And a consideration of the etymology of the words “Art” and “Kunst” is the basis of a discussion of the relation of Science and Art, which is summed up in these words:
Science consists in knowing, Art consists in doing. What I must do in order to know, is Art subservient to Science: what I must know in order to do, is Science subservient to Art.
After speaking of dancing, music, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, the author says:
Of all these arts, the end is not use, but pleasure, or pleasure before use, or at least pleasure and use conjointly. In modern language, there has grown up a usage which has put them into a class by themselves under the name of the Fine Arts, as distinguished from the Useful or Mechanical Arts. (See Aesthetics and Fine Arts.) Nay, more, to them alone is often appropriated the use of the generic word Art.... And further yet, custom has reduced the number which the class-word is meant to include. When Art and the works of Art are now currently spoken of in this sense, not even music or poetry is frequently denoted, but only architecture, sculpture and painting by themselves, or with their subordinate and decorative branches.
Fine Arts
The article Fine Arts (Vol. 10, p. 355; equivalent to 70 pages of this Guide) is divided into the following parts: General Definition, with particular attention to the theory that makes the arts a form of play and to the definitions of Plato and Schiller; Classification—architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry classified as “shaping” and “speaking” or as imitative and “non-imitative,” with definitions from the aesthetic or philosophic point of view of sculpture and of painting; and Historical Development, with a criticism of Spencer’s theory of the evolution and gradual separation of the arts and of Taine’s natural history, as well as a critical and illuminating outline history of the arts.
Whether we include under the fine arts music and poetry, or with the more popular usage make the fine arts not five but three, architecture, painting and sculpture, the arts may be studied in the Britannica and there is the basis for this study in this Guide.
Music is the subject of a separate chapter.
Poetry is treated in the chapters on Literature, but it will be well to remind the student of the philosophy of art of the remarkable article Poetry (Vol. 21, p. 877; equivalent to 45 pages in this Guide) by Theodore Watts-Dunton, and of the articles on the different poetic forms, mostly by Edmund Gosse.
Architecture in the Britannica is outlined in this Guide in the chapter For Architects.