Liszt’s Letter to George Sand—Happiness of the Wanderer—Allusions to Wagner—The Artist as an Exile—Sorrowful Character of his lot—His Solitude—His Creative Moments and Inspirations—No Sympathy Between the Artist and Society—Degradation of Art—Artisans not Artists—Letter to Adolf Pictet—Why he Devoted Himself to the Piano—His love for it—Estimate of its Capabilities—Miss Fay’s “Music Study in Germany”—A Critical Notice—The Author’s First Meeting with Liszt—Personal Description—Grace of his Manner—Peculiarities of his Playing—His Home—Pleasant Gatherings—Personal Incidents—Liszt and Tausig—The Loss of “Faust”—Happily Recovered—The final Tribute.
ON the 30th of April, 1837, Liszt writes to George Sand:
“Happy, a hundred times happy, the wanderer! Happy he who does not have to traverse the beaten paths and to walk in the old tracks! Restlessly rushing on, he sees things only as they seem, and men only as they show themselves. Happy he who gives up the warm, friendly hand before its pressure grows icily chill; who does not wait for the day on which the affectionate glances of the loved one change to blank indifference! In fine, happy he who breaks with relations before he is broken by them! Of the artist it is specially true that he only pitches his tent for the hour and never settles down in any permanent place.”
Thus declares the youthful storming Apollo and many a Marsyas he flayed on these journeys of investigation, personal as well as social, over all Europe; on many a Midas grew asses’ ears in sight of the world. Read the “Letters of Travel of a Baccalaureate in Music.” There is nothing more spiritedly humorous, more serene in its earnestness.
Scarce ten years later, what was the experience of Richard Wagner, to whom a second supplementing genius was even more indispensable than the tenor Nourrit to Rossini, with “the masterwork which sprang from the brain of the Olympian god,” and still appeals to the multitude to combine art with art, the spirit with spirit, light with light?
During his abode as an exile in Weimar, in May, 1849, he writes: “Wonderful! through the love of this rarest of all friends, I gained at a time when I was homeless, the real home for my art, long looked for, always sought in the wrong places and never found. At the close of my exile, my wandering about led me to a little place which was to make a home for me.” This he did for him and for many another musician, after his change in 1842, for he knew that the artist’s only home is his art.
“Is he not always a stranger among men,” he continues, in his letter to George Sand. “Whatever he may do, wherever he may go, he always feels himself an exile. To him it is as if he had known a purer heaven, a warmer sun, a better existence. What can he do to escape this boundless sorrow, this unvoiced pain? Singing, must the artist rush through the world and in hurrying by scatter his thoughts without inquiring on what soil they fall, whether calumnies stab them, whether laurels mockingly cover them. Sorrowful and great is the destiny of the artist. A sacred predestination affixes its seal upon him at birth. He does not elect his calling but his calling elects him and incessantly urges him forward. However unpropitious his relations, the hostility of family and the world and the pressure of his mournful wretchedness may be, however insuperable the obstacles may seem, his will stands firm and remains unalterably turned to the pole. This pole to him is his art; it is his devotion to the mysterious and the divine in man and nature.
“The artist stands alone. The circumstances of his life force him into society, and so his soul creates in the midst of inharmonious influences an impenetrable solitude in which no voice of man is heard. All the passions which agitate men—vanity, ambition, envy, jealousy, even love itself, are outside the magic circle which incloses his inner world. Withdrawing into this, as into a sanctuary, he contemplates and worships that ideal which it is the object of his life to realize. Here appear to him divine and incomprehensible forms, and colors such as his eyes never beheld on the most beautiful flowers in the brightness of spring. Here he listens to the harmony of the eternal, whose cadence rules the worlds, and in which all the voices of creation join in a marvelous celestial concert. Then an ardent fever seizes him. His blood flows more quickly. A thousand consuming thoughts revolve in his brain from which only the sacred labor of art can release it. He feels as if he were the victim of an unutterable disease. An unknown power urges him to reveal by words, colors or tones, the ideal which dwells in him and fills him with a thirst of desire, with a torment for possession, such as no man has ever experienced for an object of actual passion. But when his work is ended and the whole world applauds, he is not wholly satisfied. In his discontent he would perhaps destroy it, did not some new phenomenon avert his glance from his creations, to throw him anew into those heavenly, painful ecstacies which make his life a constant struggle toward an unattainable goal, a continual effort of all the powers of the spirit to raise itself to the realization of that which he has conceived in those favored hours when the eternal beauty disclosed itself without a cloud.”
