skill in trying to fix in marble both the restlessness of momentary
actions and the flimsiness of fluttering tissues. In latter days
Auguste Rodin, an innovating master with a real genius for his art,
has attacked many problems of complicated grouping, more or less
in the nature of the Greek symplegmata, but keeps these interlocked
or contorted actions circumscribed within strict limiting lines, so
that they do not by jutting or straggling suggest a kind of acrobatic
challenge to the laws of gravity. The same artist and others inspired
by him have further sought to emancipate sculpture from the
necessity of rendering form in clear and complete definition, and to
enrich it with a new power of mysterious suggestion, by leaving his
figures wrought in part to the highest finish and vitality of surface,
while other parts (according to a precedent set in some unfinished
works of Michelangelo) remain scarcely emergent from the rough-hewn
or unhewn block. But it may be doubted whether such experiments
and expedients can permanently do much to enlarge
the scope of the art.
Next we arrive at painting, in which the third dimension is dismissed
altogether, and nothing is actually reproduced, in full or
partially, except the effect made by the appearance of
natural objects upon the retina of the eye. The consequence
is that this art can range over distance and
Means and capacities
of painting.
multitude, can represent complicated relations between its
various figures and groups of figures, extensive backgrounds,
and all those infinite subtleties of appearance in natural
things which depend upon local colours and their modification in
the play of light and shade and enveloping atmosphere. These last
phenomena of natural things are in our experience subject to change
in a sense in which the substantial or solid properties of things are
not so subject. Colours, shadows and atmospheric effects are
naturally associated with ideas of transition, mystery and evanescence.
Hence painting is able to extend its range to another kind
of facts over which sculpture has no power. It can suggest and
perpetuate in its imitation, without breach of its true laws, many
classes of facts which are themselves fugitive and transitory, as a
smile, the glance of an eye, a gesture of horror or of passion, the
waving of hair in the wind, the rush of horses, the strife of mobs,
the whole drama of the clouds, the toss and gathering of ocean waves,
even the flashing of lightning across the sky. Still, any long or
continuous series of changes, actions or movements is quite beyond
the means of this art to represent. Painting remains, in spite of its
comparative width of range, tied down to the inevitable conditions
of a space-art: that is to say, it has to delight the mind by a harmonious
variety in its effects, but by a variety apprehended not
through various points of time successively, but from various points
in space at the same moment. The old convention which allowed
painters to indicate sequence in time by means of distribution in
space, dispersing the successive episodes of a story about the different
parts of a single picture, has been abandoned since the early Renaissance;
and Wordsworth sums up our modern view of the matter
when he says that it is the business of painting
“to give |
Lastly, a really unfettered range is only attained by the art which
does not give a full and complete reproduction of any natural fact
at all, but evokes or brings natural facts before the mind
merely by the images which words convey. The whole
world of movement, of continuity, of cause and effect,
Means and capacities
of poetry.
of the successions, alternations and interaction of events,
characters and passions of everything that takes time to happen and
time to declare, is open to poetry as it is open to no other art. As
an imitative or, more properly speaking, an evocative art, then,
poetry is subject to no limitations except those which spring from
the poverty of human language, and from the fact that its means of
imitation are indirect. Poetry’s account of the visible properties of
things is from these causes much less full, accurate and efficient than
the reproduction or delineation of the same properties by sculpture
and painting. And this is the sum of the conditions concerning the
respective functions of the three arts of imitation which had been
overlooked, in theory at least, until the time of Lessing.
To the above law, in the form in which we have expressed it, it may perhaps be objected that the acted drama is at once the most full and complete reproduction of nature which we owe to the fine arts, and that at the same time the number of facts over which its imitation ranges is the greatest. The acted drama no real exception to the general law. The answer is that our law applies to the several arts only in that which we may call their pure or unmixed state. Dramatic poetry is in that state only when it is read or spoken like any other kind of verse. When it is witnessed on the stage, it is in a mixed or impure state; the art of the actor has been called in to give actual reproduction to the gestures and utterances of the personages, that of the costumier to their appearances and attire, that of the stage-decorator to their furniture and surroundings, that of the scene-painter to imitate to the eye the dwelling-places and landscapes among which they move; and only by the combination of all these subordinate arts does the drama gain its character of imitative completeness or reality.
