What then, it may be asked, about athletic games and sports, which hurt nobody, have no connexion with the chase, and give pleasure to thousands of spectators? Here the difference is, that the event which excites the spectator’s interest and pleasure at a race or match or athletic contest is not a wholly unreal or simulated event; it is less real than life, but it is more real than art. The contest has no momentous practical consequences, but it is a contest, anἄθλος, all the same, in which competitors put forth real strength, and one really wins and others are defeated. Such a struggle, in which the exertions are real and the issue uncertain, we follow with an excitement and a suspense different in kind from the feelings with which we contemplate a fictitious representation. For example, let the reader recall the feelings with which he may have watched a real fencing bout, and compare them with those with which he watches the simulated fencing bout in Shakespeare’sHamlet. The instance is a crucial one, because in the fictitious case the excitement is heightened by the introduction of the poisoned foil, and by the tremendous consequences which we are aware will turn, in the representation, on the issue. Yet because the fencing scene inHamletis a representation, and not real, we find ourselves watching it in a mood quite different from that in which we watch the most ordinary real fencing-match with vizors and blunt foils; a mood more exalted, if the representation is good, but amid the aesthetic emotions of which the fluctuations of strained, if trivial, suspense and the eagerness of sympathetic participation find no place. “The delight of tragedy,” says Johnson, “proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.” So does the peculiar quality of our pleasure in watching the fencing-match inHamlet, or the wrestling-match inAs You Like It, depend on our consciousness of fiction: if we thought the matches real they might please us still, but please us in a different way. Again, of athletics in general, they are pursuits to a considerable degree definitely utilitarian, having for their specific end the training and strengthening of individual human bodies. Nevertheless, in some systems the title of fine arts has been consistently claimed, if not for athletics technically so called, and involving the idea of competition and defeat, at any rate for gymnastics, regarded simply as a display of the physical frame of man cultivated by exercise—as, for instance, it was cultivated by the ancient Greeks—to an ideal perfection of beauty and strength.
But apart from criticisms like these on the theory of Schiller, the Kantian doctrine of a metaphysical opposition between the senses and the reason has for most minds of to-day lost its validity, and with it falls away Schiller’sThe play theory in the light of anthropological research.derivative theory of aStofftrieband aFormtriebcontending like enemies for dominion over the human spirit, with a neutral or reconcilingSpieltriebstanding between them. Even taking the existence of theSpieltrieb, or play-impulse, by itself as a plain and indubitable fact in human nature, the theory that this impulse is the general or universal source of the artistic activities of the race, which seemed adequate to thinkers so far apart as Schiller and Herbert Spencer, is found no longer to hold water. The tendency of recent thought and study on these subjects has been to abandon the abstract or dialectical method in favour of the methods of historical and anthropological inquiry. In the light of these methods it is claimed that the artistic activities of the race spring in point of fact from no single source but from a number of different sources. It is admitted that the play-impulse is one of these, and the allied and overlapping, but not identical, impulse of mimicry or imitation another. But it is urged at the same time that these twin impulses, rooted as they both are among the primordial faculties both of men and animals, are far from existing merely to provide a vent whereby the superfluous energies of sentient beings may discharge themselves at pleasure, but are indispensable utilitarian instincts, by which the young are led to practise and rehearse in sport those activities the exercise of which in earnest will be necessary to their preservation in the adult state. (The researches of Professor Karl Groos in this field seem to be conclusive.) A third impulse innate in man, though scarcely so primordial as the other two, and one which the animals cannot share with him, is the impulse of record or commemoration. Man instinctively desires, alike for safety, use and pleasure, to perpetuate and hand on the memory of his deeds and experiences whether by words or by works of his hands contrived for permanence. This impulse of record is the most stimulating ally of the impulse of mimicry or imitation, and perhaps a large part of the arts usually put down as springing from the love of imitation ought rather to be put down as springing from the commemorative or recording impulse, using imitation as its necessary means. Granting the existence in primitive man of these three allied impulses of play, of mimicry, and of record, it is urged that they are so many distinct though contiguous sources from which whole groups of the fine arts have sprung, and that all three in their originserved ends primarily or in great part utilitarian. Examining any of the rudimentary artistic activities of primitive