_March 26_.--I have lately been hearing Busoni play Chopin, and absorbing an immense joy from the skill with which that master-player evokes all the virile and complex power of Chopin, the power and the intellect which Pachmann, however deliciously he catches the butterflies fluttering up from the keys, for the most part misses.
All the great artists, in whatever medium, take so rare a delight, now and again, in interpreting some unutterable emotion, some ineffable vision, in mere terms of technique. In Chopin, in Rodin, in Besnard, in Rossetti,--indeed in any supreme artist,--again and again I have noted this. Great simple souls for the most part, inarticulate except through an endless power over the medium of their own art, they all love to take some insignificant little lump of that medium, to work at that little lump, with all their subtlest skill and power, in the production of what seemingly may be some absolutely trivial object or detail, and yet, not by what it obviously represents, but by the technique put into it, has become a reality, a secret of the soul, and an embodiment of a vision never before seen on earth.
Many years ago I realised this over Rossetti's poem "Cloud Confines." It is made out of a little lump of tawdry material which says nothing, is, indeed, mere twaddle. Yet it is wrought with so marvellous a technique that we seem to catch in it a far-away echo of voices that were heard when the morning stars sang together, and it clings tremulously to the memory for ever.
Technique is the art of so dealing with matter--whether clay or pigment or sounds or words--that it ceases to affect us in the same way as the stuff it is wrought out of originally affects us, and becomes a Transparent Symbol of a Spiritual Reality. Something that was always familiar and commonplace is suddenly transformed into something that until that moment eye had never seen or ear heard, and that yet seems the revelation of our hearts' secret.
It is an important point to remember. For one sometimes hears ignorant persons speak of technique with a certain supercilious contempt, as though it were a mere negligible and inferior element in an artist's equipment and not the art itself, the mere virtuosity of an accomplished fiddler who seems to say anything with his fiddle, and has never really said anything in his whole life. To the artist technique is another matter. It is the little secret by which he reveals his soul, by which he reveals the soul of the world. Through technique the stuff of the artist's work becomes the stuff of his own soul moulded into shapes that were never before known. In that act Dust is transubstantiated into God. The Garment of the Infinite is lifted, and the aching human heart is pressed for one brief moment against the breast of the Ineffable Mystery.