ends of that art. Thus the farmer, the engineer, the carpenter, the builder so far as he is not concerned with the look of his buildings, the weaver so far as he is not concerned with the designing of the patterns which he weaves, possesses each his peculiar skill, but a skill to which fixed problems are set, and which, if it indulges in new inventions and combinations at all, can indulge them only for the sake of an improved solution of those particular problems. The solution once found, the invention once made, its rules can be written down, or at any rate its practice can be imparted to others who will apply it in their turn. Whereas no man can write down, in a way that others can act upon, how Beethoven conquered unknown kingdoms in the world of harmony, or how Rembrandt turned the aspects of gloom, squalor and affliction into pictures as worthy of contemplation as those into which the Italians before him had turned the aspects of spiritual exaltation and shadowless day. The reason why the operations of the artist thus differ from the operations of the ordinary craftsman or artificer is that his ends, being ends other than useful, are not determinate nor fixed as theirs are. He has large liberty to choose his own problems, and may solve each of them in a thousand different ways according to the prompting of his own ordering or creating instincts. The musical composer has the largest liberty of all. Having learned what is learnable in his art, having mastered the complicated and laborious rules of musical form, having next determined the particular class of the work which he is about to compose, he has then before him the whole inexhaustible world of appropriate successions and combinations of emotional sound. He is merely directed and not fettered, in the case of song, cantata, oratorio or opera, by the sense of the words which he has to set. The value of the result depends absolutely on his possessing or failing to possess powers which can neither be trained in nor communicated to any man. And this double freedom, alike from practical service and from the representation of definite objects, is what makes music in a certain sense the typical fine art, or art of arts. Architecture shares one-half of this freedom. It has not to copy or represent natural objects; for this service it calls in sculpture to its aid; but architecture is without the other half of freedom altogether. The architect has a sphere of liberty in the disposition of his masses, lines, colours, alternations of light and shadow, of plain and ornamented surface, and the rest; but upon this sphere he can only enter on condition that he at the same time fulfils the strict practical task of supplying the required accommodation, and obeys the strict mechanical necessities imposed by the laws of weight, thrust, support, resistance and other properties of solid matter. The sculptor again, the painter, the poet, has each in like manner his sphere of necessary facts, rules and conditions corresponding to the nature of his task. The sculptor must be intimately versed both in the surface aspects and the inner mechanism of the human frame alike in rest and motion, and in the rules and conditions for its representation in solid form; the painter in a much more extended range of natural facts and appearances, and the rules and conditions for representing them on a plane surface; the poet’s art of words has its own not inconsiderable basis of positive and disciplined acquisition. So far as rules, precepts, formulas and other communicable laws or secrets can carry the artist, so far also the spectator can account for, analyse, and, so to speak, tabulate the effects of his art. But the essential character of the artist’s operation, its very bloom and virtue, lies in those parts of it which fall outside this range of regulation on the one hand and analysis on the other. His merit varies according to the felicity with which he is able, in that region, to exercise his free choice and frame his individual ideal, and according to the tenacity with which he strives to grasp and realize his choice, or to attain perfection according to that ideal.
In this connexion the question naturally arises, In what way do the progress and expansion of mechanical art affect the power and province of fine art? The great practical movement of the world in our age is a movement for the development of mechanical inventions and multiplication of mechanical products. Fine arts and machinery: “art manufactures.” So far as these inventions are applied to purposes purely useful, and so far as their products to not profess to offer anything delightful to contemplation, this movement in no way concerns our argument. But there is a vast multitude of products which do profess qualities of pleasantness, and upon which the ornaments intended to make them pleasurable are bestowed by machinery; and in speaking of these we are accustomed to the phrases art-industry, industrial art, art manufactures and the like. In these cases the industry or ingenuity which directs the machine is not fine art at all, since the object of the machine is simply to multiply as easily and as perfectly as possible a definite and prescribed impress or pattern. This is equally true whether the machine is a simple one, like the engraver’s press, for producing and multiplying impressions from an engraved plate, or a highly complex one, like the loom, in which elaborate patterns of carpet or curtain are set for weaving. In both cases there exists behind the mechanical industry an industry which is one of fine art in its degree. In the case of the engraver’s press, there exists behind the industry of the printer the art of the engraver, which, if the engraver is also the free inventor of the design, is then a fine art, or, if he is but the interpreter of the invention of another, is then in its turn a semi-mechanical skill applied in aid of the fine art of the first inventor. In the case of the weaver’s loom there is, behind the mechanical industry which directs the loom at its given task, the fine art, or what ought to be the fine art, of the designer who has contrived the pattern. In the case of the engraving, the mechanical industry of printing only exists for the sake of bringing out and disseminating abroad the fine art employed upon the design. In the case of the carpet or curtain, the fine art is often only called in to make the product of the useful or mechanical industry of the loom acceptable, since the eye of man is so constituted as to receive pleasure or the reverse of pleasure from whatever it rests upon, and it is to the interest of the manufacturer to have his product so made as to give pleasure if it can. Whether the machine is thus a humble servant to the artist, or the artist a kind of humble purveyor to the machine, the fine art in the result is due to the former alone; and in any case it reaches the recipient at second-hand, having been put in circulation by a medium not artistic but mechanical.
Again, with reference not to the application of mechanical
contrivances but to their invention; is not, it may be inquired,
the title of artist due to the inventor of some of the
astonishingly complex and astonishingly efficient
machines of modern-times? Does he not spend as
Perfected machines: are they works of
fine art?
much thought, labour, genius as any sculptor or
musician in perfecting his construction according to
his ideal, and is not the construction when it is done—so finished,
so responsive in all its parts, so almost human—is not that
worthy to be called a work of fine art? The answer is that the
inventor has a definite and practical end before him; his ideal
is not free; he deserves all credit as the perfector of a particular
instrument for a prescribed function, but an artist, a free follower
of the fine arts, he is not; although we may perhaps have to
concede him a narrow sphere for the play of something like an
artistic sense when he contrives the proportion, arrangement,
form or finish of the several parts of his machine in one way
rather than another, not because they work better so but simply
because their look pleases him better.
Returning from this digression, let us consider one common
observation more on the nature of the fine arts. They are
activities, it is said, which were put forth not because
they need but because they like. They have the
activity to spare, and to put it forth in this way pleases
Fine arts called
a kind of play.
them. Fine art is to mankind what play is to the
individual, a free and arbitrary vent for energy which is not
needed to be spent upon tasks concerned with the conservation,
perpetuation or protection of life. To insist on the superfluous
or optional character of the fine arts, to call them the play or
pastime of the human race as distinguished from its inevitable
and sterner tasks, is obviously only to reiterate our fundamental
