r,
at his behaviour.

* * * * *

Artists, it is often said, and usually felt, are so unpractical. They
are always late for dinner, they forget to post their letters and to
return the books or even money that is lent them. Art is to most
people's minds a sort of luxury, not a necessity. In but recently bygone
days music, drawing, and dancing were no part of a training for ordinary
life, they were taught at school as "accomplishments," paid for as
"extras." Poets on their side equally used to contrast art and life, as
though they were things essentially distinct.

"Art is long, and Time is fleeting."

Now commonplaces such as these, being unconscious utterances of the
collective mind, usually contain much truth, and are well worth
weighing. Art, we shall show later, is profoundly connected with life;
it is nowise superfluous. But, for all that, art, both its creation and
its enjoyment, is unpractical. Thanks be to God, life is not limited to
the practical.

When we say art is unpractical, we mean that art is _cut loose from
immediate action_. Take a simple instance. A man--or perhaps still
better a child--sees a plate of cherries. Through his senses comes the
stimulus of the smell of the cherries, and their bright colour urging
him, luring him to eat. He eats and is satisfied; the cycle of normal
behaviour is complete; he is a man or a child of action, but he is no
artist, and no art-lover. Another man looks at the same plate of
cherries. His sight and his smell lure him and urge him to eat. He does
_not_ eat; the cycle is not completed, and, because he does not eat, the
sight of those cherries, though perhaps not the smell, is altered,
purified from desire, and in some way intensified, enlarged. If he is
just a man of taste, he will take what we call an "aesthetic" pleasure in
those cherries. If he is an actual artist, he will paint not the
cherries, but his vision of them, his purified emotion towards them. He
has, so to speak, come out from the chorus of actors, of cherry-eaters,
and become a spectator.

I borrow, by his kind permission, a beautiful instance of what he well
calls "Psychical Distance" from the writings of a psychologist.[36]

"Imagine a fog at sea: for most people it is an experience of acute
unpleasantness. Apart from the physical annoyance and remoter forms of
discomfort, such as delays, it is apt to produce feelings of peculiar
anxiety, fears of invisible d