536 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 



Section I. 



LITERATURE AND THE FINE ARTS. 



President of the Section, Mr. E. Vaughan Boulger, M.A., D. Lit., 

 Professor of the English Language, Literature, and Mental and 

 Moral Philosophy, in the University of Adelaide. 



Thursday, August 30. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 

 \_Ahstract.^ 



The President asserted that Art was as necessuy to man's well- 

 being as Science. Science ascertained and marshalled the facts, 

 without a knowledge of which, man must fight a losing battle 

 against the forces adverse to his material welfare. Art supplied 

 that, without which the fight would not be worth fighting at all, 

 for what was life without joy, and it was precisely joy that Art 

 strove to impart. Art included all woi^ks of man which reflected 

 moral or physical beauty. The essence of beauty was incompre- 

 hensible, because beauty had no fixed type. The Platonic and 

 Darwinian theories as to the origin of the sense of beauty were 

 then discussed with impartiality. The speaker held that Art was 

 more than imitative ; that in the very process of imitation the 

 artist introduced something especially his own. Whether this 

 something was a reminiscence of ante-natal perception, or the 

 result of a special faculty developed by evolution the speaker 

 could not say. With Ruskiu he believed that the Fine Arts might 

 be limited to sculpture and painting, and suggested that at the 

 next meeting of the Association the existing Section should be 

 sub-divided into three independent Sections, namely, (i) Literature, 

 (ii) Fine Arts, (iii) any other Arts such as Music, wliich the 

 Council might deem worthy of consideration. Rejecting Schlegel's 

 definition of Literature as too wide, he defined the term as the 

 artistic verbal expression of thought and feeling, and contended 

 that Literature was the cheapest and most eff^ective form of mental 

 recreation. For a couple of shillings a man might buy a copy of 

 Shakespeare, and find therein intellectual food for a life-time. He 

 deplored the neglect of literature in Australia, but believed that 

 the Governments of the difierent colonies had done all that they 

 could to provide Literature and the Fine Arts. What was really 

 needed was a higher ideal of life in each individual. Finally, he 

 commended to every artist the dictum of a great poet and a keen 

 critic : — 



" Think clearly, feel nobly, and delineate firmly." 



