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CLASSIFICATION] 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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