Current generalizations on the history of fine art: Hegel.
Students of human culture have concentrated a great deal of attentive
thought upon the history of fine art, and have put forth various
comprehensive generalizations intended at once to sum up and to account
for the phases and vicissitudes of that history. The most famous
formulae are those of Hegel, who regarded particular arts as being
characteristic of and appropriate to particular forms of civilization
and particular ages of history. For him, architecture was the symbolic
art appropriate to ages of obscure and struggling ideas, and
characteristic of the Egyptian and the Asiatic races of old and of the
medieval age in Europe. Sculpture was the classical art appropriate to
ages of lucid and self-possessed ideas, and characteristic of the Greek
and Roman period. Painting, music and poetry were the romantic arts,
appropriate to the ages of complicated and overmastering ideas, and
characteristic of modern humanity in general. In the working out of
these generalizations Hegel brought together a mass of judicious and
striking observations; and that they contain on the whole a
preponderance of truth may be admitted. It has been objected against
them, from the philosophical point of view, that they too much mix up
the definition of what the several arts theoretically are with
considerations of what in various historical circumstances they have
practically been. From the historical point of view there can be taken
what seems a more valid objection, that these formulae of Hegel tend too
much to fix the attention of the student upon the one dominant art
chosen as characteristic of any period, and to give him false ideas of
the proportions and relations of the several arts at the same period--of
the proportions and relations which poetry, say, really bore to
sculpture among the Greeks and Romans, or sculpture to architecture
among the Christian nations of the middle age. The truth is, that the
historic survey gained over any field of human activity from the height
of generalizations so vast in scope as these are must needs, in the
complexity of earthly affairs, be a survey too distant to give much
guidance until its omissions are filled up by a great deal of nearer
study; and such nearer study is apt to compel the student in the long
run to qualify the theories with which he has started until they are in
danger of disappearing altogether.
Herbert Spencer and the evolution theory.
Another systematic exponent of the universe, whose system is very
different from that of Hegel, Herbert Spencer, brought the doctrine of
evolution to bear, not without interesting results, upon the history of
the fine arts and their development. Herbert Spencer set forth how the
manual group of fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting, were in
their first rudiments bound up together, and how each of them in the
course of history has liberated itself from the rest by a gradual
process of separation. These arts did not at first exist in the distinct
and developed forms in which we have above described them. There were no
statues in the round, and no painted panels or canvases hung upon the
wall. Only the rudiments of sculpture and painting existed, and that
only as ornaments applied to architecture, in the shape of tiers of
tinted reliefs, representing in a kind of picture-writing the exploits
of kings upon the walls of their temple-palaces. Gradually sculpture
took greater salience and roundness, and tended to disengage itself from
the wall, while painting found out how to represent solidity by means of
its own, and dispensed with the raised surface upon which it was first
applied. But the old mixture and union of the three arts, with an
undeveloped art of painting and an undeveloped art of sculpture still
engaged in or applied to the works of architecture, continued on the
whole to prevail through the long cycles of Egyptian and Assyrian
history. In the Egyptian palace-temple we find a monument at once
political and religious, upon the production of which were concentrated
all the energies and faculties of all the artificers of the race. With
its incised and pictured walls, its half-detached colossi, its open and
its colonnaded chambers, the forms of the columns and their capitals
recalling the stems and blossoms of the lotus and papyrus, with its
architecture everywhere taking on the characters and covering itself
with the adornments of immature sculpture and painting--this structure
exhibits within its single fabric the origins of the whole subsequent
group of shaping arts. From hence it is a long way to the innumerable
artistic surroundings of later Greek and Roman life, the many temples
with their detached and their engaged statues, the theatres, the
porticoes, the baths, the training-schools, the stadiums, with free and
separate statues both of gods and men adorning every building and public
place, the frescoes upon the walls, the panel pictures hung in temples
and public and private galleries. In the terms of the Spencerian theory
of evolution, the advance from the early Egyptian to the later Greek
stage is an advance from the one to the manifold, from the simple to the
complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and affords a
striking instance of that vast and ceaseless process of differentiation
and integration which it is the law of all things to undergo. In the
Christian monuments of the early middle age, again, the arts, owing to
the political and social cataclysm in which Roman civilization went
down, have gone back to the rudimentary stage, and are once more
attached to and combined with each other. The single monument, the one
great birth of art, in that age, is the Gothic church. In this we find
the art of applied sculpture exercised in fashions infinitely rich and
various, but entirely in the service and for the adornment of the
architecture; we find painting exercised in fashions more rudimentary
still, principally in the forms of translucent imagery in the chancel
windows and tinted decorations on the walls and vaultings. From this
stage again the process of the differentiation of the arts is repeated.
