he evokes a twofold image of beauty in motion, of which one half might be the despair of those painters who designed the dancing maidens of the walls of Herculaneum, and the other half the despair of all artists who in modern times have tried to fix upon their canvas the buoyancy and grace of dancing waves. In representing the perfections of form in a bride’s slender foot, the speaking art, poetry, would find itself distanced by either of the shaping arts, painting or sculpture. Suckling calls up the charm of such a foot by describing it not at rest but in motion, and in the feet which
| “Beneath the petticoat, Like little mice, went in and out,” |
leaves us an image which baffles the power of the other arts. Keats, when he tells of Madeline unclasping her jewels on St Agnes’s Eve, does not attempt to conjure up their lustre to the eye, as a painter would have done, and a less poetical poet might have tried to do, but in the words “her warmed jewels” evoked instead a quality, breathing of the very life of the wearer, which painting could not even have remotely suggested.
The differences between the means and capacities of representation proper to the shaping arts of sculpture and painting and those proper to the speaking art of poetry were for a long while overlooked or misunderstood. The maxim of Simonides, General law of the relative means and capacities of the several imitative arts: sculpture. that poetry is a kind of articulate painting, and painting a kind of mute poetry, was vaguely accepted until the days of Lessing, and first overthrown by the famous treatise of that writer on the Laocoön. Following in the main the lines laid down by Lessing, other writers have worked out the conditions of representation or imitation proper not only to sculpture and painting as distinguished from poetry, but to sculpture as distinguished from painting. The chief points established may really all be condensed under one simple law, that the more direct and complete the imitation effected by any art, the less is the range and number of phenomena which that art can imitate. Thus sculpture in the round imitates its objects much more completely and directly than any other single art, reproducing one whole set of their relations which no other art attempts to reproduce at all, namely, their solid relations in space. Precisely for this reason, such sculpture is limited to a narrow class of objects. As we have seen, it must represent human or animal figures; nothing else has enough either of universal interest or of organic beauty and perfection. Sculpture in the round must represent such figures standing free in full clearness and detachment, in combinations and with accessories comparatively simple, on pain of teasing the eye with a complexity and entanglement of masses and lights and shadows; and in attitudes comparatively quiet, on pain of violating, or appearing to violate, the conditions of mechanical stability. Being a stationary or space-art, it can only represent a single action, which it fixes and perpetuates for ever; and it must therefore choose for that action one as significant and full of interest as is consistent with due observation of the above laws of simplicity and stability. Such actions, and the facial expressions accompanying them, should not be those of sharp crisis or transition, because sudden movement or flitting expression, thus arrested and perpetuated in full and solid imitation by bronze or marble, would be displeasing and not pleasing to the spectator. They must be actions and expressions in some degree settled, collected and capable of continuance, and in their collectedness must at the same time suggest to the spectator as much as possible of the circumstances which have led up to them and those which will next ensue. These conditions evidently bring within a very narrow range the phenomena with which this art can deal, and explain why, as a matter of fact, the greater number of statues represent simply a single figure in repose, with the addition of one or two symbolic or customary attributes. Paint a statue (as the greater part both of Greek and Gothic statuary was in fact painted), and you bring it to a still further point of imitative completeness to the eye; but you do not thereby lighten the restrictions laid upon the art by its material, so long as it undertakes to reproduce in full the third or solid dimension of bodies. You only begin to lighten its restrictions when you begin to relieve it of that duty. We have traced how sculpture in relief, which is satisfied with only a partial reproduction of the third dimension, is free to introduce a larger range of objects, bringing forward secondary figures and accessories, indicating distant planes, indulging even in considerable violence and complexity of motion, since limbs attached to a background do not alarm the spectator by any idea of danger of fragility. But sculpture in the round has not this licence. It is true that the art has at various periods made efforts to escape from its natural limitations. Several of the later schools of antiquity, especially that of Pergamus in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C., strove hard both for violence of expression and complexity of design, not only in relief-sculptures, like the great altar-friezes now at Berlin, but in detached groups, such as (pace Lessing) the Laocoön itself. Many modern virtuosi of sculpture since Bernini have misspent their skill in trying to fix in marble both the restlessness of momentary actions and the flimsiness of fluttering tissues. In latter days Auguste Rodin, an innovating master with a real genius for his art, has attacked many problems of complicated grouping, more or less in the nature of the Greek symplegmata, but keeps these interlocked or contorted actions circumscribed within strict limiting lines, so that they do not by jutting or straggling suggest a kind of acrobatic challenge to the laws of gravity. The same artist and others inspired by him have further sought to emancipate sculpture from the necessity of rendering form in clear and complete definition, and to enrich it with a new power of mysterious suggestion, by leaving his figures wrought in part to the highest finish and vitality of surface, while other parts (according to a precedent set in some unfinished works of Michelangelo) remain scarcely emergent from the rough-hewn or unhewn block. But it may be doubted whether such experiments and expedients can permanently do much to enlarge the scope of the art.
