That music should be so far the most really alive of all our modern
arts is a fact which confirms all I have argued in the foregoing
pages. For music is of all arts the one which insists on most
co-operation on the part of its votaries. Requiring to be performed
(ninety-nine times out of a hundred) in order to be enjoyed, it has
made merely _musical people_ into performers, however humble; and has
by this means called forth a degree of attention, of familiarity, of
practical effort, which makes the art enter in some measure into
life, and in that measure, become living. To play an instrument,
however humbly, to read at sight, or to sing, if only in a choir, is
something wholly different from lounging in a gallery or wandering on
a round of cathedrals: it means acquired knowledge, effort,
comparison, self-restraint, and all the realities of manipulation;
quite apart even from trying to read the composer's intentions, there
is in learning to strike the keys with a particular part of the
finger-tips, or in dealing out the breath and watching intonation and
timbre in one's own voice, an output of care and skill akin to those
of the smith, the potter or the glass blower: all this has a purpose
and is work, and brings with it disinterested work's reward, love.
To find the analogy of this co-operation in the arts addressing
themselves to the eye, we require, nowadays, to leave the great number
who merely enjoy (or ought to enjoy) painting, sculpture or
architecture, and seek, now that craft is entirely divorced from art,
among the small minority which creates, or tries to create. Artistic
enjoyment exists nowadays mainly among the class of executive artists;
and perhaps it is for this very reason, and because all chance of
seeing or making shapely things has ceased in other pursuits, that the
"fine arts" are so lamentably overstocked; the man or woman who would
have been satisfied with playing the piano enough to read a score or
sing sufficiently to take part in a chorus, has, in the case of other
arts, to undergo the training of a painter, sculptor or art critic,
and often to delude himself or herself with grotesque ambitions in one
of these walks.