Throughout the above account of the imitative and non-imitative groups of fine arts, we have so far followed Aristotle as to allow the name of imitation to all recognizable representation or evocation of realities,—using the word “realities” in no metaphysical sense, but to signify the myriad phenomena Things unknown shadowed forth by imitation of things known. of life and experience, whether as they actually and literally exist to-day, or as they may have existed in the past, or may be conceived to exist in some other world not too unlike our own for us to conceive and realize in thought. When we find among the ruins of a Greek temple the statue of a beautiful young man at rest, or above the altar of a Christian church the painting of one transfixed with arrows, we know that the statue is intended to bring to our minds no mortal youth, but the god Hermes or Apollo, the transfixed victim no simple captive, but Sebastian the holy saint. At the same time we none the less know that the figures in either case have been studied by the artist from living models before his eyes. In like manner, in all the representations alike of sculpture, painting and poetry the things and persons represented may bear symbolic meanings and imaginary names and characters; they may be set in a land of dreams, and grouped in relations and circumstances upon which the sun of this world never shone; in point of fact, through many ages of history they have been chiefly used to embody human ideas of supernatural powers; but it is from real things and persons that their lineaments and characters have been taken in the first instance, in order to be attributed by the imagination to another and more exalted order of existences.
The law which we have last laid down is a law defining the relations of sculpture, painting and poetry, considered simply as arts having their foundations at any rate in reality, and drawing from the imitation of reality their indispensable elements and materials. It is a law defining the range and character Imitation by art necessarily an idealized imitation. of those elements or materials in nature which each art is best fitted, by its special means and resources, to imitate. But we must remember that, even in this fundamental part of its operations, none of these arts proceeds by imitation or evocation pure and simple. None of them contents itself with seeking to represent realities, however literally taken, exactly as those realities are. A portrait in sculpture or painting, a landscape in painting, a passage of local description in poetry, may be representations of known things taken literally or for their own sakes, and not for the sake of carrying out thoughts to the unknown; but none of them ought to be, or indeed can possibly be, a representation of all the observed parts and details of such a reality on equal terms and without omissions. Such a representation, were it possible, would be a mechanical inventory and not a work of fine art.
Hence the value of a pictorial imitation is by no means necessarily
in proportion to the number of facts which it records. Many accomplished
pictures, in which all the resources of line, colour
and light-and-shade have been used to the utmost of
the artist’s power for the imitation of all that he could see
Completeness not the test of value in
a pictorial imitation.
in nature, are dead and worthless in comparison with a
few faintly touched outlines or lightly laid shadows or
tints of another artist who could see nature more vitally
and better. Unless the painter knows how to choose and
combine the elements of his finished work so that it
shall contain in every part suggestions and delights over and
above the mere imitation, it will fall short, in that which
is the essential charm of fine art, not only of any scrap
of a great master’s handiwork, such as an outline sketch of
a child by Raphael or a colour sketch of a boat or a mackerel by
Turner, but even of any scrap of the merest journeyman’s handiwork
produced by an artistic race, such as the first Japanese drawing in
which a water-flag and kingfisher, or a spray of peach or almond
blossom across the sky, is dashed in with a mere hint of colour,
but a hint that tells a whole tale to the imagination. That only, we
know, is fine art which affords keen and permanent delight to contemplation.
Such delight the artist can never communicate by the
display of a callous and pedantic impartiality in presence of the
facts of life and nature. His representation of realities will only
strike or impress others in so far as it concentrates their attention on
things by which he has been struck and impressed himself. To
arouse emotion, he must have felt emotion; and emotion is impossible
without partiality. The artist is one who instinctively tends to
modify and work upon every reality before him in conformity with
some poignant and sensitive principle of preference or selection in his
mind. He instinctively adds something to nature in one direction
and takes away something in another, overlooking this kind of fact
and insisting on that, suppressing many particulars which he holds
irrelevant in order to insist on and bring into prominence others by
which he is attracted and arrested.
The instinct by which an artist thus prefers, selects and brings into light one order of facts or aspects in the thing before him rather than the rest, is part of what is called the idealizing or ideal faculty. Interminable discussion has been spent on the questions,—What is the ideal, and how do we idealize? Nature of the idealizing process. The answer has been given in one form by those thinkers (e.g. Vischer and Lotze) who have pointed out that the process of aesthetic idealization carried on by the artist is only the
