beauty still remain inseparable, among the five greater arts, in architecture. We build in the first instance for the sake of necessary shelter and accommodation, or for the commemoration, propitiation or worship of spiritual powers on Among the greater arts, architecture alone exist primarily for service. whom we believe our welfare to depend. By and by we find out that the aspect of our constructions is pleasurable or the reverse. Architecture is the art of building at once as we need and as we like, and a practical treatise on architecture must treat the beauty and the utility of buildings as bound up together. But for our present purpose it has been proper to take into account one half only of the vocation of architecture, the half by which it impresses, gives delight and belongs to that which is the subject of our study, to fine art; and to neglect the other half of its vocation, by which it belongs to what is not the subject of our study, to useful or mechanical art. It is plain, however, that the presence or absence of this foreign element, the element of practical utility, constitutes a fair ground for a new and separate classification of the fine arts. If we took the five greater arts as they exist in modern times by themselves, architecture would on this ground stand alone in one division, as the directly useful or serviceable fine art; with sculpture, painting, music and poetry together in the other division, as fine arts unassociated with such use or service. Not that the divisions would, even thus, be quite sharply and absolutely separated. Didactic poetry, we have already acknowledged, is a branch of the poetic art which aims at practice and utility. Again, the hortatory and patriotic kinds of lyric poetry, from the strains of Tyrtaeus to those of Arndt or Rouget de Lisle or Wordsworth’s sonnets written in war-time, may fairly be said to belong to a phase of fine art which aims directly at one of the highest utilities, the stimulation of patriotic feeling and self-devotion. So may the strains of music which accompany such poetry. The same practical character, as stimulating and attuning the mind to definite ends and actions, might indeed have been claimed for the greater part of the whole art of music as that art was practised in antiquity, when each of several prescribed and highly elaborated moods, or modes, of melody was supposed to have a known effect upon the courage and moral temper of the hearer. Compare Milton, when he tells of the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders which assuaged the sufferings and renewed the courage of Satan and his legions as they marched through hell. In modern music, of which the elements, much more complex in themselves than those of ancient music, have the effect of stirring our fibres to moods of rapturous contemplation rather than of action, military strains in march time are in truth the only purely instrumental variety of the art which may still be said to retain this character.
To reinforce, however, the serviceable or useful division of fine arts in our present classification, it is not among the greater arts that we must look. We must look among the lesser or auxiliary arts of the manual or shaping group. The weaver, the joiner, the potter, the smith, the goldsmith, Other and minor arts of service subordinate to architecture. the glass-maker, these and a hundred artificers who produce wares primarily for use, produce them in a form or with embellishments that have the secondary virtue of giving pleasure both to the producer and the user. Much ingenuity has been spent to little purpose in attempting to group and classify these lesser shaping arts under one or other of the greater shaping arts, according to the nature of the means employed in each. Thus the potter’s art has been classed under sculpture, because he moulds in solid form the shapes of his cups, plates and ewers; the art of the joiner under that of the architect, because his tables, seats and cupboards are fitted and framed together, like the houses they furnish, out of solid materials previously prepared and cut; and the weaver and embroiderer, from the point of view of the effects produced by their art, among painters. But the truth is, that each one of these auxiliary handicrafts has its own materials and technical procedure, which cannot, without forcing and confusion, be described by the name proper to the materials and technical procedure of any of the greater arts. The only satisfactory classification of these handicrafts is that now before us, according to which we think of them all together in the same group with architecture, not because any one or more of them may be technically allied to that art, but because, like it, they all yield products capable of being practically useful and beautiful at the same time. Architecture is the art which fits and frames together, of stone, brick, mortar, timber or iron, the abiding and assembling places of man, all his houses, palaces, temples, monuments, museums, workshops, roofed places of meeting and exchange, theatres for spectacle, fortresses of defence, bridges, aqueducts, and ships for seafaring. The wise architect having fashioned any one of these great constructions at once for service and beauty in the highest degree, the lesser or auxiliary manual arts (commonly called “industrial” or “applied” arts) come in to fill, furnish and adorn it with things of service and beauty in a lower degree, each according to its own technical laws and capabilities; some, like pottery, delighting the user at once by beauty of form, delicacy of substance, and pleasantness of imitative or non-imitative ornament; some, like embroidery, by richness of tissue, and by the same twofold pleasantness of ornament; some, like goldsmith’s work, by exquisiteness of fancy and workmanship proportionate to the exquisiteness of the material. To this vast group of workmen, whose work is at the same time useful and fine in its degree, the ancient Greek gave the place which is most just and convenient for thought, when he classed them all together under the name of τέκτονες, or artificers, and called the builder by the name of ἀρχιτέκτων, arch-artificer or artificer-in-chief. Modern usage has adopted the phrase “arts and crafts” as a convenient general name for their pursuits.
