"No, it doesn't; there's as much art that depends upon tradition as there is religion."
"No," replied Rangely. "In so far as art gets its inspiration from fossil tradition it is lifeless and indeed ceases to be art. Religion presupposes something exterior; while art is the outgrowth of the individual's own mind, the best expression of his inner strength."
"Religion," Herman threw in, "demands the existence of the unknown; art only the existence of the inexpressible."
"Yet art devotes itself to expression."
"Yes, but more to suggesting. It phrases the possible so as to suggest that which is above and beyond expression, yet toward which it helps the emotions and the imagination. I think a man's soul a matter of very little moment as compared to his imagination, and it is because art ministers to the latter that I place it above religion."
The talk was diverted here by some laughing remark which led on to a train of gay badinage. The German tried to bring the conversation back to serious levels, but in vain.
"Oh, what fustian we've given ourselves up to to-night," laughed
Rangely.
"It amuses me to hear you fellows discuss religion," Tom Bently observed. "You wander round the subject as aimlessly as the young women in the first half hour of a Harvard symphony concert."
"Never you mind, Bently," rejoined Ainsworth. "You are sure of coming out all right; the gods are bound to protect humbug, for on it depends their own existence."
They drifted in little groups to different parts of the studio, admiring this or that bit of grace or beauty. Then the German, who was a professional musician, tuned an old mandolin with which a Venetian lover some star-lit night centuries ago, may have serenaded his loved one from his gondola; and to its trembling accompaniment sang a quaint chansonette, his Teutonic accent making havoc among its liquid Italian syllables. Then Rangely possessed himself of a strange African instrument, a crooked gourd, hollowed and strung with twisted tree fibers, and joined to the notes of the mandolin, its weird, cicada-like harshness. The duet moved Bently to clear a miscellaneous collection of articles from the lid of a spinnet of the time of Louis XIV., upon which be-powdered and be-patched dames, long forgotten, had strummed pretty little tinkling tunes, while all about them other marionette-like ladies and gallants played at little tinkling loves, as pretty and as empty.