Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/209

 FINE ARTS 199 construction according to his ideal, and is not the construc tion when it is done so finished, so responsive in all its parts, so almost human is not that worthy of the name of tine art 1 ? Nay, we must reply, for the inventor has a definite and practical end before him; his ideal is not free; he deserves all credit as the perfector of a particular instru ment for a prescribed function, but an artist, a free follower of the fine arts, he is not. Lastly, let us consider one common observation more con cerning the nature of the fine arts, though in effect it too does but affirm, in a somewhat new light, that negative de finition on which we have dwelt so much already. The fine arts, it is said, are activities which men put forth, not because they need but because they like. They have the activity to spare, and to put it forth in this way pleases them. Fine art is to mankind what play is to the indivi dual, a free and arbitrary vent for energy which is not needed to be spent upon tasks concerned with the conserva tion, perpetuation, or protection of life. To insist on the superfluous or optional character of the fine arts, to call them the play or pastime of the human race as distinguished from its inevitable and sterner tasks, is obviously only to reiterate our fundamental distinction between the fine arts and the useful or necessary. But the distinction, as expressed in this particular form, has been interpreted in a great variety of ways, and followed out to an infinity of conclu sions, conclusions regarding both the nature of the activities themselves and the character and value of their results. For instance, starting from this saying that the aesthetic activities are a kind of play, the English psychology of association goes back to the spontaneous cries and move ments of children, in which their superfluous energies find a vent. It then enumerates pleasures of which the human con stitution is capable apart from direct advantage or utility. Such are the primitive or organic pleasures of sight and hearing, and the secondary or derivative pleasures of asso ciation or unconscious reminiscence and inference that soon become mixed up with these. Such are also the pleasures derived from following any kind of mimicry, or represen tation of things real or like reality. It describes the grouping within the mind of predilections based upon these pleasures ; it shows how the growing organism learns to govern its play, or direct its superfluous energies, in obedience to such predilections, till in mature individuals, and still more in mature societies, a highly regulated and accomplished group of leisure activities are habitually employed in supplying to a not less highly cultivated group of disinterested sensibilities their appropriate artistic pleasures. Again, in the views of an ancient philosopher, Plato, and a modern poet, Schiller, the consideration that the artistic activities are in the nature of play, and the mani festations in which they result independent of realities and utilities, has led to judgments so differing as the fol lowing. Plato held that the daily realities of things in ex perience are not realities indeed, but only far-off shows or reflections of the true realities, that is, of certain ideal or essential forms which can be apprehended as existing by the mind. Holding this, Plato saw in the works of fine art but the reflections of reflections, the shows of shows, and depreciated them according to their degree of remoteness from the ideal, typical, or sense-transcending existences. He sets the arts of medicine, agriculture, shoemaking, and the rest, above the fine arts, inasmuch as they produce something serious or useful (airovocuov TL). Fine art, he says, produces nothing useful, and makes only semblances (ei8o&amp;gt;Ao7rou K?J), whereas what mechanical art produces are utilities, and even in the ordinary sense realities 77x1*77). In another age, and thinking according to another Schiller system, Schiller, so far from holding thus cheap the king- an( i the dom of play and show, regarded his sovereignty over that ^ e ^ y - kingdom as the noblest prerogative of man. Schiller wrote trieb. his famous Letters on the ^Esthetic Education of Man in order to throw into popular currency, and at the same time to modify and follow up in a particular direction, certain systematic doctrines which had lately been launched upon the schools by Kant. The spirit of man, said Schiller after Kant, is placed between two worlds, the physical world or world of sense, and the moral world or world of will. Both of these are worlds of constraint or necessity. In the sensible world, the spirit of man submits to constraint from without ; in the moral world, it imposes constraint from within. So far as man yields to the importunities of sense, in so far he is bound and passive, the mere subject of outward shocks and victim of irrational forces. So far as he asserts himself by the exercise of will, imposing upon sense and outward things the dominion of the moral law within him, in so far he is free and active, the rational lord of nature and not her slave. Corresponding to these two worlds, he has within him two conflicting impulses or impulsions of his nature, the one driving him towards one way of living, the other towards another. The one, or sense-impulsion, Schiller thinks of as that which enslaves the spirit of man as the victim of matter, the other or moral impulsion as that which enthrones it as the dictator of form. Between the two the conflict at first seems inveterate. The kingdom of brute nature a-nd sense, the sphere of man s subjection and passivity, wages war against the kingdom of will and moral law, the sphere of his activity and control, and every conquest of the one is an encroach ment upon the other. One of the two, it seems, must win. The man, it seems, must either be slave or master ; he must either obey the impulsion of matter, and let sense and outward shocks lay upon him the constraint of nature, or he must obey the impulsion of form, and must control and subjugate sense under the constraint of moral reason and the will. Is there, then, no hope of truce between the two kingdoms, no ground where the two contending impulses can be reconciled 1 Must a man either abandon law and give way to sense absolutely, or else absolutely set up law and put down sense ? Nay, the answer comes, there is such a hope ; such a neutral territory there exists. Between the passive kingdom of matter and sense, where man is compelled to blindly feel and be, and the active kingdom of law and reason, where he is compelled sternly to will and act, there is a kingdom where both sense and will may have their way, and where man may give the rein to all his powers. But this middle kingdom does not lie in the sphere of practical life and conduct. In practical life and conduct you cannot yield to both impulsions at once ; let yourself go, in that sphere, to the allurements of sense, and you cast off law; maintain law, and you mortify sense. It is in the sphere of those activities which neither sub serve any necessity of nature, nor fulfil any moral duty, that the middle kingdom lies where sense and reason can be reconciled. Towards activities of this kind we are driven by a third impulsion of our nature not less essential to it than the other two, the impulsion, as Schiller calls it, of Play. Relatively to real life and conduct, play is a kind of harmless show ; it is that which we are free to do or leave undone as we please, and which lies aliks outside the sphere of needs and duties. In play we may do as we like, and no mischief will come of it. In this sphere man may put forth all his powers without risk of conflict, and may invent activities which will give it a complete ideal satisfaction to the contending faculties of sense and will at once, to the impulses which bid him feel and enjoy the shocks of physical and outward things, and