By citing Mr. Yeats’ conceptions I do not mean to limit the artist to a single function--that of patterning the good life. It is quite plain that pure esthetic experience is a good in itself; and when the artist has rendered this experience in a picture, a poem, a novel, a philosophy, he has performed a unique and indispensable piece of work. Could italics keep this passage from being ignored I should employ them. What I have called the picturesque is in reality just as self-sustaining and delightful as the radiant good health which Sir Thomas More rated so highly in his Utopia. If the community went to the dogs, it would still be exuberantly self-sustaining, whilst anyone had the time or the capacity to enjoy it. What I protest against is the way in which the field of the genuine artist, during these last three hundred years, has been whittled away, so that it has become more and more a mark of the artist to concern himself solely with the narrow province of pure esthetic experience, and to protest his complete aloofness from anything that lies outside this realm. Such an attitude would have struck Euripides or Milton or Goethe or Wagner as undignified and stupid, I am sure, because art is as large as life, and it does not gain in vigor or intensity by reducing its scope to that of the puppet stage. The point is that there is an artistic function to be performed in the community, for the community, as well as in the world of art, for those who are lifted up to art. “Nations, races, and individual men,” as Mr. Yeats says again, “are unified by an image, or a bundle of related images, symbolical and provocative of the state of mind that is of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity.” Whether these images shall be provided by patrioteers, hack editors, politicians, advertising men and commercialized “artists” or whether they shall be created by genuine playwrights and poets and philosophers is an important question. The function of creating these images is an artistic one, and the artist who evades his responsibility is making life for himself and his kind more difficult, since in the long run a community whose sacred literature is written by Colonel Diver and Scadder and Jefferson Brick--the great heroes of Civilization as the star of empire westward makes its way--will make even the most solitary cultivation of the arts a thorny and difficult task.