into the habit of attempting to justify all
our feelings and states of mind by reference to the physical universe,
have almost bullied some of us into believing that what cannot be so
justified does not exist.

I call him a religious man who, feeling with conviction that some things
are good in themselves, and that physical existence is not amongst them,
pursues, at the expense of physical existence, that which appears to him
good. All those who hold with uncompromising sincerity that spiritual is
more important than material life, are, in my sense, religious. For
instance, in Paris I have seen young painters, penniless, half-fed,
unwarmed, ill-clothed, their women and children in no better case,
working all day in feverish ecstasy at unsaleable pictures, and quite
possibly they would have killed or wounded anyone who suggested a
compromise with the market. When materials and credit failed altogether,
they stole newspapers and boot-blacking that they might continue to
serve their masterful passion. They were superbly religious. All artists
are religious. All uncompromising belief is religious. A man who so
cares for truth that he will go to prison, or death, rather than
acknowledge a God in whose existence he does not believe, is as
religious, and as much a martyr in the cause of religion, as Socrates
or Jesus. He has set his criterion of values outside the physical
universe.

In material things, half a loaf is said to be better than no bread. Not
so in spiritual. If he thinks that it may do some good, a politician
will support a bill which he considers inadequate. He states his
objections and votes with the majority. He does well, perhaps. In
spiritual matters such compromises are impossible. To please the public
the artist cannot give of his second best. To do so would be to
sacrifice that which makes life valuable. Were he to become a liar and
express something different from what he feels, truth would no longer be
in him. What would it profit him to gain the whole world and lose his
own soul? He knows that there is that within him which is more important
than physical existence--that to which physical existence is but a
means. That he may feel and express it, it is good that he should be
alive. But unless he may feel and express the best, he were better dead.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from
circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there
is a family alliance.