I call him a religious man who, feeling with conviction that some things are good in themselves, and that physical existence is not amongst them, pursues, at the expense of physical existence, that which appears to him good.  All those who hold with uncompromising sincerity that spiritual is more important than material life, are, in my sense, religious.  For instance, in Paris I have seen young painters, penniless, half-fed, unwarmed, ill-clothed, their women and children in no better case, working all day in feverish ecstasy at unsaleable pictures, and quite possibly they would have killed or wounded anyone who suggested a compromise with the market.  When materials and credit failed altogether, they stole newspapers and boot-blacking that they might continue to serve their masterful passion.  They were superbly religious.  All artists are religious.  All uncompromising belief is religious.  A man who so cares for truth that he will go to prison, or death, rather than acknowledge a God in whose existence he does not believe, is as religious, and as much a martyr in the cause of religion, as Socrates or Jesus.  He has set his criterion of values outside the physical universe.

In material things, half a loaf is said to be better than no bread.  Not so in spiritual.  If he thinks that it may do some good, a politician will support a bill which he considers inadequate.  He states his objections and votes with the majority.  He does well, perhaps.  In spiritual matters such compromises are impossible.  To please the public the artist cannot give of his second best.  To do so would be to sacrifice that which makes life valuable.  Were he to become a liar and express something different from what he feels, truth would no longer be in him.  What would it profit him to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?  He knows that there is that within him which is more important than physical existence—­that to which physical existence is but a means.  That he may feel and express it, it is good that he should be alive.  But unless he may feel and express the best, he were better dead.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy.  Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance.  Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.  And if we are licensed to lay aside the science of aesthetics and, going behind our emotion and its object, consider what is in the mind of the artist, we may say, loosely enough, that art is a manifestation of the religious sense.  If it be an expression of emotion—­as I am persuaded that it is—­it is an expression of that emotion which is the vital force in every religion, or, at any rate, it expresses an emotion felt for that which is the essence of all.  We may say that both art and religion are manifestations of man’s religious sense, if by “man’s religious sense” we mean his sense of ultimate reality.  What we may not say is, that art is