Moreover, if one would practise the art of living, he must have the artistic spirit. I do not mean the æsthetic in its[Pg 304] narrower meaning, but the spirit of the man who finds joy in his own creating of something beautiful or noble or lovely. Life, as Emerson says, must be for itself and not for a spectacle. Artists may get great pay for their work, but if they have spent their lives with their minds on the pay and not on the work, they have not been artists. It is the work, indeed the working, that counts and that is its own best reward. Nor must we defer the practice of our art. A poet or a painter or a musician does not say to himself, “I will make a million first, and then I will write poetry or paint pictures or compose music.” His art is life itself, the best of life, for the genuine artist. Money and freedom may be pleasant and useful but they are not the essence of any art, that of life any more than any other. Keats did not postpone writing his poetry until he could retire from mixing drugs and find a cottage in the country. If he had, there would have been no poetry to make his name immortal. And if anyone says of the art of life, that he will try to order his life artistically when he has another five thousand a year, or when he is vice-president instead of sales manager or when he can quit, he will never so order it at all. He does not understand and has not got it in him. He will simply take his place in the American procession with the other four million Fords of the year. If you decide that you have the courage to “be different,” if you can decide what you really want of life, then you may achieve an art of living if you have the will to see it through. And you will find, incidentally, that in place of the sheep-like flocks of country-club Joneses you will have as friends and guests a far more interesting group, that your life will have attained to a depth and a richness of experience that is[Pg 305] denied to the standardized Joneses and all their kith and kin, and that you are no longer an automaton with inhibitions but a human being expressing your own unique personality: loving, enjoying, experiencing, suffering perhaps, but alive. Your life will not be a machine-made product identical with millions of others turned out by the same firm, but a work of art which will give joy to yourself and others because it is like no other.