the musician, to the

dictates and precise prescriptions of utility. Even in structures

raised for purposes not of everyday use and necessity, but of

commemoration or worship, the rules for such commemoration and such

worship have prescribed a more or less fixed arrangement and

proportion of the parts or members, whether in the Egyptian temple or

temple-tomb, the Greek temple or heroon, or in the churches of the

middle ages and Renaissance in the West.

Analogies of architecture and music.

Hence the effects of architecture are necessarily less full of

various, rapturous and unforeseen enchantment than the effects of

music. Yet for those who possess sensibility to the pleasures of the

eye and the perfections of shaping art, the architecture of the great

ages has yielded combinations which, so far as comparison is

permissible between things unlike in their materials, fall little

short of the achievements of music in those kinds of excellence which

are common to them both. In the virtues of lucidity, of just

proportion and organic interdependence of the several parts or

members, in the mathematic subtlety of their mutual relations, and of

the transitions from one part or member to another, in purity and

finish of individual forms, in the character of one thing growing

naturally out of another and everything serving to complete the

whole--in these qualities, no musical combination can well surpass a

typical Doric temple such as the Parthenon at Athens. None, again, can

well surpass some of the great cathedrals of the middle ages in the

qualities of sublimity, of complexity, in the power both of expressing

and suggesting spiritual aspiration, in the invention of intricate

developments and ramifications about a central plan, in the union of

majesty in the main conception with fertility of adornment in detail.

In fancifulness, in the unexpected, in capricious and far-sought

opulence, in filling the mind with mingled enchantments of east and

west and south and north, music can hardly do more than a building

like St Mark's at Venice does with its blending of Byzantine elements,

Italian elements, Gothic elements, each carried to the utmost pitch of

elaboration and each enriched with a hundred caprices of ornament, but

all working together, all in obedience to a law, and "all beginning

and ending with the Cross."

Exceptional and limited admission of imitative forms in architecture.

In the case of architecture, however, as in the case of music, the

non-imitative character must not be stated quite without exception or

reserve. There have been styles of architecture in which forms

suggesting or imitating natural or other phenomena have held a place

among the abstract forms proper to the art. Often the mode of such

suggestions is rather symbolical to the mind than really imitative to

the eye; as when the number and relations of the heavenly planets were

imaged by that race of astronomers, the Babylonians, in the seven

concentric walls of their great temple, and in many other

architectural constructions; or as when the shape of the cross was

adopted, with innumerable slight varieties and modifications, for the

ground plan of the churches of Christendom. Passing to examples of

imitation more properly so called, it may be true, and was, at any

rate, long believed, that the aisles of Gothic churches, when once the

use of the pointed arch had been evolved as a principle of

construction, were partly designed to evoke the idea of the natural

aisles of the forest, and that the upsoaring forest trunks and

meeting branches were more or less consciously imaged in their piers

and vaultings. In the temple-palaces of Egypt, one of the regular

architectural members, the sustaining pier, is often systematically

wrought in the actual likeness of a conventionalized cluster of lotus

stems, with lotus flowers for the capital. When we come to the

fashion, not rare in Greek architecture, of carving this same

sustaining member, the column, in complete human likeness, and

employing caryatids, canephori, atlases or the like, to support the

entablature of a building, it then becomes difficult to say whether we

have to do with a work of architecture or of sculpture. The case, at

any rate, is different from that in which the sculptor is called in to

supply surface decoration to the various members of a building, or to

fill with the products of his own art spaces in the building specially

contrived and left vacant for that purpose. When the imitative feature

is in itself an indispensable member of the architectural

construction, to architecture rather than sculpture we shall probably

do best to assign it.

Definition of architecture.

Defining architecture, then (apart from its utility, which for the

present we leave out of consideration), as _a shaping art, of which

the function is to express and arouse emotion by combinations of

ordered and decorated mass_, we pass from the characteristics of the

non-imitative to those of the imitative group of arts, namely

sculpture, painting and poetry.

The imitative arts are arts of record using imitation as their means.

If we keep in mind the source and origin of these arts, we must

remember what has already been observed, that they spring by no means

from man's love of imitation alone, but from his desire to record and

commemorate experience, using the faculty of imitation as his means.

Mnemosyne (Memory) was in Greek tradition the mother of the Muses;

imitation, in the sense above defined, is but their instrument. Hence

we might think "arts of record" a better name for this group than arts

of imitation. The answer is--but a large part of pure architecture is

also commemorative; from the pyramids and obelisks of Egypt down there

are many monuments in which the impulse of men to perpetuate their own

or others' memories has worked without any aid of imitation. Hence as

the definition of a class of arts contrasted with architecture and

music the name "arts of record" would fail; and we have to fall back

on the current and established name of the "imitative arts." In

considering them we cannot do better than follow that Aristotelian

division which describes each art according, first, to the objects

which it imitates, and, secondly, to the means it employs.

Sculpture as an imitative art.

Taking sculpture first, as imitating a smaller range of objects than

the other two, and imitating them more completely: sculpture may have

for the objects of its imitation the shapes of whatever things possess

length, breadth and magnitude. For its means or instruments it has

solid form, which the sculptor either carves out of a hard substance,

as in the case of wood and stone, or models in a yielding substance,

as in the case of clay and wax, or casts in a dissolved or molten

substance, as in the case of plaster and of metal in certain uses, or

beats, draws or chases in a malleable and ductile substance, as in the

case of metal in other uses, or stamps from dies or moulds, a method

sometimes used in all soft or fusible materials. Thus a statue or

statuette may either be carved straight out of a block of stone or

wood, or first modelled in clay or wax, then moulded in plaster or

some equivalent material, and then carved in stone or cast in bronze.

A gem is wrought in stone by cutting and grinding. Figures in

jeweller's work are wrought by beating and chasing; a medallion by

beating and chasing or else by stamping from a die; a coin by stamping

from a die; and so forth. The process of modelling (Gr. [Greek:

plattein]) in a soft substance being regarded as the typical process

of the sculptor, the name _plastic art_ has been given to his

operations in general.

Sculpture in the round and in relief.

In general terms, the task of sculpture is to imitate solid form with

solid form. But sculptured form may be either completely or

incompletely solid. Sculpture in completely solid form exactly

reproduces, whether on the original or on a different scale, the

relations or proportions of the object imitated in the three

dimensions of length, breadth and depth or thickness. Sculpture in

incompletely solid form reproduces the proportions of the objects with

exactness only so far as concerns two of its dimensions, namely, those

of length and breadth; while the third dimension, that of depth or

thickness, it reproduces in a diminished proportion, leaving it to the

eye to infer, from the partial degree of projection given to the work,

the full projection of the object imitated. The former, or completely

solid kind of sculpture, is called sculpture in the round; its works

stand free, and can be walked round and seen from all points. The

latter, or incompletely solid kind of sculpture, is called sculpture

in relief; its works do not stand free, but are engaged in or attached

to a background, and can only be seen from in front. According, in the

latter kind of sculpture, to its degree of projection from the

background, a work is said to be in high or in low relief. Sculpture

in the round and sculpture in relief are alike in this, that the

properties of objects which they imitate are their external forms as

defined by their outlines--that is, by the boundaries and

circumscriptions of their masses--and their light and shade--the

lights and shadows, that is, which diversify the curved surfaces of

the masses in consequence of their alternations and gradations of

projection and recession. But the two kinds of sculpture differ in

this. A work of sculpture in the round imitates the whole of the

outlines by which the object imitated is circumscribed in the three

dimensions of space, and presents to the eye, as the object itself

would do, a new outline succeeding the last every moment as you walk

round it. Whereas a work of sculpture in relief imitates only one

outline of any object; it takes, so to speak, a section of the object

as seen from a particular point, and traces on the background the

boundary-line of that particular section, merely suggesting, by

modelling the surface within such boundary according to a regular, but

a diminished, ratio of projection, the other outlines which the object

would present if seen from all sides successively.

