The divorce of the art of the cultivated classes from that of the whole community tended to deprive it of any other standards than the artist himself was content to erect. Here again the comparison with science is curiously pertinent. The world of art is in a sense a separate world, and it can be cultivated for a time without reference to the desires and emotions of the community out of which it has sprung. But the motto “Art for art’s sake” turns out in practice to be something quite different--namely, art for the artist’s sake; and art which is produced in this manner, without any external standard of performance, is frequently just an instrument for overcoming a neurosis or enabling the artist to restore his personal equilibrium. Divorced from his community, the artist was driven back upon himself: instead of seeking to create a beauty which all men might share, he devoted himself to projecting a poignant angle of his personal vision--an angle which I shall call the picturesque. The cause of this divorce I have already pointed out in the chapter on the Country House; it is with the effects of this divorce, for which the artist was not greatly to blame, that we are here concerned. This conflict between “beauty” and the “picturesque” is perhaps common to all the arts, and with sufficient factual detail I might be able to trace its effects on literature and music. For the sake of clearness and simplicity I shall confine myself to painting and sculpture, with the proviso that our conclusions will apply, by and large, to the whole field. Let me emphasize, before going any further, that I am using the terms “beauty” and the “picturesque” in quite different senses from the vague ones that are usually attached to them; and that I use them without any preliminary judgment as to their place and value in the good life. The picturesque, in the quite arbitrary sense in which the word is used here, is an abstract quality of vision, sound, or meaning which creates what we might call pure esthetic experience. In painting, the picturesque probably arose with the discovery, on the part of the leisured classes in the Country House, that it was possible to achieve rapture, a sort of esthetic trance, a complete state of beatitude, by the more or less prolonged contemplation of a pictorial subject. Up to the time of this discovery, painting was simply a branch of interior decoration; the great paintings of the Christian World served, for the public, as illustrations to that outline of history which mediæval theology provided: they had a habitat, a social destination.