LAURUS NOBILIS

BY

VERNON LEE

CONTENTS

 The Use of Beauty "Nisi Citharam" Higher Harmonies Beauty and Sanity The Art and the Country Art and Usefulness Wasteful Pleasures

LAURUS NOBILIS. 

CHAPTERS ON ART AND LIFE. 

 TO ANGELICA RASPONI DALLE TESTE FROM HER GRATEFUL OLD FRIEND AND NEIGHBOUR VERNON LEE. 1885-1908. 

 Die Realität der Dinge ist der Dinge Werk; der Schein der Dinge ist der Menschen Werk; und ein Gemüt, das sich am Scheine weidet, ergötzt sich schon nicht mehr an dem, was es empfängt, sondern an dem, was es tut. SCHILLER, _Briefe über Ästhetik_. 

LAURUS NOBILIS. 

THE USE OF BEAUTY. 

I. 

One afternoon, in Rome, on the way back from the Aventine, theroad-mender climbed onto the tram as it trotted slowly along, andfastened to its front, alongside of the place of the driver, a boughof budding bay. 

Might one not search long for a better symbol of what we may all do byour life? Bleakness, wind, squalid streets, a car full ofheterogeneous people, some very dull, most very common; a laboriousjog-trot all the way. But to redeem it all with the pleasantness ofbeauty and the charm of significance, this laurel branch. 

II. 

Our language does not possess any single word wherewith to sum up thevarious categories of things (made by nature or made by man, intendedsolely for the purpose of subserving by mere coincidence) whichminister to our organic and many-sided æsthetic instincts: the thingsaffecting us in that absolutely special, unmistakable, and hithertomysterious manner expressed in our finding them _beautiful_. It is ofthe part which such things--whether actually present or merelyshadowed in our mind--can play in our life; and of the influence ofthe instinct for beauty on the other instincts making up our nature, that I would treat in these pages. And for this reason I have beenglad to accept from the hands of chance, and of that road-mender ofthe tram-way, the bay laurel as a symbol of what we have no word toexpress: the aggregate of all art, all poetry, and particularly of allpoetic and artistic vision and emotion. 

For the Bay Laurel--_Laurus Nobilis_ of botanists--happens to be notmerely the evergreen, unfading plant into which Apollo metamorphosed, while pursuing, the maiden whom he loved, even as the poet, the artistturns into immortal shapes his own quite personal and transient moods, or as the fairest realities, nobly sought, are transformed, madeevergreen and restoratively fragrant for all time in our memory andfancy. It is a plant of noblest utility, averting, as the ancientsthought, lightning from the dwellings it surrounded, even asdisinterested love for beauty averts from our minds the dangers whichfall on the vain and the covetous; and curing many aches and fevers, even as the contemplation of beauty refreshes and invigorates ourspirit. Indeed, we seem to be reading a description no longer of thevirtues of the bay laurel, but of the _virtues_ of all beautifulsights and sounds, of all beautiful thoughts and emotions, in readingthe following quaint and charming words of an old herbal:--

 "The bay leaves are of as necessary use as any other in garden or orchard, for they serve both for pleasure and profit, both for ornament and use, both for honest civil uses and for physic; yea, both for the sick and for the sound, both for the living and for the dead. The bay serveth to adorn the house of God as well as of man, to procure warmth, comfort, and strength to the limbs of men and women;. .. To season vessels wherein are preserved our meats as well as our drinks; to crown or encircle as a garland the heads of the living, and to stick and deck forth the bodies of the dead; so that, from the cradle to the grave we have still use of it, we have still need of it. "

III. 

Before beginning to expound the virtues of Beauty, let me, however, insist that these all depend upon the simple and mysterious factthat--well, that the Beautiful _is_ the Beautiful. In our discussion ofwhat the Bay Laurel symbolises, let us keep clear in our memory thelovely shape of the sacred tree, and the noble places in which we haveseen it. 

