This interpreting of Nature and this making and moulding of a people might therefore have brilliant or sinister results. There are many who wish to prevail; there are many who wish to lure their fellows on, and not all are standing on a superior plane.
For though artists, as a rule, are men of strong propensities[54] and surplus energy, there is an instinct of chastity in the best of them,[55] which impels them to devote all their power to prevailing in concepts rather than in offspring, and which makes them avoid precisely that quarter whither other men turn when they wish to prevail.[56]
The question as to what kind of man it is who walks up to Life and orders and values her for us, is therefore of the most extraordinary importance. Nothing could be more important than this. Because, as we have seen, the question is not one of truth in the Christian and modern scientific sense. A belief is often life-preserving and still false from the standpoint of reality.[57] It is a matter, rather, of finding that belief, whether true or false, which most conduces to the love of an exalted form of Life. And if we ask, Who is the man who is interpreting life for us? What is he? What is his rank? we practically lay our finger upon the very worth of our view of the world.
There is no greater delight or passionate love on earth for the artist than this: to feel that he has stamped his hand on a people and on a millennium, to feel that his eyes, his ears, and his touch have become their eyes, and their ears, and their touch. There is no deeper enjoyment than this for him: to feel that as he sees, hears and feels, they also will be compelled to see, hear and feel. Only thus is he able to prevail. A people becomes his offspring.[58]
While their elation and blessedness consisted in being raised in concepts to his level, and in seeing the world through his artistic prisms—in fact, in scoring materially by allowing him, their higher man, to establish their type; it was his solitary and unfathomable glory to prevail for ever through their minds, and to lay the foundation of his hazar, his thousand years of life on earth, in the spirit of his fellows.
Utilitarian, if you will, are both points of view: the one giving from his abundance, simply because he must discharge some of his plenitude or perish, found his meaning in giving. The others, stepping up on the gifts bestowed, found their meaning in receiving.[59]
The artist, then, as the highest manifestation of any human community, justifies his existence merely by living his life, and by imparting some of his magnificence to the things about him. To use a metaphor of George Meredith's, he gilds his retainers as the sun gilds, with its livery, the small clouds that gather round it. This is the artist's power and it is also his bliss. From a lower and more economical standpoint, he justifies his life by raising the community to its highest power; by binding it to Life with the glories which he alone can see, and by luring it up to heights which he is the first to scale and to explore.[60]
[53] Z., I, XXII.
[54] W. P., Vol. II, p. 243.