But,
if I stand before it vibrating at sight of its colour and forms, if ever
so little and for ever so short a time, unhaunted by any definite
practical thought or impulse--to that extent and for that moment it has
stolen me away out of myself and put itself there instead; has linked me
to the universal by making me forget the individual in me. And for that
moment, and only while that moment lasts, it is to me a work of Art. The
word "impersonal," then, is but used in this my definition to signify
momentary forgetfulness of one's own personality and its active wants.
So Art--I thought--is that which, heard, read, or looked on, while
producing no directive impulse, warms one with unconscious vibration. Nor
can I imagine any means of defining what is the greatest Art, without
hypothecating a perfect human being. But since we shall never see, or
know if we do see, that desirable creature--dogmatism is banished,
"Academy" is dead to the discussion, deader than even Tolstoy left it
after his famous treatise "What is Art?" For, having destroyed all the
old Judges and Academies, Tolstoy, by saying that the greatest Art was
that which appealed to the greatest number of living human beings, raised
up the masses of mankind to be a definite new Judge or Academy, as
tyrannical and narrow as ever were those whom he had destroyed.
This, at all events--I thought is as far as I dare go in defining what
Art is.
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