isolation, so far he approaches egotistic madness. He cannot grow unless
he decreases; he cannot remain himself unless he ceases to be himself.

So, too, is it in civic and artistic life. The citizen who truly lives
to the State of which he is a member--the man to whom his country raises
a monument, for example--is one, always, who has _lost himself_ for his
nation, whether he has died in battle or sacrificed himself in politics
or philanthropy. And the citizen who has merely hugged his citizenship
to himself, who has enjoyed all the privileges he can get and paid
nothing for them,--least of all himself--who has, so to say, _gained the
whole world_, has simultaneously lost himself indeed and is forgotten
within a year of his death. So with the artist. The man who has made his
art serve him, who has employed it, let us say, purely for the sake of
the money he could get out of it, who has kept it within severe limits,
who has been merely prudent and orderly and restrained, this man has, in
a sense, _saved his own life_; yet simultaneously he has lost it. But
the man to whom art is a passion, to whom nothing else is comparatively
of any value, who has plunged himself in his art, has dedicated to it
his days and his nights, has sacrificed to it every power of his being
and every energy of his mind and body, this man has indeed _lost
himself_. Yet he lives in his art as the other has not, he has _saved
himself_ in a sense of which the other knows nothing; and exactly in
proportion as he has succeeded in his self-abnegation, so far has he
attained, as we say, immortality. There is not, then, one sphere of life
in which the paradox is not true. The great historical lovers in
romance, the pioneers of science, the immortals in every plane, are
precisely those that have fulfilled on lower levels the spiritual
aphorism of Jesus Christ.

(iii) Turn, then, once more to the Catholic Church and see how in the