738 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



directed toward less indispensable issues. 2. The useful arts de- 

 rive their laws and limitations predominantly from the objective 

 world. The fine arts derive theirs more largely from the sub- 

 jective world. 3. The useful arts, therefore, partake of the uni- 

 formity of physical law, with its consequent monotony, so much 

 felt in work. The fine arts, on the other hand, permit of more 

 novelty and variety, as experienced in play. 



Although the play-impulse is at the foundation of the aesthetic 

 arts, it does not follow that art is merely the product of this im- 

 pulse. Play stimulates free imaginative activity, which creates a 

 world of its own. And we must not forget that man is not simply 

 an imaginative, but also a rational being. The reaction of reason 

 impresses upon the spontaneous activities the characteristics of 

 reason as a regulative faculty — unity, order, and proportion. Thus 

 poetry, which was at first merely the spontaneous rhythmic ex- 

 pression of excited feeling, with little restraint of law and almost 

 unlimited license, is modulated at last to the stringent require- 

 ments of exact meter, a prescribed sequence of feet, and the arti- 

 fice of terminal rhyme. The interval between the first wild lyric 

 of prehistoric man and the chastened symmetry of the modern 

 sonnet is measured by the whole diameter of human culture. 



In order to approach intelligently the development of the fine 

 arts, it is important for us to form a clear idea of what should be 

 included under this designation, and to classify this material ac- 

 cording to some principle. We may for this purpose start with 

 the classification of a recent and highly competent French writer 

 upon the subject, M. Eugene Ve'ron. He says : " By their origin 

 and the nature of their processes, the arts naturally divide them- 

 selves into two well-defined groups. The one springs from the 

 sensation of sight, and is more or less immediately connected with 

 the practices of primitive scribes. The three arts of which it is 

 composed are sculpture, painting, and architecture. Their com- 

 mon feature is development in space ; their manifestations have 

 to do with a single point of time; consequently they exclude 

 movement, which is succession and duration, replacing it by 

 simultaneity and order, whose law is proportion. The other three 

 arts — poetry, music, and the dance — are subject to the laws of 

 rhythm. They have sound for their vehicle of expression, they 

 appeal to the sense of hearing, and take their immediate origin 

 from spoken language, which seems for long to have consisted of 

 a species of cadenced singing. Their principle of action is by 

 succession, through which they are referred to general ideas of 

 lapse of time and movement. They are therefore the more direct 

 expression of the inner essence of life, while the other three deal 

 with it rather in its exterior forms, which, being expressed at one 

 given moment of their action, become as it were disguised by the 



