espeare, Michelangelo,
Beethoven were not slaves to their own professionalism; no doubt they
could laugh at it themselves. But there is always a danger that we shall
be enslaved by it; and it is the business of criticism to free us from
that slavery, to make us aware of this last infirmity of great artists.
We are on our guard easily enough against a professionalism that is out
of fashion. The Wagnerian of a generation ago could sneer at the
professionalism of Mozart; but the professionalism of Wagner seemed to
him to be inspiration made constant and certain by a new musical
invention. We know now only too well, from Wagner's imitators, that he
did not invent a new method of tapping inspiration; we ought to know
that no one can do that. The more complete the method the more tiresome
it becomes, even as practised by the inventor.

Decadence in art is always caused by professionalism, which makes the
technique of art too difficult, and so destroys the artist's energy and
joy in his practice of it. Teachers of the arts are always inclined to
insist on their difficulty and to set hard tasks to their pupils for the
sake of their hardness; and often the pupil stays too long learning
until he thinks that anything which is difficult to do must therefore be
worth doing. This notion also overawes the general public so that they
value what looks to them difficult; but in art that which seems
difficult to us fails with us, we are aware of the difficulty, not of
the art. The greater the work of art the easier it seems to us. We feel
that we could have done it ourselves if only we had had the luck to hit
upon that way of doing it; indeed, where our aesthetic experience of it
is complete, we feel as if we were doing it ourselves; our minds jump
with the artist's mind; we are for the moment the artist himself in his
very act of creation. But we are always apt to undervalue this true and
complete aesthetic experience, because it seems so easy and simple, and
we mistake for it a painful sense of the artist's skill, of his
professional accomplishment. So we demand of artists, that they shall
impress us with their accomplishment; we have not had our money's worth
unless we feel that we could not possibly do ourselves what they have
done. No doubt, when the _Songs of Innocence_ were first published,
anyone who did happen to read them thought them doggerel. Blake in a
moment had freed himself from all the professionalism of the followers
of