of art, before they can see its beauty or demand that beauty from the
artist. When they themselves become like little children, then they see
that the greatest artists, in all their seeming triumphs, are like
little children too. For in Michelangelo and Beethoven it is not the
arrogant, the accomplished, the magnificent, that moves us. They are
great men to us; but they achieved beauty because in their effort to
achieve it they were little children to themselves. They impose awe on
us, but it is their own awe that they impose. It is not their
achievement that makes beauty, but their effort, always confessing its
own failure; and in that confession is the beauty of art. That is why it
moves and frees us; for it frees us from our pretence that we are what
we would be, it carries us out of our own egotism into the wonder and
value of the artist himself.

Consider the beauty of a tune. Music itself is the best means which man
has found for confessing that he cannot say what he would say; and it is
more purely and rapturously beauty than any other form of art. A tune is
the very silencing of speech, and in the greatest tunes there is always
the hush of wonder: they seem to tell us to be silent and listen, not to
what the musician has to say, but to what he cannot say. The very
beauty of a tune is in its reference to something beyond all expression,
and in its perfection it speaks of a perfection not its own. Pater said
that all art tries to attain to the condition of music. That is true in
a sense different from what he meant. Art is always most completely art
when it makes music's confession of the ineffable; then it comes nearest
to the beauty of music. But when it is no longer a forlorn hope, when it
is able to say what it wishes to say with calm assurance, then it has
ceased to be art and become a game of skill.

Often the great artist is imperious, impatient, full of certainties; but