Now I grant at once that there is a difference between art and life, that the attitude of the painter, to return to the old illustration, is not identical with that of the wife in the house of mourning. There is in art a change, a transmutation, a something taken away and a something added. “Art,” said Goethe, “is art only because it is not nature.” And Aristotle, perhaps, had the same truth in mind in his famous theory of the purgation of the human passions. In that sense we can accept a maxim that comes from Japan: “Art lies in the shadowy frontiers between reality and unreality.”[22] The point I would make is the falseness and futility of the logical deduction that art can therefore dispense with the stuff of humanity or nature, or can weigh anchor and sail off into a shoreless sea of unreality. What has actually happened is this. Always the great creators have taken the substance of life, and, not by denying it or attempting to evade its laws, but by looking more intently below its surface, have found meanings and values that transmute it into something at once the same and different. The passions that distract the individual man with the despair of isolated impotence they have invested with a universal significance fraught with the destinies of humanity; the scenery of the material world they have infused with suggestions of an indwelling otherworld. And so by a species of symbolism, or whatever you choose to call it, they have lifted mortal life and its theatre to a higher reality which only to the contented or dust-choked dwellers in things as they are may appear as unreal. That, for instance, is precisely what Perugino has achieved in his picture of a death-scene entitled the Mystic Crucifixion, where pain and grief and the fear that clutches the individual heart in its hand of ice have been transmuted into a drama of divine redemption through suffering, while the tender burgeoning of spring thrown up against the far-off juncture of earth and sky gives hints of a mode of existence in joyous and infinite freedom. Even the lesser creators, those who in innocence of spirit have undertaken merely to reproduce what they see, may have done so with a clarity and largeness of vision capable of working a magic alchemy of which they themselves perhaps never dreamed.