impersonality which is implied
in the fact that every living soul is composed of the same
elements.

It may require no little subtlety of vision to detect in the pure
beauty of line, colour, and texture that compose, say, some lovely
piece of bric-a-brac, the hidden presence of that primordial duality
out of which all forms of beauty emerge, but the metaphysical
significance latent in the phrase "the sense of difficulty overcome"
points us towards just this very interpretation. The circumstantial
and the sexual "motifs" in art, so appealing to the mob, may or
may not play an aesthetic part in the resultant rhythm. If they do,
they do so because such "interest" and such "eroticism" were an
integral portion of the original vision that gave unity to the work
in question. If they do not, but are merely dragged in by the
un-aesthetic observer, it is easy enough for the genuine virtuoso to
disregard such temptation and to put "story," "message,"
"sentiment," and "sex-appeal" rigidly aside, as he seeks to respond
to the primordial vision of an "unstoried" non-sexual beauty
springing from those deeper levels of the soul where "story,"
"sentiment," and sex have no longer any place.

More dangerous, however, to art, than any popular craving for
"human interest" or for the comfort of amorous voluptuousness, is
the unpardonable stupidity of puritanical censorship. Such
censorship, in its crass impertinence, assumes that its miserable
and hypocritical negations represent that deep, fierce, terrible
"imperative" uttered by the soul's primordial conscience.

They represent nothing of the sort.

The drastic revelations of "conscience" are, as I have pointed out
again and again, fused and blended in their supreme moments with
the equally drastic revelations of reason and the aesthetic sense.

They are inevitably blended with these, because, as we have
proved, they are all three nothing less than divergent aspects of the
one irresistible projection of the soul itself which I have named
"creative love."

Thus it comes about that in the great, terrible moments of tragic art
there may be an apparent catastrophic despair, which in our
normal moods seems hopeless, final, absolute.

It is only when the complex rhythm of the apex-thought is brought
to bear upon these _moments of midnight_ that a strange and
unutterable healing emerges from them, a shy, half-hinted whisper
or something deeper than hope, a magical effluence, a "still,