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Artists, it is often said, and usually felt, are so unpractical.  They are always late for dinner, they forget to post their letters and to return the books or even money that is lent them.  Art is to most people’s minds a sort of luxury, not a necessity.  In but recently bygone days music, drawing, and dancing were no part of a training for ordinary life, they were taught at school as “accomplishments,” paid for as “extras.”  Poets on their side equally used to contrast art and life, as though they were things essentially distinct.

    “Art is long, and Time is fleeting.”

Now commonplaces such as these, being unconscious utterances of the collective mind, usually contain much truth, and are well worth weighing.  Art, we shall show later, is profoundly connected with life; it is nowise superfluous.  But, for all that, art, both its creation and its enjoyment, is unpractical.  Thanks be to God, life is not limited to the practical.

When we say art is unpractical, we mean that art is cut loose from immediate action.  Take a simple instance.  A man—­or perhaps still better a child—­sees a plate of cherries.  Through his senses comes the stimulus of the smell of the cherries, and their bright colour urging him, luring him to eat.  He eats and is satisfied; the cycle of normal behaviour is complete; he is a man or a child of action, but he is no artist, and no art-lover.  Another man looks at the same plate of cherries.  His sight and his smell lure him and urge him to eat.  He does not eat; the cycle is not completed, and, because he does not eat, the sight of those cherries, though perhaps not the smell, is altered, purified from desire, and in some way intensified, enlarged.  If he is just a man of taste, he will take what we call an “aesthetic” pleasure in those cherries.  If he is an actual artist, he will paint not the cherries, but his vision of them, his purified emotion towards them.  He has, so to speak, come out from the chorus of actors, of cherry-eaters, and become a spectator.

I borrow, by his kind permission, a beautiful instance of what he well calls “Psychical Distance” from the writings of a psychologist.[36]

“Imagine a fog at sea:  for most people it is an experience of acute unpleasantness.  Apart from the physical annoyance and remoter forms of discomfort, such as delays, it is apt to produce feelings of peculiar anxiety, fears of invisible dangers, strains of watching and listening for distant and unlocalized signals.  The listless movements of the ship and her warning calls soon tell upon the nerves of the passengers; and that special, expectant tacit anxiety and nervousness, always associated with this experience, make a fog the dreaded terror of the sea (all the more terrifying because of its very silence and gentleness) for the expert seafarer no less than the ignorant landsman.