It is by a new evolution or unfolding, and by one carried to much
further and more complicated stages than the last had reached, that the
arts since the middle age have come to the point where we find them
to-day; when architecture is applied to a hundred secular and civil uses
with not less magnificence, or at least not less desire of magnificence,
than that with which it fulfilled its two only uses in the middle age,
the uses of worship and of defence; when detached sculptures adorn, or
are intended to adorn, all our streets and commemorate all our
likenesses; when the subjects of painting have been extended from
religion to all life and nature, until this one art has been divided
into the dozen branches of history, landscape, still life, genre,
anecdote and the rest. Such being in brief the successive stages, and
such the reiterated processes, of evolution among the shaping or space
arts, the action of the same law can be traced, it is urged, in the
growth of the speaking or time arts also. Originally poetry and music,
the two great speaking arts, were not separated from each other and from
the art of bodily motion, dancing. The father of song, music and
dancing, all three, was that primitive man of whom so much has already
been said, he who first clapped hands and leapt and shouted in time at
some festival of his tribe. From the clapping, or rudimentary rhythmical
noise, has been evolved the whole art of instrumental music, down to the
entrancing complexity of the modern symphony. From the shout, or
rudimentary emotional utterance, has proceeded by a kindred evolution
the whole art of vocal music down to the modern opera or oratorio. From
the leap, or rudimentary expression of emotion by rhythmical movements
of the body, has descended every variety of dancing, from the stately
figures of the tragic chorus of the Greeks to the _kordax_ of their
comedy or the complexities of the modern ballet.
Weak and strong points of Spencer's generalization.
That the theory of evolution serves usefully to group and to interpret
many facts in the history of art we shall not deny, though it would be
easy to show that Herbert Spencer's instances and applications are not
sufficient to sustain all the conclusions that he seems to draw from
them. Thus, it is perfectly true that the Egyptian or Assyrian palace
wall is an instance of rudimentary painting and rudimentary sculpture in
subservience to architecture. But it is not less true that races who had
no architecture at all, but lived in caverns of the earth, exhibit, as
we have already had occasion to notice, excellent rudiments of the other
two shaping arts in a different form, in the carved or incised handles
of their weapons. And it is almost certain that, among the nations of
oriental antiquity themselves, the art of decorating solid walls so as
to please the eye with patterns and presentations of natural objects was
borrowed from the precedent of an older art which works in easier
materials, namely, the art of the weaver. It would be in the perished
textile fabrics of the earliest dwellers in the valleys of the Euphrates
and the Nile that we should find, if anywhere, the origins of the
systems of surface design, whether conventional or imitative, which
those races afterwards applied to the decoration of their solid
constructions. Not, therefore, in any one exclusive type of primitive
artistic activity, but in a score of such types equally, varying
according to race, region and circumstances, shall we find so many germs
or nuclei from which whole families of fine arts have in the course of
the world's history differentiated and unfolded themselves. And more
than once during that history, a cataclysm of political and social
forces has not only checked the process of the evolution of the fine
arts, but from an advanced stage of development has thrown them back
again to a primitive stage. Recent research has shown how the Minoan and
Mycenaean civilizations in the Mediterranean basin, with their developed
fine arts, must have perished and been effaced before the second growth
of art from new rudiments took place in Greece. The great instance of
the downfall of the Roman civilization need not be requoted. By
Spencer's application of the theory of evolution, not less than by
Hegel's theory of the historic periods, attention is called to the fact
that Christian Europe, during several centuries of the middle age,
presents to our study a civilization analogous to the civilization of
the old oriental empires in this respect, that its ruling and
characteristic manual art is architecture, to which sculpture and
painting are, as in the oriental empires, once more subjugated and
attached. It does not of course follow that such periods of fusion or
mutual dependence among the arts are periods of bad art. On the
contrary, each stage of the evolution of any art has its own
characteristic excellence. The arts can be employed in combination, and
yet be all severally excellent. When music, dancing, acting and singing
were combined in the performance of the Greek chorus, the combination no
doubt presented a relative perfection of each of the four elements
analogous to the combined perfection, in the contemporary Doric temple,
of pure architectural form, sculptured enrichment of spaces specially
contrived for sculpture in the pediments and frieze, and coloured
decoration over all. The extreme differentiation of any art from every
other art, and of the several branches of one art among themselves, does
not by any means tend to the perfection of that art. The process of
evolution among the fine arts may go, and indeed in the course of
history has gone, much too far for the health of the arts severally.
