But “art”? Well: one might say that this ceaseless falsification of life through the escape into Beauty becomes Art when it compels all men—or all those men who act as the interpreters of life—to look upon reality and to see there, as though it had always been there, awaiting our attention through the ages, just that one particular type of Beauty. “How strange that we could not see it before!” men will cry, after some great artist has performed a “miracle” through his passionate sensitiveness to the spirit of Tragedy.... And so, we rediscover the meaning of Art.... But I said that I had no “views”—and I immediately give myself the lie. I have views—one must, I suppose, when one deeply believes in anything. Let my genuine interest in your efforts to find a needle in this haystack of American culture-philistinism serve me as a partial buffer against your impatience with my ideas. [What do you mean by Beauty?—the idea that education puts upon the minds of people, meaning lovely, pleasing to the senses and the emotions? That isn’t Art; it is not necessarily a feature but may be an “instrument” of Art. What of real Beauty, which surpasses the spirit of joy or tragedy? _It_ may be “too keen, too poignant, too unendurable” for the mind; but the soul claims it always. The artist does not falsify or interpret life: he _creates_ with joy!—even if the joy in the creating is the surplus of his agony.—_j. h._] The Blindness of the Social Vision _Louis Puteklis, Cambridge, Mass._: When I looked on the empty pages of your September issue, two important questions arose, along with many minor ones. Not having the time to go into details I will ask one question: What is _your_ definition of art? You say: “Art for Art’s sake”; that is only a phrase. But in this world people have different understandings of art: what is beautiful for one is ugly for another. What is praised by the capitalist class with its religious atmosphere is despised by the proletarian class with its progressive atheism. What is a picture of an angel to an atheist? Such a product of an artist’s imagination, which perpetuates religious humbug, is to be condemned without hesitation. What is a poem about the Virgin worth to a class-conscious worker if his own daughter or sister is slaving in the sweat shop, is ever in all kinds of danger and temptations under this glorious capitalistic system? So we cannot say “Art for Art’s sake,” until we know what is meant by Art. Moreover, nobody fell down from heaven a master artist. We shall teach and train them _with patience_, and not with ... “scolding”....