FINE ARTS. In a general sense the fine arts are those among the arts and industries which man cultivates for his necessities or conveniences, and which minister also to his love of beauty. Architecture, for example, providing shelter and ac commodation, offers in its use and mechanic perfection visions of the strength, fitness, harmony and proportion of parts; but also by its dispositions and contrasts of light and shade ; by colour and enrichments ; and by variety and relation of contours, surfaces and intervals, has decorative competence and so is accounted a fine art. In the graphic arts we observe that love of beauty can cover the interest of visual excitement such as caricature and the grotesque. The terrible, the painful, the squalid, the de graded,—in a word every variety of the significant,—may be brought within the province of fine art on the ground that the art of man springs from his impulse to create, and thereby asso ciates with creation the kindred pleasure, that of witnessing and appreciating what is made to attract that interest. In common usage there is often confusion between art-making and art-seeing as measures of art-values. But the word fine has a special sig nification for aesthetic creation, as conditioning its power over material.
"God saw creation that it was good," and "in the image of God," we read, "man was created." The word image admits the power of the artist to fine art vision and in this connection design has a cognate association. On the other hand when the spectator of art finds pleasure or satisfaction in an executed work of craft, his mental exaltation comes in seeing what the creator imaged and recognizing its fineness. Such recognition may come in mutual co-ordination with the spirit of the age—acting as a mass instinct in the broad sense of the designer and his clients being of one mind. But it may go on to the schooling of temperament, and so become the conscious taste, acting as a gauge or rule upon the images of craft. Such alternating relations and the constant va rieties in human design and taste have given rise to a formidable body of speculation and discussion. The present article, dealing with concrete processes and the material results of the creative activities of man, defines them as fine art in general ; classifies the fine arts in their main distinctions and discusses their his torical aspects in various phases of image-design and taste association.
A popular and established theory distinguishes art from nature, in that man is deliberately the fabricator of art, while nature functions outside him. Design itself is a dexterity of which one of the essential qualities is the will and premeditation of the artist. We reckon the songs of birds as instinctive, and this "epithet colours the skylark's outpourings as of a different order from the poet's." The distinction is, however, modified as we realize that the power of imaging has grown by natural instinct in evolution out of the desire to make. The earliest workers in sculpture or painting were the cave-dwellers of the prehistoric ages who scratched the outlines of animals of the chase on imple ments or who made models of them upon their cave walls. Chil dren can be seen still as innocent artists making for themselves, just for the pleasure of seeing what they make. So the original or rudimentary type of the architect-artists was evolved when a savage found his satisfaction in tidiness and developed an instinct of fitness in his ordering of the skins or the tree branches that covered his tent or hut. So the first artificer was a maker of club or spear to his pleasure in its handling—the primitive art monger having small reason for pleasing anybody but himself.
As early in history' the primitive dancer and singer were seek ing their audiences, so the artificer wrought, with an eye to please others too. The historical sequences of art pass from craft to style; and it will be shown that as long as these were in full accord, the current association was working for an instinctive satisfaction and it has its images in the balanced economy of craft and taste; but when taste or some imported association of style began to lecture workmanship, art lost its creative will, and craft decayed.
There is accounted also a disinterested sphere for the art in stinct in that the spectator has a share in the designer's ideal and a sympathetic, indirect satisfaction for himself therefrom. But the first-hand pleasure of design is that of the creative imagination; and in its spontaneous working we have engaged "incalculably complex groups of faculties, reminiscences, preferences, emotions," that constitute the vision of the artist. The product is a finished work of craft, and so has its power to please, graded by craft capacity. But skill in any useful art means a practised conduct of the hand, fashioning material to a particular end. The artist differs from the mechanical workman in the nature of his images of beauty arising in the material associations of his craft, and so he is consciously solving aesthetic problems according to the excita tion of an ordering as well as a creating instinct in himself.
The conclusion is that images of beauty make the substance of the fine arts and create the several qualifications of architecture, sculpture and painting. Architecture, for example, is a mistress art in that its occasions demand the full substance of aesthetic vision. "The architect has liberty for the disposition of his masses, lines, colours, alternations of light and shadow, of plain and ornamented surface, and the rest." In him material association formulates his images, because in supplying definite accommodations, he has mechanical necessities to meet in laws of weight, thrust, support, resistance and other properties of solid matter. The sculptor and the painter, too, have their spheres of action in physical appear ance. But the sculptor is creating surface aspects by a mechanical tooling. He materializes his images by cutting them into stone; marble or wood, or by shaping them in metal, plaster, etc. The painter finds to his hand a more extended range of natural facts and appearances, because his pictorial images are flat on a plane surface, as worked in terms of his painting tools. In all three fine arts, however, the artist's operation has its every bloom and virtue, in the nature of a material regulation. The rank of artistry may be gauged by the spectator, but the working test has been the artist's power to grasp and realize his vision in the terms of his craft. It is claimed for the fine arts that their ideality of form and colour is a sort of "play—a free vent for an energy over and above what is needed to be spent upon the conservation, perpetuation or protection of life." However, the superfluous or optional character of art is that it comes in the instinctive gratification of a free creative choice and by such trans mitted pleasure, public taste is gratified.