Thus an artist of our own day is usually either a painter only or a
sculptor only; but yet it is acknowledged that the painter who can model
a statue, or the sculptor who can paint a picture, is likely to be the
more efficient master of both arts; and in the best days of Florentine
art the greatest men were generally painters, sculptors, architects and
goldsmiths all at once. In like manner a landscape painter who paints
landscape only is apt not to paint it so well as one who paints the
figure too; and in recent times the craft of engraving had almost ceased
to be an art from the habit of allotting one part of the work, as skies,
to one hand, another part, as figures, to a second, and another part, as
landscape, to a third. This kind of continually progressing subdivision
of labour, which seems to be the necessary law of industrial processes,
is fatal to any skill which demands, as skill in the fine arts, we have
seen, demands, the free exercise and direction of a highly complex
cluster both of faculties and sensibilities.
Reaction against over-evolution amongst the fine arts.
In the second half of the 19th century a reaction set in against such
over-differentiation of the several manual arts and crafts. This
reaction is chiefly identified in England with the name of William
Morris, who insisted by precept and example that one form of artistic
activity was as worthy as another, and himself both practised and
trained others in the practice of glass-painting, weaving, embroidery,
furniture and wall-paper designing, and book decoration alike. His
example has been to some extent followed in most European countries, and
efforts have been made to reunite the functions of artist and craftsman,
and to set a limit to the process of differentiation among the various
manual arts. In the vocal or time arts also, a reformer of high genius
and force of character, Richard Wagner, rose to contend that in music
the process of evolution and differentiation had gone much too far.
Music, he urged, as separated from words and actions, independent
orchestral and instrumental music, had reached its utmost development,
and its further advance could only be an advance into the inane; while
operatic music had broken itself up into a number of set and separate
forms, as aria, scena, recitative, which corresponded to no real
varieties of instinctive emotional utterance, and in the aimless
production of which the art was in danger of paralysing and stultifying
itself. This process, he declared, must be checked; music and words must
be brought back again into close connexion and mutual dependence; the
artificial opera forms must be abolished, and a new and homogeneous
music-drama be created, of which the author must combine in himself the
functions of poet, composer, inventor, and director of scenery and stage
appliances, so that the entire creation should bear the impress of a
single mind; to the creation of such a music-drama he accordingly
devoted all the energies of his being.
Taine's philosophy or natural history of the fine arts.
It is thus evident that the evolution theory, though it furnishes us
with some instructive points of view for the history of the fine arts as
for other things, is far from being the whole key to that history.
Another key, employed with results perhaps less really luminous than
they are certainly showy and attractive, is that supplied by Taine.
Taine's philosophy, which might perhaps be better called a natural
history, of fine art consists in regarding the fine arts as the
necessary result of the general conditions under which they are at any
time produced--conditions of race and climate, of religion, civilization
and manners. Acquaint yourself with these conditions as they existed in
any given people at any given period, and you will be able to account
for the characters assumed by the arts of that people at that period,
and to reason from one to the other, as a botanist can account for the
flora of any given locality, and can reason from its soil, exposure and
temperature, to the orders of vegetation which it will produce. This
method of treating the history of the fine arts, again, is one which can
be pursued with profit in so far as it makes the student realize the
connexion of fine arts with human culture in general, and teaches him
how the arts of any age and country are not an independent or arbitrary
phenomenon, but are essentially an outcome, or efflorescence, to use a
phrase of Ruskin's, of deep-seated elements in the civilization which
produces them. But it is a method which, rashly used, is very apt to
lead to a hasty and one-sided handling both of history and of art. It is
easy to fasten on certain obvious relations of fine art to general
civilization when you know a few of the facts of both, and to say, the
cloudy skies and mongrel industrial population of Protestant Amsterdam
at such and such a date had their inevitable reflection in the art of
Rembrandt; the wealth and pomp of the full-fleshed burghers and
burgesses of Catholic Antwerp had theirs in the art of Rubens. But to do
this in the precise and conclusive manner of Taine's treatises on the
philosophy of art always means to ignore a large range of conditions or
causes for which no corresponding effect is on the surface apparent, and
generally also a large number of effects for which appropriate causes
cannot easily be discovered at all.
Criticisms and counter-criticisms on Taine's methods.
These considerations have resulted in a reaction against Taine's
theories which goes probably too far. It is no complete confutation of
his philosophy of art-history to contend, as has been done somewhat
contemptuously by Professor Ernst Grosse and others, that the great
artist, so far from representing the general tendencies of his time and
environment, is commonly a solitary innovator and revolutionist, and has
to educate and create his own public, often through years of obloquy or
neglect. This is sometimes true when the traditions and ideals of art
are undergoing revolution or swift experimental change, but hardly ever
true in times of stable tradition and accepted ideals; and when true it
only shows that the tendencies the innovating genius represents are
tendencies which have till his time been working underground, and which
he is born to bring into light and evidence. A new and revolutionary
impulse in art, as in thought or politics, is like a yeast or ferment
working at first secretly, affecting for a while only a few spirits, as
a new epidemic may for a while only affect a few constitutions, and then
gradually ripening and strengthening till it communicates itself to
thousands. In its inception such a ferment is not, indeed, one of the
obvious phenomena of the society in which it takes root, but it is none
the less one of the most vital and significant phenomena. The truth is,
that this particular efflorescence of human culture depends for its
character at any given time upon combinations of causes which are by no
means simple, but generally highly complex, obscure and nicely balanced.
