To the writer of prose there may come a beautiful fancy; he
delights in it and hastens to record his thought. He may write the
most flowing, the most perfect prose, but as he writes he is still
occupied with his thought; his sole object is to find words which
will but express it. The same fancy comes to the poet; he, too,
delights in it, and seeks to record it; but when the poet touches
pen to paper he is seized with a new and an entirely distinct
delight, a delight _in his method of expressing_ his thought; he
may even permit his delight in his symbol, the flow, rhythm and
ring of rhyme, to sweep him onward in forgetfulness of his first
fancy--literature is filled with such examples.
Now and then a writer of prose expresses himself so finely, writes
so well, that we feel instinctively and immediately not only the
delight in the thought, but also a certain amount of delight in the
manner of expressing the thought, in the style, ... and to the
extent of the _double_ delight such prose is art, for art, as we
shall see, is by no means confined to the five so-called fine arts.
No hard and fast line can be drawn between that which is art and
that which is not art, the one fades imperceptibly into the other.
And farther on in the same little volume:[41]
The current notions of art are such and the current notions of
labor are such that it may seem to most of you as though any
attempt to discuss the two together could result only in a waste of
words; yet time was when art and labor were so intimately united in
the great domain of human effort that the one almost invariably
implied more or less of the other; and the time will yet be when
there will be no labor without at least some art, even as there is
now and ever has been no art without at least some labor.
Art lies not in the employment, but in the _manner_ of the
employment of the powers of nature for an end; not in the task, but
in the _attitude_ of the worker towards his task.
* * * * *
Whether a Cubist painting is or is not art does not depend upon the
opinion of either critic or multitude; if it did it would be art to one
man and not to another, art to one generation and not to another--an
illogical conclusion.
[Illustration: KLEE
House by the Brook]
[Illustration: VAN REES
Still Life]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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