In fact, art in its nature is a social activity, because man in his nature is a social being.  Art does not exist in isolation because man does not exist in isolation.  His very faculties are in their nature social always and whether for good or for evil.  The individual in isolation is a figment of man’s mind, and so is art in isolation.

But although art is a social activity, it is not, as Tolstoy thinks, a moral activity.  The artist does not address mankind with the object of doing them good.  It is useless to say that he ought to have that object; if he had he would not be an artist.  The aim of doing good is itself incompatible with the artistic aim.  But that is not to say that art does not do good.  It may do good all the more because the artist is not trying to do good.

But what is it that really happens when the artist addresses us, and why does he wish to address us?  To answer this, we must consider our own experience, not merely as an audience but also as artists, for we are, as Croce insists, all of us to some extent artists.  You have all no doubt been aware of some failure and dissatisfaction in those of your experiences which seem to you the highest.  Suppose, for instance, you see some extreme beauty, as of a sunset.  It leaves you sad with a feeling of your own inadequacy.  You have not been equal to it, and why?  You will say in speaking of it to others—­I wish I could tell you what I felt or what I saw, but I can’t.  That wish is itself natural and instantly stirred in you by the experience of extreme beauty.  The experience seems incomplete, because you cannot tell anyone else what you felt and saw; and you are hurt by your effort and failure to do so.

It is a fact of human nature that the experience of any beauty does arouse in us the desire to communicate our experience; and this desire is instinctive.  It is not that we wish to do good to others by communicating it.  It is simply that we wish to communicate it.  The experience itself is incomplete for us until we communicate it.  The happiness which it gives us is frustrated by our failure to communicate it.  We should be utterly happy if we could make others see what we see and feel what we feel, but we fail of happiness because we cannot.

Why?  One can only conjecture and express conjectures in dull language.  This beauty is itself a universal quality or virtue which makes particular things more real when they have it.  It speaks to the universal in us, to the everyman in us, and, speaking so, it makes us aware of the universal in all men.  We too wish to speak to that universal, we wish to find it and the more intense reality which is to be seen only where it is seen, we wish ourselves to be a part of it; and we can do that only when all other men also are a part of it.  Beauty seems to speak not merely to us but to the whole listening earth, and we would be assured that all the earth is listening to it, not to us.