man already mentioned: the decoration of the person with tattooings or strings of shells or teeth or feathers had primarily the object of attracting or impressing the opposite sex, or terrifying an enemy, or indicating the tribal relations of the person so adorned; some of the same purposes were served by the scratches and tufts and markings on weapons or utensils; thegraffitior outline drawings of animals incised by cave-dwellers on bones are surmised to have sprung in like manner from the desire of conveying information, combined, probably, sometimes with that of obtaining magic power over the things represented; the erection of memorial shrines and images of all kinds, from the rudest upwards, had among other purposes the highly practical one of propitiating the spirits of the departed; and so on through the whole range of kindred activities. It is contended, next, that such activities only take on the character of rudimentary fine arts at a certain stage of their evolution. Before they can assume that character, they must come under the influence and control of yet another rooted and imperious impulse in mankind. That is the impulse of emotional self-expression, the instinct which compels us to seek relief under the stimulus of pent-up feeling; an instinct, it is added, second only in power to those which drive us to seek food, shelter, protection from enemies, and satisfaction for-sexual desires. According to a law of our constitution, the argument goes on, this need for emotional self-expression finds itself fully satisfied only by certain modes of activity; those, namely, which either have in themselves, or impress on their products, the property of rhythm, that is, of regular interval and recurrence, flow, order and proportion. Leaping, shouting, and clapping hands is the human animal’s most primitive way of seeking relief under the pressure of emotion; so soon as one such animal found out that he both expressed and relieved his emotions best, and communicated them best to his fellows, when he moved in regular rhythm and shouted in regular time and with regular changes of pitch, he ceased to be a mere excited savage and became a primitive dancer, singer, musician—in a word, artist. So soon as another found himself taking pleasure in certain qualities of regular interval, pattern and arrangement of lines, shapes, and colours, apart from all questions of purpose or utility, in his tattooings and self-adornments, his decoration of tools or weapons or structures for shelter or commemoration, he in like manner became a primitive artist in ornamental and imitative design.
The special qualities of pleasure felt and communicated by doing things in one way rather than another, independently of direct utility, which we indicated at the outset as characteristic of the whole range of the fine arts, appear on this showing to be dependent primarily on the response of our organic sensibilities of nerve and muscle, eye, ear and brain to the stimulus of rhythm, (using the word in its widest sense) imparted either to our own actions and utterances or to the works of our hands. Such pleasures would seem to have been first experienced by man directly, in the endeavour to find relief with limbs and voice from states of emotional tension, and then incidentally, as a kind of by-product arising and affording similar relief in the development of a wide range of utilitarian activities. Into the nature of those organic sensibilities, and the grounds of the relief they afford us when gratified, it is the province of physiological and psychological aesthetics to inquire: our business here is only with the activities directed towards their satisfaction and the results of those activities in the works of fine art. On the whole the account of the matter yielded by the method of anthropological research, and here very briefly summarized, may be accepted as answering more closely to the complex nature of the facts than any of the accounts hitherto current; and so we may expand our first tentative suggestion of a definition into one more complete, which from the nature of the case cannot be very brief or simple and must run somehow thus:Fine art is everything which man does or makes in one way rather than another, freely and with premeditation, in order to express and arouse emotion, in obedience to laws of rhythmic movement or utterance or regulated design, and with results independent of direct utility and capable of affording to many permanent and disinterested delight.
II.Of the Fine Arts severally.
Architecture,sculpture,painting,musicandpoetryare 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 groupModes in which the five greater arts have been classified.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 musicpleases 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.
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 asdancing, an art subordinatePlace of the minor or subordinate fine arts.to music, but quite different in kind;acting, an art auxiliary topoetry, from which in kind it differs no less;eloquencein all kinds, so far as it is studied and not merely spontaneous; and among the arts which fashion or dispose material objects,embroideryand the weaving of patterns,pottery,glassmaking,goldsmith’s workandjewelry,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.
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 areNo one classification final or sufficient.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.