people speak of a cook as an "artist," and a pudding as a "perfect
poem," but a healthy instinct rebels. Art, whether sculpture, painting,
drama, music, is of sight or hearing. The reason is simple. Sight and
hearing are the distant senses; sight is, as some one has well said,
"touch at a distance." Sight and hearing are of things already detached
and somewhat remote; they are the fitting channels for art which is cut
loose from immediate action and reaction. Taste and touch are too
intimate, too immediately vital. In Russian, as Tolstoi has pointed out
(and indeed in other languages the same is observable), the word for
beauty (_krasota_) means, to begin with, only that which pleases the
sight. Even hearing is excluded. And though latterly people have begun
to speak of an "ugly deed" or of "beautiful music," it is not good
Russian. The simple Russian does not make Plato's divine muddle between
the good and the beautiful. If a man gives his coat to another, the
Russian peasant, knowing no foreign language, will not say the man has
acted "beautifully."

To see a thing, to feel a thing, as a work of art, we must, then, become
for the time unpractical, must be loosed from the fear and the flurry of
actual living, must become spectators. Why is this? Why can we not live
and look at once? The _fact_ that we cannot is clear. If we watch a
friend drowning we do not note the exquisite curve made by his body as
he falls into the water, nor the play of the sunlight on the ripples as
he disappears below the surface; we should be inhuman, aesthetic fiends
if we did. And again, why? It would do our friend no harm that we should
enjoy the curves and the sunlight, provided we also threw him a rope.
But the simple fact is that we _cannot_ look at the curves and the
sunlight because our whole being is centred on acting, on saving him; we
cannot even, at the moment, fully feel our own terror and impending
loss. So again if we want to see and to feel the splendour and vigour of
a lion, or even to watch the cumbrous grace of a bear, we prefer that a
cage should intervene. The cage cuts off the need for motor actions; it
interposes the needful physical and moral distance, and we are free for
contemplation. Released from our own terrors, we see more and better,
and we feel differently. A man intent on action is like a horse in
blinkers, he goes straight forward, seeing only the road ahead.

Our brain is, indeed, it would seem, in part, an e