ART. In any attempt to arrive at a clear and comprehensive definition of the meaning of art it is necessary to disregard all philological or etymological derivations which, in the past, have led to much confusion of thought and to an expansion of the human activities embraced by this term, which oversteps the limitations imposed upon it by the modern conception of its meaning. We are not concerned with the meaning attached to the word Art, or its Greek, Latin and German equivalents, in the past, which was so vague that almost all attempts to define it led to contradictory and often diametrically opposed conclusions, but with the more restricted and purely aesthetic interpretation put upon it by modern thinkers.
The old meaning, in its widest sense, of the Greek r1Xvv, the Latin ars, the German Kunst (derived from Konnen), implied skill and ability, acquired through patient practice and directed towards a definite end, whether this end be aesthetical, ethical or useful. According to their aim the arts would thus be divided into Fine Arts, Arts of Conduct, and Liberal Arts, the Fine Arts being concerned with the attainment of the beautiful, the Arts of Conduct with the good, and the Liberal Arts with the useful.
In the modern and more restricted sense the term art applies only to those human activities which tend towards an aestheticism —in other words, the Fine Arts—and although, in a figurative way, we speak of the art of cooking, the art of the chase, the art of living, the art of war, and so forth, neither cooking, nor hunt ing, nor living, nor warfare would ever be seriously included in a list of the arts which embraces the static arts—architecture, sculpture and painting, with their subdivisions—and the dynamic arts—music, poetry and the drama (rhetoric).
Many attempts have been made to explain the essential nature of art, the quality which distinguishes art from all other mani festations of human activity, but most of them lack clearness, do not cover the whole field, or are capable of being extended to non-artistic activities. A number of writers on aesthetics, from Plato and Schiller to K. Lange, recognizing the non-utilitarian. immaterialistic character of art, explain it as a form of playa theory which cannot be reconciled with the now generally accepted notion that superstitious fear of the unknown forces of nature is one of the. main springs of artistic creation in primitive man who, by the productions of his art, tries to placate the mysterious hostile powers or to create symbols of stability and rest in the bewildering turmoil of the universe.
Equally unsatisfactory, in the light of modern speculation, is the Einfiulilung (empathy, q.v) theory, first advanced by Herder and elaborated, among others, by Vernon Lee, which, whilst throwing valuable light on the true nature of aesthetic enjoyment, does not supply a complete solution of the problem presented by the investigation of the basic constitution of art. Neither is this solution to be found in Croce's equation of art and intuition, nor in Santayana's "objectified pleasure"; less still in the entirely fallacious popular definition of art being nature seen through a temperament. Tolstoy came nearer the truth in insisting upon emotional impulse as indispensable to all artistic expression, but went sadly astray in the elaboration of his theory.
It is scarcely necessary to insist upon the fallacy of such popular notions as the identifications of art with the representa tion of nature, or, worse still, of the beautiful in nature. Art is not representation, but interpretation; and it is not too much to say that art begins where the artist departs from strict imitation of ' nature, imposing upon her a rhythm of his own creation, according to his own sense of fitness. Nature is the artist's inexhaustible source of inspiration, but the laws which govern the work of art are wholly independent from the laws of nature. If the Pastoral Symphony is a sublime work of art, it is because Beethoven, far from imitating the sounds of nature in the manner of "programme music" (which more often than not is but re motely connected with art), expressed the emotions awakened in him by intimate communion with nature in terms of abstract rhythm dictated to him by his inspiration and controlled by that perfect craftmanship which is essential to the creation of a work of art.
It is true that the arts of painting and sculpture, less abstract than the art of music, necessitate a higher degree of verisimilitude to nature ; but it is equally certain that the aesthetic appeal of the painter's or sculptor's work, though enhanced by the pleasure of recognition and association with familiar visual experience, is based on abstract qualities akin to the qualities of music, the difference being merely the medium—sound in the one case, form and colour in the other. But whereas our ears are trained to be susceptible to the rhythmic combination of sounds and to accept the musical work of art without probing into the representational meaning of these sounds, the aesthetic education of our eyes has been comparatively neglected. Instinctively we turn to the paint ing or piece of sculpture with a feeling of curiosity as to its mean ing. Instinctively we compare it with our own experience of natural appearance and are apt to make its verisimilitude the criterion of its artistic merit, disregarding, at first sight at least, the abstract rhythm of form and colour which distinguishes the work of art from the mechanical imitation of nature. The associ ations of the subject are apt to blind us to the essential art qualities. If the Japanese painter looks at a landscape through his straddling legs with his head lowered to the level of his knees, it is because, through seeing his subject upside down, he is not led astray by the associations of the various "incidents" that constitute the landscape, and his attention is riveted upon the pure pattern of colours and forms. For the same reason many Western painters, in the course of their work, at times turn their canvas upside down in order to be able to concentrate on the abstract qualities of the design, which are obscured by "life-like" representation.
