It is the same in sculpture, in music, and in poetry. Art, in all its forms, is bounded on one side by the practically useful and on the other by unsuccessful attempts at art. How is art to be marked off from each of these? The ordinary educated man of our circle, and even the artist who has not occupied himself especially with æsthetics, will not hesitate at this question either. He thinks the solution has been found long ago, and is well known to everyone.
“Art is such activity as produces beauty,” says such a man.
If art consists in that, then is a ballet or an operetta art? you inquire.
“Yes,” says the ordinary man, though with some hesitation, “a good ballet or a graceful operetta is also art, in so far as it manifests beauty.”
But without even asking the ordinary man what differentiates the “good” ballet and the “graceful” operetta from their opposites (a question he would have much difficulty in answering), if you ask him whether the activity of costumiers and hairdressers, who ornament the figures and faces of the women for the ballet and the operetta, is art; or the activity of Worth, the dressmaker; of scent-makers and men-cooks, then he will, in most cases, deny that their activity belongs to the sphere of art. But in this the ordinary man makes a mistake, just because he is an ordinary man and not a specialist, and because he has not occupied himself with æsthetic questions. Had he looked into these matters, he would have seen in the great Renan’s book, Marc Aurele, a dissertation showing that the tailor’s work is art, and that those who do not see in the adornment of woman an affair of the highest art are very small-minded and dull. “C’est le grand art” says Renan. Moreover, he would have known that in many æsthetic systems—for instance, in the æsthetics of the learned Professor Kralik, Weltschönheit, Versuch einer allgemeinen Æsthetik, von Richard Kralik, and in Les problèmes de l’Esthétique Contemporaine, by Guyau—the arts of costume, of taste, and of touch are included.
“Es Folgt nun ein Fünfblatt von Künsten, die der subjectiven Sinnlichkeit entkeimen” (There results then a pentafoliate of arts, growing out of the subjective perceptions), says Kralik (p. 175). “Sie sind die ästhetische Behandlung der fünf Sinne.” (They are the æsthetic treatment of the five senses.)
These five arts are the following:—
Die Kunst des Geschmacksinns—The art of the sense of taste (p. 175).
Die Kunst des Geruchsinns—The art of the sense of smell (p. 177).
Die Kunst des Tastsinns—The art of the sense of touch (p. 180).