Then, in that instant, a beauty
which had never been in the world came into the world; a new thing was
created, lived, died, having revealed itself to all those who were
capable of receiving it. That thing was neither Beethoven nor Ysaye, it
was made out of their meeting; it was music, not abstract, but embodied
in sound; and just that miracle could never occur again, though others
like it might be repeated for ever. When the sound stopped, the face
returned to its blind and deaf waiting; the interval, like all the rest
of life probably, not counting in the existence of that particular soul,
which came and went with the music.
And Ysaye seems to me the type of the artist, not because he is
faultless in technique, but because he begins to create his art at the
point where faultless technique leaves off. With him, every faculty is
in harmony; he has not even too much of any good thing. There are times
when Busoni astonishes one; Ysaye never astonishes one, it seems natural
that he should do everything that he does, just as he does it. Art, as
Aristotle has said finally, should always have "a continual slight
novelty"; it should never astonish, for we are astonished only by some
excess or default, never by a thing being what it ought to be.
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