I ventured to say that there were still some secrets of artistic production in porcelain that foreigners had not discovered. She laughed at the idea. The ‘secrets,’ she said, were the very things the Meccanian experts had rejected as of no value. I might as well say that the Chinese political constitution was a secret because the Meccanians had not adopted it. When I suggested that scientific knowledge was not a complete equipment for Art, and would not necessarily increase the artistic powers of a nation, she said this was a mere superstition. Art was not a mystery. Every work of art admitted of being analysed; the laws of its production were ascertainable; and it could be reproduced or modified in every conceivable way.
I asked if the same were true of music. I had heard, I said, that for nearly a hundred years even the Meccanians had produced no great musician.
“Another superstition,” she declared. “The great musicians, as they were called, were merely the pioneers of music. Their works were much overrated in foreign countries. We have proved by analysis,” she said, “that they were merely groping for their effects. We know what they wanted to effect, and we have discovered how to get those effects. Musical psychology was an unknown science a hundred years ago. Why, the old composers had simply no means of testing the psychological effects of their works by experiment.”
“I am afraid I am very ignorant of musical science,” I said. “In fact, I did not even know there was such a thing as a science of music.”
“What did you think music was?” she almost snapped.
“Simply one of the Arts,” I said.
“There can be no art in the proper sense without a science.”
“But I thought you Europeans considered that in Sculpture, for example, the Ancients had never been surpassed; and yet they had no science of sculpture.”
“Their science was probably lost: but we have recovered the true science. The basis of all sculpture is accurate measurement. Whatever has bulk, whatever occupies space, can be measured, if your instruments are fine enough. Our instruments are fine enough. We can reproduce any statue ever made by any artist.”