There is no difference of opinion concerning the nature of fine art and the fine arts as thus generally described, and as contra-distinguished from art and the arts mechanical. It is acknowledged that the one set of arts exists to satisfy practical needs, and the other set exists to give delight and satisfy the sense of beauty, while as to an intermediate set of arts which exist for both purposes, it is possible to distinguish in each case the part which is beautiful or pleasurable from the part which is mechanical or merely useful. But as soon as we inquire further, and seek for more precise definitions, we find ourselves confronted with a mass of speculation and discussion as formidable as has been accumulated in any department of human thought. Granting that the fine arts are those of which the end is beauty, or beauty and use conjointly, the question next arises, what is beauty 1 and next, how does the beauty of art differ from the beauty of nature? and then, what place do the arts of beauty hold in the general scheme of things 1—what are the relations of these activities and their results to the idea of the universe, to the faculties of man, and to each other ì To such inquiries as these, enormous in extent and enormous in complexity, a separate place has been given in modern philosophy under the name AEsthetics. “It is the province of aesthetics,” says Professor Ruskin, “to tell you (if you did not know it before) that the taste and colour of a peach are pleasant, and to ascertain (if it be ascertainable, and you have any curiosity to know) why they are so.” But in a less sarcastic and more extended definition, it would be said that the name AEsthetics is intended to designate a scientific doctrine or account of beauty in nature and art, and of the faculties for enjoying and for originating beauty which exist in man. Instead, however, of an accepted or uniform science, we find on these subjects a multitude of speculations as conflicting as they are voluminous; but yet conflicting more in appearance than in reality, because the source of their contradictions lies less in difference of judgment concerning the facts themselves, than in difference of doctrine concerning the abstract order of the universe in which those facts find a place, and in consequent diversity of method in arranging and of formula in interpreting the facts.

Of the principal speculations of AESTHETICS the reader already possesses a synopsis under the proper heading. Our present task is of a different kind. We shall, indeed, as well as our space admits, endeavour to state what characters all the fine arts possess in common, and in what they severally differ from one another, as well as to lay down certain leading facts of their history; in other words, we shall submit (1) a definition of fine art in general, (2) a definition and classification of the fine arts severally, (3) some observations on their historical development. But in so doing, we shall not profess even to state the deeper problems either of metaphysics or psychology which will lie to right and left of our path, still less, as the exponents of any one philosophical system, to solve them. We shall simply take account of the facts and phenomena of the several arts as we find them in experience, and sum them up in the language of every day; keeping of necessity in view only the most salient features of the vast provinces of inquiry before us, and leaving particulars to be supplied under the headings of the individual arts. And when, as will sometimes happen, we do quote the formulas and refer to the systems of philosophers, it will be, not as adopting any of them for better for worse, but as finding suggestions in all of them by turns; since, though one body of speculative doctrine may be no truer than another, yet each brings forward some aspect and contains some presentment of the truth; and a complicated mass of facts, when it is arranged in the order and expressed in the terms of a system, may not be essentially the clearer, but is usually the better marshalled for review.

