y quite useful.

MR. WENTWORTH

But good gracious! _Useful?_

JOE

Yes. Like history. To do away with the Louvre would be to destroy a part
of history. There's no good doing that. We need history--it cranks up
life--but we've got to recognize that after all it is only history, not
life itself--not art.

MR. WENTWORTH

But what _is_ art, if the Louvre _isn't_?

SILVIA

Don't you see, Mr. Wentworth? If you could only get for a moment into the
stream of experience where Joe and the others brought me! A picture is art
as long as it's alive--as long as it can give back the fresh, first-hand
impulses that were put into it. After that--when life has flowed on and
set up new impulses requiring a different expression--then a picture drops
back upon a lower level. What Joe calls _history_.

JOE

Like everything else.

MR. WENTWORTH

But you put art on the same plane as invention. An improved motor car
scraps the old model. But you can't _improve_ art!

JOE

No, certainly not. We don't try to. We just do our best. We _recover_ art.

MR. WENTWORTH

_Recover_ it?

SILVIA

Yes--discover it all over again. It gets lost, lost in hard and fast rules
or sentimentality, then a genius comes along and digs down to the buried
city--creation. Art isn't like invention. It's more like religion.

MR. WENTWORTH

There you are!

JOE

There we are! Isn't there a struggle going on all the time to free
religion, the _spirit_ of religion, from hard and fast rules and from
false emotions? It's exactly the same thing.

MR. WENTWORTH

Ah, but rules are necessary to maintain order. That's what I insist about
art. We _must_ have rules!

SILVIA

I know exactly what you mean, Mr. Wentworth. You mean that if fanatics
tore down all the churches on the street corners, and there weren't any
more Sunday morning sermons, everybody would run wild. But there again
it's the same thing as with art: the man who has the spirit of the thing
in him feels that the spirit itself is a far better control than heaps of
stones and sermons. It's all a matter of _living_. Imagine asking one of
the Apostles which church he went to!

MR. WENTWORTH

Wait! We are getting art mixed up with too much else. Didn't you say, Mr.
Carson, that pictures died when they no longer gave out impulses of
beauty?

JOE

Yes.

MR. WENTWORTH

Well! I admit there are dead pictures, too many of them, but they are the
canvasses that were still-born. The ma