n, but we seldom know why we desire it or even what exactly
it is we desire. We make the strangest, clumsiest efforts to communicate
with each other--I am making one now--and we are constantly inhibited by
false shame from real communication. We are afraid to be serious with
each other, afraid of beauty, of the universal, when we see it. On this
point I will tell a little story from Mr. Kirk's _Study of Silent
Minds_. At a concert behind the front, an audience of soldiers had
listened to the ordinary items, a performance, as Mr. Kirk says, 'clean,
bright, and amusing', which means of course silly and ugly. Then the
orchestra played the introduction to the _Keys of Heaven_, and a gunner
remarked--'Sounds like a bloody hymn.' That was his fear of beauty, his
false shame. But when the _Keys of Heaven_ was ended, the whole
audience, including the gunner, gave a sigh of content; and after that
they went to hear it time after time. Well, the beauty of that song, and
of all art, is the 'Key of Heaven' itself. For Heaven is a state of
being of which we all dream, however dully, in which all have the power
of communication with each other; in which all are aware of the
universal, possessed by it and a part of it, all members of one body,
all notes in one tune, and therefore all the more intensely themselves,
for a note is itself, finds itself, only in a tune; otherwise it is mere
nonsense.

Of course if you are to believe this, you must believe in the existence
of a universal, independent of yourself, yet also in you and in all men.
You must believe that beauty exists as a virtue, a quality, a relation
of things, and that it is possible for you also to produce that virtue,
to live in that relation. But no one can prove that to you. The only way
to believe it is to see beauty with intensity and to make the effort of
communication in some form or other.

Tolstoy believes that the very word beauty is a useless one because, he
says, all efforts to define beauty are vain. But that is true of the
word life, yet we have to use the word because life exists. And all
explanations of art which refuse to believe in beauty as a reality
independent of us, yet one of which we may become a part, do fall into
incredible nonsense. We are told that art is play; the only answer to
which is that it isn't. Others say that it is an expression of the
sexual instinct, which has forgotten itself. They discover that in some
savage tribe the male beats a