Useful arts

“ The representative arts comprise painting and sculpture, and literature in its manifestations of the drama, fiction, and dramatic and descriptive poetry. These arts draw their subjects from nature and human life, from the world external to the artist. The arts of form comprise architecture and music, and that limitless range of human activities in design and pattern-making for embellishment—including also the whole category of "useful arts"—which may be subsumed under the comprehensive term decoration. ”

“ The present volume is offered to the public, under the impression that the general cultivation of practical taste, and an acquaintance with the principles of the Fine Arts, are not only desirable in the light of acquirement, but must eventually prove highly beneficial to the useful arts of the country. ”

“ On the contrary, it provides a foundation for works of the imagination—a basis for that spirituality which is the fruit of the happy conjunction of a multitude of material conditions evolved from the humblest as well as the noblest of the useful arts—a basis without which the beautiful arts could never exist. ”

“ In this wide sense it embraces what are usually called the useful arts. In a narrower and purely æsthetic sense it designates what are more specifically termed the fine arts, as architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. The useful arts have their origin in positive practical needs, and restrict themselves to satisfying them. The fine arts minister to the sentiment of taste through the medium of the beautiful in form, colour, rhythm, or harmony. See Fine Arts, Painting, Sculpture, &c.—In the Middle Ages it was common to give certain branches of study the name of arts.—Cf. ”

“ The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a high dome, and the expansive interior of a cathedral, have a sensible effect on manners. I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish hurry.
But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade, and the useful arts. ”

“ I do not mean that they cannot on that account be useful, for without doubt utility itself contributes to beauty; but only that they owe their form primarily to the aesthetic interest. The motive of fine art in its purity appears when special materials are selected on account of their plasticity and their appeal to the more highly developed senses. Fine arts that employ one medium are now separated and perfected through the cultivation of expert proficiency. ”

“ One can imagine what an infinity, what variety and richness, of details it should contain.
Our subject presents, at the same time, another kind of interest more elevated and not less alluring. Here each Art appears in its different phases and in its diversified progress. It is a history, not alone of the Arts, but of the epoch itself in which they were developed; for the Arts, regarded in their generality, are the truest expression of society. They speak to us of tastes, of ideas, of character: they exhibit us in their works. ”

“ And meanwhile, through all the centuries of centuries, art, which is the type and sample of all higher, better modes of life, art has given us in itself the concrete sample, the unmistakable type of that needful reconciliation of work and play; and has shown us that there is, or should be, no difference between them. For art has made the things which are useful, and done the things which are needed, in those shapes and ways of beauty which have no aim but our satisfaction. ”

“ It is intended to contribute to the advancement of science, by presenting to the contemplation of the artist and the connoisseur, specimens of the most esteemed works of the best masters, ancient and modern, both in painting and in sculpture; and by diffusing in a novel and interesting form a knowledge of what for ages has been appreciated and enthusiastically admired, instil into the mind of the mere indifferent observer a taste for the polite arts. ”

“ AND now we come to that great and important subject, the Fine Arts, which day by day are becoming more appreciated and find a rapid increase of patrons. It is true that there are some who do not regard Art as an essentiality, and who are even indifferent to it as an ornament. ”

“ They are less indispensable for the material preservation of the individual. They contribute to the embellishment rather than to the sustaining of life. They procure us pleasures in which our personality seems less interested and more self-forgetful. To these two senses, then, art should be addressed, is addressed, in fact, in order to reach the soul. Hence the division of arts into two great classes,—arts addressed to hearing, arts addressed to sight; on the one hand, music and poetry; on the other, painting, with engraving, sculpture, architecture, gardening. ”

“ As engaging the emotions and the imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts their quality. As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of tools to materials with constantly increasing perfection, they involve the element of technique indispensable to artistic production. ”

“ But in as far as a certain sort of pleasure is pursued as a principal aim, we can make of it, if not a specific character of a class properly so called, at least the principle and the tendency of a class in the works of art. Thus, for example, we could take the arts which, above all, satisfy the intelligence and imagination—consequently those which have as chief object the true, the perfect, and the beautiful—and unite them under the name of fine arts (arts of taste, arts of intelligence) ”

“ I have spoken of poetry, but all the other modes of art produce similar effects in their degree. The races and nations whose senses are naturally finer, and their sensuous perceptions more exercised, than ours, receive the same kind of impressions from painting and sculpture: and many of the more delicately organized among ourselves do the same. All the arts of expression tend to keep alive and in activity the feelings they express. ”

“ For, among that vast group of human activities to which the name of "arts" is applied, there are certain forms, the very essence of which consists in the seemingly unattainable character of their ends. And these activities, constantly striving for the absolute—for ideals of the many forms of beauty and of strength—are those known as the "Fine Arts." ”

“ Even thus the spirit, immersed in things of sense presented to us by the figurative arts, is still spirit, though diminished in its intellectual clearness and invested with hues not its own. To fashion that alabaster form of art with utmost skill, to make it beautiful, to render it transparent, is the artist's function. ”

