palace-temple we find a monument at once political and religious,
upon the production of which were concentrated all the energies
and faculties of all the artificers of the race. With its incised
and pictured walls, its half-detached colossi, its open and its
colonnaded chambers, the forms of the columns and their
capitals recalling the stems and blossoms of the lotus and papyrus,
with its architecture everywhere taking on the characters and
covering itself with the adornments of immature sculpture and
painting—this structure exhibits within its single fabric the
origins of the whole subsequent group of shaping arts. From
hence it is a long way to the innumerable artistic surroundings
of later Greek and Roman life, the many temples with their
detached and their engaged statues, the theatres, the porticoes,
the baths, the training-schools, the stadiums, with free and
separate statues both of gods and men adorning every building
and public place, the frescoes upon the walls, the panel pictures
hung in temples and public and private galleries. In the terms
of the Spencerian theory of evolution, the advance from the
early Egyptian to the later Greek stage is an advance from the
one to the manifold, from the simple to the complex, from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and affords a striking
instance of that vast and ceaseless process of differentiation and
integration which it is the law of all things to undergo. In the
Christian monuments of the early middle age, again, the arts,
owing to the political and social cataclysm in which Roman
civilization went down, have gone back to the rudimentary
stage, and are once more attached to and combined with each
other. The single monument, the one great birth of art, in that
age, is the Gothic church. In this we find the art of applied
sculpture exercised in fashions infinitely rich and various, but
entirely in the service and for the adornment of the architecture;
we find painting exercised in fashions more rudimentary still,
principally in the forms of translucent imagery in the chancel
windows and tinted decorations on the walls and vaultings.
From this stage again the process of the differentiation of the
arts is repeated. It is by a new evolution or unfolding, and
by one carried to much further and more complicated stages
than the last had reached, that the arts since the middle age
have come to the point where we find them to-day; when
architecture is applied to a hundred secular and civil uses with
not less magnificence, or at least not less desire of magnificence,
than that with which it fulfilled its two only uses in the middle
age, the uses of worship and of defence; when detached sculptures
adorn, or are intended to adorn, all our streets and commemorate
all our likenesses; when the subjects of painting have been
extended from religion to all life and nature, until this one art
has been divided into the dozen branches of history, landscape,
still life, genre, anecdote and the rest. Such being in brief the
successive stages, and such the reiterated processes, of evolution
among the shaping or space arts, the action of the same law
can be traced, it is urged, in the growth of the speaking or time
arts also. Originally poetry and music, the two great speaking
arts, were not separated from each other and from the art of
bodily motion, dancing. The father of song, music and dancing,
all three, was that primitive man of whom so much has already
been said, he who first clapped hands and leapt and shouted in
time at some festival of his tribe. From the clapping, or rudimentary
rhythmical noise, has been evolved the whole art of
instrumental music, down to the entrancing complexity of the
modern symphony. From the shout, or rudimentary emotional
utterance, has proceeded by a kindred evolution the whole art
of vocal music down to the modern opera or oratorio. From
the leap, or rudimentary expression of emotion by rhythmical
movements of the body, has descended every variety of dancing,
from the stately figures of the tragic chorus of the Greeks to
the kordax of their comedy or the complexities of the modern
ballet.
That the theory of evolution serves usefully to group and to interpret many facts in the history of art we shall not deny, though it would be easy to show that Herbert Spencer’s instances and applications are not sufficient to sustain all the conclusions that he seems to draw from them. Thus, it is perfectly true Weak and strong points of Spencer’s generalization. that the Egyptian or Assyrian palace wall is an instance of rudimentary painting and rudimentary sculpture in subservience to architecture. But it is not less true that races who had no architecture at all, but lived in caverns of the earth, exhibit, as we have already had occasion to notice, excellent rudiments of the other two shaping arts in a different form, in the carved or incised handles of their weapons. And it is almost certain that, among the nations of oriental antiquity themselves, the art of decorating solid walls so as to please the eye with patterns and presentations of natural objects was borrowed from the precedent of an older art which works in easier materials, namely, the art of the weaver. It would be in the perished textile fabrics of the earliest dwellers in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile that we should find, if anywhere, the origins of the systems of surface design, whether conventional or imitative, which those races afterwards applied to the decoration of their solid constructions. Not, therefore, in any one exclusive type of primitive artistic activity, but in a score of such types equally, varying according to race, region and circumstances, shall we find so many germs or nuclei from which whole families of fine arts have in the course of the world’s history differentiated and unfolded themselves. And more than once during that history, a cataclysm of political and social forces has not only checked the process of the evolution of the fine arts, but from an advanced stage of development has thrown them back again to a primitive stage. Recent research has shown how the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations in the Mediterranean basin, with their developed fine arts, must have perished and been effaced before the second growth of art from new rudiments took place in Greece. The great instance of the downfall of the Roman civilization need not be requoted. By Spencer’s application of the theory of evolution, not less than by Hegel’s theory of the historic periods, attention is called to the fact that Christian Europe, during several centuries of the middle age, presents to our study a civilization analogous to the civilization of the old oriental empires in this respect, that its ruling and characteristic manual art is architecture, to which sculpture and painting are, as in the oriental empires, once more subjugated and attached. It does not of course follow that such periods of fusion or mutual dependence among the arts are periods of bad art. On the contrary, each stage of the evolution of any art has its own characteristic excellence. The arts can be employed in combination, and yet be all severally excellent. When music, dancing, acting and singing were combined in the performance of the Greek chorus, the combination no doubt presented a relative perfection of each of the four elements analogous to the combined perfection, in the contemporary Doric temple, of pure architectural form, sculptured enrichment of spaces specially contrived for sculpture in the pediments and frieze, and coloured decoration over all. The extreme differentiation of any art from every other art, and of the several branches of one art among themselves, does not by any means tend to the perfection of that art. The process of evolution among the fine arts may go, and indeed in the course of history has gone, much too far for the health of the arts severally. Thus an artist of our own day is usually either a painter only or a sculptor only; but yet it is acknowledged that the painter who can model a statue, or the sculptor who can paint a picture, is likely to be the more efficient master of both arts; and in the best days of Florentine art the greatest men were generally painters, sculptors, architects and goldsmiths all at once. In like manner a landscape painter who paints landscape only is apt not to paint it so well as one who paints the figure too; and in recent times the craft of engraving had almost ceased to be an art from the habit of allotting one part of the work, as skies, to one hand, another part, as figures, to a second, and another part, as landscape, to a third. This kind of continually progressing subdivision of labour, which seems to be the necessary law of industrial processes, is fatal to any skill which demands, as skill in the fine arts, we have seen, demands, the free exercise and direction of a highly complex cluster both of faculties and sensibilities.
