their essential definition in a personal relation to the spectator or reader, they flatter the individual taste[11] of such, to which their workmanship is primarily directed. Virgil and Horace, for example, delight us in this respect by an educated style, in which we can trace a variety of things aimed at, and an effort deliberately made to give pleasure. In architecture, sculpture, and painting, owing to this spirit of complaisance, simple and imposing effects of size disappear, and we find on every side small pictures standing by themselves, ornamentation, fineries, dimples on cheeks, elegant hair-dress, smiles, all the varied folding of draperies, enchanting colours and shapes, exceptional, difficult, but for all that unconstrained movements in the pose of the figure[12]. In the so-called Gothic or German art of building, where the same is carried in the direction of this spirit, we find decoration elaborated without limit, so that the whole appears to be little more than a collection of little columns with all the utmost variety of ornamentations, diminutive towers, spires, and so forth, which, in their isolation, please us, without, however, destroying the impression of the larger connections of the whole and the still insistent masses of the same.
In so far, however, as the province of art we have been discussing in its entirety gives way to this activity of externalization, this presentment of what is purely exterior, we may emphasize it in its further generalization as the _effect_, which makes use of as a means of expression what is unpleasing, strained, and colossal, the type of uncouth contrasts such as the prodigious genius of Michael Angelo often exploits to excess. The effect may be generally indicated as the excessive leaning towards an ulterior public, which results in the form no longer being asserted in its independent, self-sufficient and buoyant repose. Rather it turns round, as it were, and makes an appeal at the same time to the onlooker, and strives to place itself in a relation to him by means of this manner of presentment. Both aspects, namely essential repose and the address to the spectator, must no doubt be present in a work of art; but these aspects should fall together in complete equilibrium. If the work of art in the severe style is wholly without qualification self-contained, without any appeal to the spectator, it leaves him cold. If, on the other hand, the appeal is made too directly to him, it creates indeed a sensuous pleasure, but loses to that extent its substantive thoroughness[13], or it does so without this thoroughness of content and the simple character of the conception and delineation therein contained. This passage from itself then merges in the accidental characterization of the appearance; as a result the image itself shares this accidental character, in which we no longer recognize the actual subject-matter and the form which is imperatively rooted in itself, but rather the poet and artist with his own personal designs, his peculiar type of production and skill.
And for this reason the public is entirely released from the essential content of the work, finding itself by means of it placed in a personal relation[14] to the artist, inasmuch as everything now wholly depends on its seeing that which the artist through his art intended, that is, the cunning and personal skill which is embodied in his grasp of his subject and its execution. To be thus brought into personal community of insight and critical acumen with the artist is for most people a flattering concession; and our reader or audience, and very possibly the spectator of plastic art, with even more readiness wonder at their poet, musician, or painter or sculptor respectively; and the vanity of such is all the better satisfied in proportion as the work invites them to this personal criticism, and supplies them openly with hints of such designs and points of view. In the severe style, on the contrary, no such confidences are made over to the spectator at all. What we have is just the substantive nature of the content, which in its representation austerely, and even harshly, repulses the purely personal quest. A repulse of this kind will often be no doubt merely indicative of the spleen of the artist, who, after entrusting a profound significance to his work, instead of making the exposition of the same free, transparent, and buoyant, deliberately makes it hard to follow. A trade in mysteries of this kind is also nothing but another form of affectation, and a spurious alternative to the complaisance we have criticized.
It is pre-eminently in the work of the French school that we find this tendency to flatter, attract, and create effect, and they have in this way elaborated this easy-going and complaisant attitude to the public as the main object of their efforts. They seek to find the real importance of their artistic work in the satisfaction such affords others, whose interest they would arouse and whom they would duly impress. This tendency is particularly marked in their dramatic poetry. Marmontel, for example, gives us the following anecdote in connection with the performance of his drama "Dénis, the Tyrant." The crisis culminated in a question asked the Tyrant. Clairon, in whose mouth this question was put, when the moment for asking it had arrived, and when actually in conversation with Dionysius, made a forward step in front of the audience and dramatically addressed them instead. By this rhetorical effect the enthusiastic support of the entire piece was assured.
We Germans, on the other hand, require too much a content in our works of art, in the depths of which the artist finds a deliverance from himself, without troubling himself about the public, who is just left to look at it, take trouble over it, and help himself out with it, as he pleases or is able.
