make his whole attitude artistic--that is, contemplative. He is
always looking and prying and savouring, _savourant_, as he would say,
when he ought to be living. The result is that there is nothing to
_savourer_. All art springs by way of ritual out of keen emotion towards
life, and even the power to appreciate art needs this emotional reality
in the spectator. The aesthete leads at best a parasite, artistic life,
dogged always by death and corruption.

* * * * *

This brings us straight on to another question: What about Art and
Morality? Is Art immoral, or non-moral, or highly moral? Here again
public opinion is worth examining. Artists, we are told, are bad
husbands, and they do not pay their debts. Or if they become good
husbands and take to paying their debts, they take also to wallowing in
domesticity and produce bad art or none at all; they get tangled in the
machinery of practical reactions. Art, again, is apt to deal with risky
subjects. Where should we be if there were not a Censor of Plays? Many
of these instructive attitudes about artists as immoral or non-moral,
explain themselves instantly if we remember that the artist is _ipso
facto_ detached from practical life. In so far as he is an artist, for
each and every creative moment he is inevitably a bad husband, if being
a good husband means constant attention to your wife and her interests.
Spiritual creation _a deux_ is a happening so rare as to be negligible.

The remoteness of the artist, his essential inherent detachment from
motor-reaction, explains the perplexities of the normal censor. He,
being a "practical man," regards emotion and vision, feeling and ideas,
as leading to action. He does not see that art arises out of ritual and
that even ritual is one remove from practical life. In the censor's
world the spectacle of the nude leads straight to desire, so the dancer
must be draped; the problem-play leads straight to the Divorce Court,
therefore it must be censored. The normal censor apparently knows
nothing of that world where motor-reactions are cut off, that house made
without hands, whose doors are closed on desire, eternal in the heavens.
The censor is not for the moment a _persona grata_, but let us give him
his due. He acts according to his lights and these often quite
adequately represent the average darkness. A normal audience contains
many "practical" men whose standard is the same as that of the normal
c