truth, neither one is devoid of truth. “Science is the knowing; art is the doing.”
The scientist, we have said, measures, compares, expresses things in terms of each other, establishes the relations of things one to another. In answer to your question: “What is a wave?” he will tell you that a wave is the result of certain causes and principles; he will show you the materials that compose the wave; and, if your curiosity is still unappeased, he will separate those materials into their elements. He will show you the effects of conditions upon them, and he may continue, showing cause and cause of cause to the beginning of the world; or, in the other direction, he may deal with effect upon effect to the end of it. He always leads you into the relations of the wave to all other things and always away from the wave itself.
The artist on the other hand forces your attention to the wave, ignoring in his picture the fact that anything else exists. “The real work of art — its way leads nowhere and its frame ends the world.” (Münsterberg). He bends all lines of attention to the thing in hand, fills the consciousness with it, excluding all other things, and uses it as a means of bringing you into the mood which he has experienced. Sleep is said to be the most agreeable experience of which we can know. It relieves us, for the time being, from all responsibility and the need of making any sort of choice or discrimination. Fine art brings us into a somewhat similar condition of repose or of absorption. It leads us, as it were, by making captive first our sense of seeing or of hearing or our imagination, and thence, through the unity and intensity of its interest, our whole consciousness, until like the children of Hamelin we forget all else and follow. But our enjoyment of fine art differs from our enjoyment of sleep. The enjoyment of fine art is the enjoyment of repose, it is true, but even in this repose there are a sort of activity and a full consciousness. When we are enjoying a lyric or a musical rhapsody or a symphony of color, we are living as intensely as at any other time, but our life is being led, and is simply free of the conscious effort of living.
The scope of this essay is to make clear the nature of fine art. It is not its purpose, however, to rehearse any justification of it. Fine art, it is true, does not appear to minister to any of the primal needs of food, raiment or shelter. We cannot here discuss the question as to whether or not man has any real needs other than these three, which, to be sure, he shares with all the higher animals. True it is, however, that the oldest relics of man's handiwork that have come down to us are examples of his fine art, and true it is that he has never ceased to paint and sing nor to admire and listen even to this day.
Fine Arts, History of. A complete history of the fine arts, under which head we must include such forms of expression as architecture, sculpture, painting and decoration and the handicrafts, would at the same time be a history of the development of the esthetic, intellectual and religious nature of the human race. It would need to be considered in its relation to its primitive development, its climax and its decline.
Certain typical phases belong to the art of all races and individuals, and it is only these typical phases that can be clearly demonstrated in special cases that will be touched upon in the brief treatment that is necessary here.
It seems to be true the world around that pictorial expression was first of all a means of communication and was, as nearly as possible, representative of the object depicted. Gradually the truth to the object's form was replaced by some character that became the sign of the object. From these developed the characters that, finally, were used in the various alphabets. In the childhood of the race the tendency is to interpret natural phenomena in the terms of personal experience; and we find records of this personification and symbolism in both the construction and decoration of articles used in religious ceremonials and in the things of every day utility.
At first what seems to be decoration is not such in a strict meaning of the term, but is rather significant of a religious thought or is propitiatory in character.
Art in its strictest sense can only be said to begin when there is a distinct reaching out for the expression of beauty in the form of the thing created and when there is added to this endeavor the effort to make the form more beautiful by means of a suitable decoration. Symbolic use of decorative forms frequently precedes, by many generations, the studied effort so to use them that they are subordinated to the object, and frequently we find decorative forms, in the later phases of art, that have completely lost their significance.
In the decadent period of all arts we have finally lost both the symbolism of decoration and art-forms and the sense of its fitness, and find in their places a scarcity of originality and a realistic and frequently over-ornate use of natural forms. Any art that resorts to copying other forms, or to the copying of natural form for the sake of skillfully imitating it, has lost its inspiration and is in its decadence. At the present time we have, in the various countries of the world and among the bar-
