Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/205

FINE ARTS 195 DLstinc- tion artlmi nature: preniedi tation one philosophical system, to solve them. We shall simply take account of the facts and phenomena of the several arts as we find them in experience, and sum them up in the language of every day ; keeping of necessity in view only the most salient features of the vast provinces of inquiry before us, and leaving particulars to be supplied under the headings of the individual arts. And when, as will some time.-; happen, we do quote the formulas and refer to the systems of philosophers, it will be, not as adopting any of them for better for worse, but as finding suggestions in all of them by turns ; since, though one body of speculative doctrine may be no truer than another, yet each brings forward some aspect and contains some presentment of the truth ; and a complicated mass of facts, when it is arranged in the order and expressed in the terms of a system, may not be essentially the clearer, but is usually the better marshalled for review. At the threshold it will be necessary that we should call to mind the terms of our own definition of art in S enera l ( see ART). According to the popular distinction between art and nature, the idea of art only includes phenomena of which man is the cause and that, when he ac t s no t spontaneously but with calculation, not from i m P u ^ se but from forethought; while the idea of nature includes all phenomena, both in man and in the world outside him, which take place without forethought or studied initiative of his own. This distinction we saw reason to recognize as practically valid. Art, we said accordingly, means every regulated operation or dexterity whereby we pursue ends which we know beforehand; and it means nothing but such operations and dexterities. That which any one does without thinking about it, and without considering what he is doing it for, is not art at all. Hence we shall not allow the title of fine art to natural eloquence, to charm or dignity of manner, to delicacy and tact in social intercourse, and other graces of life and con duct for which such a title is sometimes claimed, though they really proceed from an unconscious gift or unreflecting habit in those who exhibit them. All these are manifes tations of the beautiful, and in witnessing them we ex perience a pleasure analogous, no doubt, to the pleasures of fine art. Nevertheless, so far as such manifestations are spontaneous, they are not arts, but, as we have called them, graces ; they are due, as Greek theology would have ex pressed it, not to the teaching of Athene but to the gift of the Charites. When the exigencies of a deductive and ontological system lead a writer like Dr Robert Zimmermann, of Vienna, to co-ordinate these spontaneous acts or traits of beautiful and expressive behaviour with the deliberate artistic activities of the race, we feel that he is sacrificing to system a distinction which is essential. That distinction common parlance very justly observes, with its opposition of " art " to " nature/ and its phrase of " second nature " for those habits which have become so ingrained as to seem spontaneous, whether originally the result of disci pline or not. One of the essential qualities of art is premeditation; and when Shelley talks of the skylark s profuse strains of unpremeditated art, he in effect lays emphasis on the fact that it is only by a metaphor that he uses the word art in this case at all; he calls attention to that which (if the songs of birds are as instinctive as we suppose) precisely makes the difference between the skylark s outpourings and his own. For example, when we see a person in all whose ordinary movements there is freedom and beauty, we put down the charm of these to inherited and inbred physical aptitudes of which the person has never thought, and call it nature ; but when we go on to notice that the same person is beautifully and appropriately dressed, since we know that it is impossible to dress without thinking of it, we put down the charm of this to judicious fore thought and calculation, and call it art. Again, it is an established and a just practical maxim of the dramatic art, that the actor who in the moment of performance really and involuntarily surrenders himself to the emotions of his part and situation, though he may rouse the sympathies of the audience by a natural exhibition of feeling, yet is not acting like an artist, and does not produce as much effect, nor an effect of the same kind, as he does when, master of him self, he goes through a series of utterances and gestures which he has deliberately conceived and rehearsed before hand. The task of art is not, in either of the above instances, to create a product outsideof or separate from the artist. The material upon which the artist has in these cases to work con sists of his or her own natural aptitudes; aptitudes, in the one case, of personal charm, which have to be made the most of by appropriate adornment ; aptitudes, in the other case, for mimicry and emotional expression, which have to be made the most of by study and practice. In such instances, it may often be hard to separate the share of nature from the share of art in the result to determine where grace ends and calculation begins, or where ends the sympathetic power of natural expression, and where begins the properly artistic power of studied and premeditated ex pression. Perhaps no writer has observed the differences or laid down the boundary lines between these adjacent kingdoms of artlessness a-nd art with more acuteness than Schleiermacher. But we have said enough to mark for the present purpose the reality and importance of the distinction. And having thus secured ourselves against the intrusion among fine arts of those phases of beauty in human act and utterance which justly belong not to art at all but nature, we can enter upon what is our proper business, the delimitation of the separate place and functions of the fine arts among the rest of the arts and among each other. I. Or FINE ART IN GENERAL. When we say of the fine arts as a group that they are activities which minister to the love of beauty in man, it is as if we said, the tailor s art is an activity which ministers to his need of clothes ; and the inference is, in the one case as in the other, that a separate class of men is to be found in every community devoted to this particular employment. And such, practically, we all know to be the case ; the gifts and calling of the artist constitute a separate profession, a profession of the producers, so to speak, of fine art, while the rest of the community are enjoyer s or recipients of the fine art produced. In the most primitive societies, un doubtedly, this was not so, and we can go back to an original or rudimentary stage of every fine art at which the separation between a class of producers or performers, and a class of recipients, does not exist. Such an original or rudimentary stage of the dramatic art, for instance, we are accustomed to witness in children, who will occupy them selves at all moments with mimicry and make-believe for their own satisfaction, and without the least regard to the presence or absence of witnesses. The original or rudi mentary type of the profession of imitative sculptors or painters is the cave-dweller of the palaeolithic age, who, when he rested from his day s hunting, first took up the bone handle of his weapon, and with a flint either carved it into the shape, or on its surface scratched the outlines, of the animals of the chase. The original or rudimentary type of the architect, considered not as a mere builder but as an artist, is the savage who, when his tribe had taken to live in tents or huts instead of caves, first arranged the skins and timbers of his tent or hut in one way because it pleased his eye, rather than in some other way which was as good for shelter. The original The plea sures of fine art essen tially a commu nicable order of plea sures.