This is the reason why
all attempts to suppress the theatre and opera are and always will be in
vain. They are attempts to suppress the expression and awakening of a
life which can neither be expressed nor awakened in any other way; and
suppression of life, however successfully it may be accomplished for a
time, is never permanently possible.
These arts do not truly create, they interpret. Man is not a creator, he
is only a discoverer. The imagination is not creative, it is only
reportorial. Ideals are realities; imagination is seeing. The musician,
the artist, the poet, discover life which others have not discovered,
and each with his own instrument interprets that life to those less
sensitive than himself. Observe a musician composing. He writes; stops;
hesitates; meditates; perhaps hums softly to himself; perhaps goes to
the piano and strikes a chord or two. What is he doing? He is trying to
express to himself a beauty which he has heard in the world of infinite
phenomena, and to reproduce it as well as sensuous sounds can reproduce
it, that those with duller hearing than himself may hear it also.
Observe a painter before his easel. He paints; looks to see the effect;
erases; adds; modifies; reexamines; and repeats this operation over and
over again. What is he doing? He is copying a beauty which he has seen
in the invisible world, and which he is attempting to bring out from its
hiding so that the men who have no eyes except for the sensuous may also
see it.
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