Again he describes, with more gloomy tints, the social reception of the artist to-day, in our enlightened century, and the necessity which has been laid upon him, the mighty and high-throned one, at all times, and now more than ever, to associate with the meanest existence, provided it truly longs for the marvels of art, to lavish upon them the water of life.
“The artist dwells these days outside of the social community,” he writes, “for the poetical element, especially the religious agitation of humanity, has disappeared from our modern public. What have they who attempt to solve the problem of human happiness by granting a few privileges, by an unlimited expansion of industry and of egoistic well being—what have they to do with a poet or an artist? Why should they trouble themselves with those who wander about, of no use to the State-machinery of the world, to kindle sacred flames, noble feelings and lofty inspirations, that by their achievements they may satisfy the restless longing for the beautiful and the great which rests more or less securely in the depths of every soul? Such beautiful times are no more as when the blooming verdure of art spread itself and exhaled its perfume over all Greece. Every citizen was then an artist, for law-givers, warriors, philosophers, all were imbued with the idea of moral, spiritual and physical beauty. The majestic astonished no one, and great achievements were as common as those creations which at the same time exhibited and prompted them.
“The strong and mighty art of the Middle Ages which built cathedrals and summoned the enraptured people to them with peal of bells and the sound of the organ, became extinct when faith was animated anew. There is to-day the inward interest which unites art and society, but that which brought power and glory to those other deep agitations, is destroyed. The social art has gone and has not yet returned. Whom do we principally meet in these days? Sculptors? No, the manufacturers of statues. Painters? No, the manufacturers of pictures. Musicians? No, the manufacturers of music. Everywhere artisans, nowhere artists. Hence, there can only be cruel pain to one who was born with the pride and the wild freedom of a genuine child of art. He is surrounded by a swarm of mechanical workers who obsequiously devote their services to the caprices of the populace and the fancies of the uncultivated wealthy, at whose nod they bow themselves down to the earth, as if they could not get close enough to it. The artist must accept them as his brothers and as the multitude confounds them together, must see himself and them rated at the same value and regarded with the same childish, stupid astonishment. It can not be said that these are the complaints of vanity and self-conceit. No, no—they who stand so high that no rivalry can reach them, they know this. The bitter tears which our eyes have shed belong to the worship of the true god, whose temple is defiled with idols for whose sake the silly people have forsaken the worship of the living god and bowed the knee before these degrading divinities of stone.”
Thus speaks this proud and truly noble soul whose best efforts and talents have been sacrificed to the silliness of idle caprice and to the obstinate humors of shallow minds. He knows that the only remedy is the old Grecian one, the personal contemplation of noble forms, of true skill.
“It is a fact that thorough musical culture is confined to a very few,” he says. “The majority are ignorant of the first rudiments of art and in the upper circles nothing is rarer than an earnest study of our masters. They are content with hearing a few good works from time to time, and without choice, amongst a mass of miserable stuff which spoils the taste and accustoms the ear to wretched poverty. In contrast with the poet who speaks all languages and besides only devotes himself to mankind, and whose mind has been cultivated by classical study, the musician reveals himself in a mysterious language, the comprehension of which, if it does not presuppose particular study, shows at least a long accustomed familiarity with it. Besides that, in contrast with the painter and sculptor, he has the disadvantage that they are devoted more to the expression of form, which is more universal than the inward conception of nature and the feeling for the infinite which are the essence of music.”
How firmly also his knowledge was founded upon personal experience is shown by the fact that like photography now-a-days, which represents all and every phase of the treasures of the plastic arts, so the piano for him could “gather the harvest, make use of the garnered treasures, and invest with life again those which conduce to ideas of happiness.”