DIVISION OF SUBJECT Approaching now, after these general observations we have made with reference to the distinctions of style common to all the arts, the division of the third fundamental section of our inquiry we may observe that the one-sided understanding has looked about in many directions for various principles of differentiation in its classification of the specific arts severally. The true division can, however, only be deduced from the nature of the work of art, which in the entire complexus of its forms[15] explicitly unfolds the totality of the aspects and phases which are referable to its own notion. And the first thing which asserts itself in this connection as important is the consideration that art, in accordance with the fact that its presentments now have definitely to pass into sensuous reality, becomes on account of this also art for the _senses_, so that the definition of this sense and the material medium which is applicable to it, and in which the work of art is made objective, must necessarily furnish us with the principles of subdivision in the several arts. Now the senses, for the reason that they are senses, or in other words, are related to a given material, a disparate exterior medium[16] and an essential multiplicity, are themselves different, namely, feeling, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. It is not our business in this place to demonstrate the ideal necessity of this totality and its disparate parts; that is the function of the philosophy of Nature. Our problem is limited to the inquiry whether all these senses, or if not, which of them are capable, by virtue of their notional significance, of being organs for the reception of works of art. We have already at a previous stage excluded feeling, taste, and smell. Botticher's mere feeling with the hand of the effeminately smooth portions of statues of goddesses is not a part of artistic contemplation or enjoyment at all. By the sense of touch the individual merely comes, as an individual endowed with sense, into contact with the purely sensuous particular thing and its gravity, hardness, softness, and material resistance. A work of art is, however, not merely a sensuous thing, but Spirit manifested through a sensuous medium. As little can we exercise our sense of _taste_ on a work of art as such, because taste is unable to leave the object in its free independence, but is concerned with it in a wholly active way, resolves it, in fact, and consumes it. A cultivation and refinement of taste is only possible and desirable in connection with dishes of food and their preparation, or the chemical qualities of objects. An object of art, however, should be contemplated in its independent and self-contained objective presence, which no doubt is there for the mind that perceives it, but only as an appeal to soul and intelligence, not in some active relation, and with none whatever to the appetites and volition. As for the sense of _smell_ it is just as little able to become an organ of artistic enjoyment, inasmuch as things are only presented to this sense in so far as they are themselves in a condition of process, and are dissolved through the air and its direct influence.
_Sight_, on the other hand, possesses a purely ideal relation to objects by means of light, a material, which is at the same time immaterial, and which suffers on its part the objects to continue in their free self-subsistence, making them appear and re-appear, but which does not, as the atmosphere or fire does, consume them actively either by imperceptible degrees or patently. Everything, then, is an object of the appetiteless vision, which materially exists in Space as a disparate aggregate, which, however, in so far as it remains unimpaired in its integrity, merely is disclosed in its form and colour.
The remaining ideal sense is _hearing._ This is in signal contrast to the one just described. Hearing is concerned with the tone, rather than the form and colour of an object, with the vibration of what is corporeal; it requires no process of dissolution, as the sense of smell requires, but merely a trembling of the object, by which the same is in no wise impoverished. This ideal motion, in which through its sound what is as it were the simple individuality[17], the soul of the material thing expresses itself, the ear receives also in an ideal way, just as the eye shape and colour, and suffers thereby what is ideal or not external in the object to appeal to what is spiritual or non-corporeal.
As a third accretion to these two senses we have the _sensuous conception_, memory, the retention of images, which appear in consciousness by means of the isolated perception, in this way subsumed under universals, and become related and united to the same by means of the imagination, so that now in one particular aspect the external reality itself exists both as ideal and spiritual, while that which is spiritual from another point of view accepts under the imaginative conception the form of what is external, and is brought to consciousness as a disparate and correlated aggregate.