III. Of the History of the Fine Arts.
Students of human culture have concentrated a great deal of attentive thought upon the history of fine art, and have put forth various comprehensive generalizations intended at once to sum up and to account for the phases and vicissitudes of that history. The most famous formulae Current generalizations on the history of fine art: Hegel. are those of Hegel, who regarded particular arts as being characteristic of and appropriate to particular forms of civilization and particular ages of history. For him, architecture was the symbolic art appropriate to ages of obscure and struggling ideas, and characteristic of the Egyptian and the Asiatic races of old and of the medieval age in Europe. Sculpture was the classical art appropriate to ages of lucid and self-possessed ideas, and characteristic of the Greek and Roman period. Painting, music and poetry were the romantic arts, appropriate to the ages of complicated and overmastering ideas, and characteristic of modern humanity in general. In the working out of these generalizations Hegel brought together a mass of judicious and striking observations; and that they contain on the whole a preponderance of truth may be admitted. It has been objected against them, from the philosophical point of view, that they too much mix up the definition of what the several arts theoretically are with considerations of what in various historical circumstances they have practically been. From the historical point of view there can be taken what seems a more valid objection, that these formulae of Hegel tend too much to fix the attention of the student upon the one dominant art chosen as characteristic of any period, and to give him false ideas of the proportions and relations of the several arts at the same period—of the proportions and relations which poetry, say, really bore to sculpture among the Greeks and Romans, or sculpture to architecture among the Christian nations of the middle age. The truth is, that the historic survey gained over any field of human activity from the height of generalizations so vast in scope as these are must needs, in the complexity of earthly affairs, be a survey too distant to give much guidance until its omissions are filled up by a great deal of nearer study; and such nearer study is apt to compel the student in the long run to qualify the theories with which he has started until they are in danger of disappearing altogether.
Another systematic exponent of the universe, whose system is very different from that of Hegel, Herbert Spencer, brought the doctrine of evolution to bear, not without interesting results, upon the history of the fine arts and their development. Herbert Spencer set forth how the Herbert Spencer and the evolution theory. manual group of fine arts, architecture, sculpture and painting, were in their first rudiments bound up together, and how each of them in the course of history has liberated itself from the rest by a gradual process of separation. These arts did not at first exist in the distinct and developed forms in which we have above described them. There were no statues in the round, and no painted panels or canvases hung upon the wall. Only the rudiments of sculpture and painting existed, and that only as ornaments applied to architecture, in the shape of tiers of tinted reliefs, representing in a kind of picture-writing the exploits of kings upon the walls of their temple-palaces. Gradually sculpture took greater salience and roundness, and tended to disengage itself from the wall, while painting found out how to represent solidity by means of its own, and dispensed with the raised surface upon which it was first applied. But the old mixture and union of the three arts, with an undeveloped art of painting and an undeveloped art of sculpture still engaged in or applied to the works of architecture, continued on the whole to prevail through the long cycles of Egyptian and Assyrian history. In the Egyptian