Subjects proper for sculpture in the round.

As sculpture in the round reproduces the real relations of a solid

object in space, it follows that the only kind of object which it can

reproduce with pleasurable effect according to the laws of regulated

or rhythmical design must be one not too vast or complicated, one that

can afford to be detached and isolated from its surroundings, and of

which all the parts can easily be perceived and apprehended in their

organic relations. Further, it will need to be an object interesting

enough to mankind in general to make them take delight in seeing it

reproduced with all its parts in complete imitation. And again, it

must be such that some considerable part of the interest lies in those

particular properties of outline, play of surface, and light and shade

which it is the special function of sculpture to reproduce. Thus a

sculptured representation in the round, say, of a mountain with cities

on it, would hardly be a sculpture at all; it could only be a model,

and as a model might have value; but value as a work of fine art it

could not have, because the object imitated would lack organic

definiteness and completeness; it would lack universality of interest,

and of the interest which it did possess, a very inconsiderable part

would depend upon its properties of outline, surface, and light and

shade. Obviously there is no kind of object in the world that so well

unites the required conditions for pleasurable imitation in sculpture

as the human body. It is at once the most complete of organisms, and

the shape of all others the most subtle as well as the most

intelligible in its outlines; the most habitually detached in active

or stationary freedom; the most interesting to mankind, because its

own; the richest in those particular effects, contours and

modulations, contrasts, harmonies and transitions of modelled surface

and circumscribing line, which it is the prerogative of sculpture to

imitate. Accordingly the object of imitation for this art is

pre-eminently the body of man or woman. That it has not been for the

sake of representing men and women as such, but for the sake of

representing gods in the likeness of men and women, that the human

form has been most enthusiastically studied, does not affect this fact

in the theory of the art, though it is a consideration of great

importance in its history. Besides the human form, sculpture may

imitate the forms of those of the lower animals whose physical

endowments have something of a kindred perfection, with other natural

or artificial objects as may be needed merely by way of accessory or

symbol. The body must for the purposes of this art be divested of

covering, or covered only with such tissues as reveal, translate or

play about without concealing it. Chiefly in lands and ages where

climate and social use have given the sculptor the opportunity of

studying human forms so draped or undraped has this art attained

perfection, and become exemplary and enviable to that of other races.

Subjects proper for sculpture in relief.

Relief sculpture is more closely connected with architecture than the

other kind, and indeed is commonly used in subordination to it. But if

its task is thus somewhat different from that of sculpture in the

round, its principal objects of imitation are the same. The human body

remains the principal theme of the sculptor in relief; but the nature

of his art allows, and sometimes compels, him to include other objects

in the range of his imitation. As he has not to represent the real

depth or projection of things, but only to suggest them according to a

ratio which he may fix himself, so he can introduce into the third or

depth dimension, thus arbitrarily reduced, a multitude of objects for

which the sculptor in the round, having to observe the real ratio of

the three dimensions, has no room. He cam place one figure in slightly

raised outline emerging from behind the more fully raised outline of

another, and by the same system can add to his representation rocks,

trees, nay mountains and cities and birds on the wing. But the more he

uses this liberty the less will he be truly a sculptor. Solid

modelling, and real light and shade, are the special means or

instrument of effect which the sculptor alone among imitative artists

enjoys. Single outlines and contours, the choice of one particular

section and the tracing of its circumscription, are means which the

sculptor enjoys in common with the painter or draughtsman. And indeed,

when we consider works executed wholly or in part in very low relief,

whether Assyrian battle-pieces and hunting-pieces in alabaster or

bronze, or the backgrounds carved in bronze, marble or wood by the

Italian sculptors who followed the example set by Ghiberti at the

Renaissance, we shall see that the principle of such work is not the

principle of sculpture at all. Its effect depends little on qualities

of surface-light and shadow, and mainly on qualities of contour, as

traced by a slight line of shadow on the side away from the light, and

a slight line of light on the side next to it. And we may fairly

hesitate whether we shall rank the artist who works on this principle,

which is properly a graphic rather than a plastic principle, among

sculptors or among draughtsmen. The above are cases in which the

relief sculptor exercises his liberty in the introduction of other

objects besides human figures into his sculptured compositions. But

there is another kind of relief sculpture in which the artist has less

choice. That is, the kind in which the sculptor is called in to

decorate with carved work parts of an architectural construction which

are not adapted for the introduction of figure subjects, or for their

introduction only as features in a scheme of ornament that comprises

many other elements. To this head belongs most of the carving of

capitals, mouldings, friezes (except the friezes of Greek temples),

bands, cornices, and, in the Gothic style, of doorway arches, niches,

canopies, pinnacles, brackets, spandrels and the thousand members and

parts of members which that style so exquisitely adorned with true or

conventionalized imitations of natural forms. This is no doubt a

subordinate function of the art; and it is impossible, as we have seen

already, to find a precise line of demarcation between carving, in

this decorative use, which is properly sculpture, and that which

belongs properly to architecture.

Definition of sculpture.

Leaving such discussions, we may content ourselves with the definition

of sculpture as _a shaping art, of which the business is to express

and arouse emotion by the imitation of natural objects, and

principally the human body, in solid form, reproducing either their

true proportions in three dimensions, or their proportions in the two

dimensions of length and breadth only, with a diminished proportion in

the third dimension of depth or thickness._

Painting as an imitative art.

In considering bas-relief as a form of sculpture, we have found

ourselves approaching the confines of the second of the shaping

imitative arts, the graphic art or art of painting. Painting, as to

its means or instruments of imitation, dispenses with the third

dimension altogether. It imitates natural objects by representing them

as they are represented on the retina of the eye itself, simply as an

assemblage of variously shaped and variously shaded patches of colour

on a flat surface. Painting does not reproduce the third dimension of

reality by any third dimension of its own whatever; but leaves the eye

to infer the solidity of objects, their recession and projection,

their nearness and remoteness, by the same perspective signs by which

it also infers those facts in nature, namely, by the direction of

their several boundary lines, the incidence and distribution of their

lights and shadows, the strength or faintness of their tones of

colour.

Range of objects imitable by painting.

Hence this art has an infinitely greater range and freedom than any

form of sculpture. Near and far is all the same to it, and whatever

comes into the field of vision can come also into the field of a

picture; trees as well as persons, and clouds as well as trees, and

stars as well as clouds; the remotest mountain snows, as well as the

violet of the foreground, and far-off multitudes of people as well as

one or two near the eye. Whatever any man has seen, or can imagine

himself as seeing, that he can also fix by painting, subject only to

one great limitation,--that of the range of brightness which he is

able to attain in imitating natural colour illuminated by light. In

this particular his art can but correspond according to a greatly

diminished ratio with the effects of nature. But excepting this it can

do for the eye almost all that nature herself does; or at least all

that nature would do if man had only one eye since the three

dimensions of space produce upon our binocular machinery of vision a

particular stereoscopic effect of which a picture, with its two

dimensions only, is incapable. The range of the art being thus almost

unbounded, its selections have naturally been dictated by the varying

interest felt in this or that subject of representation by the

societies among whom the art has at various times been practised. As

in sculpture, so in painting, the human form has always held the first

place. For the painter, the intervention of costume between man and

his environment is not a misfortune in the same degree as it is for

the sculptor. For him, clothes of whatever fashion or amplitude have

their own charm; they serve to diversify the aspect of the world, and

to express the characters and stations, if not the physical frames, of

his personages; and he is as happy or happier among the brocades of

Venice as among the bare limbs of the Spartan palaestra. Along with

man, there come into painting all animals and vegetation, all man's

furniture and belongings, his dwelling-places, fields and landscape;

and in modern times also landscape and nature for their own sakes,

skies, seas, mountains and wildernesses apart from man.

