The voice in Mozart's music is itself a universal voice
speaking to the universe of universal things. And all art is an acting
of the beauty that has been experienced, a perpetuation of it so that
all men may share it for ever. The artist's effort is to be the sunset
he has seen, to eternalize it in his art, but always so that he and all
men may be part of this universal by their common experience of it.

So, as I say, the artist must not speak to any particular audience with
the aim of pleasing them--there is that amount of truth in Whistler's
doctrine; and he does fail if he does not communicate, since his aim is
communication--there is that amount of truth in Tolstoy's doctrine.

But the next question that arises is the attitude of ourselves to the
artist.

We have to remember that he is speaking not to us in particular, but to
all mankind, and that he speaks, not to please us or to satisfy any
particular demand of ours, but to communicate to us that universal he
has experienced so that we with him may become part of it.

It follows then that we must not make any particular demands upon him.
We must not come with our own ideas of what he ought to give us. If we
do, we shall be an obstruction between him and that ideal universal
audience to which he would address himself. We shall be tempting him,
with our egotistical demands, to comply with them. But these demands we
are always making; and that is why the relation between the artist and
any actual public is usually nowadays wrong. I was once looking at
Tintoret's 'Crucifixion' in the Scuola di San Rocco with a lady, and she
said to me--'That isn't my idea of a horse.' 'No'--I answered--'it's
Tintoret's. If it were your idea of a horse, why should you look at it?
You look at a picture to get the artist's idea.' But that isn't the
truth about art either. The artist doesn't try to substitute his own
particular for yours. He tries to communicate to you that universal
which he has experienced, because it is to him a universal, not his own,
but all men's, and he wishes to realize it by sharing it with all men.
His faith, though he may never have consciously expressed it to himself,
is in this universal which, because it is a universal, can be
communicated to all men. His effort is based on that faith. He speaks
because he believes all men can hear, if they will.

So the effort of the audience must be to hear and not to distract him
with their particular demands. They m