But why should we want art at all?  I hope I have answered that question incidentally.  It is so that we may have life more abundantly; for we can have life more abundantly only when we are in communication with each other, mind flowing into mind, the universal expressing itself in and through all of us.  We all more or less blindly desire this communication, but we seldom know why we desire it or even what exactly it is we desire.  We make the strangest, clumsiest efforts to communicate with each other—­I am making one now—­and we are constantly inhibited by false shame from real communication.  We are afraid to be serious with each other, afraid of beauty, of the universal, when we see it.  On this point I will tell a little story from Mr. Kirk’s Study of Silent Minds.  At a concert behind the front, an audience of soldiers had listened to the ordinary items, a performance, as Mr. Kirk says, ’clean, bright, and amusing’, which means of course silly and ugly.  Then the orchestra played the introduction to the Keys of Heaven, and a gunner remarked—­’Sounds like a bloody hymn.’  That was his fear of beauty, his false shame.  But when the Keys of Heaven was ended, the whole audience, including the gunner, gave a sigh of content; and after that they went to hear it time after time.  Well, the beauty of that song, and of all art, is the ‘Key of Heaven’ itself.  For Heaven is a state of being of which we all dream, however dully, in which all have the power of communication with each other; in which all are aware of the universal, possessed by it and a part of it, all members of one body, all notes in one tune, and therefore all the more intensely themselves, for a note is itself, finds itself, only in a tune; otherwise it is mere nonsense.

Of course if you are to believe this, you must believe in the existence of a universal, independent of yourself, yet also in you and in all men.  You must believe that beauty exists as a virtue, a quality, a relation of things, and that it is possible for you also to produce that virtue, to live in that relation.  But no one can prove that to you.  The only way to believe it is to see beauty with intensity and to make the effort of communication in some form or other.

Tolstoy believes that the very word beauty is a useless one because, he says, all efforts to define beauty are vain.  But that is true of the word life, yet we have to use the word because life exists.  And all explanations of art which refuse to believe in beauty as a reality independent of us, yet one of which we may become a part, do fall into incredible nonsense.  We are told that art is play; the only answer to which is that it isn’t.  Others say that it is an expression of the sexual instinct, which has forgotten itself.  They discover that in some savage tribe the male beats a tom-tom to attract the female; and they conclude that Beethoven’s Choral Symphony is only a more elaborate tom-tom beaten