The chief forms or modes of painting: line, light-and-shade and

colour.

Besides the two questions about any art, what objects does it imitate,

and by the use of what means or instruments, Aristotle proposes (in

the case of poetry) the further question, which of several possible

forms does the imitation in any given case assume? We may transfer

very nearly the same inquiry to painting, and may ask, concerning any

painter, according to which of three possible systems he works. The

three possible systems are (1) that which attends principally to the

configuration and relations of natural objects as indicated by the

direction of their boundaries, for defining which there is a

convention in universal use, the convention, that is, of line; this

may be called for short the system of _line_; (2) that which attends

chiefly to their configuration and relations as indicated by the

incidence and distribution of their lights and shadows--this is the

system of _light-and-shade_ or _chiaroscuro_; and (3) that which

attends chiefly, not to their configuration at all, but to the

distribution, qualities and relations of local colours upon their

surface--this is the system of _colour_. It is not possible for a

painter to imitate natural objects to the eye at all without either

defining their boundaries by outlines, or suggesting the shape of

their masses by juxtapositions of light and dark or of local colours.

In the complete art of painting, of course, all three methods are

employed at once. But in what is known as outline drawing and outline

engraving, one of the three methods only is employed, line; in

monochrome pictures, and in shaded drawings and engravings, two only,

line with light-and-shade; and in the various shadeless forms of

decorative painting and colour-printing, two only, line with colour.

Even in the most accomplished examples of the complete art of

painting, as was pointed out by Ruskin, we find that there almost

always prevails a predilection for some one of these three parts of

painting over the other two. Thus among the mature Italians of the

Renaissance, Titian is above all things a painter in colour,

Michelangelo in line, Leonardo in light-and-shade. Many academic

painters in their day tried to combine the three methods in equal

balance; to the impetuous spirit of the great Venetian, Tintoretto, it

was alone given to make the attempt with a great measure of success. A

great part of the effort of modern painting has been to get rid of the

linear convention altogether, to banish line and develop the resources

of the oil medium in imitating on canvas, more strictly than the early

masters attempted, the actual appearance of things on the retina as an

assemblage of coloured streaks and patches modified and toned in the

play of light-and-shade and atmosphere.

Technical varieties of the painter's craft.

It remains to consider, for the purpose of our classification, what

are the technical varieties of the painter's craft. Since we gave the

generic name of painting to all imitation of natural objects by the

assemblage of lines, colours and lights and darks on a single plane,

we must logically include as varieties of painting not only the

ordinary crafts of spreading or laying pictures on an opaque surface

in fresco, oil, distemper or water-colour, but also the craft of

arranging a picture to be seen by the transmission of light through a

transparent substance, in glass painting; the craft of fitting

together a multitude of solid cubes or cylinders so that their united

surface forms a picture to the eye, as in mosaic; the craft of

spreading vitreous colours in a state of fusion so that they form a

picture when hardened, as in enamel; and even, it would seem, the

crafts of weaving, tapestry, and embroidery, since these also yield to

the eye a plane surface figured in imitation of nature. As drawing we

must also count incised or engraved work of all kinds representing

merely the outlines of objects and not their modellings, as for

instance the _graffiti_ on Greek and Etruscan mirror-backs and

dressing-cases; while raised work in low relief, in which outlines are

plainly marked and modellings neglected, furnishes, as we have seen, a

doubtful class between sculpture and painting. In all figures that are

first modelled in the solid and then variously coloured, sculpture and

painting bear a common share; and by far the greater part both of

ancient and medieval statuary was in fact tinted so as to imitate or

at least suggest the colours of life. But as the special

characteristic of sculpture, solidity in the third dimension, is in

these cases present, it is to that art and not to painting that we

shall still ascribe the resulting work.

Definition of painting.

With these indications we may leave the art of painting defined in

general terms as a _shaping or space art, of which the business is to

express and arouse emotion by the imitation of all kinds of natural

objects, reproducing on a plane surface the relations of their

boundary lines, lights and shadows, or colours, or all three of these

appearances together_.

Poetry as an imitative art.

The next and last of the imitative arts is the speaking art of poetry.

The transition from sculpture and painting to poetry is, from the

point of view not of our present but of our first division among the

fine arts, abrupt and absolute. It is a transition from space into

time, from the sphere of material forms to the sphere of immaterial

images. Following Aristotle's method, we may define the objects of

poetry's imitation or evocation, as everything of which the idea or

image can be called up by words, that is, every force and phenomenon

of nature, every operation and result of art, every fact of life and

history, or every imagination of such a fact, every thought and

feeling of the human spirit, for which mankind in the course of its

long evolution has been able to create in speech an explicit and

appropriate sign. The means or instruments of poetry's imitation are

these verbal signs or words, arranged in lines, strophes or stanzas,

so that their sounds have some of the regulated qualities and direct

emotional effect of music.

The chief forms or modes of poetry.

The three chief modes or forms of the imitation may still be defined

as they were defined by Aristotle himself. First comes the _epic_ or

narrative form, in which the poet speaks alternately for himself and

his characters, now describing their situations and feelings in his

own words, and anon making each of them speak in the first person for

himself. Second comes the _lyric_ form, in which the poet speaks in

his own name exclusively, and gives expression to sentiments which are

purely personal. Third comes the _dramatic_ form, in which the poet

does not speak for himself at all, but only puts into the mouths of

each of his personages successively such discourse as he thinks

appropriate to the part. The last of these three forms of poetry, the

dramatic, calls, if it is merely read, on the imagination of the

reader to fill up those circumstances of situation, action and the

rest, which in the first or epic form are supplied by the narrative

between the speeches, and for which in the lyric or personal form

there is no occasion. To avoid making this call upon the imagination,

to bring home its effects with full vividness, dramatic poetry has to

call in the aid of several subordinate arts, the shaping or space art

of the scene-painter, the mixed time and space arts of the actor and

the dancer. Occasionally also, or in the case of opera throughout,

dramatic poetry heightens the emotional effect of its words with

music. A play or drama is thus, as performed upon the theatre, not a

poem merely, but a poem accompanied, interpreted, completed and

brought several degrees nearer to reality by a combination of

auxiliary effects of the other arts. Besides the narrative, the lyric

and dramatic forms of poetry, the _didactic_, that is the teaching or

expository form, has usually been recognized as a fourth. Aristotle

refused so to recognize it, regarding a didactic poem in the light not

so much of a poem as of a useful treatise. But from the _Works and

Days_ down to the _Loves of the Plants_ there has been too much

literature produced in this form for us to follow Aristotle here. We

shall do better to regard didactic poetry as a variety corresponding,

among the speaking arts, to architecture and the other manual arts of

which the first purpose is use, but which are capable of accompanying

and adorning use by a pleasurable appeal to the emotions.

Definition of poetry.

We shall hardly make our definition of poetry, considered as an

imitative art, too extended if we say that it is _a speaking or time

art, of which the business is to express and arouse emotion by

imitating or evoking all or any of the phenomena of life and nature by

means of words arranged with musical regularity_.

Relation of poetry as an Imitative art to painting and sculpture.