At the threshold it will be necessary that we should call to mind the terms of our own definition of art in general (see Art). According to the popular distinction between art and nature, the idea of art only includes phenomena of which man is the cause—and that, when he acts not spontaneously but with calculation, not from impulse but from forethought; while the idea of nature includes all phenomena, both in man and in the world outside him, which take place without forethought or studied initiative of his own. This distinction we saw reason to recognize as practically valid. Art, we said accordingly, means every regulated operation or dexterity whereby we pursue ends which we know beforehand; and it means nothing but such operations and dexterities. That which any one does without thinking about it, and without considering what he is doing it for, is not art at all. Hence we shall not allow the title of fine art to natural eloquence, to charm or dignity of manner, to delicacy and tact in social intercourse, and other graces of life and conduct for which such a title is sometimes claimed, though they really proceed from an unconscious gift or unreflecting habit in those who exhibit them. All these are manifestations of the beautiful, and in witnessing them we experience a pleasure analogous, no doubt, to the pleasures of fine art. Nevertheless, so far as such manifestations are spontaneous, they are not arts, but, as we have called them, graces; they are due, as Greek theology would have expressed it, not to the teaching of Athênê but to the gift of the Charites. When the exigencies of a deductive and ontological system lead a writer like Dr Robert Zimmermann, of Vienna, to co-ordinate these spontaneous acts or traits of beautiful and expressive behaviour with the deliberate artistic activities of the race, we feel that he is sacrificing to system a distinction which is essential That distinction common parlance very justly observes, with its opposition of “art” to “nature,” and its phrase of “second nature” for those habits which have become so ingrained as to seem spontaneous, whether originally the result of discipline or not. One of the essential qualities of art is premeditation; and when Shelley talks of the skylark’s profuse strains of unpremeditated art, he in effect lays emphasis on the fact that it is only by a metaphor that he uses the word art in this case at all; he calls attention to that which (if the songs of birds are as instinctive as we suppose) precisely makes the difference between the skylark’s outpourings and his own. For example, when we see a person in all whose ordinary movements there is freedom and beauty, we put down the charm of these to inherited and inbred physical aptitudes of which the person has never thought, and call it nature; but when we go on to notice that the same person is beautifully and appropriately dressed, since we know that it is impossible to dress without thinking of it, we put down the charm of this to judicious forethought and calculation, and call it art. Again, it is an established and a just practical maxim of the dramatic art, that the actor who in the moment of performance really and involuntarily surrenders himself to the emotions of his part and situation, though he may rouse the sympathies of the audience by a natural exhibition of feeling, yet is not acting like an artist, and does not produce as much effect, nor an effect of the same kind, as he does when, master of himself, he goes through a series of utterances and gestures which he has deliberately conceived and rehearsed beforehand. The task of art is not, in either of the above instances, to create a product outsideof or separate from the artist. The material upon which the artist has in these cases to work consists of his or her own natural aptitudes; aptitudes, in the one case, of personal charm, which have to be made the most of by appropriate adornment; aptitudes, in the other case, for mimicry and emotional expression, which have to be made the most of by study and practice. In such instances, it may often be hard to separate the share of nature from the share of art in the result—to determine where grace ends and calculation begins, or where ends the sympathetic power of natural expression, and where begins the properly artistic power of studied and premeditated expression. Perhaps no writer has observed the differences or laid down the boundary lines between these adjacent kingdoms of artlessness and art with more acuteness than Schleiermacher. But we have said enough to mark for the present purpose the reality and importance of the distinction. And having thus secured ourselves against the intrusion among fine arts of those phases of beauty in human act and utterance which justly belong not to art at all but nature, we can enter upon what is our proper business, the delimitation of the separate place and functions of the fine arts among the rest of the arts and among each other.

I. Of Fine Art in general.

When we say of the fine arts as a group that they are activities which minister to the love of beauty in man, it is as if we said, the tailor’s art is an activity which ministers to his need of clothes; and the inference is, in the one case as in the other, that a separate class of men is to be found in every community devoted to this particular employment. Aud such, practically, we all know to be the case; the gifts and calling of the artist constitute a separate profession, a profession of the producers, so to speak, of fine art, while the rest of the community are enjoyess or recipients of the fine art produced. In the most primitive societies, undoubtedly, this was not so, and we can go back to an original or rudimentary stage of every fine art at which the separation between a class of producers or performers, and a class of recipients, does not exist. Such an original or rudimentary stage of the dramatic art, for instance, we are accustomed to witness in children, who will occupy themselves at all moments with mimicry and make-believe for their own satisfaction, and without the least regard to the presence or absence of witnesses. The original or rudimentary type of the profession of imitative sculptors or painters is the cave-dweller of the palaeolithic age, who, when he rested from his day’s hunting, first took up the bone handle of his weapon, and with a flint either carved it into the shape, or on its surface scratched the outlines, of the animals of the chase. The original or rudimentary type of the architect, considered not as a mere builder but as an artist, is the savage who, when his tribe had taken to live in tents or huts instead of caves, first arranged the skins and timbers of his tent or hut in one way because it pleased his eye, rather than in some other way which was as good for shelter. The original type of the artificer or maker of household implements, considered in the same light, was the other savage who first took it into his head to fashion his club or spear in one way rather than in another way as good for killing, and to ornament it with tufts or markings. In none of these cases had the primitive artist any reason for pleasing anybody but himself. Again, the original or rudimentary type of lyric song and dancing arose when the first reveller clapped hands and stamped or shouted in time, in honour of his god, in commemoration of a victory, or in mere obedience to the blind stirring of a rhythmic impulse within him; and to such a display the presence or absence of witnesses does not signify at all. The original type of the instrumental musician is the shepherd who first notched a reed and drew sounds from it while his sheep were cropping. The father of all artists in dress and personal adornment was the first wild man who tattooed himself or bedecked himself with shells and plumes. But in both of these last instances, it may be said, the primitive artist surely had the motive of pleasing not himself only, but his mate, or the female whom he desired to be his mate? However that may be, it is clear that what any one can eñjoy by himself, whether in the way of musical sounds or personal adornments, or in the way of mimicry, of rhythmical movements, of imitative or ornamental carving and drawing, of the disposition and adornment of dwelling places and utensils—the same things, it is clear, others can also enjoy with him. For these and similar things to give pleasure, it is not essential that others should be by; but the pleasures they give are essentially of a kind in which others can, if they are by, participate.