There are bay twigs, gathered together in bronze sheaves, in the greatgarland surrounding Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise. There are twointerlaced branches of bay, crisp-edged and slender, carved in finelow relief inside the marble chariot in the Vatican. There is afan-shaped growth of Apollo's Laurel behind that Venetian portrait ofa poet, which was formerly called Ariosto by Titian. And, mostsuggestive of all, there are the Mycenaean bay leaves of beaten gold, so incredibly thin one might imagine them to be the withered crown ofa nameless singer in a forgotten tongue, grown brittle through threethousand years and more. 

Each of such presentments, embodying with loving skill some feature ofthe plant, enhances by association the charm of its reality, accompanying the delight of real bay-trees and bay leaves withinextricable harmonics, vague recollections of the delight of bronze, of delicately cut marble, of marvellously beaten gold, of deepVenetian crimson and black and auburn. 

But best of all, most satisfying and significant, is the remembranceof the bay-trees themselves. They greatly affect the troughs ofwatercourses, among whose rocks and embanked masonry they love tostrike their roots. In such a stream trough, on a spur of the Hill ofFiesole, grow the most beautiful poet's laurels I can think of. Theplace is one of those hollowings out of a hillside which, revealinghow high they lie only by the sky-lines of distant hills, always feelso pleasantly remote. And the peace and austerity of this littlevalley are heightened by the dove-cot of a farm invisible in theolive-yards, and looking like a hermitage's belfry. The olives arescant and wan in the fields all round, with here and there the blossomof an almond; the oak woods, of faint wintry copper-rose, encroachabove; and in the grassy space lying open to the sky, the mountainbrook is dyked into a weir, whence the crystalline white water leapsinto a chain of shady pools. And there, on the brink of that weir, andall along that stream's shallow upper course among grass and brakes ofreeds, are the bay-trees I speak of: groups of three or four atintervals, each a sheaf of smooth tapering boles, tufted high up withevergreen leaves, sparse bunches whose outermost leaves are sharplyprinted like lance-heads against the sky. Most modest little trees, with their scant berries and rare pale buds; not trees at all, I fancysome people saying. Yet of more consequence, somehow, in their calmdisregard of wind, their cheerful, resolute soaring, than any othertrees for miles; masters of that little valley, of its rocks, pools, and overhanging foliage; sovereign brothers and rustic demi-gods forwhom the violets scent the air among the withered grass in March, and, in May, the nightingales sing through the quivering star night. 

Of all southern trees, most simple and aspiring; and certainly mostperfect among evergreens, with their straight, faintly carminedshoots, their pliable strong leaves so subtly rippled at the edge, andtheir clean, dry fragrance; delicate, austere, alert, serene; such arethe bay-trees of Apollo. 

IV. 

I have gladly accepted, from the hands of that tram-way road-mender, the Bay Laurel--_Laurus Nobilis_--for a symbol of all art, all poetry, and all poetic and artistic vision and emotion. It has summed up, better than words could do, what the old Herbals call the _virtues_, of all beautiful things and beautiful thoughts. And it has suggested, I hope, the contents of the following notes; the nature of my attemptto trace the influence which art should have on life. 

V. 

Beauty, save by a metaphorical application of the word, is not in theleast the same thing as Goodness, any more than beauty (despiteKeats' famous assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These threeobjects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which expressthemselves in their pursuit--energies vital, primordial, and necessaryeven to man's physical survival--have all been evolved under the samestress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; andhave therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth, been working perpetually in concert, meeting, crossing, andstrengthening one another, until they have become indissolubly woventogether by a number of great and organic coincidences. 

It is these coincidences which all higher philosophy, from Platodownwards, has strained for ever to expound. It is these coincidences, which all religion and all poetry have taken for granted. And to threeof these it is that I desire to call attention, persuaded as I am thatthe scientific progress of our day will make short work of all thespurious æstheticism and all the shortsighted utilitarianism whichhave cast doubts upon the intimate and vital connection between beautyand every other noble object of our living. 

The three coincidences I have chosen are: that between development ofthe æsthetic faculties and the development of the altruisticinstincts; that between development of a sense of æsthetic harmony anda sense of the higher harmonies of universal life; and, beforeeverything else, the coincidence between the preference for æstheticpleasures and the nobler growth of the individual. 

