But, though the artist’s vision and emotion alike are modified, purified, they are not devitalized.  Far from that, by detachment from action they are focussed and intensified.  Life is enhanced, only it is a different kind of life, it is the life of the image-world, of the imagination; it is the spiritual and human life, as differentiated from the life we share with animals.  It is a life we all, as human beings, possess in some, but very varying, degrees; and the natural man will always view the spiritual man askance, because he is not “practical.”  But the life of imagination, cut off from practical reaction as it is, becomes in turn a motor-force causing new emotions, and so pervading the general life, and thus ultimately becoming “practical.”  No one function is completely cut off from another.  The main function of art is probably to intensify and purify emotion, but it is substantially certain that, if we did not feel, we could not think and should not act.  Still it remains true that, in artistic contemplation and in the realms of the artist’s imagination not only are practical motor-reactions cut off, but intelligence is suffused in, and to some extent subordinated to, emotion.

* * * * *

One function, then, of art is to feed and nurture the imagination and the spirit, and thereby enhance and invigorate the whole of human life.  This is far removed from the view that the end of art is to give pleasure.  Art does usually cause pleasure, singular and intense, and to that which causes such pleasure we give the name of Beauty.  But to produce and enjoy Beauty is not the function of art.  Beauty—­or rather, the sensation of Beauty—­is what the Greeks would call an epigignomenon ti telos, words hard to translate, something between a by-product and a supervening perfection, a thing like—­as Aristotle[54] for once beautifully says of pleasure—­“the bloom of youth to a healthy young body.”

That this is so we see most clearly in the simple fact that, when the artist begins to aim direct at Beauty, he usually misses it.  We all know, perhaps by sad experience, that the man who seeks out pleasure for herself fails to find her.  Let him do his work well for that work’s sake, exercise his faculties, “energize” as Aristotle would say, and he will find pleasure come out unawares to meet him with her shining face; but let him look for her, think of her, even desire her, and she hides her head.  A man goes out hunting, thinks of nothing but following the hounds and taking his fences, being in at the death:  his day is full—­alas! of pleasure, though he has scarcely known it.  Let him forget the fox and the fences, think of pleasure, desire her, and he will be in at pleasure’s death.

So it is with the artist.  Let him feel strongly, and see raptly—­that is, in complete detachment.  Let him cast this, his rapt vision and his intense emotion, into outside form, a statue or a painting; that form will have about it a nameless thing, an unearthly aroma, which we call beauty; this nameless presence will cause in the spectator a sensation too rare to be called pleasure, and we shall call it a “sense of beauty.”  But let the artist aim direct at Beauty, and she is gone, gone before we hear the flutter of her wings.