Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/214

 FINE A E T S Non-imi tative charac ter of ar chitec ture. Analo gies of architec ture and music. art, of tvhich the business is to utter and arouse emotion by successions and combinations of regulated sound. That which music is thus among the speaking or time-arts, architecture is among the shaping or space-arts. As music appeals to our faculties for taking pleasure in non-imitative combinations of transitory sound, so architecture appeals to our faculties for taking pleasure in non-imitative combi nations of stationary mass. Corresponding to the system of ear-effects or combinations of time, tone, and harmony with which music works, architecture works with a system of eye-effects or combinations of line, light and shade, CDlour, proportion, interval, alternation of plane and decorated parts, regularity and variety in regularity, apparent stability, vastness, appropriateness, and the rest. Such pleasures of the eye and ear, depending on abstract relations of sounds in time and sights in space, and not all on concrete imita tion, are one half of those disinterested pleasures of which we are capable, and which the play-impulse within us finds oat and turns to account. Only, the materials of architec ture are not volatile and intangible like sound, but solid brick, stone, metal, and mortar, and the laws of weight and force according to which these materials have to be combined are much more severe and cramping than the laws of melody and harmony which regulate the combinations of music. The architect is further subject up to a certain point, which the musician is not, to the dictates and pre cise prescriptions of utility. Hence the effects of architec ture are necessarily less full of various, rapturous, and un foreseen enchantment than the effects of music. Yet for those who possess sensibility (which many persons without knowing it completely lack) to the pleasures of the eye and the perfections of shaping art, the architecture of the great ages has yielded combinations which, so far as comparison is permissible between things unlike in their materials, fall no whit short of the achievements of music in those kinds of excellence which are common to them both. Thus in the virtues of lucidity, of just proportion and organic inter dependence of the several parts or members, in exquisite subtlety of their mutual relations, and of the transitions from one part or member to another, in consummate purity and consummate finish of individual forms, in the character of one thing growing naturally out of another and every thing serving to complete the whole in all these qualities, no musical combination can surpass a typical Doric temple such as the Hecatompedon at Athens. None, again, can surpass the great cathedrals of the Middle Age in the quali ties of sublimity, of complexity, in the power both of ex pressing and suggesting spiritual aspiration, in the invention of intricate developments and ramifications about a central plan, in the union of greatness and majesty in the main conception with inexhaustible fertility of adornment in de tail. In fancifulness, in the unexpected, in capricious opulence and far-sought splendour, in filling the mind with mingled enchantments of East and West and South and North, none can surpass a building like St Mark s at Venice, with its blending of Byzantine elements, Italian elements, Cfothic elements, each carried to the utmost pitch of elabo ration and each enriched with a hundred caprices of orna ment, but all working together, all in obedience to a law, and &quot;all beginning and ending with the Cross.&quot; It wuuld be tempting to carry further, and into more par ticular applications, the parallel between the space-effects of architecture and the time-effects of music. But we must be content with having indicated it here. It is no fanciful similitude, but constitutes, so to speak, the positive aspect of that affinity between music and architecture, of which we bring forward the negative aspect only when we separate these two arts, as being non-imitative, from the imitative arts of sculpture, painting, and poetry. In the case of architecture, however, as in the case of music, this non-imitative character must not be stated quite Excep- without exception or reserve. There have been styles tions anci of architecture in which forms suggesting or imitating ^ mita natural or other phenomena have held a place among the thTabcw abstract forms proper to the art. Often the mode of such suggestions is rather symbolical to the mind than really imitative to the eve; as when the number and relations of the heavenly planets were imaged in the seven concentric walls of their great temple, and in many other architectural constructions, by that race of astronomers the Babylonians; or as when the shape of the cross was adopted, with innumer able slight varieties and modifications, for the ground plan of the churches of Christendom. Passing to examples of imitation more properly so-called, it may be true, and was at any rate long believed, that the aisles of Gothic churches Lad reference to or were inspired by the aspect of the natural forest aisles amid which they rose, and that the upsoaring forest trunks and meeting branches were imaged in their piers and vaultings. In the temple-palaces of Egypt, one of the regular architectural members, the sus. taining pier, is often systematically wrought in the actual likeness of a conventionalized cluster of lotus stems, with lotus flowers for the capitals. When we come to the fashion, not rare in Greek architecture, of carving this same sustaining member, the column, in complete human likeness, and employing Caryatids, Canephori, Atlases, or the like, to carry the architrave of a building, it then becomes difficult to say whether we have to do with the work of architecture or of sculpture. The case, at any rate, is different from that in which the sculptor is called in to supply surface decoration to the various members of a building, or to fill with the products of his own art spaces in the building specially contrived and left vacant for that purpose. When the imitative feature is in itself an indispensable member of the architectural construction, to architecture rather than sculpture (not that such niceties of appropriation are import ant) we shall probably do best to assign it. Defining Denni- architecture, then (apart from its utility, which for the tion of present we leave out of consideration), as a shaping art, oj arch ^vhich the function is to arouse emotion by combinations of ordered and decorated mass, we pass from the characteristics of the non-imitative to those of the imitative group of arts. The second half of the disinterested pleasures of which The iml we are capable, and which the play impulse finds out and tative turns to account in us, are the pleasures afforded by arts * imitation, that is, by the showing of shows or the telling of stories which bring before us things like what we know in reality. In the consideration of the arts which minister to these pleasures, we cannot do better than follow that Aristotelian division to which we have already alluded, and which describes each art according, first, to the objects it imitates, and secondly, to the means or instruments it employs. Sculpture, then, may have for its objects of imitation Sculp- the shapes of whatever things possess length, breadth, and ture and magnitude. For its means or instruments it has solid form, ts varie which the sculptor either carves out of a hard substance, as in the case of wood and stone, or models in a yielding substance, as in the case of clay and wax, or casts in a dis solved or molten substance, as in the case of plaster and of metal in certain uses, or beats, draws, or chases in a malleable and ductile substance, as in the case of metal in other uses, or stamps from dies or moulds, a method some times used in all soft or fusible materials. Thus a statue or statuette may either be carved straight out of a block of stone or wood, or first modelled in clay or wax, then moulded in plaster or some equivalent material, and then carved in stone or cast in bronze. A gem is wrought in stone by cutting and grinding. Figures in jeweller s work . ture.