Neither the varieties of poetical form, however, nor the modes in

which the several forms have been mixed up and interchanged--as such

mixture and interchange are implied, for instance, by the very title

of a group of Robert Browning's poems, the _Dramatic Lyrics_,--the

observation of neither of these things concerns us here so much as the

observation of the relations of poetry in general, as an art of

representation or imitation, to the other arts of imitation, painting

and sculpture. Verbal signs have been invented for innumerable things

which cannot be imitated or represented at all either in solid form or

upon a coloured surface. You cannot carve or paint a sigh, or the

feeling which finds utterance in a sigh; you can only suggest the idea

of the feeling, and that in a somewhat imperfect and uncertain way, by

representing the physical aspect of a person in the act of breathing

the sigh. Similarly you cannot carve or paint any movement, but only

figures or groups in which the movement is represented as arrested in

some particular point of time; nor any abstract idea, but only figures

or groups in which the abstract idea, as for example release,

captivity, mercy, is symbolized in the concrete shape of allegorical

or illustrative figures. The whole field of thought, of propositions,

arguments, injunctions and exhortations is open to poetry but closed

to sculpture and painting. Poetry, by its command over the regions of

the understanding, of abstraction, of the movement and succession of

things in time, by its power of instantaneously associating one image

with another from the remotest regions of the mind, by its names for

every shade of feeling and experience, exercises a sovereignty a

hundred times more extended than that of either of the two arts of

manual imitation. But, on the other hand, words do not as a rule bear

any sensible resemblance to the things of which they are the signs.

There are few things that words do not stand for or cannot call up;

but they stand for things symbolically and at second hand, and call

them up only in idea, and not in actual presentment to the senses. In

strictness, the business of poetry should not be called imitation at

all, but rather evocation. The strength of painting and sculpture lies

in this, that though there are countless phenomena which they cannot

represent at all, and countless more which they can only represent by

symbolism and suggestion more or less ambiguous, yet there are a few

which each can represent more fully and directly than poetry can

represent any thing at all. These are, for sculpture, the forms or

configurations of things, which that art represents directly to the

senses both of sight and touch; and for painting the forms and colours

of things and their relations to each other in space, air and light,

which the art represents to the sense of sight, directly so far as

regards surface appearance, and indirectly so far as regards solidity.

For many delicate qualities and differences in these visible relations

of things there are no words at all--the vocabulary of colours, for

instance, is in all languages surprisingly scanty and primitive. And

those visible qualities, for which words exist, the words still call

up indistinctly and at second hand. Poetry is almost as powerless to

bring before the mind's eye with precision a particular shade of red

or blue, a particular linear arrangement or harmony of colour-tones,

as sculpture is to relate a continuous experience, or painting to

enforce an exhortation or embellish an abstract proposition. The wise

poet, as has been justly remarked, when he wants to produce a vivid

impression of a visible thing, does not attempt to catalogue or

describe its stationary beauties. Shakespeare, when he wants to make

us realize the perfections of Perdita, puts into the mouth of

Florizel, not, as a bad poet would have done, a description of her

lilies and carnations, and the other charms which a painter could

make us realize better, but the praises of her ways and movements; and

with the final touch,

"When you do dance, I wish you

A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do

Nothing but that,"

he evokes a twofold image of beauty in motion, of which one half might

be the despair of those painters who designed the dancing maidens of

the walls of Herculaneum, and the other half the despair of all

artists who in modern times have tried to fix upon their canvas the

buoyancy and grace of dancing waves. In representing the perfections

of form in a bride's slender foot, the speaking art, poetry, would

find itself distanced by either of the shaping arts, painting or

sculpture. Suckling calls up the charm of such a foot by describing it

not at rest but in motion, and in the feet which

"Beneath the petticoat,

Like little mice, went in and out,"

leaves us an image which baffles the power of the other arts. Keats,

when he tells of Madeline unclasping her jewels on St Agnes's Eve,

does not attempt to conjure up their lustre to the eye, as a painter

would have done, and a less poetical poet might have tried to do, but

in the words "her warmed jewels" evoked instead a quality, breathing

of the very life of the wearer, which painting could not even have

remotely suggested.

General law of the relative means and capacities of the several

imitative arts: sculpture.

The differences between the means and capacities of representation

proper to the shaping arts of sculpture and painting and those proper

to the speaking art of poetry were for a long while overlooked or

misunderstood. The maxim of Simonides, that poetry is a kind of

articulate painting, and painting a kind of mute poetry, was vaguely

accepted until the days of Lessing, and first overthrown by the famous

treatise of that writer on the Laocoon. Following in the main the

lines laid down by Lessing, other writers have worked out the

conditions of representation or imitation proper not only to sculpture

and painting as distinguished from poetry, but to sculpture as

distinguished from painting. The chief points established may really

all be condensed under one simple law, _that the more direct and

complete the imitation effected by any art, the less is the range and

number of phenomena which that art can imitate_. Thus sculpture in the

round imitates its objects much more completely and directly than any

other single art, reproducing one whole set of their relations which

no other art attempts to reproduce at all, namely, their solid

relations in space. Precisely for this reason, such sculpture is

limited to a narrow class of objects. As we have seen, it must

represent human or animal figures; nothing else has enough either of

universal interest or of organic beauty and perfection. Sculpture in

the round must represent such figures standing free in full clearness

and detachment, in combinations and with accessories comparatively

simple, on pain of teasing the eye with a complexity and entanglement

of masses and lights and shadows; and in attitudes comparatively

quiet, on pain of violating, or appearing to violate, the conditions

of mechanical stability. Being a stationary or space-art, it can only

represent a single action, which it fixes and perpetuates for ever;

and it must therefore choose for that action one as significant and

full of interest as is consistent with due observation of the above

laws of simplicity and stability. Such actions, and the facial

expressions accompanying them, should not be those of sharp crisis or

transition, because sudden movement or flitting expression, thus

arrested and perpetuated in full and solid imitation by bronze or

marble, would be displeasing and not pleasing to the spectator. They

must be actions and expressions in some degree settled, collected and

capable of continuance, and in their collectedness must at the same

time suggest to the spectator as much as possible of the circumstances

which have led up to them and those which will next ensue. These

conditions evidently bring within a very narrow range the phenomena

with which this art can deal, and explain why, as a matter of fact,

the greater number of statues represent simply a single figure in

repose, with the addition of one or two symbolic or customary

attributes. Paint a statue (as the greater part both of Greek and

Gothic statuary was in fact painted), and you bring it to a still

further point of imitative completeness to the eye; but you do not

thereby lighten the restrictions laid upon the art by its material, so

long as it undertakes to reproduce in full the third or solid

dimension of bodies. You only begin to lighten its restrictions when

you begin to relieve it of that duty. We have traced how sculpture in

relief, which is satisfied with only a partial reproduction of the

third dimension, is free to introduce a larger range of objects,

bringing forward secondary figures and accessories, indicating distant

planes, indulging even in considerable violence and complexity of

motion, since limbs attached to a background do not alarm the

spectator by any idea of danger of fragility. But sculpture in the

round has not this licence. It is true that the art has at various

periods made efforts to escape from its natural limitations. Several

of the later schools of antiquity, especially that of Pergamus in the

3rd and 2nd centuries B.C., strove hard both for violence of

expression and complexity of design, not only in relief-sculptures,

like the great altar-friezes now at Berlin, but in detached groups,

such as (_pace_ Lessing) the Laocoon itself. Many modern _virtuosi_ of

sculpture since Bernini have misspent their skill in trying to fix in

marble both the restlessness of momentary actions and the flimsiness

of fluttering tissues. In latter days Auguste Rodin, an innovating

master with a real genius for his art, has attacked many problems of

complicated grouping, more or less in the nature of the Greek

_symplegmata_, but keeps these interlocked or contorted actions

circumscribed within strict limiting lines, so that they do not by

jutting or straggling suggest a kind of acrobatic challenge to the

laws of gravity. The same artist and others inspired by him have

further sought to emancipate sculpture from the necessity of rendering

form in clear and complete definition, and to enrich it with a new

power of mysterious suggestion, by leaving his figures wrought in part

to the highest finish and vitality of surface, while other parts

(according to a precedent set in some unfinished works of

Michelangelo) remain scarcely emergent from the rough-hewn or unhewn

block. But it may be doubted whether such experiments and expedients

can permanently do much to enlarge the scope of the art.

