have been the worldly,
unconscientious atheist described by Vasari. So, at least, it would
seem. But tarry awhile. We have decided on analogy, and by a sort of
instinct of cause and effect, that the work must correspond in its main
qualities with the main qualities of the artist, of the artistic
organism by which it is produced. Mark what we have said: of the artist,
or artistic organism. Now what is this artistic organism, this artist?
An individual, a man, surely? Yes, and no. The artist and the man are
not the same: the artist is only part of the man; how much of him,
depends upon the art in which he is a worker. The work is produced by
the man, but not by the whole of him; only by that portion which we call
the artist; and how much that portion is, what relation it bears to the
whole man, we can ascertain by asking ourselves what faculties are
required for the production of a work of art. And thus we soon get to a
new question. The faculties required for the production of a work of art
may be divided into two classes; those which directly and absolutely
produce it, and those which are required to enable the production to
take place without interference from contrary parts of the individual
nature. These secondary qualities, merely protective as it were, are
the moral qualities common, in greater or less degree, to all workers:
concentration, patience, determination, desire of improvement; they are
not artistic in themselves, and are not more requisite to the artist
than to the thinker, or statesman, or merchant, or soldier, to preserve
his very different mental powers from the disturbing influence of
laziness, or fickleness, or any more positive tendencies, vices or
virtues, which might interfere with the development of his talents.
And of these purely protective qualities only so much need exist as the
relative strength of the artistic faculty and of the unartistic
tendencies of the individual require in order that the former be
protected from the latter; and thus it comes that where the artistic
endowment has been out of all proportion large, as in the case of such
a man as Rossini, it has been able to produce the most excellent work
without much of what we should call moral fibre: the man was lazy and
voluptuous, but he was, above all, musical; it was easier for him to be
musically active than to be merely dissipated and inactive: the artistic
instincts were the strongest, and were passively followed. When these