In the second half of the 19th century a reaction set in against
such over-differentiation of the several manual arts and crafts.
This reaction is chiefly identified in England with the
name of William Morris, who insisted by precept and
example that one form of artistic activity was as
Reaction against over-evolution amongst the
fine arts.
worthy as another, and himself both practised and
trained others in the practice of glass-painting, weaving,
embroidery, furniture and wall-paper designing, and
book decoration alike. His example has been to some
extent followed in most European countries, and efforts have
been made to reunite the functions of artist and craftsman,
and to set a limit to the process of differentiation among the
various manual arts. In the vocal or time arts also, a reformer
of high genius and force of character, Richard Wagner, rose to
contend that in music the process of evolution and differentiation
had gone much too far. Music, he urged, as separated from
words and actions, independent orchestral and instrumental
music, had reached its utmost development, and its further
advance could only be an advance into the inane; while operatic
music had broken itself up into a number of set and separate
forms, as aria, scena, recitative, which corresponded to no real
varieties of instinctive emotional utterance, and in the aimless
production of which the art was in danger of paralysing and
stultifying itself. This process, he declared, must be checked;
music and words must be brought back again into close connexion
and mutual dependence; the artificial opera forms must be
abolished, and a new and homogeneous music-drama be created,
of which the author must combine in himself the functions of
poet, composer, inventor, and director of scenery and stage
appliances, so that the entire creation should bear the impress
of a single mind; to the creation of such a music-drama he
accordingly devoted all the energies of his being.
It is thus evident that the evolution theory, though it furnishes
us with some instructive points of view for the history of the fine
arts as for other things, is far from being the whole
key to that history. Another key, employed with
results perhaps less really luminous than they are
Taine’s philosophy or natural history
of the fine arts.
certainly showy and attractive, is that supplied by
Taine. Taine’s philosophy, which might perhaps
be better called a natural history, of fine art consists
in regarding the fine arts as the necessary result of the
general conditions under which they are at any time produced—conditions
of race and climate, of religion, civilization and
manners. Acquaint yourself with these conditions as they
existed in any given people at any given period, and you will
be able to account for the characters assumed by the arts of that
people at that period, and to reason from one to the other, as a
botanist can account for the flora of any given locality, and can
reason from its soil, exposure and temperature, to the orders
of vegetation which it will produce. This method of treating
the history of the fine arts, again, is one which can be pursued
with profit in so far as it makes the student realize the connexion
of fine arts with human culture in general, and teaches him how
the arts of any age and country are not an independent or
arbitrary phenomenon, but are essentially an outcome, or
efflorescence, to use a phrase of Ruskin’s, of deep-seated elements
in the civilization which produces them. But it is a method
which, rashly used, is very apt to lead to a hasty and one-sided
handling both of history and of art. It is easy to fasten on
certain obvious relations of fine art to general civilization when
you know a few of the facts of both, and to say, the cloudy skies
and mongrel industrial population of Protestant Amsterdam at
such and such a date had their inevitable reflection in the art of
Rembrandt; the wealth and pomp of the full-fleshed burghers
and burgesses of Catholic Antwerp had theirs in the art of
Rubens. But to do this in the precise and conclusive manner
of Taine’s treatises on the philosophy of art always means to
ignore a large range of conditions or causes for which no corresponding
effect is on the surface apparent, and generally also
a large number of effects for which appropriate causes cannot
easily be discovered at all.
These considerations have resulted in a reaction against Taine’s theories which goes probably too far. It is no complete confutation of his philosophy of art-history to contend, as has been done somewhat contemptuously by Professor Ernst Grosse and others, that the great Criticisms and counter-criticisms on Taine’s methods. artist, so far from representing the general tendencies of his time and environment, is commonly a solitary innovator and revolutionist, and has to educate and create his own public, often through years of obloquy or neglect. This is sometimes true when the traditions and ideals of art are undergoing revolution or swift experimental change, but hardly ever true in times of stable tradition and accepted ideals; and when true it only shows that the tendencies the innovating genius represents are tendencies which have till his time been working underground, and which he is born to bring into light and evidence. A new and revolutionary impulse in art, as in thought or politics, is like a yeast or ferment working at first secretly, affecting for a while only a few spirits, as a new epidemic may for a while only affect a few constitutions, and then gradually ripening and strengthening till it communicates itself to thousands. In its inception such a ferment is not, indeed, one of the obvious phenomena of the society in which it takes root, but it is none the less one of the most vital and significant phenomena. The truth is, that this particular efflorescence of human culture depends for its character at any given time upon combinations of causes which are by no means simple, but generally highly complex, obscure and nicely balanced. For instance, the student who should try to reason back from the holy and beatified character which prevails in much of the devotional painting of the Italian schools down to the Renaissance would be much mistaken were he to conclude, “like art, like life, thoughts and manners.” He would not understand the relation of the art to the general civilization of those days unless he were to remember that one of the chief functions of the imagination is to make up for the shortcomings of reality, and to supply to contemplation images of that which is most lacking in actual life; so that the visions at once peaceful and ardent embodied by the religious schools of art in the Italian cities are to be explained, not by the peace, but rather in great part by the dispeace, of contemporary existence, and by the longing of the human spirit to escape into happier and more calm conditions.
Any one of the three modes of generalization to which we have
referred might no doubt yield, however, supposing in the student
the due gifts of patience and of caution, a working
clue to guide him through that immense region of
research, the history of the fine arts. But it is hardly
Difficulty of combining the study of the manual with
that of the
vocal group
of fine arts.
possible to pursue to any purpose the history of the
two great groups, the shaping group and the speaking
group, together. At some stages of the world’s
history the manual and the monumental arts have
flourished, as in Egypt and Assyria, when there was
no fine art of words at all, and the only literature was
that of records cut in hieroglyph or cuneiform on
palace walls and temples, and on tablets, seals and cylinders.
At other times and in other communities there has existed
a great tradition and inheritance of poetry and song when the
manual arts were only beginning to emerge again from the
wreck of an old civilization, as in the Homeric age of Greece,
or where they had never flourished at all except by imitation
and importation, as in Palestine. In historic Greece all three
divisions of the art of poetry, the epic, lyric and the dramatic,
had been perfected, and two of them had again declined, before
sculpture had reached maturity or painting had passed beyond
the stage of its early severity. The European poetry of the
middle ages, abundant and rich as it was alike in France and
Provence, in Germany and Scandinavia, can yet not take rank,
among the creations of human genius, beside the great masterpieces
of Romanesque and Gothic architecture; it was in Italy
only that Dante, before the end of that age, carried poetry to
a place of equality if not of primacy among the arts. Taking the
England of the Elizabethan age, we find the great outburst of
our national genius in poetry contemporary with nothing more