In his twenty-fifth year, he writes to Adolf Pictet, asking why he was surprised that he devoted himself exclusively to the piano. He hardly realized that he had touched upon the most sensitive point of his very existence. “You do not know,” he says, “that if I should give up my piano, which speaks so much, it would be to me a day of gloom, robbing me of the light which illuminated all my early life and has grown to be inseparable from it. For, look you, my piano is to me what his vessel is to the seaman, his horse is to the Arab—nay, even more, till now it has been myself, my speech, my life. It is the repository of all that stirred my nature in the passionate days of my youth. I confided to it all my desires, my dreams, my joys and sorrows. Its strings vibrated with my emotions and its flexible keys have obeyed my every caprice. Would you have me abandon it and strive for the more brilliant and sounding triumphs of the theater or orchestra? O, no! Even admitting that I were competent for music of that kind, even then my resolution would be firm not to abandon the study and development of piano-playing, until I had accomplished whatever is practicable, whatever it is possible to attain now-a-days.”
In this he discloses those deep aspirations which now have a more lively interest and higher significance for us, since we know that they have not disappointed him.
“Perhaps the mysterious influence which binds me to it so strongly, prejudices me,” he writes, “but I consider the piano as of great consequence. In my estimation it holds the first place in the hierarchy of instruments. It is the most enjoyable and the most common of all. Its importance and popularity are due to the harmonious power which it almost exclusively possesses, in consequence of which it is also capable of compressing the whole art of music in itself. In the compass of its seven octaves it includes the entire scope of the orchestra and the ten fingers suffice for the harmony which is produced by a band of a hundred performers. By its agency it is possible to diffuse works which, owing to the difficulty of collecting an orchestra, would remain unknown to the great majority. Consequently it is to the orchestral composition what the steel engraving is to painting, which it repeats over and over, and though it lacks color yet it can exhibit light and shade.”
In order to reach the goal of an art which has been rightly designated as the idea of the world and the soul of humanity, and to behold it spreading over our age and extending to posterity, he settled down to rest after his career as a virtuoso, and founded “Weimar.” It must be in that Germany of which he wrote to his friend Berlioz, in 1838, “the study of art is universally less superficial here, the feeling is truer, the usages are better. The traditions of Mozart, Beethoven and Weber are not lost. These three geniuses have taken deep root in Germany.” Without this Weimar we should certainly have had no artistic execution to-day which would be worthy of the modern or classic productions. Indeed Munich and Baireuth themselves, how could they have been possible without the master-scholars who by Liszt’s piano instruction displayed in every form the expressive, soaring, flaming revelation of minute details as well as of the whole.
In bringing to a close the review of Liszt’s moral and artistic influence, alike fruitful and far-reaching, we give first of all an animated descriptive sketch by a pupil of this Weimar school and then the list of master-scholars, whom Liszt has educated, and who have continuously assisted in the realization of his ideal wishes and hopes.
“Music Study in Germany,” says the “Allgemeine Deutsche Musikzeitung,” of 1881, “is the name of a very comprehensive, elegant and spiritedly written little American book. It is in the form of letters which the American author, Miss Amy Fay, sent from Germany to her home, during her studies with Tausig, Kullak and Deppe. She manifests not only great musical and artistic intelligence in general, but also an unusual knowledge of human nature. Miss Fay has a feeling for the finest emotions of the soul. With genuine stereoscopic fidelity she points out the grand characteristics and the little peculiarities of the important personages with whom she has had the good fortune to come in contact. Of the many beauties and charms contained in these letters, those which relate to Liszt must naturally awaken the greatest, most universal and lasting interest. We select from them a few brief extracts, because we know that the feelings of reverence, love and intense admiration, which the author cherishes for Liszt, are shared to the full by thousands and thousands of hearts.”
Miss Fay saw the master first at the theater in Weimar, with three ladies, one of whom was very handsome. “He sat,” so she says, “with his back to the stage, not paying the least attention, apparently, to the play, for he kept talking all the while himself, and yet no point of it escaped him, as I could tell by his expression and gestures. Liszt is the most interesting and striking man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep set eyes, shaggy eyebrows and iron-gray hair. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives him, when he smiles, a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow, with long and slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many joints as other people’s. They are so flexible and supple that it makes you nervous to look at them. Anything like the polish of his manners I never saw. When he got up to leave his box, for instance, after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his hand on his heart and made his final bow, not with affectation or in mere gallantry, but with a quiet courtliness which made you feel that no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper. It was most characteristic. But the most extraordinary thing about Liszt is his wonderful variety of expression and play of feature. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy, tragic, the next, insinuating, amiable, ironical, sarcastic, but always the same captivating grace of manners. He is a perfect study. He is all spirit, but half the time at least, I should say, a mocking spirit. All Weimar adores him, and people say that women still go perfectly crazy over him. When he goes out every one greets him as if he were a king. Liszt looks as if he had been through everything, and has a face seamed with experience. He wears a long Abbe’s coat, reaching nearly down to his feet. He made me think of an old-time magician and I felt with a touch of his wand he could transform us all.”
