CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART

§ 1. Intention and Plan of the Work.

THE present work is designed to deal with the arts of form, in the shape of the so-called fine arts of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting, the subject of the decorative or industrial arts being reserved for subsequent treatment. The book is not intended to furnish outlines of the history of the arts, nor is it a technical manual; its aim is rather to discuss briefly and in a simple manner some of the more important facts and laws of artistic production, which should be familiar alike to the historical student of art and to the practical worker.

The subject falls into three main divisions. In the first Part, art is exhibited as a spontaneous product of human nature, born before civilisation, but nurtured by civilisation to fuller growth. The second contains some general discussion of the conditions of artistic effect, and in the third certain points connected with the three great arts of form are selected for treatment, the aim being rather to furnish a basis for intelligent art criticism, than to discuss systematic Esthetic, a subject dealt with in other volumes of this

series. The object of this University Extension Manual' is a practical one, and will have been attained if the reader's interest be stimulated in the more purely artistic qualities of works of art. These qualities are apt sometimes to be neglected for matters of ethical and historical moment, with which the student and critic of art is not directly concerned, and it is clear that there can be no advance in public comprehension of art on its artistic side, unless attention is directed more strictly to the points of treatment essential to artistic expression, and less to side-issues, however attractive these may be for literary discussion.

§ 2. Origin of Art in free and spontaneous activity.

The first actual facts' that concern us are the earliest manifestations of art, and if we could find these, we should find also the first 'law of artistic production.' The primal effort of the rudimentary artist would already furnish a key to the essential character of æsthetic expression in all its forms. This key can be given in a single word—freedom. Artistic activity is spontaneous, indulged in for its own sake, and not under the pressure of any material needs. From the first to the last, throughout all the long and varied history of art, this character is maintained. Not a thing of necessity, and only to a very modified degree a thing of use, art affords gratification to instincts and feelings which only find their sphere of exercise when material needs are satisfied. Without this detachment from the yoke of necessity there can be no art, but as soon as the being is thus released a portion of its energy is at once turned in the direction of some form of free and spontaneous expression, and this, as we shall presently see, becomes easily an activity of art.

1 The Philosophy of the Beautiful, by Professor Knight.

CHAP. I

The pre-artistic state

3

§ 3. Is there a pre-artistic state of Human Society?

The poet Schiller in his 'Letters on the Esthetical Education of Man'1 has left an excellent discussion on the conditions of this self-determined activity of the being which leads on to art, and in connection with this draws an imaginary picture of a pre-artistic state in which the whole faculties of the human creature are bound up under the pressure of his surroundings. 'What is man' he asks, 'before beauty draws out in him the capacity for free enjoyment, and the serene Form tames the wildness of life. Eternally uniform in his aims, eternally shifting in his judgments, unfettered without being free, a slave without serving any rule, . . . . in vain does nature make all her rich variety pass before his senses; he sees in her glorious fulness nothing but his prey, in her might and sublimity nothing but his foe.'2

If now we assume that it is only necessary to find some such state of society as this and then to work upwards from it to reach the actual beginnings of art, we should quickly discover our mistake, for, as a matter of fact, such a condition of complete bondage to the outward is not known to man, who at every stage of his development has found time for art. The historian can tell us nothing about the real beginnings of artistic activity among men. He may indeed lead us backward step by step through all the phases of civilised society till its annals open in the earliest records of Babylonia and Egypt, but when we have reached this point do we find the beginnings of art? On the contrary we are in presence of an art not only not beginning but in

1 Schiller's Sämmtliche Schriften, ed. Goedeke, Stuttgart 1867, etc. Theil x. p. 274 ff. (English translation by Weiss, Boston and London, 1845).

2 Schriften, ibid. p. 358, letter 24.

some of its forms already far advanced.

The architect

ure, sculpture and decoration of the oldest Egypt and the oldest Babylonia show clearly that a long period of artistic fruitfulness lies behind these first known monuments of civilised art, and of the nature of this some idea can be gained from what we know to-day of the customs and crafts of uncivilised races. It might be rash to assume that the savage as we know him is in all essential respects the same as he was before the days of Nimrod, but the remains of the earliest Oriental civilisations exhibit so many apparent survivals of what we now recognise as savagery, that we may assume between the savage of to-day and the remote ancestors of the oldest peoples of history a general similarity sufficient for our purpose. When Mr. Stanley tells us that in the dress, weapons, implements, tastes of the Wahuma of the grass land by the Albert Nyanza he was constantly reminded of the representations in Wilkinson's 'Ancient Egyptians,' he is only bearing out the accounts of other explorers, and it is probable that such primitive art as is practised to-day in Equatorial Africa had existed already from time immemorial before Menes had consolidated the first Egyptian kingdom at the point of the Delta.

§ 4. The earliest races are already artistic.

In some forms of art the savage is an adept, and it is probable that his feeling for decoration and spontaneous readiness in other forms of artistic expression have come down to him from the remotest past of the race. Such at least is the judgment of the Anthropologist. A student of man more especially in his primitive and unsophisticated ways, the Anthropologist will bid us admire the taste in ornament and dexterity in craftsmanship of the savage of to-day, and will exhibit the same qualities in the relics left