This triple mode of seizing on reality offers art the well-known division into _first_, the _plastic_ arts, which elaborate their content for vision in the external form and colour of objects, _secondly_, in the art of _sound, music_, and _thirdly_, into _poetry_, which as the art of _speech_ uses tone merely as a symbol, in order, by means of it, to address itself directly to what is ideal in the contemplation, emotion, and imagination of our spiritual life. If we rest satisfied with this sensuous aspect of our subject-matter, as the final principle of its differentiation, we shall, in respect to our first principles, find ourselves in a difficulty, because the grounds of this division, instead of being deduced from the concrete notion of our subject-matter, are merely borrowed from the most abstract features of it. We have consequently to look about us once more for a principle of division that has deeper roots, which has, in fact, already been put forward in the introduction of this work as the truly systematic mode of dividing this third section of it. The function of art is just this and only this, namely, to bring before the grasp of the senses truth, as it is in the world of spirit, reconciled, that is, in its unity as a whole with objectivity and the sensuous material. In so far, then, as this is possible at this stage in the element of the external reality of the art-product to that extent the totality, which the Absolute is in its very truth, breaks apart into the various modes that differentiate it as a process.
The _middle point_, the truly substantive centrum, is given us here in the representation of the _Absolute_, God Himself as God, in His independent _self-subsistence_, not as yet developed to the point of motion and difference, or advanced to the active operation of and separation from what is His, but presented essentially self-absorbed in supreme divine repose and stillness, briefly the Ideal embodied in a form essentially adequate to itself, which persists in its determinate existence in correspondent identity with itself. And in order that it may appear in infinite self-subsistency the Absolute must be conceived as Spirit, as conscious Subject, but as Subject which possesses essentially itself its own adequate mode of external appearance.
As divine subject, however, which passes forth into actual reality, it has confronting it an _external_ world for environment, which, in conformity with the Absolute, must be built up to an appearance harmonious with the same, an appearance permeated with the Absolute.
This environing world is then on one side the _objective_ as such, the basis, the embrace of external Nature, which, taken by itself, possesses no absolute significance for Spirit, nor any ideality such as is present to individual consciousness[18], and consequently is only able to express by suggestion the spiritual Ideal which its appearance must seek to secure by embodying its embraced content in a world of Beauty.
In opposition to external Nature we find the _ideal_ realm of _consciousness_[19], the human soul as the medium[20] for the existence and manifestation of the Absolute. Together with this subjectivity is conjoined the multiplicity and differentiation of individuality, particularization, distinction, action, and development, that is, in general terms the full and varied world of the reality of Spirit[21], in which the Absolute is known, willed, experienced, and actively present. We may already infer from what we have indicated above that the differences under which the total content of art is differentiated are in essential consonance, both for our grasp and presentation of them, with what we have previously in the second portion of our inquiry examined as the symbolical, classical, and romantic types of art. In other words symbolic art only carries the art-process to the point of marking an affinity between content and form, instead of their identity, of only suggesting the ideal significance in itself and the content which that suggestion purports to express, in other words the external appearance[22]. It furnishes consequently the fundamental type to that specific art, whose function it is to elaborate the objective world as such, Nature's environment in the beautiful conclusion given by Art to Spirit (mind), and to image by suggestion the ideal significance of what is spiritual in this external medium. The classical Ideal, on the contrary, meets the case of the presentation of the Absolute as such, in its self-subsistent external reality, its essential self-repose, while the romantic Spirit (mind) type of art is, both in content and form, identical with the internal life of the soul, and the emotional life both in its infinite aspect and its finite particularity.
It is, then, on a principle such as the above that the system of the particular arts is differentiated as follows: _First_, we have _architecture_, the beginning of all, whose foundation reposes in the very nature of its subject-matter. It is the commencement of art for this reason, that art at the start has in general terms neither discovered for the presentation of its spiritual content the adequate material, nor the forms that fully express it, and is consequently compelled to rest content in the mere _search_ after such true satisfaction, and to do so in the externality of its content and its mode of presentation. The medium of this primary art is that which is essentially unspiritual, gross matter, that is, only capable of configuration according to physical laws of gravity. Its form is the image of external Nature, united by its regularity and symmetry in the whole of a work of art to express merely an external reflection of Spirit.
The _second_ art is _sculpture._ Both for its principle and content it possesses spiritual individuality under the mode of the classic Ideal in the sense, namely, that the ideal and spiritual finds its expression in the corporeal appearance pertinent to spiritual life, which it is the function here of Art to present in existent artistic actuality.
It consequently still accepts for its material gross matter in its spatial extension, without, however, shaping the same in conformity to rule merely in respect to its gravity and its natural conditions according to the forms of the organic or inorganic, or in relation to its visibility in bringing it down to, and in all essential respects particularizing it in, a simple repetition of the external appearance.
