By art let us understand, if you please, the Fine Arts alone, but
including decorative art. Music ought to be included.
I shall astonish most of my readers, when I say that very few people
understand music. For most people it is, as Victor Hugo said, an
exhalation of art--something for the ear as perfume is for the olfactory
sense, a source of vague sensations, necessarily unformed as all
sensations are. But musical art is something entirely different. It has
line, modeling, color through instrumentation, all making up an ideal
sphere where some, like the writer of these lines, live from childhood
on, which others attain through education, while many others never know
it at all. Furthermore, musical art has more movement than the other
fine arts. It is the most mysterious of them all, although the others
are mysterious as it is easy to see.
The first manifestation of art occurs through attempts to reproduce
objects. Such attempts have been found which date back to prehistoric
times. But what is primitive man's idea in such attempts? He wants to
record by a line the contour of the object, the likeness of which he
wishes to preserve. This contour and this line do not exist in nature.
The whole philosophy of art is in that crude drawing.
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