For instance, the student who should try to reason back from the holy
and beatified character which prevails in much of the devotional
painting of the Italian schools down to the Renaissance would be much
mistaken were he to conclude, "like art, like life, thoughts and
manners." He would not understand the relation of the art to the general
civilization of those days unless he were to remember that one of the
chief functions of the imagination is to make up for the shortcomings of
reality, and to supply to contemplation images of that which is most
lacking in actual life; so that the visions at once peaceful and ardent
embodied by the religious schools of art in the Italian cities are to be
explained, not by the peace, but rather in great part by the dispeace,
of contemporary existence, and by the longing of the human spirit to
escape into happier and more calm conditions.
Difficulty of combining the study of the manual with that of the vocal
group of fine arts.
Any one of the three modes of generalization to which we have referred
might no doubt yield, however, supposing in the student the due gifts of
patience and of caution, a working clue to guide him through that
immense region of research, the history of the fine arts. But it is
hardly possible to pursue to any purpose the history of the two great
groups, the shaping group and the speaking group, together. At some
stages of the world's history the manual and the monumental arts have
flourished, as in Egypt and Assyria, when there was no fine art of words
at all, and the only literature was that of records cut in hieroglyph or
cuneiform on palace walls and temples, and on tablets, seals and
cylinders. At other times and in other communities there has existed a
great tradition and inheritance of poetry and song when the manual arts
were only beginning to emerge again from the wreck of an old
civilization, as in the Homeric age of Greece, or where they had never
flourished at all except by imitation and importation, as in Palestine.
In historic Greece all three divisions of the art of poetry, the epic,
lyric and the dramatic, had been perfected, and two of them had again
declined, before sculpture had reached maturity or painting had passed
beyond the stage of its early severity. The European poetry of the
middle ages, abundant and rich as it was alike in France and Provence,
in Germany and Scandinavia, can yet not take rank, among the creations
of human genius, beside the great masterpieces of Romanesque and Gothic
architecture; it was in Italy only that Dante, before the end of that
age, carried poetry to a place of equality if not of primacy among the
arts. Taking the England of the Elizabethan age, we find the great
outburst of our national genius in poetry contemporary with nothing more
interesting in the manual arts than the gradual and only
half-intelligent transformation of late Gothic architecture by the
adoption of Italian Renaissance forms imported principally by way of
Flanders or France, together with a fine native skill shown in the art
of miniature portrait-painting, and none at all worth mentioning in
other branches of painting or in sculpture. If the course of poetry and
that of the manual arts have thus run independently throughout almost
the whole field of history, those of music and the manual arts have been
more widely separated still. In ancient Greece music and poetry were, we
know, most intimately connected, but of the true nature of Greek music
we know but little, of that of the earlier middle ages less still, and
throughout the later middle ages and the earlier Renaissance the art
remained undeveloped, whether in the service of the church or in secular
and popular use, and in both cases in strict subservience to words. The
growth of independent music is entirely the work of the modern world,
and will probably rank in the esteem of posterity as its highest
spiritual achievement and claim to gratitude, when the mechanical
inventions and applications of applied science, which now occupy so
disproportionate a part of the attention of humanity, have become a
normal and unregarded part of its existence.
Moments in history there have no doubt been when literature and the
manual arts, and even music, have been swept simultaneously along a
single stream of ideas and feelings. Such a moment was experienced in
France in 1830 and the following years, when (to choose only a few of
the greatest names) Hugo in poetry, Delacroix in painting, and Berlioz
in music were roused to a high pitch of consentaneous inspiration by the
new ideas and feelings of romanticism. But such moments are rare and
exceptional. On the other hand, it is very possible to take the whole of
the shaping or manual group of fine arts together and to pursue their
history connectedly throughout the course of civilization. By the
history of art what is usually meant is indeed the history of these
three arts with that of some of their subordinate and connected crafts.
Leaving aside the arts of the races of the farther East, which,
profoundly interesting as they are, have but gradually and late become
known to us, and the relations of which with the arts of the nearer East
and the Mediterranean are still quite obscure--leaving these aside, the
history of the manual arts of architecture, painting and sculpture falls
naturally into several great periods or divisions to some extent
overlapping each other but in the main consecutive.
Main divisions of the history of art.