There are many means by which this problem is solved. In the first
place, the mere fact that art is representation and not reality does
much toward overcoming any feelings of moral or physical repugnance
we might have toward the objects represented. These feelings exist for
the sake of action; hence, when action is impossible--and we cannot
act on the unreal--although they may still persist, they become less
strong. Toward the merely imaginary, the practical and moral attitudes,
which towards the real would lead to condemnation and withdrawal, lose
their relevance and tend to disappear. That is one of the advantages
of art over the more immediate perception of life. It is difficult to
take a purely aesthetic attitude towards all of life, to seek only to
get into sympathetic contact with it for the sake of an inner
realization of what it is; much of it touches us too closely on the
side of our practical and moral interests. A certain man, for example,
does not belong to our set, or his ways are so bohemian that it would
imperil our social position or the safety of our souls to get acquainted
with him; so we reject him and cast him into the outer darkness of our
disapproval--or he rejects us. Such a person, we feel, is to be avoided
or haply, if we be saints, to be saved from himself; but not to be
accepted and understood. And even if we succeed in freeing ourselves
from the moral point of view, we are still preoccupied with the
practical, if the man happens to interest us commercially; we have not
the time nor the desire to see his nature as a whole. Not so in art.
As a character in a novel, a man cannot be employed; nor can it be a
hazard to keep company with him; and his soul is surely beyond our
saving; the only thing left for us to do is to sympathize with and try
to understand him, to enter into communion with his spirit. By freeing
life from the practical and moral, art gives the imagination full sway.
This, to be sure, is only a negative force working in the direction
of beauty, yet is important none the less because it enables the more