Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/208

 198 FINE ARTS large liberty to choose his own problems, and may solve each of them in a thousand different ways according to the prompting of his own ordering or creating instincts. The musical composer has the largest liberty of all. Having learned what is learnable in his art, having mastered the complicated and laborious rules of musical form, having next determined the particular class of the work which he is about to compose, he has then before Mm the whole inexhaustible world of appropriate successions and combina tions of emotional sound. He is merely directed and not fettered, in the case of song, cantata, oratorio, or opera, by the sense of the words which he has to set. The poverty or splendour of the result depends absolutely on his pos sessing or failing to possess powers which can neither be trained in, nor communicated to, any man. And this double freedom, alike from practical service and from the representation of definite objects, is what makes music in a certain sense the typical fine art, or art of arts. Archi tecture shares one half of this freedom. It has not to imitate natural objects; for this service it calls in sculpture to its aid ; but architecture is without the other half of freedom altogether. The architect has a sphere of liberty in the disposition of his masses, lines, colours, alternations of light and shadow, of plain and ornamented surface, and the rest ; but upon this sphere he can only enter on con dition that he at the same time fulfils the strict practical task of supplying the required accommodation, and obeys the strict mechanical necessities imposed by the laws of weight, thrust, support, resistance, and other properties of solid matter. In the imitative arts, the sculptor, the painter, the poet, has each in like manner his sphere of necessary facts, rules, and conditions corresponding to the nature of his task. The sculptor must be intimately versed in the facts of the human frame and the rules and condi tions for its representation in solid form ; the painter in a much more extended range of natural facts and appear ances, and the rules and conditions for representing them on a plane surface ; the poet s art of words has its own not inconsiderable basis of positive and disciplined acquisi tion. So far as rules, precepts, measurements, and other communicable laws or secrets can carry the artist, so far also the spectator can account for, analyse, and, so to speak, tabulate the effects of his art. But the essential character of the artist s operation, its very bloom and, virtue, lies in those parts of it which fall outside this range of regulation on the one hand and analysis on the other. His merit varies according to the felicity with which he is able, in that region, to exercise his free choice and frame his individual ideal, and according to the tenacity with which he strives to grasp and realize his choice, or to attain perfection according to that ideal. Of the ampli tude of that freedom, of the complex and unsearchable secrets of that felicity, of the honourableness of that pursuit after perfection, men in general have expressed their con sciousness when they have called these the fine or beautiful arts ; thereby signifying not less their admiration of the nature of the operation than their pleasure in its results. Corresponding, then, to the fact, concerning the ends or purposes of the mechanical and the fine arts respectively, that those exist for use and these independently of use we get tho further fact, concerning the respective modes of their pursuit, that the mechanical arts can be rightly prac tised by strict adherence to rule and precept, while the fine arts, though they have technical foundations which are matters of rule and precept too, can yet be rightly practised only by following, in a region outside the reach of rule and precept, the free prompting of some of the finest faculties of the spirit. In an age when the power and province of mechanical art are daily expanding, it is worth while in this connexion to inquire in what way such expansion affects the power Relative and province of fine art. The great practical movement shares of of the world in our age is a movement for the develop- art ancl ment of mechanical inventions and multiplication of me- ^j an chanical products. So far as these inventions are applied what are to purposes purely useful, and so far as their products do K-nown not profess to offer anything delightful to contemplation, as art this movement in no way concerns our argument. But f^esf &quot;d there is a vast multitude of products which do profess art-in- qualities of pleasantness, and upon which the ornaments dustries. intended to make them pleasurable are bestowed by machinery, and in speaking of which we are accustomed to the phrases art-industry, industrial art, art manufactures, and the like. It concerns us to know what relation the fine arts really hold to these. The answer is, that the in dustry or ingenuity which directs the machine is not fine art at all, since the object of the machine is simply to mul tiply as easily and as perfectly as possible a definite and pre scribed impress or pattern. This is equally true whether the machine is a perfectly simple one, like the engraver s press, for producing and multiplying impressions from an en graved plate, or a highly complex one, like the loom, in which elaborate patterns of carpet or curtain are set for weaving. In both cases there exists behind the mechanical industry an industry which is one of fine art in its degree. In the case of the engraver s press, there exists behind the industry of the printer the art of the engraver, which, if the engraver is also the free inventor of the design, is then a fine art, or if he is but the interpreter of the invention of another, is then in its turn a semi-mechanical appliance iu aid of the fine art of the first inventor. In the case of the weaver s loom there is, behind the mechanical industry which directs the loom at its given task, the fine art, or what ought to be the fine art, of the designer who has contrived the pattern. In the case of the engraving, the mechanical industry of printing only exists for the sake of bringing out and disseminating abroad the fine art em ployed upon the design. In the case of the carpet or cur tain, the fine art is only called in to make the product of the useful or mechanical industry of the loom acceptable, since the eye^of man is so constituted as to receive pleasure or the reverse of pleasure from whatever it rests upon, and it is to the interest of the manufacturer to have his product so made as to give pleasure if it can. Whether the machine is thus a humble servant to the artist, or the artist a kind of humble purveyor to the machine, the fine art in the result is due to the former alone ; and in any case it reaches the recipient at second-hand, having been put in circulation by a medium not artistic but mechanical. So far, then, as the adoption of mechanical agencies causes an increasing number of people to buy the same print, or decorate their apartments with the same hangings, or wear the same pattern, where before each community or section of a community used products according to its individual taste and tradition, so far such adoption tends to reduce the number of first-hand artistic inventions, or total quantity of fine art, in the world. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the expansion of what are called art- industries is necessarily tantamount to an increase or pro pagation of fine art; it is only tantamount to an increase or propagation of particular decorations mechanically mul tiplied; and is a thing desirable or not according as the decorations so multiplied replace something better or worse than themselves. Again, with reference not to the application of mechanical contrivances but to their invention, is not, it may be in quired, the title of artist due to the inventor of some of the astonishingly complex and astonishingly efficient machines of modern times? Docs he not spend as much thought, labour, genius, as any sculptor or musician in perfecting his