Means and capacities of painting.

Next we arrive at painting, in which the third dimension is dismissed

altogether, and nothing is actually reproduced, in full or partially,

except the effect made by the appearance of natural objects upon the

retina of the eye. The consequence is that this art can range over

distance and multitude, can represent complicated relations between

its various figures and groups of figures, extensive backgrounds, and

all those infinite subtleties of appearance in natural things which

depend upon local colours and their modification in the play of light

and shade and enveloping atmosphere. These last phenomena of natural

things are in our experience subject to change in a sense in which the

substantial or solid properties of things are not so subject. Colours,

shadows and atmospheric effects are naturally associated with ideas of

transition, mystery and evanescence. Hence painting is able to extend

its range to another kind of facts over which sculpture has no power.

It can suggest and perpetuate in its imitation, without breach of its

true laws, many classes of facts which are themselves fugitive and

transitory, as a smile, the glance of an eye, a gesture of horror or

of passion, the waving of hair in the wind, the rush of horses, the

strife of mobs, the whole drama of the clouds, the toss and gathering

of ocean waves, even the flashing of lightning across the sky. Still,

any long or continuous series of changes, actions or movements is

quite beyond the means of this art to represent. Painting remains, in

spite of its comparative width of range, tied down to the inevitable

conditions of a space-art: that is to say, it has to delight the mind

by a harmonious variety in its effects, but by a variety apprehended

not through various points of time successively, but from various

points in space at the same moment. The old convention which allowed

painters to indicate sequence in time by means of distribution in

space, dispersing the successive episodes of a story about the

different parts of a single picture, has been abandoned since the

early Renaissance; and Wordsworth sums up our modern view of the

matter when he says that it is the business of painting

"to give

To one blest moment snatched from fleeting time

The appropriate calm of blest eternity."

Means and capacities of poetry.

Lastly, a really unfettered range is only attained by the art which

does not give a full and complete reproduction of any natural fact at

all, but evokes or brings natural facts before the mind merely by the

images which words convey. The whole world of movement, of continuity,

of cause and effect, of the successions, alternations and interaction

of events, characters and passions of everything that takes time to

happen and time to declare, is open to poetry as it is open to no

other art. As an imitative or, more properly speaking, an evocative

art, then, poetry is subject to no limitations except those which

spring from the poverty of human language, and from the fact that its

means of imitation are indirect. Poetry's account of the visible

properties of things is from these causes much less full, accurate and

efficient than the reproduction or delineation of the same properties

by sculpture and painting. And this is the sum of the conditions

concerning the respective functions of the three arts of imitation

which had been overlooked, in theory at least, until the time of

Lessing.

The acted drama no real exception to the general law.

To the above law, in the form in which we have expressed it, it may

perhaps be objected that the acted drama is at once the most full and

complete reproduction of nature which we owe to the fine arts, and

that at the same time the number of facts over which its imitation

ranges is the greatest. The answer is that our law applies to the

several arts only in that which we may call their pure or unmixed

state. Dramatic poetry is in that state only when it is read or spoken

like any other kind of verse. When it is witnessed on the stage, it is

in a mixed or impure state; the art of the actor has been called in to

give actual reproduction to the gestures and utterances of the

personages, that of the costumier to their appearances and attire,

that of the stage-decorator to their furniture and surroundings, that

of the scene-painter to imitate to the eye the dwelling-places and

landscapes among which they move; and only by the combination of all

these subordinate arts does the drama gain its character of imitative

completeness or reality.

Things unknown shadowed forth by imitation of things known.

Throughout the above account of the imitative and non-imitative groups

of fine arts, we have so far followed Aristotle as to allow the name

of imitation to all recognizable representation or evocation of

realities,--using the word "realities" in no metaphysical sense, but

to signify the myriad phenomena of life and experience, whether as

they actually and literally exist to-day, or as they may have existed

in the past, or may be conceived to exist in some other world not too

unlike our own for us to conceive and realize in thought. When we find

among the ruins of a Greek temple the statue of a beautiful young man

at rest, or above the altar of a Christian church the painting of one

transfixed with arrows, we know that the statue is intended to bring

to our minds no mortal youth, but the god Hermes or Apollo, the

transfixed victim no simple captive, but Sebastian the holy saint. At

the same time we none the less know that the figures in either case

have been studied by the artist from living models before his eyes. In

like manner, in all the representations alike of sculpture, painting

and poetry the things and persons represented may bear symbolic

meanings and imaginary names and characters; they may be set in a land

of dreams, and grouped in relations and circumstances upon which the

sun of this world never shone; in point of fact, through many ages of

history they have been chiefly used to embody human ideas of

supernatural powers; but it is from real things and persons that their

lineaments and characters have been taken in the first instance, in

order to be attributed by the imagination to another and more exalted

order of existences.

Imitation by art necessarily an idealized imitation.

The law which we have last laid down is a law defining the relations

of sculpture, painting and poetry, considered simply as arts having

their foundations at any rate in reality, and drawing from the

imitation of reality their indispensable elements and materials. It is

a law defining the range and character of those elements or materials

in nature which each art is best fitted, by its special means and

resources, to imitate. But we must remember that, even in this

fundamental part of its operations, none of these arts proceeds by

imitation or evocation pure and simple. None of them contents itself

with seeking to represent realities, however literally taken, exactly

as those realities are. A portrait in sculpture or painting, a

landscape in painting, a passage of local description in poetry, may

be representations of known things taken literally or for their own

sakes, and not for the sake of carrying out thoughts to the unknown;

but none of them ought to be, or indeed can possibly be, a

representation of all the observed parts and details of such a reality

on equal terms and without omissions. Such a representation, were it

possible, would be a mechanical inventory and not a work of fine art.

Completeness not the test of value in a pictorial imitation.

Hence the value of a pictorial imitation is by no means necessarily in

proportion to the number of facts which it records. Many accomplished

pictures, in which all the resources of line, colour and

light-and-shade have been used to the utmost of the artist's power for

the imitation of all that he could see in nature, are dead and

worthless in comparison with a few faintly touched outlines or lightly

laid shadows or tints of another artist who could see nature more

vitally and better. Unless the painter knows how to choose and combine

the elements of his finished work so that it shall contain in every

part suggestions and delights over and above the mere imitation, it

will fall short, in that which is the essential charm of fine art, not

only of any scrap of a great master's handiwork, such as an outline

sketch of a child by Raphael or a colour sketch of a boat or a

mackerel by Turner, but even of any scrap of the merest journeyman's

handiwork produced by an artistic race, such as the first Japanese

drawing in which a water-flag and kingfisher, or a spray of peach or

almond blossom across the sky, is dashed in with a mere hint of

colour, but a hint that tells a whole tale to the imagination. That

only, we know, is fine art which affords keen and permanent delight to

contemplation. Such delight the artist can never communicate by the

display of a callous and pedantic impartiality in presence of the

facts of life and nature. His representation of realities will only

strike or impress others in so far as it concentrates their attention

on things by which he has been struck and impressed himself. To arouse

emotion, he must have felt emotion; and emotion is impossible without

partiality. The artist is one who instinctively tends to modify and

work upon every reality before him in conformity with some poignant

and sensitive principle of preference or selection in his mind. He

instinctively adds something to nature in one direction and takes away

something in another, overlooking this kind of fact and insisting on

that, suppressing many particulars which he holds irrelevant in order

to insist on and bring into prominence others by which he is attracted

and arrested.