VI. 

The particular emotion produced in us by such things as are beautiful, works of art or of nature, recollections and thoughts as well assights and sounds, the emotion of æsthetic pleasure, has beenrecognised ever since the beginning of time as of a mysteriouslyennobling quality. All philosophers have told us that; and thereligious instinct of all mankind has practically proclaimed it, byemploying for the worship of the highest powers, nay, by employing forthe mere designation of the godhead, beautiful sights, and sounds, andwords by which beautiful sights and sounds are suggested. Nay, therehas always lurked in men's minds, and expressed itself in themetaphors of men's speech, an intuition that the Beautiful is in somemanner one of the primordial and, so to speak, cosmic powers of theworld. The theories of various schools of mental science, and thepractice of various schools of art, the practice particularly of thepersons styled by themselves æsthetes and by others decadents, haveindeed attempted to reduce man's relations with the great world-powerBeauty to mere intellectual dilettantism or sensual superfineness. Butthe general intuition has not been shaken, the intuition whichrecognised in Beauty a superhuman, and, in that sense, a truly divinepower. And now it must become evident that the methods of modernpsychology, of the great new science of body and soul, are beginningto explain the reasonableness of this intuition, or, at all events, toshow very plainly in what direction we must look for the explanationof it. This much can already be asserted, and can be indicated evento those least versed in recent psychological study, to wit, that thepower of Beauty, the essential power therefore of art, is due to therelations of certain visible and audible forms with the chief mentaland vital functions of all human beings; relations establishedthroughout the whole process of human and, perhaps, even of animal, evolution; relations seated in the depths of our activities, butradiating upwards even like our vague, organic sense of comfort anddiscomfort; and permeating, even like our obscure relations withatmospheric conditions, into our highest and clearest consciousness, colouring and altering the whole groundwork of our thoughts andfeelings. 

Such is the primordial, and, in a sense, the cosmic power of theBeautiful; a power whose very growth, whose constantly more complexnature proclaims its necessary and beneficial action in humanevolution. It is the power of making human beings live, for themoment, in a more organically vigorous and harmonious fashion, asmountain air or sea-wind makes them live; but with the difference thatit is not merely the bodily, but very essentially the spiritual life, the life of thought and emotion, which is thus raised to unusualharmony and vigour. I may illustrate this matter by a very individualinstance, which will bring to the memory of each of my readers thevivifying power of some beautiful sight or sound or beautifuldescription. I was seated working by my window, depressed by theLondon outlook of narrow grey sky, endless grey roofs, and rusty elmtops, when I became conscious of a certain increase of vitality, almost as if I had drunk a glass of wine, because a band somewhereoutside had begun to play. After various indifferent pieces, it begana tune, by Handel or in Handel's style, of which I have never knownthe name, calling it for myself the _Te Deum_ Tune. And then it seemedas if my soul, and according to the sensations, in a certain degree mybody even, were caught up on those notes, and were striking out as ifswimming in a great breezy sea; or as if it had put forth wings andrisen into a great free space of air. And, noticing my feelings, Iseemed to be conscious that those notes were being played _on me_, myfibres becoming the strings; so that as the notes moved and soared andswelled and radiated like stars and suns, I also, being identifiedwith the sound, having become apparently the sound itself, must needsmove and soar with them. 

We can all recollect a dozen instances when architecture, music, painting, or some sudden sight of sea or mountain, have thus affectedus; and all poetry, particularly all great lyric poetry, Goethe's, Shelley's, Wordsworth's, and, above all, Browning's, is full of therecord of such experience. 