If representational truth were the criterion of the work of art, a good photograph would have a better claim to this title than an Egyptian statue, a torso by Michelangelo, the Primavera of Botticelli, or a landscape by Claude or by Cezanne. Yet photog raphy has no place among the arts, even though the photographer may, by his tact in selection, give evidence of a good deal of artistic taste. It does not rank among the arts, because it has to accept nature uncontrolled and unmodified. And it is just that power of control and purposeful modification—vide the broad simplification and relations of planes in the Egyptian statue ; the amplified muscles and heightened vitality of the Michelangelo torso ; the graceful arabesque line of Botticelli's decorative paint ing; the orderly classic arrangement of the features in Claude's landscape ; the deliberate architectural building up and accentu ation of volumes in the Cezanne—that constitute the artistic significance of these works.
The function of art is the creation of beauty. Indeed, it may be said that there is no beauty outside art, or, to be more exact, no beauty that has not been revealed by art. Nothing in nature is either beautiful or ugly, for beauty and ugliness are not positive attributes of matter, but matter is invested with these attributes by the artist's emotional reactions to some outside stimulus. Beauty thus resolves itself into objectified aesthetic emotion. The artist has the power to make this emotion visible or audible to others, and to make them partake of his pleasurable excitement. We become aware of beauty and acquire the habit of trans ferring it from the work of art to the aspect of nature which was the source of its inspiration. We learn to see beauty in a tree, in a mountain, and even in things which, before the artist had opened our eyes, left us cold or even repelled us. A toothless old hag becomes beautiful under Rembrandt's magic touch, because he saw his subject emotionally and taught us to see it in the same way. It is doubtful if anybody found anything but dinginess and "ugliness" in the mist and fog of the Thames-side in London before Whistler, by the work of his brush and the poetic imagery of his "Ten o'clock Lecture," invested the murky London atmos phere with permanent beauty.
To go farther back, it is extremely doubtful whether the otherwise highly cultured anthropocentric Greek mind that evolved the ideal type of human proportions, which to this day remains the standard of perfection, was capable of discerning any beauty in the inanimate world. The Greek artist aimed at a perfection of symmetry and rhythm which was beyond the reach of nature. When, therefore, he borrowed any forms from nature, he evolved from them a stylistic formula representing the ideal type of these forms—an ideal which has no counterpart in actual existence. Greek ornament, architectural and otherwise, owes its origin to this attitude.
Until the dawn of the Renaissance in Italy the beauty of mountain scenery was a closed book to the mediaeval mind. A mountain was a thing to be shunned, an impediment to traffic, a source of danger and fatigue. Even a poet of the stamp of Petrarch found it necessary, in a long letter, to plead, as an excuse for his eccentricity in undertaking an unnecessary moun tain expedition—an almost unheard-of adventure in his days— the example of Philip of Macedonia, who had ascended Mount Haemus in a similar spirit of enterprise. But this letter, which fills ten printed pages, whilst containing much information about the hardships, dangers and fatigue of the expedition, and theo retical reflections which might as well have been penned at the desk in his study, includes no hint of emotional response to nature in her most majestic moods, no description, no word of aesthetic appreciation. Petrarch in this proved himself the child of his time. Mountains only became beautiful in the eyes of mankind after Giotto and his followers had introduced them into their pictures to replace the traditional gold backgrounds of early mediaeval art. Art had then once more fulfilled its educational mission.
That beauty is not an attribute of nature, but of art, or of the artist's mind, need scarcely be demonstrated. If it were not so, it would be an immutable value, not subject to fluctuations. Yet, not only does the ideal of beauty change with successive genera tions, but it varies with races and individuals. It is only the beauty values set up by art that remain permanent, and their appreciation is largely a matter of artistic education. To define art as the attainment of the beautiful would, therefore, only be substituting one term for another and would necessitate the even more elusive definition of the beautiful. Clive Bell's "significant form" as the determining factor of all art does not take us any further, for this "significant form" is only beauty in a new disguise. It would be as difficult to establish where exactly form becomes significant or where beauty begins.
Beauty, although the aim of art, has thus to be eliminated from any plausible and receptable definition of art. To find such a definition it is necessary to trace the common denomination of the infinitely varied manifestations of human activity which legitimately come under the heading of art, the peculiar charac teristic which distinguishes the work of art both from the product of natural forces and of purely industrial activity. What is there in common between, say, a Gothic cathedral, a Beethoven sym phony, a Greek vase, a Rembrandt etching, a Giotto fresco, a Shakespeare sonnet, the Ludovisi "Throne of Venus," the stained glass windows of Chartres cathedral, a Benin bronze, an Ispahan carpet, and a Euripedes tragedy, to explain their being accounted as works of art, whilst no such claim could be advanced for a coloured photograph, a cast of the human figure from life, the tawdry mantel ornament of factory production, a piece of dog gerel verse, or a rubbishy ballad?