small
voice" from beneath the disastrous eclipse, which not only "purges
our passions by pity and terror" but evokes an assured horizon,
beyond truth, beyond beauty, beyond goodness, where the mystery
of love, in its withdrawn and secret essence, transforms all things
into its own likeness.

The nature of art is thus found to be intimately associated with the
universal essence of every personal life. Art is not, therefore, a
thing for the "coteries" and the "cliques"; nor is it a thing for the
exclusive leisure of any privileged class. It is a thing springing
from the eternal "stuff of the soul," of every conceivable soul,
whether human, sub-human, or super-human.

Art is nearer than "philosophy" or "morality" to the creative
energy; because, while it is impossible to think of art as
"philosophy" or "morality," it is inevitable that we should think of
both of these as being themselves forms and manifestations of art.

All that the will does, in gathering together its impressions of life
and its reactions to life, must, even in regard to the most vague,
shadowy, faint and obscure filcherings of contemplation, be
regarded as a kind of intimate "work of art," with the soul as the
"artist" and the flow of life as the artist's material.

Every personal soul, however "inartistic," is an artist in this sense;
and every personal life thus considered is an effective or
ineffective "work of art."

The primal importance of what in the narrow and restricted sense
we have come to call "art" can only be fully realized when we
think of such "art" as concentrating upon a definite material
medium the creative energy which is for ever changing the world
in the process of changing our attitude to the world.

The deadly enemy of art--the power that has succeeded, in these
commercial days, in reducing art to a pastime for the leisured and
wealthy--is the original inert malice of the abyss.

This inert malice assumes, directly it comes in contact with
practical affairs, the form of the possessive instinct. And the
attitude towards art of the "collector" or the leisured "epicurean,"
for whom it is merely a pleasant sensation among other sensations,
is an attitude which undermines the basis of its life. The very
essence of art is that it should be a thing common to all, within the
reach of all, expressive of the inherent and universal nature of all.
And that this is the nature of art is proved by the fact that art is
the personal exp