“I feel that is so, because I notice that that is the essential point to grasp. Death is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.”
Both their faces lost some of their colour, hers her white, his his yellow. They flung themselves upon each other like waves. The fuller stream came from him.
“You say that the actors on the stage are pure life, yet they represent something that we do not. But ‘all the world’s a stage,’ isn’t it? So how do we not also stand for that something?”
“Yes, life does generally stand for that something too; but it only emerges and is visible in art.”
“Still I don’t know what art is!”
“You ought to by this time. However, we can go further. Consider the content of what we call art. A statue is art, as you said; you are life. There is bad art and bad life. We will only consider the good. A statue, then, is a dead thing; a lump of wood or stone. Its hues and masses are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and women are the worst art of all, because there are fewer semi-dead things about them. The shell of the tortoise, the plumage of a bird, makes these animals approach nearer to art. Soft, quivering and quick flesh is as far from art as an object can be.”
“Art is merely the dead, then?”
“No, but deadness is the first condition of art. A hippopotamus’s armoured hide, a turtle’s shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand; that opposed to naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life, along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement, on the other.
“Deadness, then,” Tarr went on, “in the limited sense in which we use that word is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like a machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.”