Is it not part of the pedantry of letters to limit the word art, a
little narrowly, to certain manifestations of the artistic spirit, or,
at all events, to set up a comparative estimate of the values of the
several arts, a little unnecessarily? Literature, painting, sculpture,
music, these we admit as art, and the persons who work in them as
artists; but dancing, for instance, in which the performer is at once
creator and interpreter, and those methods of interpretation, such as
the playing of musical instruments, or the conducting of an orchestra,
or acting, have we scrupulously considered the degree to which these
also are art, and their executants, in a strict sense, artists?
If we may be allowed to look upon art as something essentially
independent of its material, however dependent upon its own material
each art may be, in a secondary sense, it will scarcely be logical to
contend that the motionless and permanent creation of the sculptor in
marble is, as art, more perfect than the same sculptor's modelling in
snow, which, motionless one moment, melts the next, or than the dancer's
harmonious succession of movements which we have not even time to
realise individually before one is succeeded by another, and the whole
has vanished from before our eyes. Art is the creation of beauty in
form, visible or audible, and the artist is the creator of beauty in
visible or audible form. But beauty is infinitely various, and as truly
beauty in the voice of Sarah Bernhardt or the silence of Duse as in a
face painted by Leonardo or a poem written by Blake. A dance, performed
faultlessly and by a dancer of temperament, is as beautiful, in its own
way, as a performance on the violin by Ysaye or the effect of an
orchestra conducted by Richter. In each case the beauty is different,
but, once we have really attained beauty, there can be no question of
superiority. Beauty is always equally beautiful; the degrees exist only
when we have not yet attained beauty.
And thus the old prejudice against the artist to whom interpretation in
his own special form of creation is really based upon a
misunderstanding. Take the art of music. Bach writes a composition for
the violin: that composition exists, in the abstract, the moment it is
written down upon paper, but, even to those trained musicians who are
able to read it at sight, it exists in a state at best but half alive;
to all the rest of the world it is silent. Ysaye plays it on his violin,
and the thing begins to breathe, has found a voice perhaps more
exquisite than the sound which Bach heard in his brain when he wrote
down the notes. Take the instrument out of Ysaye's hands, and put it
into the hands of the first violin in the orchestra behind him; every
note will be the same, the same general scheme of expression may be
followed, but the thing that we shall hear will be another thing, just
as much Bach, perhaps, but, because Ysaye is wanting, not the work of
art, the creation, to which we have just listened.
That such art should be fragile, evanescent, leaving only a memory which
can never be realised again, is as pathetic and as natural as that a
beautiful woman should die young. To the actor, the dancer, the same
fate is reserved. They work for the instant, and for the memory of the
living, with a supremely prodigal magnanimity. Old people tell us that
they have seen Desclée, Taglioni; soon no one will be old enough to
remember those great artists. Then, if their renown becomes a matter of
charity, of credulity, if you will, it will be but equal with the renown
of all those poets and painters who are only names to us, or whose
masterpieces have perished.
Beauty is infinitely various, always equally beautiful, and can never be
repeated. Gautier, in a famous poem, has wisely praised the artist who
works in durable material:
Oui, l'oeuvre sort plus gelle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.
No, not more beautiful; only more lasting.
Tout passe. L'art robuste
Seul à l'éternité.
Le buste
Survit à la cité.
Well, after all, is there not, to one who regards it curiously, a
certain selfishness, even, in this desire to perpetuate oneself or the
work of one's hands; as the most austere saints have found selfishness
at the root of the soul's too conscious, or too exclusive, longing after
eternal life? To have created beauty for an instant is to have achieved
an equal result in art with one who has created beauty which will last
many thousands of years. Art is concerned only with accomplishment, not
with duration. The rest is a question partly of vanity, partly of
business. An artist to whom posterity means anything very definite, and
to whom the admiration of those who will live after him can seem to
promise much warmth in the grave, may indeed refuse to waste his time,
as it seems to him, over temporary successes. Or he may shrink from the
continuing ardour of one to whom art has to be made over again with the
same energy, the same sureness, every time that he acts on the stage or
draws music out of his instrument. One may indeed be listless enough to
prefer to have finished one's work, and to be able to point to it, as it
stands on its pedestal, or comes to meet all the world, with the
democratic freedom of the book. All that is a natural feeling in the
artist, but it has nothing to do with art. Art has to do only with the
creation of beauty, whether it be in words, or sounds, or colour, or
outline, or rhythmical movement; and the man who writes music is no more
truly an artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who composes
rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the dancer who composes
rhythms with the body, and the one is no more to be preferred to the
other, than the painter is to be preferred to the sculptor, or the
musician to the poet, in those forms of art which we have agreed to
recognise as of equal value.