It insists on and brings into the light the free or optional character
of these activities, as distinguished from others to which we are
compelled by necessity or duty, as well as the fact that these
activities, superfluous as they may be from the points of view of
necessity and of duty, spring nevertheless from an imperious
and a saving instinct of our nature. It does justice to the part
which is, or at any rate may be, filled in the world by pleasures
which are apart from profit, and by delights for the enjoyment
of which men cannot quarrel. It claims the dignity they deserve
for those shows and pastimes in which we have found a way to
make permanent all the transitory delights of life and nature,
to turn even our griefs and yearnings, by their artistic utterance,
into sources of appeasing joy, to make amends to ourselves for
the confusion and imperfection of reality by conceiving and
imaging forth the semblances of things clearer and more complete,
since in contriving them we incorporate with the experiences
we have had the better experiences we have dreamed of and
longed for.
One manifestly weak point of Schiller’s theory is that though it asserts that man ought only to play with the beautiful, and that he is his best or ideal self only when he does so, yet it does not sufficiently indicate what kinds of play are beautiful nor why we are moved to adopt Its weak points. them. It does not show how the delights of the eye and spirit in contemplating forms, colours and movements, of the ear and spirit in apprehending musical and verbal sounds, or of the whole mind at once in following the comprehensive current of images called up by poetry—it does not clearly show how delights like these differ from those yielded by other kinds of play or pastime, which are by common consent excluded from the sphere of fine art.
The chase, for instance, is a play or pastime which gives scope
for any amount of premeditated skill; it has pleasures, for
those who take part in it, which are in some degree
analogous to the pleasures of the artist; we all know
the claims made on behalf of the noble art of venerie
Kinds of play which are
not fine art.
(following true medieval precedent) by the knights
and woodmen of Sir Walter Scott’s romances. It is an
obvious reply to say that though the chase is play to us, who in
civilized communities follow it on no plea of necessity, yet to a
not remote ancestry it was earnest; in primitive societies
hunting does not belong to the class of optional activities at all,
but is among the most pressing of utilitarian needs. But this
reply loses much of its force since we have learnt how many of
the fine arts, however emancipated from direct utility now,
have as a matter of history been evolved out of activities
primarily utilitarian. It would be more to the point to remark
that the pleasures of the sportsman are the only pleasures
arising from the chase; his exertions afford pain to the victim,
and no satisfaction to any class of recipients but himself; or
at least the sympathetic pleasures of the lookers-on at a hunt
or at a battle are hardly to be counted as pleasures of artistic
contemplation. The issue which they witness is a real issue;
the skilled endeavours with which they sympathize are put
forth for a definite practical result, and a result disastrous to one
of the parties concerned.
What then, it may be asked, about athletic games and sports, which hurt nobody, have no connexion with the chase, and give pleasure to thousands of spectators? Here the difference is, that the event which excites the spectator’s interest and pleasure at a race or match or athletic contest is not a wholly unreal or simulated event; it is less real than life, but it is more real than art. The contest has no momentous practical consequences, but it is a contest, an ἄθλος, all the same, in which competitors put forth real strength, and one really wins and others are defeated. Such a struggle, in which the exertions are real and the issue uncertain, we follow with an excitement and a suspense different in kind from the feelings with which we contemplate a fictitious representation. For example, let the reader recall the feelings with which he may have watched a real fencing bout, and compare them with those with which he watches the simulated fencing bout in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The instance is a crucial one, because in the fictitious case the excitement is heightened by the introduction of the poisoned foil, and by the tremendous consequences which we are aware will turn, in the representation, on the issue. Yet because the fencing scene in Hamlet is a representation, and not real, we find ourselves watching it in a mood quite different from that in which we watch the most ordinary real fencing-match with vizors and blunt foils; a mood more exalted, if the representation is good, but amid the aesthetic emotions of which the fluctuations of strained, if trivial, suspense and the eagerness of sympathetic participation find no place. “The delight of tragedy,” says Johnson, “proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.” So does the peculiar quality of our pleasure in watching the fencing-match in Hamlet, or the wrestling-match in As You Like It, depend on our consciousness of fiction: if we thought the matches real they might please us still, but please us in a different way. Again, of athletics in general, they are pursuits to a considerable degree definitely utilitarian, having for their specific end the training and strengthening of individual human bodies. Nevertheless, in some systems the title of fine arts has been consistently claimed, if not for athletics technically so called, and involving the idea of competition and defeat, at any rate for gymnastics, regarded simply as a display of the physical frame of man cultivated by exercise—as, for instance, it was cultivated by the ancient Greeks—to an ideal perfection of beauty and strength.
But apart from criticisms like these on the theory of Schiller, the Kantian doctrine of a metaphysical opposition between the senses and the reason has for most minds of to-day lost its validity, and with it falls away Schiller’s derivative theory of a Stofftrieb and a Formtrieb The play theory in the light of anthropological research. contending like enemies for dominion over the human spirit, with a neutral or reconciling Spieltrieb standing between them. Even taking the existence of the Spieltrieb, or play-impulse, by itself as a plain and indubitable fact in human nature, the theory that this impulse is the general or universal source of the artistic activities of the race, which seemed adequate to thinkers so far apart as Schiller and Herbert Spencer, is found no longer to hold water. The tendency of recent thought and study on these subjects has been to abandon the abstract or dialectical method in favour of the methods of historical and anthropological inquiry. In the light of these methods it is claimed that the artistic activities of the race spring in point of fact from no single source but from a number of different sources. It is admitted that the play-impulse is one of these, and the allied and overlapping, but not identical, impulse of mimicry or imitation another. But it is urged at the same time that these twin impulses, rooted as they both are among the primordial faculties both of men and animals, are far from existing merely to provide a vent whereby the superfluous energies of sentient beings may discharge themselves at pleasure, but are indispensable utilitarian instincts, by which the young are led to practise and rehearse in sport those activities the exercise of which in earnest will be necessary to their preservation in the adult state. (The researches of Professor Karl Groos in this field seem to be conclusive.) A third impulse innate in man, though scarcely so primordial as the other two, and one which the animals cannot share with him, is the impulse of record or commemoration. Man instinctively desires, alike for safety, use and pleasure, to perpetuate and hand on the memory of his deeds and experiences whether by words or by works of his hands contrived for permanence. This impulse of record is the most stimulating ally of the impulse of mimicry or imitation, and perhaps a large part of the arts usually put down as springing from the love of imitation ought rather to be put down as springing from the commemorative or recording impulse, using imitation as its necessary means. Granting the existence in primitive man of these three allied impulses of play, of mimicry, and of record, it is urged that they are so many distinct though contiguous sources from which whole groups of the fine arts have sprung, and that all three in their origin
