“_Life_ is anything that could live and die. _Art_ is peculiar; it is anything that lives and that yet you cannot imagine as dying.” “Why cannot art die? If you smash up a statue, it is as dead as a dead man.” “No, it is not. That is the difference. It is the God, or soul, we say, of the man. It always has existed, if it is a true statue.” “But cannot you say of some life that it could not die?” “No, because in that case it is the _real_ coming through. _Death_ is the one attribute that is peculiar to _life_. It is the something that it is impossible to imagine in connexion with art. Reality is entirely founded on this fact, that of _Death_. All _action_ revolves round that, and has it for motif. The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key of life.” “But what is _art_? You are talking about it as though I knew what it was!” “What is life, do you know? Well, I know what art is in the same way.” “Yes, but I ask you as a favour to define it for me. A picture is art, a living person is life. We sitting here are _life_; if we were talking on a stage we should be _art_. How would you define art?” “Well, let’s take your example. But a picture, and also the actors on a stage, are pure life. Art is merely what the picture and the stage-scene represent, and what we now, and any living person as such, only, do _not_. That is why you can say that the true statue can be smashed, and yet not die.” “Still, what _is_ it? What _is_ art?” “It is ourselves disentangled from death and accident.” “How do you know?” “I feel that is so, because I notice that that is the essential point to grasp. _Death_ is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.” Both their faces lost some of their colour, hers her white, his his yellow. They flung themselves upon each other like waves. The fuller stream came from him. “You say that the actors on the stage are pure life, yet they represent something that _we_ do not. But ‘all the world’s a stage,’ isn’t it? So how do we not also stand for that something?” “Yes, life does generally stand for that something too; but it only emerges and is visible in art.” “_Still_ I don’t know what art is!” “You ought to by this time. However, we can go further. Consider the content of what we call art. A statue is art, as you said; you are life. There is bad art and bad life. We will only consider the good. A statue, then, is a dead thing; a lump of wood or stone. Its hues and masses are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and women are the worst art of all, because there are fewer semi-dead things about them. The shell of the tortoise, the plumage of a bird, makes these animals approach nearer to art. Soft, quivering and quick flesh is as far from art as an object can be.”