Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/222

 212 FINE ARTS man, all his houses, palaces, temples, workshops, roofed places of meeting and exchange, theatres for spectacle, fortresses of defence, bridges, aqueducts, and ships for seafaring. The wise architect having fashioned any one of these great constructions at once for service and beauty in the highest degree, the lesser or auxiliary manual arts come in, to fill, furnish, and adorn it with things of service and beauty in a lower degree, each according to its own technical laws and capabilities; some, like pottery, delight ing the user at once by beauty of form, delicacy of sub stance, and pleasantness of imitative or non-imitative orna ment; some, like embroidery, by richness of tissue, and by the same twofold pleasantness of ornament; some, like goldsmith s work, by preciousness of fancy and workman ship proportionate to the preciousness of the material. To this vast group of workmen, whose work is at the same time useful and fine in its degree, the ancient Greek gave the place which is most just and convenient for thought, when he classed them all together under the name of rcKToi/es or artificers, and called the builder by the name of dpxtTtKTtov, arch-artificer or artificer-in-chief. Of the manner in which the operation of these auxiliary manual arts has been modified in later times by the increase of mechanical agencies, and of the degree to which the intervention of such agencies, in multiplying one uni form design upon a vast number of wares, is compatible with the true characters of fine art in the product, we have said enough further back. It is time now to turn to the last section of our inquiry. III. OF THE HISTORY OF THE FINE ARTS. Hegel Under this heading it will not be expected, nor will our and the S p ace allow, that we should do more than touch in the of the most g enera -l terms on some of the great facts and divisions three i u the history of the several arts. The students of human periods, culture have within the last hundred years concentrated a great deal of attentive thought upon the history of fine art, and have put forth various comprehensive generalizations intended at once to sum up, and to account for, the phases and vicissitudes of that history. The most famous formula of all is that of Hegel, to which we have already alluded. Hegel, we learned, regarded particular arts as being charac teristic of and appropriate to particular forms of civiliza tion and particular ages of history. For him, architecture was the symbolic art appropriate to ages of obscure and struggling ideas, and characteristic of the Egyptian and the Asiatic races of old and of the medireval age -in Europe. Sculpture was the classical art appropriate to ages of lucid and self-possessed ideas, and characteristic of the Greek and Roman period. Painting, music, and poetry were the romantic arts, appropriate to the ages of complicated and overmastering ideas, and characteristic of modern humanity in general. In the working out of these generalizations, Hegel has brought together a great mass of judicious and striking observations; and that they are generalizations con taining on the whole a preponderance of truth may be ad mitted. It has been objected against them, from the philo sophical point of view, that they too much mix up the definition of what the several arts theoretically are with considerations of what in various historical circumstances they have practically been. From the historical point of view, there can be taken what seems a more valid objec tion, that these formulas of Hegel tend too much to concen trate the attention of the student upon the one dominant art chosen as characteristic of any period, and to give him false ideas of the proportions and relations of the several arts at the same period, of the proportions and relations which poetry, say, really bore to sculpture among the Greeks and Romans, or sculpture to architecture among the Christian nations of the Middle Age. The truth is, that the historic survey gained over any field of human activity from the height of generalizations so vast in their range and scope as these are, must needs, in the complexity of earthly affairs, be a survey too distant to give much guidance until its omissions are filled up by a great deal of nearer study ; and such nearer study is apt to compel the student in tho long run to qualify the theories with which he has started until they are in danger of disappearing altogether. Another systematic exponent of the universe, whose system is very different from that of Hegel, Mr Herbert Spencer, has brought the great scientific generalization of our time, the doctrine of Evolution, to bear, not without in- teresting results, upon the history of the fine arts and their development. Mr Herbert Spencer sets forth how the manual group of fine arts, architecture, sculpture, and painting, were in their first rudiments bound up together, and how each of them in the course of history has liber ated itself from the rest by a gradual process of separa tion. These arts did not at first exist in the distinct and developed forms in which we have above described them. There were no statues in the round, and no painted panels or canvasses hung upon the wall. Only the rudiments of sculpture and painting existed, and that only as ornaments applied to architecture, in the shape of tiers of tinted reliefs, representing, in a kind of picture-writing, the exploits of kings upon the walls of their temple-palaces. Gradually sculpture took greater salience and roundness, and tended to disengage itself from the wall, while painting found out how to represent solidity by means of its own, and dispensed with the raised surface upon which it was first applied. But the old mixture and union of the three arts, with an undeveloped art of painting and an undeveloped art of sculpture still engaged in or applied to the works of archi tecture, continued on the whole to prevail through the long cycles of Egyptian and Assyrian history. In the Egyp tian palace-temple we find a monument at once political and religious, and into this one class of monument we find concentrated all the energies and faculties of all the arti ficers of the race. With its incised and pictured walls, its half- detached colossi, its open and its colonnaded chambers, the forms of the columns and their capitals recalling the stems and blossoms of the lotus and papyrus, with its architecture everywhere taking on the characters and cover ing itself with the adornments of immature sculpture and painting this structure exhibits within its single fabric the origins of the whole subsequent group of shaping arts. From hence it is a long way to the innumerable artistic sur roundings of later Greek and Roman life, the many templf j with their detached and their engaged statues, the theatres, the porticoes, the baths, the training schools, with free and separate statues both of gods and men adorning every build ing and public place, the frescoes upon the walls, the panel- pictures hung in temples and public and private galleries. In the terms of the theory of evolution, the advance from the early Egyptian to the later Greek stage is an advance from the one to the manifold, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and affords a striking instance of that vast and ceaseless process of differ entiation and integration which it is the law of all things to undergo. In the Christian monuments of the early Middle Age, again, the arts have gone back to the rudimentary stage, and are similarly attached to and combined with each other. The single monument, the one great birth of art, in that age, is the Gothic church. In this we find the art of applied sculpture exercised in fashions infinitely rich and various, but entirely in the service and for the adornment of the architecture; we find painting exercised in fashions more rudimentary still, principally in the forms of coloured imagery in the chancel windows and illuminated mini i- Tlerl ert Spencer and the doctrine of Evolu tion.