Sidney Colvin

“ Why, in order to receive an artistic pleasure from human signs and manifestations of this kind, are we compelled to go to the theatre and see them exhibited in favour of a third person who is not really their object any more than ourselves? This is so, for one reason, evidently, because of the difference between art and nature. Not to art, but to nature and life, belongs love where it is really felt, with its attendant train of vivid hopes, fears, passions and contingencies. ”

“ What music produces is something that can be heard, and what poetry produces is something that can be either heard or read—which last is a kind of ideal hearing, having for its avenue the eye instead of the ear, and for its material, written signs for words instead of the spoken words themselves. Now what the eye sees from any one point of view, it sees all at once; in other words, the parts of anything we see fill or occupy not time but space, and reach us from various points in space at a single simultaneous perception. ”

“ Again, with reference not to the application of mechanical contrivances but to their invention; is not, it may be inquired, the title of artist due to the inventor of some of the astonishingly complex and astonishingly efficient machines of modern-times? Does he not spend as Perfected machines: are they works of
fine art? much thought, labour, genius as any sculptor or musician in perfecting his construction according to his ideal, and is not the construction when it is done—so finished, so responsive in all its parts, so almost human—is not that worthy to be called a work of fine art? ”

“ From the clapping, or rudimentary rhythmical noise, has been evolved the whole art of instrumental music, down to the entrancing complexity of the modern symphony. From the shout, or rudimentary emotional utterance, has proceeded by a kindred evolution the whole art of vocal music down to the modern opera or oratorio. From the leap, or rudimentary expression of emotion by rhythmical movements of the body, has descended every variety of dancing, from the stately figures of the tragic chorus of the Greeks to the kordax of their comedy or the complexities of the modern ballet. ”

“ Thus the sense of smell and taste have pleasures of their own like the senses of sight and hearing, and pleasures neither less poignant nor very much less capable of fine graduation and discrimination than those. Why, then, is the title of fine art not claimed for any skill in arranging and combining them? Why are there no recognized arts of savours and scents corresponding in rank to the arts of forms, colours and sounds—or at least none among Western nations, for in Japan, it seems, there is a recognized and finely regulated social art of the combination and succession of perfumes? ”

“ 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. ”

“ To art belongs love displayed where it is not really felt; and in this sphere, along with reality and spontaneousness of the display, and along with its momentous bearings, there disappear all those elements of pleasure in its contemplation which are not disinterested—the elements of personal exultation and self-congratulation, the pride of exclusive possession or acceptance, all these emotions, in short, which are summed up in the lover’s triumphant monosyllable, “Mine.” ”

“ Following Aristotle’s method, we may define the objects of poetry’s imitation or evocation, as everything of which the idea or image can be called up by words, that is, every force and phenomenon of nature, every operation and result of art, every fact of life and history, or every imagination of such a fact, every thought and feeling of the human spirit, for which mankind in the course of its long evolution has been able to create in speech an explicit and appropriate sign. ”

“ In strictness, the business of poetry should not be called imitation at all, but rather evocation. The strength of painting and sculpture lies in this, that though there are countless phenomena which they cannot represent at all, and countless more which they can only represent by symbolism and suggestion more or less ambiguous, yet there are a few which each can represent more fully and directly than poetry can represent any thing at all. These are, for sculpture, the forms or configurations of things, which that art represents directly to the senses both of sight and touch ”

“ Almost all painting, even for the most extensive and monumental phases of decoration in church or palace or civic hall, was on canvas stretched over or fitted into its allotted space in the architecture, and the art of fresco, even in Venice, its last stronghold, was for a time neglected or forgotten. Portable paintings for princely or private galleries and cabinets became the chief and most characteristic products of the art. The subjects of painting multiplied themselves. All manner of new aspects of life and nature were brought within the technical compass of the painter. ”

“ Thus the view of Aristotle cannot be defended on the ground that he was familiar with music only in an elementary form, and principally as the direct accompaniment of words, and that in his day the modern development of the art, as an art for building up constructions of independent sound, vast and intricate fabrics of melody and harmony detached from words, was a thing not yet imagined. That is perfectly true; the immense technical and intellectual development of music, both in its resources and its capacities, is an achievement of the modern world ”

“ In representing the perfections of form in a bride’s slender foot, the speaking art, poetry, would find itself distanced by either of the shaping arts, painting or sculpture. Suckling calls up the charm of such a foot by describing it not at rest but in motion, and in the feet which
leaves us an image which baffles the power of the other arts. ”

“ And this double freedom, alike from practical service and from the representation of definite objects, is what makes music in a certain sense the typical fine art, or art of arts. Architecture shares one-half of this freedom. It has not to copy or represent natural objects; for this service it calls in sculpture to its aid; but architecture is without the other half of freedom altogether. The architect has a sphere of liberty in the disposition of his masses, lines, colours, alternations of light and shadow, of plain and ornamented surface, and the rest ”

