Page:EB1911 - Volume 10.djvu/371

GENERAL DEFINITION] to stand off from and appreciate the results of their own labours; the singer enjoys the sound of his own voice, and the musician of his own instrument; the poet, according to his temperament, furnishes the most enthusiastic or the most fastidious reader for his own stanzas. Neither, on the other hand, does the person who is a habitual recipient from others of the pleasures of fine art forfeit the privilege of producing them according to his capabilities, and of becoming, if he has the power, an amateur or occasional artist.

Most of the common properties which have been recognized by consent as peculiar to the group of fine arts will be found on examination to be implied in, or deducible from, the one fundamental character generally claimed for them, namely, that they exist independently of direct

practical necessity or utility. Let us take, first, a point relating to the frame of mind of the recipient, as distinguished from the producer, of the pleasures of fine art. It is an observation as old as Aristotle that such pleasures differ from most other pleasures of experience in that they are disinterested, in the sense that they are not such as nourish a man’s body nor add to his riches; they are not such as can gratify him, when he receives them, by the sense of advantage or superiority over his fellow-creatures; they are not such as one human being can in any sense receive exclusively from the object which bestows them. Thus it is evidently characteristic of a beautiful building that its beauty cannot be monopolized, but can be seen and admired by the inhabitants of a whole city and by all visitors for all generations. The same thing is true of a picture or a statue, except in so far as an individual possessor may choose to keep such a possession to himself, in which case his pride in exclusive ownership is a sentiment wholly independent of his pleasure in artistic contemplation. Similarly, music is composed to be sung or played for the enjoyment of many at a time, and for such enjoyment a hundred years hence as much as to-day. Poetry is written to be read by all readers for ever who care for the ideas and feelings of the poet, and can apprehend the meaning and melody of his language. Hence, though we can speak of a class of the producers of fine art, we cannot speak of a class of its consumers, only of its recipients or enjoyers. If we consider other pleasures which might seem to be analogous to those of fine art, but to which common consent yet declines to allow that character, we shall see that one reason is that such pleasures are not in their nature thus disinterested. Thus the sense of smell and taste have pleasures of their own like the senses of sight and hearing, and pleasures neither less poignant nor very much less capable of fine graduation and discrimination than those. Why, then, is the title of fine art not claimed for any skill in arranging and combining them? Why are there no recognized arts of savours and scents corresponding in rank to the arts of forms, colours and sounds—or at least none among Western nations, for in Japan, it seems, there is a recognized and finely regulated social art of the combination and succession of perfumes? An answer commonly given is that sight and hearing are intellectual and therefore higher senses, that through them we have our avenues to all knowledge and all ideas of things outside us; while taste and smell are unintellectual and therefore lower senses, through which few such impressions find their way to us as help to build up our knowledge and our ideas. Perhaps a more satisfactory reason why there are no fine arts of taste and smell—or let us in deference to Japanese modes leave out smell, and say of taste only—is this, that savours yield only private pleasures, which it is not possible to build up into separate and durable schemes such that every one may have the benefit of them, and such as cannot be monopolized or used up. If against this it is contended that what the programme of a performance is in the musical art, the same is a menu in the culinary, and that practically it is no less possible to serve up a thousand times and to a thousand different companies the same dinner than the same symphony, we must fall back upon that still more fundamental form of the distinction between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic bodily senses, upon which the physiological psychologists of the English school lay stress. We must say that the pleasures of taste cannot be pleasures of fine art, because their enjoyment is too closely associated with the most indispensable and the most strictly personal of utilities, eating and drinking. To pass from these lower pleasures to the highest; consider the nature of the delight derived from the contemplation, by the person who is their object, of the signs and manifestations of love. That at least is a beautiful experience; why is the pleasure which it affords not an artistic pleasure either? Why, in order to receive an artistic pleasure from human signs and manifestations of this kind, are we compelled to go to the theatre and see them exhibited in favour of a third person who is not really their object any more than ourselves? This is so, for one reason, evidently, because of the difference between art and nature. Not to art, but to nature and life, belongs love where it is really felt, with its attendant train of vivid hopes, fears, passions and contingencies. To art belongs love displayed where it is not really felt; and in this sphere, along with reality and spontaneousness of the display, and along with its momentous bearings, there disappear all those elements of pleasure in its contemplation which are not disinterested—the elements of personal exultation and self-congratulation, the pride of exclusive possession or acceptance, all these emotions, in short, which are summed up in the lover’s triumphant monosyllable, “Mine.” Thus, from the lowest point of the scale to the highest, we may observe that the element of personal advantage or monopoly in human gratifications seems to exclude, them from the kingdom of fine art. The pleasures of fine art, so far as concerns their passive or receptive part, seem to define themselves as pleasures of gratified contemplation, but of such contemplation only when it is disinterested—which is simply another way of saying, when it is unconcerned with ideas of utility.

Modern speculation has tended in some degree to modify and obscure this old and established view of the pleasures of fine art by urging that the hearer or spectator is not after all so free from self-interest as he seems; that in the act of artistic contemplation he experiences an enhancement

or expansion of his being which is in truth a gain of the egoistic kind; that in witnessing a play, for instance, a large part of his enjoyment consists in sympathetically identifying himself with the successful lover or the virtuous hero. All this may be true, but does not really affect the argument, since at the same time he is well aware that every other spectator or auditor present may be similarly engaged with himself. At most the objection only requires us to define a little more closely, and to say that the satisfactions of the ego excluded from among the pleasures of fine art are not these ideal, sympathetic, indirect satisfactions, which every one can share together, but only those which arise from direct, private and incommunicable advantage to the individual.

Next, let us consider another generally accepted observation concerning the nature of the fine arts, and one, this time, relating to the disposition and state of mind of the practising artist himself. While for success in other arts it is only necessary to learn their rules and to apply them until

practice gives facility, in the fine arts, it is commonly and justly said, rules and their application will carry but a little way towards success. All that can depend on rules, on knowledge, and on the application of knowledge by practice, the artist must indeed acquire, and the acquisition is often very complicated and laborious. But outside of and beyond such acquisitions he must trust to what is called genius or imagination, that is, to the spontaneous working together of an incalculably complex group of faculties, reminiscences, preferences, emotions, instincts in his constitution. This characteristic of the activities of the artist is a direct consequence or corollary of the fundamental fact that the art he practices is independent of utility. A utilitarian end is necessarily a determinate and prescribed end, and to every end which is determinate and prescribed there must be one road which is the best. Skill in any useful art means knowing practically, by rules and the application of rules, the best road to the particular