The recommendations of the Countess von Schleinitz secured the author’s introduction to Liszt. She continues: “To-morrow I shall present myself, though I don’t know how the lion will act when I beard him in his den. I brought the B minor sonata of Chopin and intended to play only the first movement, for it is extremely difficult and it cost me all the labor I could give to prepare that. But playing to Liszt reminds me of trying to feed the elephant in the Zoological Gardens with lumps of sugar. He disposes of whole movements as if they were nothing and stretches out gravely for more. One of my fingers fortunately began to bleed and that gave me a good excuse for stopping. Liszt sat down and played the whole last three movements himself. It was the first time I had heard him and I don’t know which was the most extraordinary, the Scherzo, with its wonderful lightness and swiftness, the Adagio, with its depth and pathos, or the last movement where the whole key-board seemed to thunder and lighten. There is such a vividness about everything he plays that it does not seem as if it were mere music you were listening to, but it is as if he had called up a real living form and you saw it breathing before your face and eyes. It gives me almost a ghostly feeling to hear him, and it seems as if the air were peopled with spirits. Oh! he is a perfect wizard! It is as interesting to see him as it is to hear him, for his face changes with every modulation of the piece and he looks exactly as he is playing. He has one element that is most captivating and that is a sort of delicate and fitful mirth that keeps peering out at you here and there! It is most peculiar, and when he plays that way the most bewitching little expression comes over his face. It seems as if a little spirit of joy were playing hide and go seek with you.
“On Friday Liszt came and paid me a visit and even played a little on my piano. Only think what an honor! At the same time he invited me to a matinee he was going to give on Sunday for some countess of distinction. * * * He played five times, the last three times duets with Capellmeister Lassen, and made me come and turn the leaves. Gracious! how he does read! It is very difficult to turn for him, for he reads ever so far ahead of what he is playing, and takes in fully five bars at a glance, so you have to guess about where you think he would like to have the page over. Once I turned it too late, and once too early, and he snatched it out of my hand and whirled it back. Not quite the situation for timorous me, was it? At home Liszt doesn’t wear his long Abbe’s coat, but a short one in which he looks much more artistic. It is so delicious in that room of his. It was furnished and put in order for him by the Grand Duchess of Weimar herself. The walls are pale gray with gilded border running round the room, or rather two rooms which are divided, but not separated, by crimson curtains. The furniture is crimson, and everything is so comfortable—such a contrast to German bareness and stiffness generally. A splendid grand piano stands in one window. The other window is always wide open and looks out on the park. There is a dove cote just opposite the window, and the doves promenade up and down on the roof of it and fly about and sometimes whirr down on the sill itself. That pleases Liszt. His writing-table is beautifully fitted up with things that all match. Everything is in bronze—ink-stand, paper-weight, match-box, etc., and there is always a lighted candle standing on it by which the gentlemen can light their cigars.
“There is a carpet on the floor, a rarity in Germany, and Liszt generally walks about, and smokes, talks and calls upon one or other of us to play. From time to time he will sit down and play himself where a passage does not suit him and when he is in good spirits he makes little jests all the time. His playing was a complete revelation to me and has given me an entirely new insight into music. You can not conceive, without hearing him, how poetic he is, or the thousand nuances which he can throw into the simplest thing. He is equally great on all sides. From the zephyr to the tempest the whole scale is equally at his command.
“But Liszt is not at all like a master and can not be treated as one. He is a monarch, and when he extends his royal scepter you can sit down and play to him. You never can ask him to play anything for you no matter how much you are dying to hear it. You can not even offer to play yourself. You lay your notes on the table so he can see that you want to play, and sit down. He takes a turn up and down the room, looks at the music, and if the piece interests him, he will call upon you.
