's too conscious, or too exclusive, longing after
eternal life? To have created beauty for an instant is to have achieved
an equal result in art with one who has created beauty which will last
many thousands of years. Art is concerned only with accomplishment, not
with duration. The rest is a question partly of vanity, partly of
business. An artist to whom posterity means anything very definite, and
to whom the admiration of those who will live after him can seem to
promise much warmth in the grave, may indeed refuse to waste his time,
as it seems to him, over temporary successes. Or he may shrink from the
continuing ardour of one to whom art has to be made over again with the
same energy, the same sureness, every time that he acts on the stage or
draws music out of his instrument. One may indeed be listless enough to
prefer to have finished one's work, and to be able to point to it, as it
stands on its pedestal, or comes to meet all the world, with the
democratic freedom of the book. All that is a natural feeling in the
artist, but it has nothing to do with art. Art has to do only with the
creation of beauty, whether it be in words, or sounds, or colour, or
outline, or rhythmical movement; and the man who writes music is no more
truly an artist than the man who plays that music, the poet who composes
rhythms in words no more truly an artist than the dancer who composes
rhythms with the body, and the one is no more to be preferred to the
other, than the painter is to be preferred to the sculptor, or the
musician to the poet, in those forms of art which we have agreed to
recognise as of equal value.

BY THE SAME WRITER

Poems (Collected Edition in two volumes), 1902.

An Introduction to the Study of Browning, 1886, 1906.

Aubrey Beardsley, 1898, 1905.

The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899, 1908.

Cities, 1903.

Studies in Prose and Verse, 1904.

A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905.

Spiritual Adventures, 1905.

The Fool of the World, and Other Poems, 1906.

Studies in Seven Arts, 1906.

William Blake, 1907.

Cities of Italy, 1907.

End of Project Gutenberg's Plays, Acting and Music, by Arthur Symons

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