might be given to producing more food than we can eat); whereas what
we desire is just such beauty as will surround us on all sides, such
harmony as we can live in; our soul, dissatisfied with the reality
which happens to surround it, seeks on the contrary to substitute a
new reality of its own making, to rebuild the universe, like Omar
Khayyam, according to the heart's desire. And nothing can be more
different than such an instinct from the alleged satisfaction in
playing with dolls and knowing that they are not real people. By an
odd paradoxical coincidence, that very disbelief in the _real_
character of art, and that divorce betwixt art and utility, is really
due to our ultra-practical habit of taking seriously only the
serviceable or instructive sides of things: the quality of beauty,
which the healthy mind insists upon in everything it deals with,
getting to be considered as an idle adjunct, fulfilling no kind of
purpose; and therefore, as something detachable, separate, and
speedily relegated to the museum or lumber-room where we keep our
various shams: ideals, philosophies, all the playthings with which we
sometimes wile away our idleness. Whereas in fact a great work of art,
like a great thought of goodness, exists essentially for our more
thorough, our more _real_ satisfaction: the soul goes into it with all
its higher hankerings, and rests peaceful, satisfied, so long as it is
enclosed in this dwelling of its own choice. And it is, on the
contrary, the flux of what we call real life, that is to say, of life
imposed on us by outer necessities and combinations, which is so often
one-sided, perfunctory, not to be dwelt upon by thought nor penetrated
into by feeling, and endurable only according to the angle or the
lighting up--the angle or lighting up called "purpose" which we apply
to it.

XIX.

With what, I ventured to ask just now, are you going to fill the place
of religion in art?

With nothing, I believe, unless with religion itself. Religion,
perhaps externally unlike any of which we have historical experience;
but religion, whether individual or collective, possessing, just
because it is immortal, all the immortal essence of all past and
present creeds. And just because religion is the highest form of human
activity, and its utility is the crowning one of thoughtful and
feeling life, just for this reason will religion return, sooner or
later, to be art's most universal and most noble employer.