There is another important point.  We have seen that art promotes a part of life, the spiritual, image-making side.  But this side, wonderful though it is, is never the whole of actual life.  There is always the practical side.  The artist is always also a man.  Now the aesthete tries to make his whole attitude artistic—­that is, contemplative.  He is always looking and prying and savouring, savourant, as he would say, when he ought to be living.  The result is that there is nothing to savourer.  All art springs by way of ritual out of keen emotion towards life, and even the power to appreciate art needs this emotional reality in the spectator.  The aesthete leads at best a parasite, artistic life, dogged always by death and corruption.

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This brings us straight on to another question:  What about Art and Morality?  Is Art immoral, or non-moral, or highly moral?  Here again public opinion is worth examining.  Artists, we are told, are bad husbands, and they do not pay their debts.  Or if they become good husbands and take to paying their debts, they take also to wallowing in domesticity and produce bad art or none at all; they get tangled in the machinery of practical reactions.  Art, again, is apt to deal with risky subjects.  Where should we be if there were not a Censor of Plays?  Many of these instructive attitudes about artists as immoral or non-moral, explain themselves instantly if we remember that the artist is ipso facto detached from practical life.  In so far as he is an artist, for each and every creative moment he is inevitably a bad husband, if being a good husband means constant attention to your wife and her interests.  Spiritual creation a deux is a happening so rare as to be negligible.

The remoteness of the artist, his essential inherent detachment from motor-reaction, explains the perplexities of the normal censor.  He, being a “practical man,” regards emotion and vision, feeling and ideas, as leading to action.  He does not see that art arises out of ritual and that even ritual is one remove from practical life.  In the censor’s world the spectacle of the nude leads straight to desire, so the dancer must be draped; the problem-play leads straight to the Divorce Court, therefore it must be censored.  The normal censor apparently knows nothing of that world where motor-reactions are cut off, that house made without hands, whose doors are closed on desire, eternal in the heavens.  The censor is not for the moment a persona grata, but let us give him his due.  He acts according to his lights and these often quite adequately represent the average darkness.  A normal audience contains many “practical” men whose standard is the same as that of the normal censor.  Art—­that is vision detached from practical reactions—­is to them an unknown world full of moral risks from which the artist is qua artist immune.