Chapter XIX: Part 19

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.