“Yesterday I had prepared for him his ‘Au Bord d’une Source.’ I was nervous and played badly. He was not to be put out, however, but acted as if he thought I had played charmingly, and then he sat down and played the whole piece himself, oh, so exquisitely! It made me feel like a wood-chopper. The notes just seemed to ripple off his fingers’ ends with scarce any perceptible motion. As he neared the close I remarked that the funny little expression came over his face which he always has when he means to surprise you, and he suddenly took an unexpected chord and extemporized a poetical little end, quite different from the written one. Do you wonder that people go distracted over him?”
A talented pupil of Henselt’s arrived and played for Liszt with great success. Miss Fay says: “She played with the greatest aplomb, although her touch had a certain roughness about it to my ear. But all playing sounds barren by the side of Liszt, for his is the living, breathing impersonation of poetry, passion, grace, wit, coquetry, daring, tenderness and every other fascinating attribute that you can think of.
“I’m ready to hang myself half the time when I’ve been to him. Oh! he is the most phenomenal being in every respect! All that you’ve heard of him would never give you an idea of him. In short, he represents the whole scale of human emotions. He is a many-sided person and reflects back the light in all colors, no matter how you look at him. His pupils adore him, as in fact every one else does, but it is impossible to do otherwise with a person whose genius flashes out of him all the time so, and whose character is so winning.
“One day this week, when we were with Liszt, he was in such high spirits that it was as if he had suddenly become twenty years younger. A student from the Stuttgart Conservatory, played a Liszt concerto. His name is V. Liszt kept up a little running fire of satire all the time he was playing, but in a good-natured way. Everything that he says is so striking. In one place where V. was playing the melody rather feebly Liszt suddenly took his place at the piano, and said: ‘When I play, I always play for the people in the gallery so that those persons who pay only five groschen for their seats may also hear something.’ Then he began and I wish you could have heard him. The sound didn’t seem very loud, but it was penetrating and far-reaching. When he had finished he raised one hand in the air, and you seemed to see all the people in the gallery drinking in the sound. That is the way Liszt teaches you. He presents an idea to you and it takes fast hold of your mind, and it sticks there. Music is such a real, visible thing to him that he always has a symbol, instantly, in the material world to express his idea.
“How he can bear to hear us play, I can not imagine. I assure you, no matter how beautifully we play any piece, the minute Liszt plays it, you would scarcely recognize it. His touch and his peculiar use of the pedals are the secrets of his playing, and then he seems to dive down into the most hidden thoughts of the composer, and fetch them to the surface, so they gleam out at you, one by one, like stars.
“The more I see and hear Liszt the more I am lost in amazement. I can neither eat nor sleep on those days that I go to him. I often think of what Tausig said once: ‘Oh! compared with Liszt, we other artists are all blockheads!’ I did not believe it at the time, but I’ve seen the truth of it.
“Liszt does such bewitching little things. The other day, for instance, Fraulein Gaul was playing something to him, and in it were two runs, and after each run two staccato chords. She did them most beautifully and struck the chords immediately after.
“‘No, no,’ said Liszt, ‘after you make a run you must wait a minute before you strike the chords as if in admiration of your own performance. You must pause, as if to say, ‘now nicely I did that.’ Then he sat down and made a run himself, waited a second, and then struck the two chords in the treble, saying as he did so, ‘Bra-vo,’ and then he played again, struck the other chord, and said again, ‘Bra-vo,’ and positively, it was as if the piano had softly applauded! That is the way he plays everything. It seems as if the piano were speaking with a human tongue.
“You can not conceive anything like Liszt’s playing of Beethoven. When he plays a sonata it is as if the composition rose from the dead and stood transfigured before you. You ask yourself, ‘did I ever play that?’”
Once Miss Fay asked the master to tell her how he produced a certain effect in one of his great passages. He smiled and then immediately played the whole passage. “‘Oh! I’ve invented a great many things,’ he said, indifferently, ‘this for instance,’ and he began playing a double roll of octaves in chromatics in the bass of the piano. It was very grand and made the room reverberate. ‘Magnificent,’ said I. ‘Did you ever hear me do a storm?’ said he. ‘No.’ ‘Ah! you ought to hear me do a storm, storms are my forte.’ Then to himself between his teeth, while a weird look came into his eyes as if he could indeed rule the blast—‘Then crash the trees.’ How ardently I wished he would play a storm, but he did not. Alas, that we poor mortals here below should share so often the fate of Moses and have only a glimpse of the Promised Land, and that without the consolation of being Moses!
