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he strikes a keynote, weaves a pattern, draws a wire,
drives a nail, treads a measure, sounds a trumpet, or hits a target; or
skirmishes around his subject; or lays it bare with a dissecting knife; or
embalms a thought; or crucifies an enemy. What is he really doing all
the time?
Besides the artist two things are to be considered in every art,-- the
instrument and the audience; or, to deal in less figured phrase, the
medium and the public. From both of these the artist, if he would find
freedom for the exercise of all his powers, must sit decently aloof. It is

the misfortune of the actor, the singer, and the dancer, that their bodies
are their sole instruments. On to the stage of their activities they carry
the heart that nourishes them and the lungs wherewith they breathe, so
that the soul, to escape degradation, must seek a more remote and
difficult privacy. That immemorial right of the soul to make the body
its home, a welcome escape from publicity and a refuge for sincerity,
must be largely foregone by the actor, who has scant liberty to decorate
and administer for his private behoof an apartment that is also a place
of business. His ownership is limited by the necessities of his trade;
when the customers are gone, he eats and sleeps in the bar-parlour. Nor
is the instrument of his performances a thing of his choice; the poorest
skill of the violinist may exercise itself upon a Stradivarius, but the
actor is reduced to fiddle for the term of his natural life upon the face
and fingers that he got from his mother. The serene detachment that
may be achieved by disciples of greater arts can hardly be his, applause
touches his personal pride too nearly, the mocking echoes of derision
infest the solitude of his retired imagination. In none of the world's
great polities has the practice of this art been found consistent with
noble rank or honourable estate. Christianity might be expected to
spare some sympathy for a calling that offers prizes to abandonment
and self-immolation, but her eye is fixed on a more distant mark than
the pleasure of the populace, and, as in gladiatorial Rome of old, her
best efforts have been used to stop the games. Society, on the other
hand, preoccupied with the art of life, has no warmer gift than
patronage for those whose skill and energy exhaust themselves on the
mimicry of life. The reward of social consideration is refused, it is true,
to all artists, or accepted by them at their immediate peril. By a natural
adjustment, in countries where the artist has sought and attained a
certain modest social elevation, the issue has been changed, and the
architect or painter, when his health is proposed, finds himself, sorely
against the grain, returning thanks for the employer of labour, the
genial host, the faithful husband, the tender father, and other pillars of
society. The risk of too great familiarity with an audience which insists
on honouring the artist irrelevantly, at the expense of the art, must be
run by all; a more clinging evil besets the actor, in that he can at no
time wholly escape from his phantasmal second self. On this creature
of his art he has lavished the last doit of human capacity for expression;

with what bearing shall he face the exacting realities of life? Devotion
to his profession has beggared him of his personality; ague, old age and
poverty, love and death, find in him an entertainer who plies them with
a feeble repetition of the triumphs formerly prepared for a larger and
less imperious audience. The very journalist--though he, too, when his
profession takes him by the throat, may expound himself to his wife in
phrases stolen from his own leaders--is a miracle of detachment in
comparison; he has not put his laughter to sale. It is well for the soul's
health of the artist that a definite boundary should separate his garden
from his farm, so that when he escapes from the conventions that rule
his work he may be free to recreate himself. But where shall the weary
player keep holiday? Is not all the world a stage?
Whatever the chosen instrument of an art may be, its appeal to those
whose attention it bespeaks must be made through the senses. Music,
which works with the vibrations of a material substance, makes this
appeal through the ear; painting through the eye; it is of a piece with
the complexity of the literary art that it employs both channels,--as it
might seem to a careless apprehension, indifferently.
For the writer's pianoforte is the dictionary, words are the material in
which he works, and words may either strike the ear or be