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devices, in which sculpture and painting are set to some of their earliest tasks. Meanwhile the dance, no longer merely emotional, becomes expressive of ideas; it is seen how pose and gesture can become significant as well as beautiful, and the attempt to make these permanent leads to the rapid development of the art of sculpture. In Greece the popular religion made incessant demands for service from the arts, and as soon as sculpture had forced the marble and bronze to express character and thought, religion called for the creation in external form of divine and heroic types. In no very different spirit did mediæval theology press the sister art of painting into her service, and set it to reproduce the sacred scenes so dear to the pious hearts of the people; till finally painting, taught in this way to be a mirror of human life, went on to reflect clearly and copiously all the gay and brilliant life of those festal scenes in which, from the first, art had found its most congenial atmosphere. Whatever, in a word, were the forms of artistic expression, they came straight out of the heart of the people; and from the flagstaff of the rustic feast to the solemn temple on the Acropolis, from the gaudily dressed doll to the austere deity in marble or in bronze, from the civic procession to the monumental fresco which ennobled and fixed it forever, art in every shape was the child of the community at large.

In the next chapter the arts must be dealt with from quite another point of view.

PART II

THE FORMAL CONDITIONS OF

ARTISTIC EXPRESSION

CHAPTER I

SOME ELEMENTS OF EFFECT IN THE ARTS OF FORM

§ 74. A new branch of the subject; the function in Art of the principle of 'order.'

Up to this point the various forms of art have been dealt with as modes of free and spontaneous expression or action, that are essentially the same in their source and character and their relation to human life as a whole. From the point of view we have hitherto taken, the particular mode of expression, whether it be the physical movement of the dance, the imitative work of the painter and sculptor, or the construction of the architect, has mattered little, for the aim has been to exhibit art in all its aspects alike, as the offspring of society, the necessary outcome of a life that has scope for ideal desires and time to work for their fulfilment. The point of view must now be changed and the formal differences between the arts become the subject of investigation. The following discussion may not have the general interest of what has gone before, but the reader's attention is claimed for it with all the more confidence, since it forms a necessary transition to the after treatment in separate chapters of the three great arts of form.

We discovered in the earliest manifestations of art two elements-one an impulse, movement or act, often some

form of 'play,' which supplies the motive power, or if we prefer the metaphor, the raw material of art; the other an instinct or principle of 'order' or 'arrangement,' developed in man at a very early stage, in accordance with which he is for ever moulding this material into an artistic form. We pass on now to an analysis of this artistic form, so far at least as this can be accomplished in words. It needs of course hardly to be said that such analysis of what may be termed the artistic element in the work of art, can only be carried out in a somewhat rough and perfunctory fashion. It would be impossible in words, even were they used with the finest discrimination, to match the subtlety of the artistic alchemy which transforms the heap of quarried stone, the marble block, the bare coarse-grained canvas and little heaps of coloured earths, into shapes and hues of majestic power or bewitching grace. All that can be attempted here is to deal broadly with certain conditions of artistic effect, applying to all the arts alike or specially to architecture, sculpture and painting.

§ 75. Every work of Art must present itself as a Unity.

The first operation of the instinct of ORDER when it evolves art out of play, is to secure for the artistic product a certain distinctness of general form. It is the first essential in the work of art that it should present itself as a unity, and not a mere formless mass of indefinite extension. The architectural monument obeys this law, and so does the sculptured statue or group which is always more than a mere collection of figures, while the cabinet picture or decorative painting accepts the restraint of its frame or the limits of the panel or wall-space apportioned to it. Even in the drama the same law holds good. Only, as seen, in part an art of form, the drama unfolds itself in

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