They are artists neither in prose nor
verse, and though they may have "soul," they cannot make it visible. For
"soul" may be expressed equally through painting and sculpture and music
and acting, audits dimly discerned presence can scarcely convert slipshod
writing into literature. No one would accept as art a picture in which a
gleam of imagination struggled against the draughtsmanship of the
schoolboy to whom arms are toasting-forks, or applaud an actor who might
be brimming over with sensibility but could command neither his voice nor
his face. No one has any business to come before the public who has not
studied the medium through which he proposes to exhibit his "soul":
unfortunately this is the age and England is the country of the amateur,
and in every department we are deluged with the crude. The fault lies
less with the amateur than with the public before which he presents
himself, and which, incompetent to distinguish art from amateurishness,
is as likely to bless the one as the other. Of all forms of art
literature suffers most; for the pity is, and pity'tis't is true,
everybody learns to talk and write at an early age. This makes the
transition to literature so fatally easy. _Facilis descensus Averni!_ To
paint, one must at least know how to mix colours and handle a brush; to
compose, one must be familiar with the meaning of strayed spiders' legs
on curious parallel bars, and there are strange disconcerting rumours of
"orchestration.
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