We are following in general terms R. G. Collingwood's Outlines of the Philosophy of Art in that he defines art (I) as the creation of objects, or the pursuit of activities called works of art by people called artists—works distinguished as products intended to be beautiful; (2) as the creation of objects or the pursuit of activities called artificial as opposed to natural—that is objects created or activities pursued by human beings consciously free to control their natural impulses and to organize their life on plan; (3) as creating that frame of mind which we call artistic, the frame of mind in which we are aware of beauty. While the mechanical pleasure of tool-using bridges the distinction between art and industry—so the spiritual sense of the image brings fine art into line with literature and music—which are not arts of ob jective completion, but of powers of interpretation.
The systematists of the 19th century thought themselves com petent to grade the fine arts in terms of philosophical analysis. Hegel ranged architecture, sculpture and painting as corning in a natural order of evolution—ancient architecture the expression of obscure symbolic ideas ; sculpture the classic passage into clear cut, lucid thought ; painting the modern sum of romantic ideality. Herbert Spencer seems to track out the passage from ancient to modern—as one from the hieratic simplicity of the architectural monument to the decorative complexity of the sculptural and pic torial uses of advanced city life, and finally in our civilization, the elaborate and emotional complex which moderns account as the art of the picture. Such analysis can be seen to rank the painter's genius as the ultimate crystallization. And in this sense art history is read nowadays as character analysis, and written up as a sublimation of temperament. Criticism was initiated when Vasari wrote the lives of the Renaissance painters in 155o, and to this day we have his successors, decorating the story of art with literary values. The temperamental factor in the develop ment of painting has been well studied by D. S. MacColl, who dis tinguishes three outstanding varieties : "The Olympian painter," he says, "is king and master in a world made for his use ; he is on the gods' side and his art mirrors their perfection of form, their happiness in majesty of calm possession. The Titan is rebel against the Powers, his spirit is of passion and strife"; and his art develops as a social revolution. A third temperament is of the mystic who "seeks in humility and meekness values outside things visible," and recognizing the nothingness of assertion, surrenders his perception of reality to an inner sense of second-sight. With increasing distinctness in the last 30o years the temperamental con ditions of fine art have marbled the basal colouring of the picture habit in associations of schools and cliques. Olympians, Titans and mystics appear master individualities, linking up the Renais sance with our painting. Olympian graces appear in pictorial pro cession from Raphael's allegories to the flattered portraits of hu manity and circumstance which have in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries made the staple of fashionable master craft. In idyllic atmospheres have been stayed the contentments of the Dutch and French genre, its domestic atmosphere and homely landscape ; and similarly the poetry and pleasantry of the English academicians has been steeped in a mild-mannered geniality. Titan mentality must be allowed to the painter scientist, such as Leonardo da Vinci; to Rembrandt adventuring into untrodden paths of chiaros curo; to Salvator Rosa brigand hunting in the wild; to Bruegel sidling away to the fair-booth and kermesse dance. So too were the high-handed despisers of convention, Hogarth and Goya, handing on the torch to the rebellious anarchists of the French painting cliques. Yet there was the line of mystics too—Giorgione painting he knew not what ; Velazquez finding a new wonder in the focus of the eye; El Greco imagining a chaos of line and colour; Blake making his mystery of ghostly hope and fear ; Turner ad venturing flights into the glory of the air; or Corot painting a fairy light for spring-time willows.
Temperament and circumstance have had to make literary standard values of fine art. Taine has laid stress on the vicissi tudes of racial and political development for initiating or repress ing pictorial genius. Fromentin, however, questions such deduc tion, observing how the Dutch innocence and simplicity were no reflection of the stirring life and dramatic heroism of the Netherlands revolt from Spain : whereas French painting in the 19th century was moulded continually to the trend of revolu tionary politics. Latterly our experts are laying less stress on philosophical analysis and we may summarize the loth century appraisement of art as, seeking practical definition, Sir C. J. Holmes in his Notes on the Science of Picture-Making gives the present-day conditions that govern picture practice.
"All great art, being emphatically personal, is accompanied by variation from previously existing standards of excellence. This personal variation is marked by a new intensity of feeling, by a new sense of vitality and by a new rhythm of pattern. All great artists are pioneers possessing these characteristics. In their fol lowers, the second-rate artists, we find less intensity of feeling, less vitality and a feebler rhythmical sense. Emotion is the key stone of painting as it is of poetry. What is not strongly felt is no material for the artist. The painter's emotion sums up and concentrates his experiences (imaginative or visual) in terms of rhythmical paint as the poet does in terms of rhythmical words. Theory is not a substitute for talent, but its necessary teacher. Principles of design are not rigid moulds into which the subject matter of a work has to be squeezed. Their task is to suggest to the artist the particular means, by which each given subject can be perfectly expressed. Tradition is no more than the body of principles, which secure conformity between art and its con temporary environment. What is a perfect tradition for one period or climate may thus be a fatal influence in another period or climate, because it does not fit the changed conditions. Hence the danger of revivals of old methods. Systems of art teaching have commonly failed from not recognizing the necessity of prog ress, from enslavement to a fixed canon of ideal beauty. No such fixed canon of ideal beauty can be set up as a standard for future achievement. We cannot do again what has already been done by a great artist ; we must do something different. Each field of artistic activity is exhausted by the first great artist who gathers a full harvest from it." Art history in successions of style and in appraisement of art value has no verdict to offer as to what is great art in definition of greatness. We may say that fine artistry is figuration, yet also transfiguration; but to be proficient in his craft is the artist's necessity for himself ; to be ideal is his instinct, for so he assures partnership with the spectator. Art history has been a serial evolution of art instincts crystallizing into styles. Their succes sion in world history may be indexed as ancient, classic, mediaeval and modern, but this -is just to link up art manifestations with phases of human progress.