“ Properly enough, the enjoyment of most of us is unthinking; and in the appreciation of the masterpieces of the several arts few of us are wont to consider curiously the craftsmanship of the men who wrought these marvels, their skill of hand, their familiarity with the mechanics of their art, their consummate knowledge of technic. Our regard is centered rather on the larger aspects of the masterwork, on its meaning and on its veracity, on its intellectual elevation, and on its moral appeal. ”

“ Every operation in the arts should be perfect. It has to be so in most arts, from violin-playing to circus-riding, before the artist dare make his bow to the public.
Placing on one side the question of the higher grades of art which depend upon special talent or genius—the great qualities of imagination, composition, form and colour, which belong to mastership—I would now, in this book, intended for students, dwell upon those minor things, the doing of which well or ill depends only upon good-will, patience, and industry. ”

“ All these, properly called Arts, but not Fine Arts, are pursuits in which the hand of man and his head go together, working at the same instant.
Then FINE ART is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. ”

“ The kind of vision that he gives us will depend, of course, upon the materials of his art—it will be one thing in sound, another in color or line or patterned words. Even as we demand of art in general a unique value, as fulfilling a unique function, so we shall demand of the different arts that each provide us with the unique beauty which its materials can create. ”

“ The Web.—Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative. ”

“ And chiefly the great representative and imaginative arts—that is to say, the drama and sculpture—are to teach what is noble in past history, and lovely in existing human and organic life.
4. And the test of right manner of execution in these arts, is that they strike, in the most emphatic manner, the rank of popular minds to which they are addressed.
5. And the test of utmost fineness in execution in these arts, is that they make themselves be forgotten in what they represent; and so fulfil the words of their greatest Master,
"The best, in this kind, are but shadows." ”

“ Thus, while the three arts are each limited to their own special functions, they, at the same time, would appear to assimilate from each other what is lacking in themselves, and so contribute to the complete artistic harmony. ”

“ I have used the word art not in the sense merely of fine art, but in the sense of all liberal and disinterested practical work; and the excellent performance of that work demands certain qualifications which are common to all the arts as well as peculiar to the methods and materials of certain particular arts and crafts. ”

“ This search for beauty—this Psyche of art—is the purely inspiring artistic purpose, as distinct from the technical and useful one, which should, perfectly reconciled and united with it, determine the form of our work. ”

“ He has shown us art, as it nowadays exists, divided and specialised into two or three "fine arts," each of which employs exceptional and highly trained talent in the production of objects so elaborate and costly, so lacking in all utility, that they can be possessed only by the rich few; objects, moreover, so unfamiliar in form and in symbol that only the idle can learn to enjoy (or pretend to enjoy) them after a special preliminary initiation and training. ”

“ It is only of late, and chiefly by a superficial imitation of foreigners, that we have begun to use the word Art by itself, and to speak of Art as we speak of Science, or Government, or Religion: we used to talk of the Arts, and more specifically of the Fine Arts: and even by them were vulgarly meant only two forms of art, Painting and Sculpture, the two which as a people we cared least about—which were regarded even by the more cultivated among us as little more than branches of domestic ornamentation, a kind of elegant upholstery. ”

“ We think, however, that most persons will peruse with some interest (and, let us hope, a little indulgence) these studies on an art which, like all arts invented by necessity or inspired by pleasure, has kept pace with the genius of nations, and became more refined and more perfect in proportion as they themselves became more polite. ”

“ But the word Art, becoming appropriated to the fine arts, has been treated as if it necessarily carried along with it, and as if works to be called works of art must necessarily possess, the attributes of free individual skill and invention, expressing themselves in ever new combinations of pleasurable contrivance, and seeking perfection not as a means towards some ulterior practical end but as an ideal end in itself. ”

“ All the kindred arts, however, with which taste and feeling are conversant, have their birth and subsequent im [Pg 16] provement, in the same universal principles of the human mind. Principles which mysteriously, yet powerfully, and doubtless for the accomplishment of the wisest ends, connect man with that nature amidst whose haunts he is destined to dwell—which awaken his untutored enthusiasm to her beauties, and unite his individual sympathies, as his social remembrances, with her hallowed associations. ”

“ Except where they visibly influence each other, I avoid dealing with the greater arts, leaving them to the study of the learned in each special branch.
All art, however, throws reflected lights, and gleaning in the track of those authors who have preceded us, we often pick up valuable hints which we accept, and make use of them gladly. ”

“ However, these particular affinities are lost in proportion as the works of these three kinds of art rise to a greater elevation, and it is a natural and necessary consequence of their perfection, that, without confounding their objective limits, the different arts come to resemble each other more and more, in the action which they exercise on the mind. ”

“ Most of the great works of art have reference to our time only indirectly—as they and we are related to eternity. And we require arts which specifically refer to our moment, which create the image of our lives. There are some twenty workers in literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the dance who are doing this for us now—and doing it in such a manner as to associate our modern existence with that extraordinary march of mankind which we like to call the progress of humanity. ”

“ There are three great arts in this world—singin', hand-paintin', and last but not least, speakin'. I try my hand at all of them except hand-paintin', and I wish to impress on all you scholars what a joy it is to oneself and one's friends to have mastered one of these muses. ”

“ By what means then shall those work who long for reform in the arts, and who shall they seek to kindle into eager desire for possession of beauty, and better still, for the development of the faculty that creates beauty? ”