Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/217

 FINE ARTS Tech nical va rieties of painting. Defini tion of painting. is atuvc and me thods of poetry. 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 for children in which a water-flag and king fisher, 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. This, however, is an order of considerations belonging rather to particular criti cism than to general classification. It remains to consider, for the purposes of our classifica tion, what are the technical varieties of the painter s craft. Since we gave the generic name of painting to all imitation of natural objects by the assemblage of lines, colours, and lights and darks on a single plane, we must include as varieties of painting, not only the ordinary crafts of spread ing or laying pictures on an opaque surface in fresco, oil, or water-colour, but also the craft of arranging a picture to be seen by the transmission of light through a transparent substance, in glass painting ; the craft of fitting together a multitude of solid cubes or cylinders so that their united surface forms a picture to the eye, in mosaic ; the craft of spre:i ling vitreous colours in a state of fusion so that they form a picture when hardened, as in enamel ; and even, it would seem, the crafts of tapestry and embroidery, since these also yield to the eye a plane surface figured in imita tion of nature. As drawing we must also count incised or engraved work of all kinds representing merely the outlines of objects and not their modellings, as for instance the mythological subjects incised upon the bronze mirrors and dressing cases of Etruscan ladies ; while raised work in low relief, in which outlines are plainly marked and modellings neglected, furnishes, as we have seen, a doubtful class be tween sculpture and painting. In all figures that are first modelled in the solid and then variously coloured, sculp ture and painting bear a common part ; as for instance when the sculptor Praxiteles handed his finished statue to the painter Nicias to receive its circumlitio or tinting, But as the special characteristic of sculpture, the third dimension, is here present, it is to that art and not to painting that we shall still ascribe the resulting work. The system of more or less highly colouring stone statues, that is, of painting sculpture, which the moderns have disused, prevailed alike in the Greek and Gothic ages ; and solid form and local colour have been similarly combined in the productions of pottery in all ages, from those of Corinth and Tanagra down to those of Dresden and Sevres. With these indications, which the reader can easily follow up for himself, we may leave the art of painting defined in general terms as a shaping art, of which the business is to imitate all kinds of natural objects by repro ducing on a plane surface the relations of their boundary lines, lights and shadoivs, or colours, or all three of these appearances together. The next and last of the imitative arts is the speaking art of poetry. The transition from sculpture and painting to poetry is, from the point of view not of our present but of our first division among the fine arts, abrupt and abso lute. It is a transition from space into time, from the sphere of material forms to the sphere of immaterial images. This is not the place for any detailed exposition of the principles of poetry. But for the sake of the due co-ordina tion of this art in our general scheme, we are bound as briefly as we can to state its functions among the rest. In so doing we will again adopt the several heads of descrip tion with which the reader is already familiar from Aristotle, The objects of poetry s imitation, then, we shall define as everything of which the idea or image can be called up by words, that is, every force and phenomenon of nature, every operation and result of art, every fact of life and history, or every imagination of such a fact, every thought and feeling of the human spirit, for which mankind in the course of its long evolution has been able to create in speech an explicit and appropriate sign. The means or instruments of poetry s imitation are these verbal signs or words, arranged in lines, strophes, or stanzas, so that their sounds have some of the regulated qualities of music. The three chief modes or forms of the imitation may still be de fined as they were defined by Aristotle himself. First comes the epic or narrative form, in which the poet speaks alternately for himself and his characters, now describing their situations and feelings in his own words, and anon making each of them speak in the first person for him self. Second comes the lyric form, in which the poet .speaks in his own name exclusively, and gives expression to sentiments which are purely personal. Third comes the dramatic form, in which the poet does not speak for himself at all, but only puts into the mouths of each of his person ages successively such discourse as he thinks appropriate to the part. The last of these three forms of poetry, the dramatic, calls, if it is merely read, on the imagination of the reader to fill up those circumstances of situation, action, and the rest, which in the first or epic form are supplied by the narrative between the speeches, and for which in the lyric or personal form there is no occasion. To avoid mak ing this call upon the imagination, to bring home its effects in full reality, dramatic poetry has to call in the aid of several subordinate arts, the shaping or space art of the scene-painter, the mixed time and space arts of the actor and the dancer. Occasionally also, or in the case of opera throughout, dramatic poetry heightens the emotional effect of its words with music. A play or drama is thus, as per formed upon the theatre, not a poem merely, but a poem accompanied, interpreted, completed, and brought several degrees nearer to reality by a combination of auxiliary effects of the other arts. Besides the narrative, the lyric, and dramatic forms of poetry, the didactic, that is, the teach ing or expository form, has usually been recognized as a fourth. Aristotle refused so to recognize it, regarding a didactic poem in the light not so much of a poem as of a treatise. But from the Works and Days down to the Loves of the Plants there has been too much literature produced in this form for us to follow Aristotle here. We shall do better to regard didactic poetry as a variety corresponding, among the speaking arts, to architecture and the other manual arts of which the first purpose is use, but which are capable of accompanying and adorning use by a pleasurable appeal to the emotions. We shall hardly make our definition of poetry, con- Defini- sidered as an imitative art, too extended if we say that it tlon f is a speaking art, of ivhich the business is to represent by 1)0e ^ means of verbal signs arranged with musical regularity everything for which verbal signs have been invented. Neither the varieties of poetical form, however, nor the modes in which the several forms have been mixed up and interchanged as such mixture and interchange are implied, for instance, by the very title of a group of Mr Browning s poems, the Dramatic Lyrics, the observation of neither of these things concerns us here so much as the observation of the relations of poetry in general, as an art of represen tation or imitation, to the other arts of imitation, painting and sculpture. Verbal signs have been invented for innumerable things which cannot be imitated or represented at all either in solid form or upon a coloured surface. You cannot carve or paint a sigh, or the feeling which finds utter ance in a sigh ; you can only suggest the idea of the feeling, and that in a somewhat imperfect and uncertain way, by representing the physical aspect of a person in the act of breathing the sigh, Similarly you cannot carve or paint any movement, but only figures or groups in