Be this as it may, and making the above happy and honourable exception
in favour of music, it is no exaggeration to say that in our time it
is only artists who get real pleasure out of art, because it is only
artists who approach art from the side of work and bring to it work's
familiar attention and habitual energy. Indeed, paradoxical as it may
sound, art has remained alive during the nineteenth century, and will
remain alive during the twentieth, only and solely because there has
been a large public of artists.
Of artists, I would add, of quite incomparable vigour and elasticity
of genius, and of magnificent disinterestedness and purity of heart.
For let us remember that they have worked without having the sympathy
of their fellow-men, and worked without the aid and comfort of allied
crafts: that they have created while cut off from tradition, unhelped
by the manifold suggestiveness of useful purpose or necessary message;
separated entirely from the practical and emotional life of the world
at large; tiny little knots of voluntary outlaws from a civilisation
which could not understand them; and, whatever worldly honours may
have come to mock their later years, they have been weakened and
embittered by early solitude of spirit. No artistic genius of the past
has been put through such cruel tests, has been kept on such miserably
short commons, as have our artists of the last hundred years, from
Turner to Rossetti and Watts, from Manet and Degas and Whistler to
Rodin and Albert Besnard. And if their work has shown lapses and
failings; if it has been, alas, lacking at times in health or joy or
dignity or harmony, let us ask ourselves what the greatest
individualities of Antiquity and the Middle Ages would have produced
if cut off from the tradition of the Past and the suggestion of the
Present--if reduced to exercise art outside the atmosphere of life;
and let us look with wonder and gratitude on the men who have been
able to achieve great art even for only art's own sake.