“Liszt sometimes strikes wrong notes when he plays, but it does not trouble him in the least, on the contrary he rather enjoys it when he comes down squarely wrong, as it affords him an opportunity of displaying his genius and giving things such a turn that the false note will appear simply a key leading to new and unexpected beauties. An accident of this kind happened to him in one of the Sunday matinees when the room was full of distinguished people and of his pupils. He was rolling up the piano in arpeggios in a very grand manner indeed, when he struck a semi-tone short of the high note upon which he had intended to end. I caught my breath and wondered whether he was going to leave us like that, in mid air, as it were, and the harmony unresolved or whether he would be reduced to the humiliation of correcting himself like ordinary mortals and taking the right chord. A half smile came over his face, as much as to say, ‘don’t fancy that this little thing disturbs me,’ and he instantly went meandering down the piano in harmony with the false note he had struck, and then rolled deliberately up in a second grand sweep, this time striking true. I never saw a more delicious piece of cleverness. It was so quick-witted and so exactly characteristic of Liszt. Instead of giving you a chance to say ‘He has made a mistake,’ he forces you to say, ‘He has shown how to get out of a mistake.’
“Another day I heard him pass from one piece into another by making the finale of the first one play the part of prelude to the second. So exquisitely were the two woven together that you could hardly tell where the one left off and the other began. Ah, me! such a facile grace! Nobody will ever equal him with those rolling basses and those flowing trebles. And then his Adagios! When you hear him in one of those you feel that his playing has got to that point where it is purified from all earthly dross and is an exhalation of the soul that mounts straight to heaven.”
This little book contains many more beautiful passages but we are reluctantly forced to desist. One charming trait of Liszt is related, however, which we can not pass over in closing. Miss Fay says:
“Gottschal, organist in Weimar, told me that one time when Tausig was ‘hard up’ for money, he sold the score of Liszt’s ‘Faust’ for five thalers, to a servant, along with a great pile of his own notes. Gottschal, hearing of it, went to the man and purchased them. Then he went to Liszt and told him that he had the score. As it happened, the publisher had written for it that very day and Liszt was turning the house upside down, looking for it everywhere. He was in an awful state of mind because his score was nowhere to be found. ‘A whole year’s labor lost,’ he cried, and he was in such a rage that when Gottschal asked him for the third time what he was looking for, he turned and stamped his foot at him and said: ‘You confounded fellow, can’t you leave me in peace and not torment me with your stupid questions?’ Gottschal knew perfectly well what was wanting but he wished to have a little fun out of the matter. At last he took pity on Liszt and said: ‘Herr Doctor, I know what you have lost! It is the score to your Faust.’ ‘O,’ said Liszt, changing his tone immediately, ‘do you know anything of it?’ ‘Of course, I do,’ said Gottschal, and proceeded to unfold Master Tausig’s performance and how he had rescued the precious music. Liszt was transported with joy that it was found and cried out: ‘We are saved, Gottschal has rescued us,’ and then Gottschal said that Liszt embraced him in his transport, and could not say or do enough to make up for his having been so rude to him. Well, you would have supposed that it was now all up with Master Tausig, but not at all. A few days after was Tausig’s birth-day. Madame C. took Gottschal aside and begged him to drop the subject of the note-stealing, for Liszt doted so on his Carl that he wished to forget it. Sure enough, Liszt kissed Carl and congratulated him on his birth-day and consoled himself with his same old observation: ‘You’ll either turn out a great blockhead, my little Carl, or a great master.’”
“O, thou amiable grand master Liszt!”
Thus closes our notice of this genial book. Since the “soulful fantasies” of Bettina about Beethoven, nothing comparable with it from a lady’s hand has appeared.
In closing, we append, with the master’s own approval, as the fac-simile in our own little work shows, a list of his principal scholars. We preface it with a sentiment of the master, which shows how much that remark of Beethoven’s to Bettina about music was to him—“The elevated types of the moral sense also constitute its foundations,” or truth and the will combined. It reads:
“It belongs to the higher mission of art, not only to exhibit and celebrate in song the heroic spirit but to inspire it. Hence the artist should feel it, preserve it and diffuse it like a sacred flame.”