Wind Instruments (mechanically blown).
Accordion; Barrel-Organ; Concertina; Harmonium; Orchestrion; Organ; Physharmonica; Portative Organ; Positive Organ; Regal; to which, though mouth blown, may be added Cheng. See also Free Reed Vibration; Keyboard.
Instruments of Percussion.
Sounding a Sensible Note: Bell; Bumbulum; Carillon; Glockenspiel; Gong; Harmonica; Jews’ Harp; Musical Box; Parsifal Bell-Instrument; Xylophone. Not Sounding a Sensible Note: Castanets; Cymbals; Chinese Pavillon; Drum; Kettle Drum; Nacaire; Sistrum; Tambourine; Timbrel; Tom-Tom; Triangle; Tympanon.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE FINE ARTS: GENERAL AND INTRODUCTORY
The art-student and every other reader interested in the fine arts will find in the Britannica the material for courses of reading of very great range and of the utmost interest and value—whether he wishes to study theory, practice or history.
Theory of Art
Of course no adequate treatment of the arts, or of any one of them, could logically, much less advantageously, separate theory, practice and history. But the theory of art, though it may be inferred or deduced from many other articles in the book, including those the most devoted to the practical or historical, may best and most directly be studied in three articles, Aesthetics, Art, and Fine Arts. Of these, the first, Aesthetics (Vol. 1, p. 277), equivalent to nearly 40 pages of this Guide, is written by Professor James Sully, late of University College, London, and author of The Human Mind and other psychological studies. It discusses the meaning of beauty and the problem of the nature of pleasure, especially “higher” pleasure, its relation to play, etc. And the article closes with a history of Aesthetic Theories, including those of the following philosophers, on all of whom the student will find separate and elaborate critical biographies in the Britannica: Plato, who set beauty high, but thought art a mere trick of imitation and wished it be censored rather than encouraged in his model republic; Aristotle, who sets beauty above the useful and necessary, but whose aesthetic seems to be applied to poetry rather than to any other art; the German philosophers, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, who so deeply impressed their theories on the literature of their times, etc. The articles Art (Vol. 2, p. 657) and Fine Arts are both by Sir Sidney Colvin, formerly keeper of prints and drawings, British Museum. The former begins with a contrast between art and nature—the contrast made famous by Pope, by Chaucer, repeatedly by Shakespeare and by Dr. Johnson in his definition of Art as “the power of doing something which is not taught by Nature or by instinct.” This definition is in itself an excellent text for a discourse on the importance in the study of the fine arts of the best literature on the subject. But Sir Sidney Colvin points out that the definition is incomplete, since Art
is a name not only for the power of doing something, but for the exercise of the power; and not only for the exercise of the power, but for the rules according to which it is exercised; and not only for the rules, but for the result. Painting, for instance, is an art, and the word connotes not only the power to paint, but the act of painting; and not only the act, but the laws for performing the act rightly; and not only all these, but the material consequences of the act or the thing painted.
Art is then “Every regulated operation or dexterity by which organized beings pursue ends which they know beforehand, together with the rules and the result of every such operation or dexterity.”