does, though it is in the highest degree functionless and gratuitous.
Nor is such by-play without consequences, some of which might
conceivably be fortunate. What is functionless is so called for being
worthless from some ideal point of view, and not conducing to the
particular life considered. But nothing real is dissociated from the
universal flux; everything--madness and all unmeaning cross-currents in
being--count in the general process and discharge somewhere, not without
effect, the substance they have drawn for a moment into their little
vortex. So our vain arts and unnecessary religions are not without real
effects and not without a certain internal vitality. When life is
profoundly disorganised it may well happen that only in detached
episodes, only in moments snatched for dreaming in, can men see the blue
or catch a glimpse of something like the ideal. In that case their
esteem for their irrelevant visions may be well grounded, and their thin
art and far-fetched religion may really constitute what is best in their
experience. In a pathetic way these poor enthusiasms may be justified,
but only because the very conception of a rational life lies entirely
beyond the horizon.

[Sidenote: Anomalous character of the irrational artist.]

It is no marvel, when art is a brief truancy from rational practice,
that the artist himself should be a vagrant, and at best, as it were, an
infant prodigy. The wings of genius serve him only for an escapade,
enabling him to skirt the perilous edge of madness and of mystical
abysses. But such an erratic workman does not deserve the name of artist
or master; he has burst convention only to break it, not to create a new
convention more in harmony with nature. His originality, though it may
astonish for a moment, will in the end be despised and will find no
thoroughfare. He will meantime be wretched himself, torn from the roots
of his being by that cruel, unmeaning inspiration; or, if too rapt to
see his own plight, he will be all the more pitied by practical men, who
cannot think it a real blessing to be lost in joys that do not
strengthen the character and yield nothing for posterity.

Art, in its nobler acceptation, is an achievement, not an indulgence. It
prepares the world in some sense to receive the soul, and the soul to
master the world; it disentangles those threads in each that can be
woven into the other. That the artist should be eccentric, homeless,
dreamful may almost