VIII
Finally, art serves to liberalize life, to make it expansive and generous in spirit. This is possible because, in the first place, art is unworldly. I mean simply that the enjoyment of beauty is not {210} a part of ambition; that it does not call into play those habits of calculation and forms of skill that conduce to success in livelihood or the gaining of any of the proximate ends of organized social life. It frees the mind from its harness and turns it out to pasture. I suppose that every one has had that experience of spiritual refreshment which occasionally comes when one has gone body and soul out of doors, or when one is delivered over to the enchantment of sober and elevating music, and suddenly made aware of the better things that have been long forgotten. Such experiences are a moral inspiration. It is as though, the clamor of the world being for the moment shut out, one hears at last the voices that speak with authority. For an instant the broad sweep of truth flashes upon eyes that have been too intently watchful of affairs near at hand. The good-will can be sustained only by a mind that now and then withdraws itself from its engagements, and expands its view to the full measure of life. For the momentary inhibiting of the narrower practical impulses, and the evoking of this quiet and contemplative mood, the love of nature and the love of art are the most reliable means.
But art promotes liberality of spirit in an even more definitely moral sense. For art, like all forms of culture, and like the service of humanity, {211} provides for the highest type of social intercourse. The aesthetic interest is one of those rare interests which are common to all men without being competitive. All men require bread, but since this interest requires exclusive possession of its objects, its very commonness is a source of suspicion and enmity. Similarly all men require truth and beauty and civilization, but these objects are enhanced by the fact that all may rejoice in them without their being divided or becoming the property of any man. They bring men together without rivalry and intrigue, in a spirit of good-fellowship. "Culture," says Matthew Arnold, "is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light."
'This,' he continues, 'is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.'[20]
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Art, both in the creation and in the enjoyment of it, is thus true to the deepest motive of morality. It is a remoulding of nature to the end that all may live, and that they may live abundantly.