Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/761

Rh very necessity under which they labor to limit themselves to a definite attitude, depriving them of the most salient characteristic of the other group of arts—movement and power of change." He then offers the following classification:

We may accept this as the basis of a grouping of the fine arts, but it should be revised in the light of two considerations: First, it is a mixed classification, for dancing does not appeal to us through the ear only, as Véron asserts, but partly through the eye also, in the case of a spectator, but mainly through the muscular sense; and, second, it is a grouping that entirely ignores the genetic element by which the several arts are evolved, if not out of one another, at least in a definite order of sequence. Both of these objections are fully met, and in addition each of the arts is characterized by its own distinctive peculiarity, if we adopt the following arrangement:

A few words will assist us to see that this classification is a scientific one. In distinguishing between the arts of movement and the arts of form, we retain every advantage of Véron's scheme without a strained reference of the figures of the dance to the ear instead of the eye and the muscular sense, and at the same time do not obscure the close affiliation between dancing and music, which most obviously exists. The revised grouping also specifies the peculiar kind of movement and of form construction exemplified by each art. We further recognize in architecture its beginning as one of the useful arts, which, as mere form construction, it does not surpass. But when decoration is added, or rather when the decorative purpose pervades the entire plan and execution of architectural form, then for the first it becomes a fine art. The peculiarity of sculpture is, that it is representative form construction, endeavoring to copy literally, or to represent fully, the object of the sculptor's work. In the earliest sculpture, as we have no inconsiderable evidence to show, even color was employed, and this in a truly representative way, reproducing the colors of the parts represented. Painting is not strictly representative, but imitative, striving to present on a flat surface, with only two dimensions, objects which in reality occupy three dimensions of space. By the arts of perspective and foreshortening this aim is in a great degree accomplished, so that a result is produced which