“ And Rembrandt’s profound spiritual insight into human character and personality did not prevent him from plunging his subjects, ever deeper and deeper as his life advanced, into a mysterious shadow-world of his own imagination, where all local colours were broken up and crumbled, and where amid the struggle of gloom and gleam he could make his intensely individualized men and women breathe more livingly than in plain human daylight. ”

“ The architect, sculptor, painter, are able respectively to stand off from and appreciate the results of their own labours; the singer enjoys the sound of his own voice, and the musician of his own instrument; the poet, according to his temperament, furnishes the most enthusiastic or the most fastidious reader for his own stanzas. Neither, on the other hand, does the person who is a habitual recipient from others of the pleasures of fine art forfeit the privilege of producing them according to his capabilities, and of becoming, if he has the power, an amateur or occasional artist. ”

“ Poetry is written to be read by all readers for ever who care for the ideas and feelings of the poet, and can apprehend the meaning and melody of his language. Hence, though we can speak of a class of the producers of fine art, we cannot speak of a class of its consumers, only of its recipients or enjoyers. If we consider other pleasures which might seem to be analogous to those of fine art, but to which common consent yet declines to allow that character, we shall see that one reason is that such pleasures are not in their nature thus disinterested. ”

“ The one great change was in architecture. Greece had been content with the constructive system of columns and horizontal entablature, and under that system had invented and perfected her three successive modes or orders of architecture—the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. The genius of Rome invented the round arch, and by help of that system erected throughout her subject world a thousand vast constructions—temple, palace, bath, amphitheatre, forum, aqueduct, triumphal gate and the rest—on a scale of monumental grandeur such as Greece had never known. ”

“ But in our own more restricted usage, to imitate means to copy, mimic or represent some existing phenomenon, some definite reality of experience; and we can only call those imitative arts which bring before us such things, either directly by showing us their actual likeness, as sculpture does in solid form, and as painting does by means of lines and colours on a plane surface, or else indirectly, by calling up ideas or images of them in the mind, as poetry and literature do by means of words. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many modern virtuosi of sculpture since Bernini have misspent their 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus architecture, in so far as it provides shelter and accommodation, is one of the useful or mechanical arts, and one of the fine arts only in so far as its structures impress or give pleasure by the aspect of strength, fitness, harmony and proportion of parts, by disposition and contrast of light and shade, by colour and enrichment, by variety and relation of contours, surfaces and intervals. ”

“ Sculpture in the round must represent such figures standing free in full clearness and detachment, in combinations and with accessories comparatively simple, on pain of teasing the eye with a complexity and entanglement of masses and lights and shadows; and in attitudes comparatively quiet, on pain of violating, or appearing to violate, the conditions of mechanical stability. Being a stationary or space-art, it can only represent a single action, which it fixes and perpetuates for ever ”

“ Schiller, the poet and enthusiast, thus making his own application of the Kantian metaphysics, goes on to set forth how the fine arts, or activities of play and show, are for him the typical, the ideal activities of the race, since in them alone is it possible for man to put forth his whole, that is his ideal self. “Only when he plays is man really and truly man.” “Man ought only to play with the beautiful, and he ought to play with the beautiful only.” ”

“ Besides devotional and classical subjects and portraiture, daily life in all its phases, down to the homeliest and grossest, the life of the parlour and the tavern, of field and shore and sea, with landscape in all its varieties, took their place as material for the painter. The truths of indoor and outdoor atmosphere were translated on canvas for the first time. The Dutchmen from about 1620 to 1670 were the most active innovators and path-breakers of modern art along all these lines. ”

“ We are slow to allow the title of fine art to natural eloquence, to charm or dignity of manner, to delicacy and tact in social intercourse, and other such graces of life and conduct, since, although in any given case they may have been deliberately cultivated in early life, or even through ancestral generations, they do not produce their full effect until they are so ingrained as to have become unreflecting and spontaneous. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Poetry is almost as powerless to bring before the mind’s eye with precision a particular shade of red or blue, a particular linear arrangement or harmony of colour-tones, as sculpture is to relate a continuous experience, or painting to enforce an exhortation or embellish an abstract proposition. ”

“ We have to wait, in music, while one note follows another in a theme, and one theme another in a movement; and in poetry, while one line with its images follows another in a stanza, and one stanza another in a canto, and so on. It is a convenient form of expressing both aspects of this difference between the two groups of arts, to say that architecture, sculpture and painting are arts which give shape to things in space, or, more briefly, shaping arts; and music and poetry arts which give utterance to things in time, or, more briefly, speaking arts. ”

“ The answer is that the inventor has a definite and practical end before him; his ideal is not free; he deserves all credit as the perfector of a particular instrument for a prescribed function, but an artist, a free follower of the fine arts, he is not; although we may perhaps have to concede him a narrow sphere for the play of something like an artistic sense when he contrives the proportion, arrangement, form or finish of the several parts of his machine in one way rather than another, not because they work better so but simply because their look pleases him better. ”

“ 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. ”