They will introduce you to a profound, passionate, lyrical life. They
will aid you to possess the world. Art is not simply a manner of moving
the pencil, the pen or the bow. It is not a secret, technical process.
It is, above everything else, a way of living.
If your business is to grow wheat or to smelt copper, perform it with
interest and skill. That will render service to other men whose
function is to assemble colors, shapes, words or sounds. They will know
how to render service to you, in their own fashion, repay you in turn.
But do not imagine that their works are destined merely to divert your
leisure. They have a more sacred, a more beautiful mission: that of
placing you in possession of your own wealth.
Art is the supreme gift that men make of their discoveries, their
riches.
No one has possessed the world better than Lucretius, Shakespeare or
Goethe. What do you know of Croesus, who heaped up his gold to such an
abnormal and monstrous degree? Nothing has remained of that chimerical
fortune but a vague memory. But the fortune of Rembrandt has become and
will remain the fortune of our race.
To follow the example of these masters is not so much to try, with pen
or palette in hand, to imitate them, as to understand with them, and
thanks to them, what they have understood.
This cannot hurt your pride or hinder the expansion of your own
personality. Quite the contrary. This studious humility is the surest
path toward the conquest of your own soul. The anatomists will explain
to you that the human embryo adopts successively, in its quick
evolution, all the forms the species has known before its actual
flowering. This great law rules also in the moral order, and do not
count on escaping it. It is by first knowing the world through the
masters that you will succeed some day in grasping it in your hands,
dominating it yourself.
Ambition is an intoxicating passion, but to go to school to genius is a
prudent measure and a sweet experience, too.