Nature of the idealizing process.

The instinct by which an artist thus prefers, selects and brings into

light one order of facts or aspects in the thing before him rather

than the rest, is part of what is called the _idealizing_ or _ideal_

faculty. Interminable discussion has been spent on the

questions,--What is the ideal, and how do we idealize? The answer has

been given in one form by those thinkers (e.g. Vischer and Lotze) who

have pointed out that the process of aesthetic idealization carried on

by the artist is only the higher development of a process carried on

in an elementary fashion by all men, from the very nature of their

constitution. The physical organs of sense themselves do not retain or

put on record all the impressions made upon them. When the nerves of

the eye receive a multitude of different stimulations at once from

different points in space, the sense of eyesight, instead of being

aware of all these stimulations singly, only abstracts and retains a

total impression of them together. In like manner we are not made

aware by the sense of hearing of all the several waves of sound that

strike in a momentary succession upon the nerves of the ear; that

sense only abstracts and retains a total impression from the combined

effect of a number of such waves. And the office which each sense thus

performs singly for its own impressions, the mind performs in a higher

degree for the impressions of all the senses equally, and for all the

other parts of our experience. We are always dismissing or neglecting

a great part of our impressions, and abstracting and combining among

those which we retain. The ordinary human consciousness works like an

artist up to this point; and when we speak of the ordinary or

inartistic man as being impartial in the retention or registry of his

daily impressions, we mean, of course, in the retention or registry of

his impressions as already thus far abstracted and assorted in

consciousness. The artistic man, whose impressions affect him much

more strongly, has the faculty of carrying much farther these same

processes of abstraction, combination and selection among his

impressions.

Subjective and objective ideals.

The possession of this faculty is the artist's most essential gift. To

attempt to carry farther the psychological analysis of the gift is

outside our present object; but it is worth while to consider somewhat

closely its modes of practical operation. One mode is this: the artist

grows up with certain innate or acquired predilections which become a

part of his constitution whether he will or no,--predilections, say,

if he is a dramatic poet, for certain types of plot, character and

situation; if he is a sculptor, for certain proportions and a certain

habitual carriage and disposition of the limbs; if he is a figure

painter, for certain schemes of composition and moulds of figure and

airs and expressions of countenance; if a landscape painter, for a

certain class of local character, sentiment and pictorial effect in

natural scenery. To such predilections he cannot choose but make his

representations of reality in large measure conform. This is one part

of the transmuting process which the data of life and experience have

to undergo at the hands of artists, and may be called the subjective

or purely personal mode of idealization. But there is another part of

that work which springs from an impulse in the artistic constitution

not less imperious than the last named, and in a certain sense

contrary to it. As an imitator or evoker of the facts of life and

nature, the artist must recognize and accept the character of those

facts with which he has in any given case to deal. All facts cannot be

of the cast he prefers, and in so far as he undertakes to deal with

those of an opposite cast he must submit to them; he must study them

as they actually are, must apprehend, enforce and bring into

prominence their own dominant tendencies. If he cannot find in them

what is most pleasing to himself, he will still be led by the

abstracting and discriminating powers of his observation to discern

what is most expressive and significant in _them_, he will emphasize

and put on record this, idealizing the facts before him not in his

direction but in their own. This is the second or objective half of

the artist's task of idealization. It is this half upon which Taine

dwelt almost exclusively, and on the whole with a just insight into

the principles of the operation, in his well-known treatise _On the

Ideal in Art_. Both these modes of idealization are legitimate; that

which springs from inborn and overmastering personal preference in the

artist for particular aspects of life and nature, and that which

springs from his insight into the dominant and significant character

of the phenomena actually before him, and his desire to emphasize and

disengage them. But there is a third mode of idealizing which is less

vital and genuine than either of these, and therefore less legitimate,

though unfortunately far more common. This mode consists in making

things conform to a borrowed and conventional standard of beauty and

taste, which corresponds neither to any strong inward predilection of

the artist nor to any vital characteristic in the objects of his

representation. Since the rediscovery of Greek and Roman sculpture in

the Renaissance, a great part of the efforts of artists have been

spent in falsifying their natural instincts and misrepresenting the

facts of nature in pursuit of a conventional ideal of abstract and

generalized beauty framed on a false conception and a shallow

knowledge of the antique. School after school from the 16th century

downwards has been confirmed in this practice by academic criticism

and theory, with resulting insipidities and insincerities of

performance which have commonly been acclaimed in their day, but from

which later generations have sooner or later turned away with a

wholesome reaction of distaste.

Examples of the two modes and of their reconciliation.

The two genuine modes of idealization, the subjective and the

objective, are not always easy to be reconciled. The greatest artist

is no doubt he who can combine the strongest personal instincts of

preference with the keenest power of observing characteristics as they

are, yet in fact we find few in whom both these elements of the ideal

faculty have been equally developed. To take an example among

Florentine painters, Sandro Botticelli is usually thought of as one

who could never escape from the dictation of his own personal ideals,

in obedience to which he is supposed to have invested all the

creations of his art with nearly the same conformation of brows, lips,

cheeks and chin, nearly the same looks of wistful yearning and

dejection. There is some truth in this impression, though it is

largely based on the works not of the master himself, but of pupils

who exaggerated his mannerisms. Leonardo da Vinci was strong in both

directions; haunted in much of his work by a particular human ideal of

intellectual sweetness and alluring mystery, he has yet left us a vast

number of exercises which show him as an indefatigable student of

objective characteristics and psychological expressions of an order

the most opposed to this. And in this case again followers have

over-emphasized the master's predilections, Luini, Sodoma and the rest

borrowing and repeating the mysterious smile of Leonardo till it

becomes in their work an affectation cloying however lovely. Among

latter-day painters, Burne-Jones will occur to every reader as the

type of an artist always haunted and dominated by ideals of an

intensely personal cast partly engendered in his imagination by

sympathy with the early Florentines. If we seek for examples of the

opposite principle, of that idealism which idealizes above all things

objectively, and seeks to disengage the very inmost and individual

characters of the thing or person before it, we think naturally of

certain great masters of the northern schools, as Durer, Holbein and

Rembrandt. Durer's endeavour to express such characters by the most

searching intensity of linear definition was, however, hampered and

conditioned by his inherited national and Gothic predilection for the

strained in gesture and the knotted and the gnarled in structure,

against which his deliberate scholarly ambition to establish a canon

of ideal proportion contended for the most part in vain. And

Rembrandt's profound spiritual insight into human character and

personality did not prevent him from plunging his subjects, ever

deeper and deeper as his life advanced, into a mysterious shadow-world

of his own imagination, where all local colours were broken up and

crumbled, and where amid the struggle of gloom and gleam he could make

his intensely individualized men and women breathe more livingly than

in plain human daylight.

Caricature and the grotesque as modes of the ideal.

It is by the second mode of operation chiefly, that is by

imaginatively discerning, disengaging and forcing into prominence

their inherent significance, that the idealizing faculty brings into

the sphere of fine art deformities and degeneracies to which the name

beautiful or sublime can by no stretch of usage be applied. Hence

arise creations like the Stryge of Notre-Dame and a thousand other

grotesques of Gothic architectural carving. Hence, although on a lower

plane and interpreted with a less transmuting intensity of insight and

emphasis, the snarling or jovial grossness of the peasants of Adrian

Brauwer and the best of his Dutch compeers. Hence Shakespeare's

Caliban and figures like those of Quilp and Quasimodo in the romances

of Dickens and Hugo; hence the cynic grimness of Goya's Caprices and

the profound and bitter impressiveness of Daumier's caricatures of

Parisian bourgeois life; or again, in an angrier and more insulting

and therefore less understanding temper, the brutal energy of the

political drawings of Gilray.

