sound of a line or verse in poetry is bound to be such as would thrill the physical ear in hearing, or the mental ear in reading, with a delightful excitement even though the meaning went for nothing. If the imitative arts are to touch and elevate the emotions, if they are to afford permanent delight of the due pitch and volume, it is not a more essential law that their imitation, merely as such, should be of the order which we have defined as ideal, than that they should at the same time exhibit these independent effects which they share with the non-imitative group.
So far we have assumed, without asserting, the necessity that the artist in whatever kind should possess a power of execution, or technique as it is called in modern phrase, adequate to the task of embodying and giving shape to his ideals. In thought it is possible to separate the conception of a Necessity of due balance between conception and technique: the non-imitative arts and their technique. work of art from its execution; in practice it is not possible, and half the errors in criticism and speculation about the fine arts spring from failing to realize that an artistic conception can only be brought home to us through and by its appropriate embodiment. Whatever the artist’s cast of imagination or degree of sensibility may be in presence of the materials of life, it is essential that he should be able to express himself appropriately in the material of his particular art. To quote the writer (R. A. M. Stevenson) who has enforced this point most clearly and vividly, perhaps with some pardonable measure of over-statement: “It is a sensitiveness to the special qualities of some visible or audible medium of art which distinguishes the species artist from the genus man.” And again: “There are as many separate faculties of imagination as there are separate mediums in which to conceive an image—clay, words, paint, notes of music.” ... “Technique differs as the material of each art differs—differs as marble, pigments, musical notes and words differ.” The artist who does not enjoy and has not with delighted labour mastered the effects of his own chosen medium will never be a master; the hearer, reader or spectator who cannot appreciate the qualities of skill, vitality and charm in the handling of the given material, or who fails to feel their absence when they are lacking, or who looks in one material primarily for the qualities appropriate to another, will never make a critic. The technique of the space-arts differs radically from that of the time-arts. So again do those of the imitative and the non-imitative arts differ among themselves. The non-imitative arts of music and architecture are in a certain degree alike in this, that the artist is in neither case his own executant (this at least is true of music so far as concerns its modern concerted and orchestral developments); the musical composer and the architect each imagines and composes a design in the medium of his own art which it is left for others to carry out under his direction. The technique in each case consists not in mastery of an instrument (though the musical composer may be, and often is, a master of some one of the instruments whose effects he in his mind’s ear co-ordinates and combines); it lies in the power of knowing and conjuring up all the emotional resources and effects of the various materials at his command, and of conceiving and designing to their last detail vast and ordered structures, to be raised by subordinate executants from those materials, which shall adequately express his temperament and embody his ideals.
In the imitative arts, on the other hand, the sculptor, unless he is a fraud, must be wholly his own executant in the original task of modelling his design in the soft material of clay or wax, though he must accept the aid of assistants whether in the casting of his work in bronze or in first roughing The imitative arts and their technique: painting and sculpture. it out from the block in marble. Too many sculptors have been inclined further to trust to trained mechanical help in finishing their work with the chisel; with the result that the surface loses the touch which is the expression of personal temperament and personal feeling for the relations of his material to nature. The artist in love with the vital qualities of form, or those of his own handiwork in expressing such qualities in modelling-clay, will never stop until he learns how to translate them for himself in marble. Proceeding to that imitative art which leaves out the third dimension of nature, and by so doing enormously increases the range of objects and effects which come within its power—proceeding to the art of painting, the painter is in theory exclusively his own executant, and in practice mainly so, though in certain schools and periods the great artists have been accustomed to surround themselves with pupils to whom they have imparted their methods and who have helped them in the subordinate and preparatory parts of their work. But the painter fit to teach and lead can by no means escape the necessity of being himself a master of his material, and his handling of it must needs bear the immediate impress of his temperament. His emotional preferences among the visible facts of nature, his feeling for the relative importance and charm of line, colour, light and shade, used whether for the interpretation and heightening of natural fact or for producing a pattern in itself harmonious and suggestive to the eye, his sense of the special modes of handling most effective for communicating the impression he desires, all these together inevitably appear in, and constitute, his style and technique. If he is careless or inexpert or conventional, or cold or without delight, in technique, though he may be animated by the noblest purposes and the loftiest ideas, he is a failure as a painter. At certain periods in the history of painting, as in the 13th and 14th centuries in Italy, the technique seems indeed to modern eyes wholly immature; but that was because there were many aspects of visible things which the art had not yet attempted or desired to portray, not because it did not put forth with delight its best traditional or newly acquired skill in portraying the special aspects with which it had so far attempted to grapple. At certain other periods, as in the later 16th and 17th centuries in the same country, the elements of inherited technical facility and academic pride of skill outweigh the sincerity and freshness of interest taken in the aspects of things to be portrayed, and the true balance is lost. At other times, as in much of the work of the 19th century, especially in England, painters have been diverted from their true task, and lost hold of intelligent and living technique altogether, in trying to please a public blind to the special qualities of their art, and prone to seek in it the effects, frivolous or serious, which are appropriate not to paint and canvas but to literature.
Lastly, the poet and literary artist must obviously be the exclusive master of his own technique. No one can help him: all depends on the keenness of his double sensibility to the thrill of life and to that of words, and to his power of maintaining a just balance between the two. If he is truly and organically Technique in poetry: the magic of words. sensitive to words alone, and has learnt life only through their medium and not through the energies of his own imagination, nor through personal sensibility to the impact of things and thoughts and passions and experience, then his work may be a miracle of accomplished verbal music, and may entrance the ear for the moment, but will never live to illuminate and sustain and console. If, on the other hand, he has imagination and sensibility in full measure, and lacks the inborn love of and gift for words and their magic, he will be but a dumb or stammering poet all his days. There is no better witness on this point than Wordsworth. His own prolonged lapses from verbal felicity, and continual habit of solemn meditation on themes not always inspiring, might make us hesitate to choose him as an example of that particular love and gift. But Wordsworth could never have risen to his best and greatest self had he not truly possessed the sensibilities which he attributes to himself in the Prelude:
“Twice five years |
And again, expressing better than any one else the relation which words in true poetry hold to things, he writes:
| “Visionary power |
3. The Serviceable and the Non-Serviceable Arts.—It has been established from the outset that, though the essential distinction of fine art as such is to minister not to material necessity or practical use, but to delight, yet there are some among the arts of men which do both these things at once and are Third classification: the serviceable and the non-serviceable arts. arts of direct use and of beauty or emotional appeal together. Under this classification a survey of the field of art at different periods of history would yield different results. In ruder times, we have seen, the utilitarian aim was still the predominant aim of art, and most of what we now call fine arts served in the beginning to fulfil the practical needs of individual and social life; and this not only among primitive or savage races. In ancient Egypt and Assyria the primary purpose of the relief-sculptures on palace and temple walls was the practical one of historical record and commemoration. Even as late as the middle ages and early Renaissance the primary business of the painter was to give instruction to the unlearned in Bible history and in the lives of the saints, and to rouse him to moods of religious and ethical exaltation. The pleasures of fine art proper among the manual-imitative group—the pleasures, namely, of producing and contemplating certain arrangements rather than others of design, proportion, pattern, colour and light and shade, and of putting forth and appreciating certain qualities of skill, truth and significance in idealized imitation,—these were, historically speaking, by-products that arose gradually in the course of practice and development. As time went on, the conscious aim of ministering to such pleasures displaced and threw into the background the utilitarian ends for which the arts had originally been practised, and the pleasures became ends in themselves.
But even in advanced societies the double qualities of use and