The _form_ which is here, however, determined by virtue of the content itself is the actual life of Spirit, human form, and its objective organism permeated with Spirit's own breath, whose function it is to embody in adequate shape the self-subsistence of the Divine in its supreme repose and unperturbed greatness, unaffected by the divisions and limitations of human affairs, their conflicts and endurances.
_Thirdly_, we have to render intelligible in one final whole those arts whose province it is to give form to the ideal content of the individual soul-life.
The art of _painting_ marks the _beginning_ of this final totality.
It converts the external form itself entirely into an expression of what is ideal[23], which within the limits of the environing world not merely reproduces the ideal self-containedness of the Absolute, but also brings to the vision the same as essentially a personal possession[24] in its spiritual existence, volition, feeling, action, in its activity and relation to another, and consequently also in its sufferings, pain, death, in the entire series of passions and satisfaction. Its object is for this reason no longer _God_ simply, that is, as object of the human consciousness, but this consciousness itself, God, that is, either in His reality present in the action and suffering of individual life, or as spirit of the community, as the spiritual related through feeling to itself, soul-life in its resignation, its sacrifice of, or joy and blessedness in, life and action within the limits of the natural world. As a means to the presentation of this _content_ the art of painting is bound to utilize the external phenomenon in respect to its form, not merely the human organism, but also Nature in its simplicity in so far as the same suffers what is of spirit to shine through with clarity. It is, however, unable to utilize as material physical matter and its spatial existence just as it is; it is compelled, in working it up into its forms, essentially to idealize the same. The first step by means of which the sensuous material is raised in this respect to confront mind[25], consists, on the one hand, in the uplifting of the actual sensuous appearance, whose visibility is converted into the mere _show_ by art, and on the other in _colour_ by means of the distinctions, transitions, and modulations of which this transformation is effected.
The art of painting, consequently, in order to express the soul in its ideality, resolves the three dimensions of space into that of superficies as that which most intimately asserts the ideality of what is external, and represents spatial distance and form by means of the phenomena of colour. For painting is not concerned with producing mere visibility in its general significance, but with that form of visibility which, if it is ideally produced, is also quite as much essentially particularized. In sculpture and the art of building forms are visible by means of external light. In the art of painting, on the contrary, the material which is itself essentially obscure possesses intrinsically within itself its inward or ideal, light in short. It is itself transfused in its own medium, and mere light is to that extent essentially obscured. The unity, however, and blending of light and dark is colour[26].
_Secondly_, the art of _music_ offers a contrast to that of painting in one and the same sphere as the latter. Its real element is the ideal realm as such, emotion in its formless independence, capable of asserting itself not in externality and its reality, but purely through the external medium which disappears immediately when it is expressed and thereby cancels itself. Its _content_ consequently consists of the internal life of Spirit in its immediate, essential subjective unity, emotion simply; its _material_ is musical tone, its form and configuration, the concord, discord, harmony, contrast, opposition, and resolution of such tones according to the laws of their quantitative intervals respectively and their artistically elaborated time measure.
Finally, in the _third_ place, after painting and music we get the art of speech, _poetry_ in its general terms, the absolutely genuine art of Spirit and its expression as such. For everything which the human consciousness conceives and spiritually embodies in the chamber of spirit speech is able to accept, express, and bring imaginatively before us, and only speech is thus able. In respect to its content, therefore, poetry is the richest and its boundaries are the widest.
But in proportion as it gains as the vehicle of Spirit it loses on the side of the material object. In other words, for the reason that it neither works for the perception of the sense as the plastic arts, nor merely for the ideal emotion, as music does, but is concerned to create its spiritual significances under the form of its own spiritual medium merely for the conception and contemplation of mind, the _material_ through which its constructive activity is asserted only retains for it the value of a _means_, however much it may be elaborated in an artistic sense, by which Spirit is expressed for Spirit, and no longer counts as a sensuous mode of existence, in which the spiritual content is capable of finding a reality adequate to it. Such a means can in the light of our previous consideration only be _tone_ regarded as the still relatively most adequate material of spiritual expression. Tone here, however, does not in the present case preserve, as was the case with music, an independent validity of its own for which the unique and essential aim of art could be exhausted in finding an artistic form, but conversely is entirely steeped in the world of Spirit and the definite content of conception and contemplation, and appears simply as the external symbol of this content. So far as the _embodiment_ which the poetry receives is concerned, in this respect poetry may claim to include the whole field of art in the sense, that is, that it repeats in its own province the modes of presentation adopted by the other arts, which is only in a qualified degree the case with painting and music.
