Art Part 9

That will be very sad for the majority; it will not matter much to art.

For those who can feel the significance of form, art can never be less than a religion. In art these find what other religious natures found and still find, I doubt not, in impa.s.sioned prayer and wors.h.i.+p. They find that emotional confidence, that a.s.surance of absolute good, which makes of life a momentous and harmonious whole. Because the aesthetic emotions are outside and above life, it is possible to take refuge in them from life. He who has once lost himself in an "O Alt.i.tudo" will not be tempted to over-estimate the fussy excitements of action. He who can withdraw into the world of ecstasy will know what to think of circ.u.mstance. He who goes daily into the world of aesthetic emotion returns to the world of human affairs equipped to face it courageously and even a little contemptuously. And if by comparison with aesthetic rapture he finds most human pa.s.sion trivial, he need not on that account become unsympathetic or inhuman. For practical purposes, even, it is possible that the religion of art will serve a man better than the religion of humanity. He may learn in another world to doubt the extreme importance of this, but if that doubt dims his enthusiasm for some things that are truly excellent it will dispel his illusions about many that are not. What he loses in philanthropy he may gain in magnanimity; and because his religion does not begin with an injunction to love all men, it will not end, perhaps, in persuading him to hate most of them.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: An example of this was the temporary police-court set up recently in Francis Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road. I do not know whether it yet stands; if so, it is one of the few tolerable pieces of modern architecture in London.]

[Footnote 28: We may hope much from the Omega Workshops in London; but at present they employ only trained artists. We have yet to see what effect they will have on the untrained.]

THE END