Next we arrive at painting, in which the third dimension is dismissed altogether, and nothing is actually reproduced, in full or partially, except the effect made by the appearance of natural objects upon the retina of the eye. The consequence Means and capacities of painting. is that this art can range over distance and multitude, can represent complicated relations between its various figures and groups of figures, extensive backgrounds, and all those infinite subtleties of appearance in natural things which depend upon local colours and their modification in the play of light and shade and enveloping atmosphere. These last phenomena of natural things are in our experience subject to change in a sense in which the substantial or solid properties of things are not so subject. Colours, shadows and atmospheric effects are naturally associated with ideas of transition, mystery and evanescence. Hence painting is able to extend its range to another kind of facts over which sculpture has no power. It can suggest and perpetuate in its imitation, without breach of its true laws, many classes of facts which are themselves fugitive and transitory, as a smile, the glance of an eye, a gesture of horror or of passion, the waving of hair in the wind, the rush of horses, the strife of mobs, the whole drama of the clouds, the toss and gathering of ocean waves, even the flashing of lightning across the sky. Still, any long or continuous series of changes, actions or movements is quite beyond the means of this art to represent. Painting remains, in spite of its comparative width of range, tied down to the inevitable conditions of a space-art: that is to say, it has to delight the mind by a harmonious variety in its effects, but by a variety apprehended not through various points of time successively, but from various points in space at the same moment. The old convention which allowed painters to indicate sequence in time by means of distribution in space, dispersing the successive episodes of a story about the different parts of a single picture, has been abandoned since the early Renaissance; and Wordsworth sums up our modern view of the matter when he says that it is the business of painting
| “to give To one blest moment snatched from fleeting time The appropriate calm of blest eternity.” |
Lastly, a really unfettered range is only attained by the art which does not give a full and complete reproduction of any natural fact at all, but evokes or brings natural facts before the mind merely by the images which words convey. The whole Means and capacities of poetry. world of movement, of continuity, of cause and effect, of the successions, alternations and interaction of events, characters and passions of everything that takes time to happen and time to declare, is open to poetry as it is open to no other art. As an imitative or, more properly speaking, an evocative art, then, poetry is subject to no limitations except those which spring from the poverty of human language, and from the fact that its means of imitation are indirect. Poetry’s account of the visible properties of things is from these causes much less full, accurate and efficient than the reproduction or delineation of the same properties by sculpture and painting. And this is the sum of the conditions concerning the respective functions of the three arts of imitation which had been overlooked, in theory at least, until the time of Lessing.
To the above law, in the form in which we have expressed it, it may perhaps be objected that the acted drama is at once the most full and complete reproduction of nature which we owe to the fine arts, and that at the same time the number of The acted drama no real exception to the general law. facts over which its imitation ranges is the greatest. The answer is that our law applies to the several arts only in that which we may call their pure or unmixed state. Dramatic poetry is in that state only when it is read or spoken like any other kind of verse. When it is witnessed on the stage, it is in a mixed or impure state; the art of the actor has been called in to give actual reproduction to the gestures and utterances of the personages, that of the costumier to their appearances and attire, that of the stage-decorator to their furniture and surroundings, that of the scene-painter to imitate to the eye the dwelling-places and landscapes among which they move; and only by the combination of all these subordinate arts does the drama gain its character of imitative completeness or reality.
Throughout the above account of the imitative and non-imitative groups of fine arts, we have so far followed Aristotle as to allow the name of imitation to all recognizable representation or evocation of realities,—using the word “realities” in no Things unknown shadowed forth by imitation of things known. metaphysical sense, but to signify the myriad phenomena of life and experience, whether as they actually and literally exist to-day, or as they may have existed in the past, or may be conceived to exist in some other world not too unlike our own for us to conceive and realize in thought. When we find among the ruins of a Greek temple the statue of a beautiful young man at rest, or above the altar of a Christian church the painting of one transfixed with arrows, we know that the statue is intended to bring to our minds no mortal youth, but the god Hermes or Apollo, the transfixed victim no simple captive, but Sebastian the holy saint. At the same time we none the less know that the figures in either case have been studied by the artist from living models before his eyes. In like manner, in all the representations alike of sculpture, painting and poetry the things and persons represented may bear symbolic meanings and imaginary names and characters; they may be set in a land of dreams, and grouped in relations and circumstances upon which the sun of this world never shone; in point of fact, through many ages of history they have been chiefly used to embody human ideas of supernatural powers; but it is from real things and persons that their lineaments and characters have been taken in the first instance, in order to be attributed by the imagination to another and more exalted order of existences.
The law which we have last laid down is a law defining the relations of sculpture, painting and poetry, considered simply as arts having their foundations at any rate in reality, and drawing from the imitation of reality their indispensable elements and Imitation by art necessarily an idealized imitation. materials. It is a law defining the range and character of those elements or materials in nature which each art is best fitted, by its special means and resources, to imitate. But we must remember that, even in this fundamental part of its operations, none of these arts proceeds by imitation or evocation pure and simple. None of them contents itself with seeking to represent realities, however literally taken, exactly as those realities are. A portrait in sculpture or painting, a landscape in painting, a passage of local description in poetry, may be representations of known things taken literally or for their own sakes, and not for the sake of carrying out thoughts to the unknown; but none of them ought to be, or indeed can possibly be, a representation of all the observed parts and details of such a reality on equal terms and without omissions. Such a representation, were it possible, would be a mechanical inventory and not a work of fine art.