I have said that the difference between this æsthetic heightening ofour vitality (and this that I have been describing is, I pray you toobserve, the æsthetic phenomenon _par excellence_), and such otherheightening of vitality as we experience from going into fresh air andsunshine or taking fortifying food, the difference between theæsthetic and the mere physiological pleasurable excitement consistsherein, that in the case of beauty, it is not merely our physical butour spiritual life which is suddenly rendered more vigorous. We do notmerely breathe better and digest better, though that is no smallgain, but we seem to understand better. Under the vitalising touch ofthe Beautiful, our consciousness seems filled with the affirmation ofwhat life is, what is worth being, what among our many thoughts andacts and feelings are real and organic and important, what among themany possible moods is the real, eternal _ourself_. 

Such are the great forces of Nature gathered up in what we call the_æsthetic phenomenon_, and it is these forces of Nature which, stolenfrom heaven by the man of genius or the nation of genius, and weldedtogether in music, or architecture, in the arts of visible design orof written thoughts, give to the great work of art its power toquicken the life of our soul. 

VII. 

I hope I have been able to indicate how, by its essential nature, bythe primordial power it embodies, all Beauty, and particularly Beautyin art, tends to fortify and refine the spiritual life of theindividual. 

But this is only half of the question, for, in order to get the fullbenefit of beautiful things and beautiful thoughts, to obtain in thehighest potency those potent æsthetic emotions, the individual mustundergo a course of self-training, of self-initiation, which in itsturn elicits and improves some of the highest qualities of his soul. Nay, as every great writer on art has felt, from Plato to Ruskin, butnone has expressed as clearly as Mr. Pater, in all true æsthetictraining there must needs enter an ethical element, almost an asceticone. 

The greatest art bestows pleasure just in proportion as people arecapable of buying that pleasure at the price of attention, intelligence, and reverent sympathy. For great art is such as isrichly endowed, full of variety, subtlety, and suggestiveness; full ofdelightfulness enough for a lifetime, the lifetime of generations andgenerations of men; great art is to its true lovers like Cleopatra toAntony--"age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety. "Indeed, when it is the greatest art of all, the art produced by themarvellous artist, the most gifted race, and the longest centuries, wefind ourselves in presence of something which, like Nature itself, contains more beauty, suggests more thought, works more miracles thananyone of us has faculties to appreciate fully. So that, in some ofTitian's pictures and Michael Angelo's frescoes, the great Greeksculptures, certain cantos of Dante and plays of Shakespeare, fuguesof Bach, scenes of Mozart and quartets of Beethoven, we can each ofus, looking our closest, feeling our uttermost, see and feel perhapsbut a trifling portion of what there is to be seen and felt, leavingother sides, other perfections, to be appreciated by our neighbours. Till it comes to pass that we find different persons very differentlydelighted by the same masterpiece, and accounting most discrepantlyfor their delight in it. 

Now such pleasure as this requires not merely a vast amount ofactivity on our part, since all pleasure, even the lowest, is theexpression of an activity; it requires a vast amount of attention, ofintelligence, of what, in races or in individuals, means specialtraining. 

VIII. 

There is a sad confusion in men's minds on the very essential subjectof pleasure. We tend, most of us, to oppose the idea of pleasure tothe idea of work, effort, strenuousness, patience; and, therefore, recognise as pleasures only those which cost none of these things, oras little as possible; pleasures which, instead of being producedthrough our will and act, impose themselves upon us from outside. Inall art--for art stands halfway between the sensual and emotionalexperiences and the experiences of the mere reasoning intellect--inall art there is necessarily an element which thus imposes itself uponus from without, an element which takes and catches us: colour, strangeness of outline, sentimental or terrible quality, rhythmexciting the muscles, or clang which tickles the ear. But the artwhich thus takes and catches our attention the most easily, askingnothing in return, or next to nothing, is also the poorest art: theoleograph, the pretty woman in the fashion plate, the caricature, therepresentation of some domestic or harrowing scene, children being putto bed, babes in the wood, railway accidents, etc. ; or again, dance ormarch music, and the equivalents of all this in verse. It catches yourattention, instead of your attention conquering it; but it speedilyceases to interest, gives you nothing more, cloys, or comes to a deadstop. It resembles thus far mere sensual pleasure, a savoury dish, aglass of good wine, an excellent cigar, a warm bed, which imposethemselves on the nerves without expenditure of attention; with theresult, of course, that little or nothing remains, a sensualimpression dying, so to speak, childless, a barren, disconnectedthing, without place in the memory, unmarried as it is to the memory'sclients, thought and human feeling. 