In other words poetry gives, on the one hand, as epic poetry the form of _objectivity_ to its content, which no doubt here does not, as in the plastic arts, attain to an external existence. It is none the less a world conceived by the mind in the form of the objective world and represented as objective for the individual imagination. This it is which constitutes human speech as such, which finds satisfaction in its own content and its expression by means of speech.
On the other hand, however, poetry is conversely to an equal degree speech of the soul, the _ideal_ medium, which, as that inward content returns to itself, is _lyrical poetry_, which invokes the aid of music in order to penetrate yet more deeply the world of souls and emotion.
Finally, to take the _third_ example, poetry proceeds through speech within the limits of a self-contained _action_, which it at the same time makes an object of its presentment, and consequently is able to ally itself closely to music, gesture, mimicry, and the dance. This is _dramatic_ art, in which man, in all that the term implies[27], creatively presents the work of art which is the product of human life.
These five arts form the system of realized and actual art, essentially determined by itself and differentiated as such. In addition to them there are no doubt other incomplete arts, for example, the arts of gardening and dance. These we shall only refer to incidentally as the opportunity recurs. A philosophical investigation must perforce restrict itself entirely to distinctions referable to the notion, and develop and grasp these adequate and veritable modes of embodiment.
Nature and reality is not, it is true, confined to these circumscribed limits, but is more liberal in its movement, and we not unfrequently hear it made a matter of praise that in this respect the products of genius are perforce compelled to expand themselves beyond just such limitations. In Nature, however, transitional organisms of either hybrid or amphibian type, instead of emphasizing the spontaneity and excellence of Nature, merely demonstrate its inability to hold fast to the essential differentiations of species which are rooted in that process, or to prevent their deterioration before external conditions and influences. The same thing may be affirmed in art with regard to these intermediate forms, although the same are capable of producing much, too, that delights us, is full of charm and utility, albeit not in the highest class of perfection.
If we turn our attention now after these introductory remarks and considerations to the more specific examination of the separate arts, we shall find ourselves from another point of view in some difficulty. For inasmuch as we have hitherto concerned ourselves with art as such, the Ideal and the general types, under which its evolution according to its _notion_ proceeds, it is imperative to pass over into the concrete existence of art, and by doing so into the world of experience. Here we find a condition very analogous to that we observe in Nature, the provinces of which are readily grasped in their generality and the necessary laws which distinguish them, in whose actual material existence, however, the individual objects and their species, not merely in the aspects which they present to observation, but also in the form under which they exist, are of such a wealth of variety that, as a part of the difficulty, they offer as feasible every conceivable way of approaching them; and in addition to this the philosophical notion, when we are desirous of applying the standard of its simple lines of distinction, appears as insufficient for this purpose and the mere grasp of thought incapable of taking in the breath of such fulness. If, however, we merely rest satisfied with mere description and superficial reflections we fall short no less of the object we have set before us, that is, a development which is both scientific and systematic. Added to which difficulties we have the further one that nowadays every particular art makes the independent demand for a special science, inasmuch as with the continuous growth of connoisseurship in art the range of such special knowledge has become ever more rich and extensive. This science of the connoisseur, or dilettante, has, however, in our own times become fashionable under the direct teaching of philosophy itself. It has, in short, been maintained that it is in art we must look for real religion, the discovery of truth and the Absolute, that, in short, it stands on a loftier pedestal than philosophy for the reason that it is not abstract, but receives at the same time the Idea in reality and for a contemplation and emotion which are concrete[28]. And on the other hand it is regarded nowadays as of august importance in art[29] to occupy one's attention with an infinite superfluity of detail of this kind, in the interests of which the demand is made from everyone that he should have observed some novelty or other. Such critical labour is a kind of learned trifling which may very readily be overdone. It causes, no doubt, considerable pleasure to examine works of art, to grasp the thoughts and reflections which such may suggest, to give currency to the points of view, which others have pointed out, and by this means to become judges and critics. The more rich, however, by this means, namely, that everybody is intent on having discovered on his own account something uniquely his own, a learning and process of reflection has become, the more every particular art, nay, every branch of the same, now renders necessary the completeness of a treatment of it from the individual's standpoint. As a corollary the historical aspect of such a survey and the criticism of works of art, which becomes inevitable, only add yet further to the learning and range of the subject. It is, moreover, essential before we take part in any discussion over the details of matters of artistic import that we should already have seen much and many times. Personally I have no doubt seen a considerable amount, but by no means all that is necessary to enable me to discuss the material of art exhaustively. All such difficulties, however, we may meet with the simple response that it does not lie within the aim of the present work to teach art-criticism, or to bring forward an historical review of such learning, or only to the extent such is necessary to apprehend on philosophical principles the essential and universal aspects of our subject, and their relation to the idea of the beautiful in its realization within the sensuous medium of art. If we keep this aim before us the variety of artistic effects we above indicated need cause us no embarrassment; for despite this complexity the essential character of the subject-matter according to its notional idea is the controlling factor; and although this is frequently lost in accidental matter by virtue of the medium in which it is realized, points of view are none the less in evidence, in which it is as clearly proclaimed. To grasp these aspects, and to develop them in a scientific way, is the very problem which it is the function of philosophy to elucidate.
