This instinct does not run counter to religion at all, but
it is an impulse not only towards a rather grim and rigid
conception of righteousness, but towards a wider appreciation of
the quality of life, its interest, its grace, its fineness, and its
fulness.
I am always sorry when I hear people talking about art as if it
were a rather easy and not very useful profession, when, as a
matter of fact, art is one of the sharp, swordlike things, like
religion and patriotism, which run through life, and divide it, and
separate people, and make men and women misunderstand each other.
Art means a temperament, and a method, and a point-of-view, and a
way of living. There are accomplished people who believe in art and
talk about it and even practise it, who do not understand what it
is; while there are people who know nothing about what is
technically called art, who are yet wholly and entirely artistic in
all that they do or think. Those who have not got the instinct of
art are wholly incapable of understanding what those who have got
the instinct are about; while those who possess it recognise very
quickly others who possess it, and are quite incapable of
explaining what it is to those who do not understand it.
I am going to make an attempt in this essay to explain what I
believe it to be, not because I hope to make it plain to those who
do not comprehend it. They will only think this all a fanciful sort
of nonsense: and I would say in passing that whenever in this world
one comes across people who talk what appears to be fantastic
nonsense, and who yet obviously understand each other and
sympathise with each other, one may take for granted that one is in
the presence of one of the hidden mysteries, and that if one does
not understand, it is because one does not see or hear something
which is perfectly plain to those who describe it.
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