Every personal soul, however "inartistic," is an artist in this sense; and every personal life thus considered is an effective or ineffective "work of art."
The primal importance of what in the narrow and restricted sense we have come to call "art" can only be fully realized when we think of such "art" as concentrating upon a definite material medium the creative energy which is for ever changing the world in the process of changing our attitude to the world.
The deadly enemy of art—the power that has succeeded, in these commercial days, in reducing art to a pastime for the leisured and wealthy—is the original inert malice of the abyss.
This inert malice assumes, directly it comes in contact with practical affairs, the form of the possessive instinct. And the attitude towards art of the "collector" or the leisured "epicurean," for whom it is merely a pleasant sensation among other sensations, is an attitude which undermines the basis of its life. The very essence of art is that it should be a thing common to all, within the reach of all, expressive of the inherent and universal nature of all. And that this is the nature of art is proved by the fact that art is the personal expression of the personal centrifugal tendency in all living souls; an expression which, when it goes far enough, becomes impersonal, because, by expressing what is common to all, it reaches the point where the particular becomes the universal.
It thus becomes manifest that the true nature of art will only be incidentally and occasionally manifested, and manifested among us with great difficulty and against obstinate resistance, until the hour comes when, to an extent as yet hardly imaginable, the centripetal tendency of the possessive instinct in the race shall have relinquished something of its malicious resistance to the outflowing force which I have named "love." And this yielding of the centripetal power to that which we call centrifugal can only take place in a condition of human society where the idea of communism has been accepted as the ideal and, in some effective measure, realized in fact.
For every work of art which exists is the rhythmic articulation, in terms of any medium, of some personal vision of life. And the more entirely "original" such a vision is, the more closely—such is the ultimate paradox of things—will it be found to approximate to a re-creation, in this particular medium, of that "eternal vision" wherein all souls have their share.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE NATURE OF LOVE
The secret of the universe, as by slow degrees it reveals itself to us, turns out to be personality. When we consider, further, the form under which personality realizes, itself, we find it to consist in the struggle of personality to grapple with the objective mystery. When, in a still further movement of analysis, we examine the nature of this struggle between the soul and the mystery which surrounds the soul, we find it complicated by the fact that the soul's encounter with this mystery reveals the existence, in the depths of the soul itself, of two conflicting emotions, the emotion of love and the emotion of malice.