. How often have I been one of a
party in a room with which all were familiar, the decoration of which
had lately been changed, and I the only one to notice it. For practical
purposes the room remained unaltered; only its emotional significance
was new. Question your friend as to the disposition of the furniture in
his wife's drawing-room; ask him to sketch the street down which he
passes daily; ten to one he goes hopelessly astray. Only artists and
educated people of extraordinary sensibility and some savages and
children feel the significance of form so acutely that they know how
things look. These see, because they see emotionally; and no one forgets
the things that have moved him. Those forget who have never felt the
emotional significance of pure form; they are not stupid nor are they
generally insensitive, but they use their eyes only to collect
information, not to capture emotion. This habit of using the eyes
exclusively to pick up facts is the barrier that stands between most
people and an understanding of visual art. It is not a barrier that has
stood unbreached always, nor need it stand so for all future time.

In ages of great spiritual exaltation the barrier crumbles and becomes,
in places, less insuperable. Such ages are commonly called great
religious ages: nor is the name ill-chosen. For, more often than not,
religion is the whetstone on which men sharpen the spiritual sense.
Religion, like art, is concerned with the world of emotional reality,
and with material things only in so far as they are emotionally
significant. For the mystic, as for the artist, the physical universe is
a means to ecstasy. The mystic feels things as "ends" instead of seeing
them as "means." He seeks within all things that ultimate reality which
provokes emotional exaltation; and, if he does not come at it through
pure form, there are, as I have said, more roads than one to that
country. Religion, as I understand it, is an expression of the
individual's sense of the emotional significance of the universe; I
should not be surprised to find that art was an expression of the same
thing. Anyway, both seem to express emotions different from and
transcending the emotions of life. Certainly both have the power of
transporting men to superhuman ecstasies; both are means to unearthly
states of mind. Art and religion belong to the same world. Both are
bodies in which men try to capture and keep alive their shyest and most
ethereal conceptio