VI
It cannot be said any longer that pure art is of no use: it helps us to live.
It helps us to live, in the most practical manner and every day.
Every moment you make instinctive, reiterated, and forcible appeals to all the forms of art. And that not only in order to express your thought, but still more and above all to shape your thought, to think your thought.
You find yourself in the midst of a landscape, and there is an image at the back of your eye. The manner in which you accept and interpret this image bears the mark of your personality and also of a crowd of other personalities which you call to your aid without knowing it.
The day when the painters of our continent invented that convention we call perspective, they modified and determined, for many long years, our way of seeing things. It must be recognized equally that since the reign of impressionism we have understood, possessed in a new way, the colors of the world.
You live in a sonorous universe where everything is rhythm, tone, number and harmony: human voices, the great sounds of nature, the artificial uproar of society envelopes you in a vibrant and complex network that you ought unceasingly to decipher and translate. Well, this you cannot do without submitting to the influence of the great souls who have occupied themselves with these things. The understanding of movements, harmonies, rhythms, only comes to you at the moment when the musicians reveal their secret to you, since they have been able, in some fashion, to interest you in them.
And this is true in regard to everything. If you discover something in your environment, if you perceive an interesting harmony between two beings, a curious relation between two ideas, you will succeed in throwing them into relief, in giving happy expression to them, only by means of the poet’s art, and if you cannot find terms and images of your own, you can freely borrow them from Hugo, from Baudelaire, from those unknown artists who have elaborated the common language of men.
We do not think alone. Resign yourself, therefore, to being the delighted prisoner of a vast, human system from which you cannot escape without error and loss. Become, with good grace, the friend and the guest of great men.