ensor. Art--that is vision detached from practical reactions--is to
them an unknown world full of moral risks from which the artist is _qua_
artist immune.

So far we might perhaps say that art was non-moral. But the statement
would be misleading, since, as we have seen, art is in its very origin
social, and social means human and collective. Moral and social are, in
their final analysis, the same. That human, collective emotion, out of
which we have seen the choral dance arise, is in its essence moral; that
is, it unites. "Art," says Tolstoy, "has this characteristic, that it
unites people." In this conviction, as we shall later see, he
anticipates the modern movement of the Unanimists (p. 249).

But there is another, and perhaps simpler, way in which art is moral. As
already suggested, it purifies by cutting off the motor-reactions of
personal desire. An artist deeply in love with his friend's wife once
said: "If only I could paint her and get what I want from her, I could
bear it." His wish strikes a chill at first; it sounds egotistic; it has
the peculiar, instinctive, inevitable cruelty of the artist, seeing in
human nature material for his art. But it shows us the moral side of
art. The artist was a good and sensitive man; he saw the misery he had
brought and would bring to people he loved, and he saw, or rather felt,
a way of escape; he saw that through art, through vision, through
detachment, desire might be slain, and the man within him find peace. To
some natures this instinct after art is almost their sole morality. If
they find themselves intimately entangled in hate or jealousy or even
contempt, so that they are unable to see the object of their hate or
jealousy or contempt in a clear, quiet and lovely light, they are
restless, miserable, morally out of gear, and they are constrained to
fetter or slay personal desire and so find rest.

* * * * *

This aloofness, this purgation of emotion from personal passion, art has
in common with philosophy. If the philosopher will seek after truth,
there must be, says Plotinus, a "turning away" of the spirit, a
detachment. He must aim at contemplation; action, he says, is "a
weakening of contemplation." Our word _theory_, which we use in
connection with reasoning and which comes from the same Greek root as
_theatre_, means really looking fixedly at, contemplation; it is very
near in meaning to our _imagination_. But the philosopher diff