distinction between the fine arts and the useful or necessary.
But the distinction, as expressed in this particular form, has been
interpreted in a great variety of ways and followed out to an
infinity of conclusions, conclusions regarding both the nature
of the activities themselves and the character and value of their
results.
For instance, starting from this saying that the aesthetic activities are a kind of play, the English psychology of association goes back to the spontaneous cries and movements of children, in which their superfluous energies find a vent. It then enumerates pleasures of which the The play idea as worked out by the English associationists. human constitution is capable apart from direct advantage or utility. Such are the primitive or organic pleasures of sight and hearing, and the secondary or derivative pleasures of association or unconscious reminiscence and inference that soon become mixed up with these. Such are also the pleasures derived from following any kind of mimicry, or representation of things real or like reality. The association psychology describes the grouping within the mind of predilections based upon these pleasures; it shows how the growing organism learns to govern its play, or direct its superfluous energies, in obedience to such predilections, till in mature individuals, and still more in mature societies, a highly regulated and accomplished group of leisure activities are habitually employed in supplying to a not less highly cultivated group of disinterested sensibilities their appropriate artistic pleasures. It is by Herbert Spencer that this view has been most fully and systematically worked out.
Again, in the views of an ancient philosopher, Plato, and a modern poet, Schiller, the consideration that the artistic activities are in the nature of play, and the manifestations in which they result independent of realities and utilities, has led to judgments so differing as the following. Plato held By Plato. that the daily realities of things in experience are not realities, indeed, but only far-off shows or reflections of the true realities, that is, of certain ideal or essential forms which can be apprehended as existing by the mind. Holding this, Plato saw in the works of fine art but the reflections of reflections, the shows of shows, and depreciated them according to their degree of remoteness from the ideal, typical or sense-transcending existences. He sets the arts of medicine, agriculture, shoemaking and the rest above the fine arts, inasmuch as they produce something serious or useful (σπουδαῖόντι). Fine art, he says, produces nothing useful, and makes only semblances (εἰδωλοποιϊκή), whereas what mechanical art produces are utilities, and even in the ordinary sense realities (αὐτοποιητική).
In another age, and thinking according to another system, Schiller, so far from holding thus cheap the kingdom of play and show, regarded his sovereignty over that kingdom as the noblest prerogative of man. Schiller wrote his famous Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in By Schiller. order to throw into popular currency, and at the same time to modify and follow up in a particular direction, certain metaphysical doctrines which had lately been launched upon the schools by Kant. The spirit of man, said Schiller after Kant, is placed between two worlds, the physical world or world of sense, and the moral world or world of will. Both of these are worlds of constraint or necessity. In the sensible world, the spirit of man submits to constraint from without; in the moral world, it imposes constraint from within. So far as man yields to the importunities of sense, in so far he is bound and passive, the subject of outward shocks and victim of irrational forces. So far as he asserts himself by the exercise of will, imposing upon sense and outward things the dominion of the moral law within him, in so far he is free and active, the rational lord of nature and not her slave. Corresponding to these two worlds, he has within him two conflicting impulses or impulsions of his nature, the one driving him towards one way of living, the other towards another. The one, or sense-impulsion (Stofftrieb), Schiller thinks of as that which enslaves the spirit of man as the victim of matter, the other or moral impulsion (Formtrieb) as that which enthrones it as the dictator of form. Between the two the conflict at first seems inveterate. The kingdom of brute nature and sense, the sphere of man’s subjection and passivity, wages war against the kingdom of will and moral law, the sphere of his activity and control, and every conquest of the one is an encroachment upon the other. Is there, then, no hope of truce between the two kingdoms, no ground where the two contending impulses can be reconciled? Nay, the answer comes, there is such a hope; such a neutral territory there exists. Between the passive kingdom of matter and sense, where man is compelled blindly to feel and be, and the active kingdom of law and reason, where he is compelled sternly to will and act, there is a kingdom where both sense and will may have their way, and where man may give the rein to all his powers. But this middle kingdom does not lie in the sphere of practical life and conduct. It lies in the sphere of those activities which neither subserve any necessity of nature nor fulfil any moral duty. Towards activities of this kind we are driven by a third impulsion of our nature not less essential to it than the other two, the impulsion, as Schiller calls it, of Play (Spieltrieb). Relatively to real life and conduct, play is a kind of harmless show; it is that which we are free to do or leave undone as we please, and which lies alike outside the sphere of needs and duties. In play we may do as we like, and no mischief will come of it. In this sphere man may put forth all his powers without risk of conflict, and may invent activities which will give a complete ideal satisfaction to the contending faculties of sense and will at once, to the impulses which bid him feel and enjoy the shocks of physical and outward things, and the impulse which bids him master such things, control and regulate them. In play you may impose upon Matter what Form you choose, and the two will not interfere with one another or clash. The kingdom of Matter and the kingdom of Form thus harmonized, thus reconciled by the activities of play and show, will in other words be the kingdom of the Beautiful. Follow the impulsion of play, and to the beautiful you will find your road; the activities you will find yourself putting forth will be the activities of aesthetic creation—you will have discovered or invented the fine arts. “Midway”—these are Schiller’s own words—“midway between the formidable kingdom of natural forces and the hallowed kingdom of moral laws, the impulse of aesthetic creation builds up a third kingdom unperceived, the gladsome kingdom of play and show, wherein it emancipates man from all compulsion alike of physical and of moral forces.” Schiller, the poet and enthusiast, thus making his own application of the Kantian metaphysics, goes on to set forth how the fine arts, or activities of play and show, are for him the typical, the ideal activities of the race, since in them alone is it possible for man to put forth his whole, that is his ideal self. “Only when he plays is man really and truly man.” “Man ought only to play with the beautiful, and he ought to play with the beautiful only.” “Education in taste and beauty has for its object to train up in the utmost attainable harmony the whole sum of the powers both of sense and spirit.” And the rest of Schiller’s argument is addressed to show how the activities of artistic creation, once invented, react upon other departments of human life, how the exercise of the play impulse prepares men for an existence in which the inevitable collision of the two other impulses shall be softened or averted more and more. That harmony of the powers which clash so violently in man’s primitive nature, having first been found possible in the sphere of the fine arts, reflects itself, in his judgment, upon the whole composition of man, and attunes him, as an aesthetic being, into new capabilities for the conduct of his social existence.
Our reasons for dwelling on this wide and enthusiastic formula of Schiller’s are both its importance in the history of reflection—it remained, indeed, for nearly a century a formula almost classical—and the measure of positive value which it still retains. The notion of a sphere of The strong points of Schiller’s theory. voluntary activity for the human spirit, in which, under no compulsion of necessity or conscience, we order matters as we like them apart from any practical end, seems coextensive with the widest conception of fine art and the fine arts as they exist in civilized and developed communities.