Unidealized imitation not fine art.

Sculpture, painting and poetry, then, are among the greater fine arts

those which express and arouse emotion by imitating or evoking real

and known things, either for their own sakes literally, or for the

sake of shadowing forth things not known but imagined. In either case

they represent their originals, not indiscriminately as they are, but

sifted, simplified, enforced and enhanced to our apprehensions partly

by the artist's power of making things conform to his own instincts

and preferences, partly by his other power of interpreting and

emphasizing the significant characters of the facts before him. Any

imitation that does not do one or other or both of these things in

full measure fails in the quality of emotional expression and

emotional appeal, and in so failing falls short, taken merely as

imitation, of the standard of fine art.

The appeal of the imitative arts depends partly on non-imitative

elements.

But we must remember that idealized imitation, as such, is not the

whole task of these arts nor their only means of appeal. There is

another part of their task, logically though not practically

independent of the relations borne by their imitations to the original

phenomena of nature, and dependent on the appeal made through the eye

and ear to our primal organic sensibilities by the properties of

rhythm, pattern and regulated design in the arrangement of sounds,

lines, masses, colours and light-and-shade. That appeal we noted as

lying at the root of the art impulse in its most elementary stage. In

its most developed stage every fine art is bound still to play upon

the same sensibilities. In a work of sculpture the contours and

interchanges of light and shadow are bound to be such as would please

the eye, whether the statue or relief represented the figure of

anything real in the world or not. The flow and balance of line, and

the distribution of colours and light-and-shade, in a picture are

bound to be such as would make an agreeable pattern although they bore

no resemblance to natural fact (as, indeed, many subordinate

applications of this art, in decorative painting and geometrical and

other ornaments, do, we know, give pleasure though they represent

nothing). The sound of a line or verse in poetry is bound to be such

as would thrill the physical ear in hearing, or the mental ear in

reading, with a delightful excitement even though the meaning went for

nothing. If the imitative arts are to touch and elevate the emotions,

if they are to afford permanent delight of the due pitch and volume,

it is not a more essential law that their imitation, merely as such,

should be of the order which we have defined as ideal, than that they

should at the same time exhibit these independent effects which they

share with the non-imitative group.

Necessity of due balance between conception and technique: the

non-imitative arts and their technique.

So far we have assumed, without asserting, the necessity that the

artist in whatever kind should possess a power of execution, or

technique as it is called in modern phrase, adequate to the task of

embodying and giving shape to his ideals. In thought it is possible to

separate the conception of a work of art from its execution; in

practice it is not possible, and half the errors in criticism and

speculation about the fine arts spring from failing to realize that an

artistic conception can only be brought home to us through and by its

appropriate embodiment. Whatever the artist's cast of imagination or

degree of sensibility may be in presence of the materials of life, it

is essential that he should be able to express himself appropriately

in the material of his particular art. To quote the writer (R.A.M.

Stevenson) who has enforced this point most clearly and vividly,

perhaps with some pardonable measure of over-statement: "It is a

sensitiveness to the special qualities of some visible or audible

medium of art which distinguishes the species artist from the genus

man." And again: "There are as many separate faculties of imagination

as there are separate mediums in which to conceive an image--clay,

words, paint, notes of music." ... "Technique differs as the material

of each art differs--differs as marble, pigments, musical notes and

words differ." The artist who does not enjoy and has not with

delighted labour mastered the effects of his own chosen medium will

never be a master; the hearer, reader or spectator who cannot

appreciate the qualities of skill, vitality and charm in the handling

of the given material, or who fails to feel their absence when they

are lacking, or who looks in one material primarily for the qualities

appropriate to another, will never make a critic. The technique of the

space-arts differs radically from that of the time-arts. So again do

those of the imitative and the non-imitative arts differ among

themselves. The non-imitative arts of music and architecture are in a

certain degree alike in this, that the artist is in neither case his

own executant (this at least is true of music so far as concerns its

modern concerted and orchestral developments); the musical composer

and the architect each imagines and composes a design in the medium of

his own art which it is left for others to carry out under his

direction. The technique in each case consists not in mastery of an

instrument (though the musical composer may be, and often is, a master

of some one of the instruments whose effects he in his mind's ear

co-ordinates and combines); it lies in the power of knowing and

conjuring up all the emotional resources and effects of the various

materials at his command, and of conceiving and designing to their

last detail vast and ordered structures, to be raised by subordinate

executants from those materials, which shall adequately express his

temperament and embody his ideals.

The imitative arts and their technique: painting and sculpture.

In the imitative arts, on the other hand, the sculptor, unless he is a

fraud, must be wholly his own executant in the original task of

modelling his design in the soft material of clay or wax, though he

must accept the aid of assistants whether in the casting of his work

in bronze or in first roughing it out from the block in marble. Too

many sculptors have been inclined further to trust to trained

mechanical help in finishing their work with the chisel; with the

result that the surface loses the touch which is the expression of

personal temperament and personal feeling for the relations of his

material to nature. The artist in love with the vital qualities of

form, or those of his own handiwork in expressing such qualities in

modelling-clay, will never stop until he learns how to translate them

for himself in marble. Proceeding to that imitative art which leaves

out the third dimension of nature, and by so doing enormously

increases the range of objects and effects which come within its

power--proceeding to the art of painting, the painter is in theory

exclusively his own executant, and in practice mainly so, though in

certain schools and periods the great artists have been accustomed to

surround themselves with pupils to whom they have imparted their

methods and who have helped them in the subordinate and preparatory

parts of their work. But the painter fit to teach and lead can by no

means escape the necessity of being himself a master of his material,

and his handling of it must needs bear the immediate impress of his

temperament. His emotional preferences among the visible facts of

nature, his feeling for the relative importance and charm of line,

colour, light and shade, used whether for the interpretation and

heightening of natural fact or for producing a pattern in itself

harmonious and suggestive to the eye, his sense of the special modes

of handling most effective for communicating the impression he

desires, all these together inevitably appear in, and constitute, his

style and technique. If he is careless or inexpert or conventional, or

cold or without delight, in technique, though he may be animated by

the noblest purposes and the loftiest ideas, he is a failure as a

painter. At certain periods in the history of painting, as in the 13th

and 14th centuries in Italy, the technique seems indeed to modern eyes

wholly immature; but that was because there were many aspects of

visible things which the art had not yet attempted or desired to

portray, not because it did not put forth with delight its best

traditional or newly acquired skill in portraying the special aspects

with which it had so far attempted to grapple. At certain other

periods, as in the later 16th and 17th centuries in the same country,

the elements of inherited technical facility and academic pride of

skill outweigh the sincerity and freshness of interest taken in the

aspects of things to be portrayed, and the true balance is lost. At

other times, as in much of the work of the 19th century, especially in

England, painters have been diverted from their true task, and lost

hold of intelligent and living technique altogether, in trying to

please a public blind to the special qualities of their art, and prone

to seek in it the effects, frivolous or serious, which are appropriate

not to paint and canvas but to literature.

Technique in poetry: the magic of words.

Lastly, the poet and literary artist must obviously be the exclusive

master of his own technique. No one can help him: all depends on the

keenness of his double sensibility to the thrill of life and to that

of words, and to his power of maintaining a just balance between the

two. If he is truly and organically sensitive to words alone, and has

learnt life only through their medium and not through the energies of

his own imagination, nor through personal sensibility to the impact of

things and thoughts and passions and experience, then his work may be

a miracle of accomplished verbal music, and may entrance the ear for

the moment, but will never live to illuminate and sustain and console.

