That clearly is the voice of the Demon once more, appealing to the same lust for an irresponsible absolute as inspires the Crocean æsthetics. And now art is to be not only independent of morals but in its essence divided altogether from human nature; and if it still aims to please, its pleasure is of a kind peculiar to itself and unrelated to the coarse fodder of life. Suppose, to take the illustration given by Señor Ortega, a notable man is lying at the point of death. His wife will be standing by his bed, a physician will be counting his pulse, while elsewhere in the house a reporter awaits the news and a painter is engaged to depict the scene. All four persons--wife, physician, reporter, painter--are intent upon the same fact, but with varying degrees of intimacy and with different kinds of interest. To the wife the event is an occasion of grief and anxiety; she is, as it were, a part of it; whereas to the artist, at the other extreme, the situation is entirely divested of human sympathy or sentiment: “his mind is set solely on the exterior, on certain lights and shadows, certain chromatic values.” And so it happens that if the natural emotions felt on such an occasion by the wife, the physician, and even to a lesser degree by the news-reporter, are what the ordinary man (the “philistine” or “bourgeois” of the older romantic jargon) regards as the real stuff of life, then art to the ordinary man is removed to a sphere of incomprehensible unreality. “An artistic object,” says Señor Ortega, “is artistic only in the measure in which it ceases to be real.” Hence, in the scene just described, the actual death-bed and the artist’s picture of it are two things “absolutely different (_completamente distintos_).” We may interest ourselves in one or the other; in one case we live with, or in, the event, in the other case we “contemplate” an object of art as such, with æsthetic pleasure perhaps, but with no human emotions. Just in so far as the picture shows any feeling for, or awakens in the beholder any response to, the significance of death, it falls below the high function of art. The tragedy of loss, the frustration of ambition, the humility of surrender, the consolations of hope, the victory of love, the sanctities of religion,--any shadow of these resting upon the canvas will detract from the purity of æsthetic pleasure. The artist and the connoisseur in the presence of death find only an occasion for certain lines and colours. And further, as our power of contemplation becomes more refined, we cease to discern (or, if we are artists, to paint) even the unreal representation of a real event; a picture will cease to depend on, or suggest, any subject whatsoever. For art is like a window through which we look out upon a garden. The ordinary man sees only the flowers and leaves beyond, and is so absorbed in these as to be quite unaware of the pane of glass, the more so as the glass is purer and clearer.