or a
philosophic puzzle, nor a rhetorical theme, nor a fashionable craze: it
was something natural, familiar; indifferent at first, then enjoyed;
only later read and thought about. It was only when I began to read
what other people had thought and felt on the subject, that I began
to discover (with surprise and awe) that there was something rare,
wonderful, exotic, sublime, mysterious, ineffable about art. I read a
great many books about all the arts, and about each art in particular,
from Plato to Lessing, from Reynolds to Taine, from Hegel to Ruskin; I
read, re-read, annotated, extracted, compared, refuted; I filled copy
books with transcendental, romantic, and positivistic aesthetics; I began
to feel, to understand art and all its wonderful mysteries; I began to
be able to express in words all the vague sublimities which I felt. Any
one reading my notes, hearing my conversation, would have sworn that I
was destined to become an art philosopher. But it was not to be. Much as
I read, copied, annotated, analysed, imitated, I could not really take
in any of the things which I read; or if I took them in, they would
remain pure literary flourishes. As soon as I got back into the presence
of art itself, all my carefully acquired artistic philosophy, mystic,
romantic, or transcendental, was forgotten: I looked at pictures and
statues, and saw in them mere lines and colours, pleasant or unpleasant;
I listened to music, and when, afterwards, I asked myself what strange
moods it had awakened in my soul, what wondrous visions it had conjured
up in my mind, I discovered that, during that period of listening, my
mind had been a complete blank, and that all I could possibly recollect
were notes. My old original prosaic, matter-of-fact feeling about art,
as something simple, straightforward, enjoyable, always persisted
beneath all the metaphysics and all the lyrism with which I tried to
crush it. I continued, indeed, to study art, to think about what it
really was; but gradually I perceived that this thinking of mine,
instead of developing my faculties for seeing in art all the wonderful
things seen in it by others, tended more and more to confirm my original
childish impression that art was a simple thing to be simply enjoyed.
My thinking was mainly negative: instead of discovering new things
in art, I discovered every day the absence in it of some of the strange
properties with which I had learned to invest it; I perceived more and