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We English are not supposed to be an artistic people, yet art, in some form or another, bulks large in the national life.  We have theatres, a National Gallery, we have art-schools, our tradesmen provide for us “art-furniture,” we even hear, absurdly enough, of “art-colours.”  Moreover, all this is not a matter of mere antiquarian interest, we do not simply go and admire the beauty of the past in museums; a movement towards or about art is all alive and astir among us.  We have new developments of the theatre, problem plays, Reinhardt productions, Gordon Craig scenery, Russian ballets.  We have new schools of painting treading on each other’s heels with breathless rapidity:  Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Futurists.  Art—­or at least the desire for, the interest in, art—­is assuredly not dead.

Moreover, and this is very important, we all feel about art a certain obligation, such as some of us feel about religion.  There is an “ought” about it.  Perhaps we do not really care much about pictures and poetry and music, but we feel we “ought to.”  In the case of music it has happily been at last recognized that if you have not an “ear” you cannot care for it, but two generations ago, owing to the unfortunate cheapness and popularity of keyed instruments, it was widely held that one half of humanity, the feminine half, “ought” to play the piano.  This “ought” is, of course, like most social “oughts,” a very complex product, but its existence is well worth noting.

It is worth noting because it indicates a vague feeling that art has a real value, that art is not a mere luxury, nor even a rarefied form of pleasure.  No one feels they ought to take pleasure in beautiful scents or in the touch of velvet; they either do or they don’t.  The first point, then, that must be made clear is that art is of real value to life in a perfectly clear biological sense; it invigorates, enhances, promotes actual, spiritual, and through it physical life.

This from our historical account we should at the outset expect, because we have seen art, by way of ritual, arose out of life.  And yet the statement is a sort of paradox, for we have seen also that art differs from ritual just in this, that in art, whether of the spectator or the creator, the “motor reactions,” i.e. practical life, the life of doing, is for the time checked.  This is of the essence of the artist’s vision, that he sees things detached and therefore more vividly, more completely, and in a different light.  This is of the essence of the artist’s emotion, that it is purified from personal desire.