If, on the other hand, he has imagination and sensibility in full

measure, and lacks the inborn love of and gift for words and their

magic, he will be but a dumb or stammering poet all his days. There is

no better witness on this point than Wordsworth. His own prolonged

lapses from verbal felicity, and continual habit of solemn meditation

on themes not always inspiring, might make us hesitate to choose him

as an example of that particular love and gift. But Wordsworth could

never have risen to his best and greatest self had he not truly

possessed the sensibilities which he attributes to himself in the

Prelude:

"Twice five years

Or less I might have seen, when first my mind

With conscious pleasure opened to the charm

Of words in tuneful order, found them sweet

For their own sakes, a passion, and a power;

And phrases pleased me chosen for delight,

For pomp, or love."

And again, expressing better than any one else the relation which

words in true poetry hold to things, he writes:

"Visionary power

Attends the motions of the viewless winds,

Embodied in the mystery of words;

There darkness makes abode, and all the host

Of shadowy things work endless changes,--there,

As in a mansion like their proper home,

Even forms and substances are circumfused

By that transparent veil with light divine,

And, through the turnings intricate of verse,

Present themselves as objects recognized,

In flashes, and with glory not their own."

Third classification: the serviceable and the non-serviceable arts.

3. _The Serviceable and the Non-Serviceable Arts._--It has been

established from the outset that, though the essential distinction of

fine art as such is to minister not to material necessity or practical

use, but to delight, yet there are some among the arts of men which do

both these things at once and are arts of direct use and of beauty or

emotional appeal together. Under this classification a survey of the

field of art at different periods of history would yield different

results. In ruder times, we have seen, the utilitarian aim was still

the predominant aim of art, and most of what we now call fine arts

served in the beginning to fulfil the practical needs of individual

and social life; and this not only among primitive or savage races. In

ancient Egypt and Assyria the primary purpose of the relief-sculptures

on palace and temple walls was the practical one of historical record

and commemoration. Even as late as the middle ages and early

Renaissance the primary business of the painter was to give

instruction to the unlearned in Bible history and in the lives of the

saints, and to rouse him to moods of religious and ethical exaltation.

The pleasures of fine art proper among the manual-imitative group--the

pleasures, namely, of producing and contemplating certain arrangements

rather than others of design, proportion, pattern, colour and light

and shade, and of putting forth and appreciating certain qualities of

skill, truth and significance in idealized imitation,--these were,

historically speaking, by-products that arose gradually in the course

of practice and development. As time went on, the conscious aim of

ministering to such pleasures displaced and threw into the background

the utilitarian ends for which the arts had originally been practised,

and the pleasures became ends in themselves.

Among the greater arts, architecture alone exist primarily for

service.

But even in advanced societies the double qualities of use and beauty

still remain inseparable, among the five greater arts, in

architecture. We build in the first instance for the sake of necessary

shelter and accommodation, or for the commemoration, propitiation or

worship of spiritual powers on whom we believe our welfare to depend.

By and by we find out that the aspect of our constructions is

pleasurable or the reverse. Architecture is the art of building at

once as we need and as we like, and a practical treatise on

architecture must treat the beauty and the utility of buildings as

bound up together. But for our present purpose it has been proper to

take into account one half only of the vocation of architecture, the

half by which it impresses, gives delight and belongs to that which is

the subject of our study, to fine art; and to neglect the other half

of its vocation, by which it belongs to what is not the subject of our

study, to useful or mechanical art. It is plain, however, that the

presence or absence of this foreign element, the element of practical

utility, constitutes a fair ground for a new and separate

classification of the fine arts. If we took the five greater arts as

they exist in modern times by themselves, architecture would on this

ground stand alone in one division, as the directly useful or

serviceable fine art; with sculpture, painting, music and poetry

together in the other division, as fine arts unassociated with such

use or service. Not that the divisions would, even thus, be quite

sharply and absolutely separated. Didactic poetry, we have already

acknowledged, is a branch of the poetic art which aims at practice and

utility. Again, the hortatory and patriotic kinds of lyric poetry,

from the strains of Tyrtaeus to those of Arndt or Rouget de Lisle or

Wordsworth's sonnets written in war-time, may fairly be said to belong

to a phase of fine art which aims directly at one of the highest

utilities, the stimulation of patriotic feeling and self-devotion. So

may the strains of music which accompany such poetry. The same

practical character, as stimulating and attuning the mind to definite

ends and actions, might indeed have been claimed for the greater part

of the whole art of music as that art was practised in antiquity, when

each of several prescribed and highly elaborated moods, or modes, of

melody was supposed to have a known effect upon the courage and moral

temper of the hearer. Compare Milton, when he tells of the Dorian mood

of flutes and soft recorders which assuaged the sufferings and renewed

the courage of Satan and his legions as they marched through hell. In

modern music, of which the elements, much more complex in themselves

than those of ancient music, have the effect of stirring our fibres to

moods of rapturous contemplation rather than of action, military

strains in march time are in truth the only purely instrumental

variety of the art which may still be said to retain this character.

Other and minor arts of service subordinate to architecture.

To reinforce, however, the serviceable or useful division of fine arts

in our present classification, it is not among the greater arts that

we must look. We must look among the lesser or auxiliary arts of the

manual or shaping group. The weaver, the joiner, the potter, the

smith, the goldsmith, the glass-maker, these and a hundred artificers

who produce wares primarily for use, produce them in a form or with

embellishments that have the secondary virtue of giving pleasure both

to the producer and the user. Much ingenuity has been spent to little

purpose in attempting to group and classify these lesser shaping arts

under one or other of the greater shaping arts, according to the

nature of the means employed in each. Thus the potter's art has been

classed under sculpture, because he moulds in solid form the shapes of

his cups, plates and ewers; the art of the joiner under that of the

architect, because his tables, seats and cupboards are fitted and

framed together, like the houses they furnish, out of solid materials

previously prepared and cut; and the weaver and embroiderer, from the

point of view of the effects produced by their art, among painters.

But the truth is, that each one of these auxiliary handicrafts has its

own materials and technical procedure, which cannot, without forcing

and confusion, be described by the name proper to the materials and

technical procedure of any of the greater arts. The only satisfactory

classification of these handicrafts is that now before us, according

to which we think of them all together in the same group with

architecture, not because any one or more of them may be technically

allied to that art, but because, like it, they all yield products

capable of being practically useful and beautiful at the same time.

Architecture is the art which fits and frames together, of stone,

brick, mortar, timber or iron, the abiding and assembling places of

man, all his houses, palaces, temples, monuments, museums, workshops,

roofed places of meeting and exchange, theatres for spectacle,

fortresses of defence, bridges, aqueducts, and ships for seafaring.

The wise architect having fashioned any one of these great

constructions at once for service and beauty in the highest degree,

the lesser or auxiliary manual arts (commonly called "industrial" or

"applied" arts) come in to fill, furnish and adorn it with things of

service and beauty in a lower degree, each according to its own

technical laws and capabilities; some, like pottery, delighting the

user at once by beauty of form, delicacy of substance, and

pleasantness of imitative or non-imitative ornament; some, like

embroidery, by richness of tissue, and by the same twofold

pleasantness of ornament; some, like goldsmith's work, by

exquisiteness of fancy and workmanship proportionate to the

exquisiteness of the material. To this vast group of workmen, whose

work is at the same time useful and fine in its degree, the ancient

Greek gave the place which is most just and convenient for thought,

when he classed them all together under the name of [Greek: tektones],

or artificers, and called the builder by the name of [Greek:

architekton], arch-artificer or artificer-in-chief. Modern usage has

adopted the phrase "arts and crafts" as a convenient general name for

their pursuits.