out of which they can all be shared. When, for example, we listen to
the hymns of the church or read the poems of Horace, the significance
of our experience is magnified because we find the feelings of millions
there; we are in unison with a vast company living and dead. No thing
of beauty is a private possession. All artists feed on one another and
into each experience of art has gone the mind-work of the ages.

But there are two types of universality, one by exclusion, the other
by inclusion. Communists like Tolstoy demand that art express only
those feelings that are already common, the religious and moral; they
would exclude all values that have not become those of the race. But
this is to diminish the importance of art; for it is art's privilege
to make feelings common by providing a medium through which they can
be communicated rather than merely to express them after they have
become common. Understanding is more valuable when it encompasses the
things that tend to separate and distinguish men than when it is limited
to the things that unite them. There is nothing so bizarre that art
may not express it, provided it be communicable.

The life of the imagination, which is the life of art, is, moreover,
the only life that we can have in common. Sharing life can never mean
anything else than possessing the life of one another sympathetically.
Actually to lead another's life would involve possessing his body,
occupying his position, doing his work, and so destroying him. But
through the sympathetic imagination we can penetrate his life and leave
him in possession. To do this thoroughly is possible, however, only
with the life of a very few people, with intimates and friends. With
the mass, we can share only ideal things like religion or patriotism,
but these also are matters of imagination. Now art enlarges the scope
of this common life by creating a new imaginary world to which we can