Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/219

FINE ARTS 209 quence 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 subtleties of appearance in natural things which depend upon local colour and incidence of light and shade. These last phenomena of natural things are in our experi- e ice 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 to some extent as sociated with ideas of transition, mystery, and evanescence. Hence painting is able to extend its range to another kind of facts over which sculpture lias no power. It can perpet uate in its imitation, without breach of its true laws, certain 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 the young Achilles hair " not un stirred," as the old description has it, by the wind, the toss and gathering of ocean waves, even the flashing of light ning 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. Lastly, a really ample range is only attained by the art which does not give a full and complete reproduction of any natural fact at all, but represents 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. We speak only of those parts of poetry which may properly be called its imitative or repre sentative parts, and not of its other parts or applications, in reasoning, in exhortation, in denunciation, and the like. As an imitative or representative 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 imi tation are indirect. Poetry s report 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. To this law, in the form in which v/e have expressed it, j t ma y p er h a p S b e objected that the acted drama is at once tne most full ant i 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 re production 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. Throughout the above account of the imitative and non- imitative groups of fine arts, we have so far followed Aristotle as to give the name of imitation to all recognizable representation whatever of realities. By realities we have Things meant not only phenomena as they actually or literally unknown exist, or may have existed in the past. Imitation, as we sh 1 a ! low ." understand it, is not tied to such strict veracity of positive byimit*- delineation or report. It includes the representation of tiou of things which, though similar to things actually existing, things have themselves never actually existed the invention of knovni phenomena, and of relations and combinations among phenomena, derived from those of actual experience, but not identical with them. Such shadowing forth of the unknown by means of the known is part of the work of that compre hensive faculty which we call the imagination. But the materials or elements with which the imaginative faculty is at liberty thus to deal are materials or elements supplied by real experience. 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 Sebas tian 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 rela tions and circumstances upon which the sun of this world never shone and such in truth was the purpose to which the arts were almost universally put until but the other day ; 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. The law which we have last laid down is a law defining Tmita- the relations of sculpture, painting, and poetry, considered tion by simply as arts having their foundations at any rate in art " eces reality, and drawing from the imitation of reality their indi- i f i ea ]j ze( i spensable elements and materials. It is a law defining the imita- range and character of the elements or materials in nature tion - which each art is best fitted, by its special means and re sources, to imitate. But we must remember that, even in this fundamental part of its operations, none of these arts proceeds by imitation 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, maybe representations of known things taken literally or for their own sakes, and not for the sake of carrying our thoughts to the unknown; but none of them ought to be, or indeed can possibly be, a re presentation of all the observed parts and details of such a reality on equal terms and without omissions. Such a re presentation, were it possible, would be a mechanical inven tory and not a work of fine art. That only, we know, is fine art which affords keen and permanent delight to con templation. 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 delineation or report of realities will only strike or impress others in so far as it directs their attention to things by which he has been struck and impressed himself. To excite emotion, he must have felt emotion ; and emotion is only another word for partiality. The constitution which observes and registers every detail of an experience with uniform and equal minuteness is a constitution which has been strongly affected by no part of that experience. Such a constitution will never make an artist. The ulterior imaginative mean ings and combinations of art being left out of the question, the artist is one who instinctively tends to modify and work IX. 27