Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/223

 FINE ARTS 213 tures in the pages of missals and service-books. And from this stage again the process of the differentiation of the arts u repeated. It is by a new evolution or unfolding, and by one carried to much farther and more complicated stages than the last had reached, that the arts since the Middle Age have come to the point where we lind them to-day; when architecture is applied to a hundred secular uses with not less magnificence, or at least not less desire of magnifi cence, than that with which it fulfilled its single sacred use of old; with sculpture adorning, or intended to adorn, all our streets and commemorating all our likenesses ; with the subjects of painting extended from religion to all life and nature, until this one art has been divided into the dozen branches of history, landscape, still life, genre, anecdote, and the rest. Such being in brief the successive stages, and such the reiterated processes, of evolution among the shaping arts, the action of the same law can be traced in the growth of the speaking or time arts also. Originally poetry and music, the two great speaking arts, were not separated from each other and from the art of bodily motion, dancing. The father of song, music, and dancing, all three, was that savage of whom we have already spoken, who first clapped hands and leapt and shouted in time at some fes tival of his tribe. From the clapping, or rudimentary rhythmical noise, has been evolved the whole art of instru mental music, down to the entrancing complexities of the modern symphony. From the shout, or rudimentary emo tional utterance, has proceeded by a kindred evolution the whole art of vocal music down to the modern opera or oratorio. From the savage leap, or rudimentary expression of emotion by rhythmical movements of the body, has descended every variety of dancing, from the stately figures of the tragic chorus of the Greeks to the kordax of their comedy or the cancan of modern Paris. That the theory of evolution serves well to group and to interpret many facts in the history of art we are not dis posed to deny, though it would be easy to show that Mi- Herbert Spencer s instances and applications are not suffi cient to sustain all the conclusions that he seems to draw from them. Thus, it is perfectly true that the Egyptian or Assyrian palace wall is an instance of rudimentary painting and rudimentary sculpture in subservience to architecture. But it is not less true that races who had no architecture at all, but lived in caverns of the earth, exhibit, as we have already had occasion to notice, the rudiments of the other two arts, in a different form, in the carved or incised handles of their weapons. And it is almost certain that, among the nations of Oriental antiquity themselves, the art of decorat ing solid walls so as to please ths eye with patterns and reseutatious of natural objects was itself borrowed from the precedent of an older art, which works in easier materials, the art of weaving or tapestry. It would be in the perished textile fabrics of the earliest dwellers in the valley of the Nile and the Euphrates that we should find, if anywhere, the origins of the systems of surface design, whether con ventional or imitative, which those races afterwards applied to the decoration of their solid constructions. Not in any one exclusive type of primitive artistic activity, but in a score of such types ecpually, varying according to race, region, and circumstances, shall we find so many germs or nuclei from which whole families of fine arts have in the course of the world s history differentiated and unfolded themselves. And once at least during that history, a cataclysm of all the political and social forces has not only checked the process of thg evolution of the fine arts, but from an advanced stage of development has thrown them back again we speak especially of the manual group to the primitive stage where they are all practised conjointly and in mutual inter dependence. By Mr Herbert Spencer s application of the theory of evolution, not less than by Hegel s theory of the historic periods, attention is called to thi; fact that Christian Europe, during several centuries of the Middle Age, presents to our study a civilization analogous to the civilization of the old Oriential empires in this respact, that its ruling and characteristic manual art is architecture, to which sculp ture and painting are, as in the Oriental empires, once moro subjugated and attached. It does not of course follow that such periods of fusion or mutual dependence among tin; arts are periods of bad art. On the contrary, each stage cf the evolution of any art has its own characteristic excellence. There is on excellence of sculpture as a decorative or sub sidiary art, and that it reached in the Gothic age. There is an excellence of sculpture as an independent art, and that it reached in Greece in the 5th century B.C., and again ap proached in Tuscany in the 15th century A.D. The arts can be employed in combination, and yet be all severally excel lent. When music, dancing, acting, and singing were com- bined in the performance of the Greekchorus, the combination no doubt presented a relative perfection of each of the four elements analogous to the combined perfection, in the con temporary Doric temple, of pure architectural form, sculp tured enrichment of spaces specially contrived for sculpture in the pediments and frieze, and coloured decoration over all. The extreme differentiation of any art from every other art, and of the several branches of one art among themselves, does not by any means tend to the perfection of that art. The process of evolution among the fine arts may go, and, indeed, in the course of history has gone, too far. Tims an artist of our own day is usually either a painter only or a sculptor only ; but yet it is acknowledged that the painter who can model a statue, or the sculptor who can paint a picture, is likely to be the more efficient master of both arts; and in the best days of Florentine art the greatest men were generally painters, sculptors, architects, and goldsmiths all at once. In like manner a landscape painter who paints landscape only is apt not to paint it so well as one who paints the figure too ; and in recent times the skill of engraving had almost perished from the habit of allotting one part of the work, as skies, to one hand, another part, as figures, to a second, and another part, as landscape, to a third. This kind of continually progressing subdivision of labour, which seems to be the necessary law of industrial processes, is fatal to any skill which demands, as skill in the fine arts, we have seen, demands, the free exercise and direction at every moment of a highly complex cluster both of faculties and sensibilities. Turning to the other group of arts, there are reformers who say that the process of evolution and differentiation has in like manner gone too far with music. Music, as separated from words and actions, say Dr Wagner and his followers, independent orchestral and instrumental music, has reached its utmost development, and its farther advance can only be an advance into the inane ; while the music that is still asso ciated with words, operatic music, has broken itself up into a number of set and separate forms, as aria, scena, recitative, which correspond to no real varieties of instinctive emo tional utterance, and in the aimless production of which the art is in danger of paralysing and stultifying itself. Tin s process, they say, must be checked ; music and words must be brought back again into close connexion and mutual dependence ; the artificial opera forms must be abolished, and a new and homogeneous musical drama must be created, of which the author shall combine in himself the now differentiated functions of poet, composer, inventor, and director of scenery and stage appliances, so that the entire creation may bear the impress of a single mind. It is thus evident that the evolution theory furnishes us with some instructive points of view for the history of the fine arts as for other things. Another key to what is called the philosophy of that history, although one which has been