And so, with the growth of societies, it comes about that one class of persons separate themselves, and become the ministers or producers of this kind of pleasures, while the rest become the persons ministered to, the participators in or recipients of the pleasures. Artists are those members of a society who are so constituted as to feel more acutely than the rest certain classes of pleasures which all can feel in their degree. By this fact of their constitution they are impelled to devote their active powers to the production of such pleasures, to the making or doing of some of those things which they enjoy so intensely when they are made and done by others. At the same time the artist does not, by assuming these ministering or creative functions, surrender his enjoying or receptive functions. He continues to participate in the pleasures of which he is himself the cause, and remains a conscious member of his own public. 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. Nay, these opposite functions of producing and enjoying the fruits of production, of ministering and being ministered to, are much more commonly combined in this than in other de-Íiartments of human exertion. Nearly every one is ready to )e the minister, if he can, of his own higher pleasures, and therefore to be his own singer or poet, his own architect, sculptor, or painter. Few are ready to be ministers of their own lower needs, and to be their own tailors, their own butchers (except in the case of wild game, the killing of which, being superfluous, possesses an attraction of which necessary killing is devoid), their own cobblers, cooks, servants, and the rest. In spite, however, of such combination or interchange of functions, we may, both practically and for the purposes of the present discussion, regard the artist as belonging generally to one category and the rest of the world to another. We may separate in our consideration those phenomena which attend the production of fine art, or exercise of the aesthetic activities, from those phenomena which attend the enjoyment of fine art, or contemplation of the results of such exercise.

For the rest, of the two parts of which our preliminary definition consisted, we shall gain most by letting alone the one and following out the other. If we take up the affirmative part, in which we said that the fine arts are those which minister to our love of beauty, and if we try to develop and complete that, we shall have, for one thing, to explain how the love of beauty, in the wide and somewhat loose sense in which we here use the phrase, means a faculty which man possesses for taking keen and permanent delight in the contemplation and the imagination of many kinds of things, including some not strictly to be called beautiful, such as grotesqueness, comicality, even ugliness itself, when they are presented in typical forms. For another thing, we shall be very apt to find ourselves arguing in a circle, and saying, such and such an art is fine because it produces beauty, and such and such a thing is beautiful because it is produced by fine art. But if we take up the negative part of our definition, in which we only said that the fine arts are arts which exist independently of practical necessity or utility, and if we try to follow out this, we shall find that here we have got hold of a character of the fine arts which at once presents instructive aspects and far-reaching consequences. Indeed, the greater part of those other characters, or common properties of whatever kind, which have been recognized by consent as peculiar to the group of fine arts, will appear on examination to be implied in, or deducible from, this one fundamental character.

Let us take first, among such common properties, one relating to the frame of mind, or moral attitude, so to call it, which accompanies the reception as distinguished from the production of aesthetic pleasure. It is an observation as old as Aristotle that such pleasures differ from most other pleasures of experience in that they are disinterested. That is to say, of course not disinterested in the sense in which that word implies the positive ethical virtue of self-abnegation, or preferring others to one’s self; but disinterested in the sense that they are not such as nourish a man’s body nor add to his riches; they are not such as can gratify him, when he receives them, by the sense of advantage or superiority over his fellow creatures; they are not such as one human being can in any sense receive exclusively from the object which bestows them. We have partly learnt as much already in glancing at the origins or rudimentary stages of the several fine arts, when we saw that, whether the primitive artist meant it or not, his operations were capable at any rate of pleasing others besides himself. To turn to their developed stages, it is evidently characteristic of a beautiful building that its beauty cannot be monopolized, but can be seen and admired by the inhabitants of a whole city and by all visitors for all generations. The same thing is true of a picture or a statue, except in so far as an individual possessor may choose to keep such a possession to himself, in which case his pride of monopoly is a sentiment wholly independent of his pleasure in artistic contemplation; (and as a rule we practically find that the heir or collector who takes most pleasure in his treasures of art is also the readiest to make them accessible to others). Similarly, music is composed to be sung or played for the enjoyment of many at a time, and for such enjoyment a hundred years hence as much as A...