It cannot be said any longer that pure art is of no use: it helps us to
live.
It helps us to live, in the most practical manner and every day.
Every moment you make instinctive, reiterated, and forcible appeals
to all the forms of art. And that not only in order to express your
thought, but still more and above all to shape your thought, to think
your thought.
You find yourself in the midst of a landscape, and there is an image at
the back of your eye. The manner in which you accept and interpret this
image bears the mark of your personality and also of a crowd of other
personalities which you call to your aid without knowing it.
The day when the painters of our continent invented that convention we
call perspective, they modified and determined, for many long years,
our way of seeing things. It must be recognized equally that since the
reign of impressionism we have understood, possessed in a new way, the
colors of the world.
You live in a sonorous universe where everything is rhythm, tone,
number and harmony: human voices, the great sounds of nature, the
artificial uproar of society envelopes you in a vibrant and complex
network that you ought unceasingly to decipher and translate. Well,
this you cannot do without submitting to the influence of the
great souls who have occupied themselves with these things. The
understanding of movements, harmonies, rhythms, only comes to you at
the moment when the musicians reveal their secret to you, since they
have been able, in some fashion, to interest you in them.
And this is true in regard to everything. If you discover something
in your environment, if you perceive an interesting harmony between
two beings, a curious relation between two ideas, you will succeed in
throwing them into relief, in giving happy expression to them, only by
means of the poet’s art, and if you cannot find terms and images of
your own, you can freely borrow them from Hugo, from Baudelaire, from
those unknown artists who have elaborated the common language of men.
We do not think alone. Resign yourself, therefore, to being the
delighted prisoner of a vast, human system from which you cannot escape
without error and loss. Become, with good grace, the friend and the
guest of great men.