Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/212

 202 FINE ARTS bear this character. Every classification of the fine arts must necessarily be provisional, according to the particular class of relations which it keeps in view. And for practical purposes it is requisite to bear in mind not one classification but several. Fixing our attention not upon complicated or problematical relations between the various arts, but only upon their simple and undisputed relations, and giving the first place in our consideration to the five greater arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, we shall find at least three principal modes in which every fine art either resembles or differs from the rest. First 1. The Shaping and the Speaking Arts. Each art either ckssifi- makes something, or does not make anything, that can be cation seeu anc j nanc ii e cL The arts which make something that in&quot; anT&quot; can ^ e seen an( * nan dled are architecture, sculpture, and speaking painting. In the products or results of all these arts ex- arts, ternal matter is in some way or another manually put to gether, fashioned, or disposed. But music and poetry do not produce any results of this kind. What music produces is something that can be heard, and what poetry produces, is something that can be either heard or read which last is a kind of ideal hearing, having for its avenue the eye instead of the ear, and for its material, written signs for words instead of the spoken words themselves. Now what the eye sees from any one point of view, it sees all at once; in other words, the parts of anything we see fill or occupy not time but space, and reach us from various points in space at a single simultaneous perception. If we are at the proper distance we see at one glance the whole height and breadth of a house from the ground to the chimneys, the whole of a statue from head to foot, and in a picture at once a the foreground and background, and everything that is within the four corners of the frame. On the other hand, the parts of anything we hear, or, reading, can imagine that we hear, fill or occupy not space but time, and reach us from various points in time through a continuous series of perceptions, or, in the case of reading, of images raised by words in the mind. We have to wait, in music, while one note follows another in a bar, and one bar another in an air, and one air another in a movement ; and in poetry, while one line with its images follows another in a stanza, and one stanza another in a canto, and so on. It is a con venient form of expressing both aspects of this difference between the two groups of arts, to say that architecture, sculpture, and painting are arts which give shape to things in space, or more briefly, shaping arts; and music and poetry arts which give utterance to things in time, or more briefly, speaking arts. These simple terms of the shaping and the speaking arts are not usual in English ; but they seem appropriate and clear, and we shall adopt them for denoting the distinction we are now considering between the group that work in space, architecture, sculpture, and pointing; and the group that work in time, music and poetry. (The distinction is best expressed in the German bildende and redende Kiinste ; for which the words manual and vocal, or else formative, or plastic, and rhetorical, are some times used, not too happily, in English.) This is practically, if not logically, the most substantial and vital distinction upon which a classification of the fine arts can be based. The arts which surround us in space with stationary effects for the eye, as tha house we live in, the picture on the walls, the marble figure in the vestibule, are stationary, hold a different kind of place in our experience not a greater or a higher place, but essentially a different place from the arts which provide us with transitory effects in time, effects capable of being awakened for the ear or mind at any moment, as a symphony is awakened by playing and an ode by reading, but lying in abeyance until we bid that moment come, and passing away when the performance or the reading is over. Such, indeed, is he practical force of the distinction that in modern usage the expression fine art, or even art, is often -used by itself in a sense which tacitly excludes music and poetry, and signifies the group of manual or shaping arts alone. As between any two of the five greater arts, the distinc- Inter- tion on which we are now dwelling is sharp and absolute, mediate Buildings, statues, pictures, belong absolutely to sight and class of space; to time and to hearing, real through the ear, or^^on ideal through the mind in reading, belong absolutely music and poetry. Among the lesser or subordinate arts, how ever, there are several in which this distinction finds no place, and which produce, in space and time at once, effects midway between the stationary or stable, and the transitory or fleeting. Such, first of all, is the dramatic art, in which the actor makes with his actions and gestures, or several actors make with the combination of their different actions and gestures, a kind of shifting picture, which appeals to the eyes of the witnesses while the sung or spoken words of the drama appeal to their ears ; thus making of them spectators and auditors at once, and associating with the pure time-art of words the mixed time-and-space art of bodily movements. As all movement whatsoever is necessarily movement through space, and takes time to happen, so every other fine art which is wholly or in part an art of movement partakes in like manner of this double character. Along with acting thus comes dancing. Dancing, when it is of the mimic character, may itself be a kind of acting, and is, whether apart from or in conjunction with this mimic ele ment, at any rate an art in which bodily movements obey, accompany, and as it were accentuate in space the time effects of music. Elocpaence or oratory in like manner, so far as its power depends on studied and premeditated gesture, is also an art which to some extent enforces its primary appeal through the ear in time by a secondary appeal through the eye in space. So much for the first distinction, that between the shaping or space-arts and the speaking or time-arts, with the intermediate and subordinate class of arts which, like acting, dancing, orator} 7, add to the pure time element a mixed time-and-space element. These can hardly be called shaping arts, because it is his own person, and not anything outside himself, which the actor, the dancer, the orator disposes or adjusts; they may perhaps best be called arts of motion, or moving arts. We must postpone further description of the functions of the several fine arts until we have taken account of the second great principle of classification among them, which is as follows : 2. The Imitative and the Non-imitative Arts. Each art Second either represents or imitates something, or does not represent classifi- or imitate anything, which exists already in nature. Of. the five greater fine arts, those which thus represent objects am i llon. , existing in nature, are sculpture, painting, and poetry, imitative i Those which do not represent anything so existing are arts - music and architecture. So that on this principle we get a different grouping from that which we got on the principle last explained. Two space-arts and one time-art now form the imitative group of sculpture, painting, and poetry ; while one space-art and one time-art form the non-imitative group of music and architecture. The mixed space-and- time arts of the actor, and of the dancer so far as he or she is also a mimic, belong of course, by their very name and nature, to the imitative class. It was this imitative character of the arts which chiefly The imi- occupied the attention of Aristotle. But Aristotle had nottative realized that there existed, along with the great group of f l imitative arts, another group strictly non-imitative. In thwarts his mind the idea of imitation or representation (mimesis) accord- was extended so as to denote the expressing, uttering, or ig to making manifest of anything whatever. Music and dancing, by which utterance or expression is given to emotions that may be quite detached from all definite ideas or images,