FIRST SUBSECTION ARCHITECTURE Art, by enabling its content to attain a realized existence under a definite form, becomes a _particular_ art. We may therefore now for the first time refer to it as an actual art and find therein the _real_ beginning of art. With this particularity, however, in so far as it purports to bring before us the objectivity of the Idea of the beautiful and art, we have presented to us at the same time in its notional significance a _totality_ of what is particular. For this reason when we now, in the sphere of the specific arts, begin our examination of the same with the art of building this must not merely be accepted in the sense that architecture asserts itself as the art which, by virtue of its notional definition, is first presented to us as such an object of inquiry, but we may equally accept as a result, that it is also in relation to its _existence_ the art first to be considered. In supplying, however, an answer to the question, what the mode of origin was, which fine art, relatively to its notion and realized form, has received, we must exclude the experience of history no less than reflections, conjectures, and ordinary conceptions, which merely have reference to objective history, and are so readily and in such variety propounded. In other words, men are ordinarily actuated by an impulse, to bring before their mental vision anything in its original mode of appearance for the reason that the beginning is the simplest mode, under which the fact asserts itself. And connected with this impulse we have present behind it the covert conviction that the simple mode of appearance informs us of the fact in its notional significance and real origin, and the further amplification of such a beginning to the actual point in the process which only really concerns us is further with a like readiness conceived under the trivial mode of thought, that a process so understood has _gradually_ brought art forward to the crucial stage above indicated. A beginning, however, of this simplicity is, if we look at its content, something which, taken by itself, is so unimportant, that for philosophical thought it can only appear as wholly accidental, albeit it is for the ordinary consciousness only just in such a way that the origin can be readily grasped. For example, we have the story, as an explanation of the origin of the art of painting, told us of a maiden who followed the dim outline of the shadow of her sleeping lover. In the same way we have sometimes a cave and sometimes a hollow tree adduced as the point of departure in the art of building. Beginnings of this kind are so intelligible in themselves that further comment on the fact appears unnecessary[30]. In particular the Greeks invented many charming tales to explain the origins not merely of fine art, but also ethical institutions and other conditions of life, all of which satisfied the primary need to make such beginnings visible to the _imagination._ Such beginnings are not substantiated by history, and yet they do not aim at making the manner of origin intelligible directly as a process involved in the _notion_, but purport to confine their explanation to the field of objective history.
DIVISION OF SUBJECT We have, then, in such a way to establish the beginning of art from its notional significance, that the first problem of art is made to consist in giving form to that which is essentially objective, the ground, that is, of Nature, the external environment, and by doing so to make that which is without ideal import to conform both to significance and form, both of which still remain external to it, for the reason that they are not either the form or significance inherent in the objective material.
The art, which has set before it this task is, as we have seen, an architecture which has already discovered its first elaboration under the modes of sculpture, or painting and music[31].
If we now direct our attention to the most primitive origins of the art of building, we find at the earliest stage that we can accept for such a beginning the hut, regarded as the human dwelling, and the temple, as the exterior enclosure of the god and his community. With a view to define this commencement more closely a dispute has been raised with reference to the nature of the _material_ employed for building, whether, that is to say, it originated in buildings of wood, which