If so many people prefer poor art to great, 'tis because they refuseto give, through inability or unwillingness, as much of their soulas great art requires for its enjoyment. And it is noticeable thatbusy men, coming to art for pleasure when they are too weary forlooking, listening, or thinking, so often prefer the sensation-novel, the music-hall song, and such painting as is but a costlier kind ofoleograph; treating all other art as humbug, and art in general as atrifle wherewith to wile away a lazy moment, a trifle about whichevery man _can know what he likes best_. 

Thus it is that great art makes, by coincidence, the same demands asnoble thinking and acting. For, even as all noble sports developmuscle, develop eye, skill, quickness and pluck in bodily movement, qualities which are valuable also in the practical business of life;so also the appreciation of noble kinds of art implies the acquisitionof habits of accuracy, of patience, of respectfulness, and suspensionof judgment, of preference of future good over present, of harmony andclearness, of sympathy (when we come to literary art), judgment andkindly fairness, which are all of them useful to our neighbours andourselves in the many contingencies and obscurities of real life. Nowthis is not so with the pleasures of the senses: the pleasures of thesenses do not increase by sharing, and sometimes cannot be shared atall; they are, moreover, evanescent, leaving us no richer; above all, they cultivate in ourselves qualities useful only for that particularenjoyment. Thus, a highly discriminating palate may have saved thelife of animals and savages, but what can its subtleness do nowadaysbeyond making us into gormandisers and winebibbers, or, at best, intocooks and tasters for the service of gormandising and winebibbingpersons?

IX. 

Delight in beautiful things and in beautiful thoughts requires, therefore, a considerable exercise of the will and the attention, suchas is not demanded by our lower enjoyments. Indeed, it is probablythis absence of moral and intellectual effort which recommends suchlower kinds of pleasure to a large number of persons. I have saidlower _kinds_ of pleasure, because there are other enjoyments besidesthose of the senses which entail no moral improvement in ourselves:the enjoyments connected with vanity and greed. We should not--even ifany of us could be sure of being impeccable on these points--we shouldnot be too hard on the persons and the classes of persons who areconscious of no other kind of enjoyment. They are not necessarilybase, not necessarily sensual or vain, because they care only forbodily indulgence, for notice and gain. They are very likely not base, but only apathetic, slothful, or very tired. The noble sport, theintellectual problem, the great work of art, the divinely beautifuleffect in Nature, require that one should _give oneself_; theFrench-cooked dinner as much as the pot of beer; the game of chance, whether with clean cards at a club or with greasy ones in a tap-room;the outdoing of one's neighbours, whether by the ragged heroes of Zolaor the well-groomed heroes of Balzac, require no such coming forwardof the soul: they _take_ us, without any need for our givingourselves. Hence, as I have just said, the preference for them doesnot imply original baseness, but only lack of higher energy. We canjudge of the condition of those who can taste no other pleasures byremembering what the best of us are when we are tired or ill: vaguelycraving for interests, sensations, emotions, variety, but quite unableto procure them through our own effort, and longing for them to cometo us from without. Now, in our still very badly organised world, anenormous number of people are condemned by the tyranny of poverty orthe tyranny of fashion, to be, when the day's work or the day'sbusiness is done, in just such a condition of fatigue and languor, ofcraving, therefore, for the baser kinds of pleasure. We all recognisethat this is the case with what we call _poor people_, and that thisis why poor people are apt to prefer the public-house to the picturegallery or the concert-room. It would be greatly to the purpose werewe to acknowledge that it is largely the case with the rich, and thatfor that reason the rich are apt to take more pleasure in ostentatiousdisplay of their properties than in contemplation of such beauty as isaccessible to all men. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of thebarbarous condition we are pleased to call _civilisation_, that somany rich men--thousands daily--are systematically toiling and moilingtill they are unable to enjoy any pleasure which requires vigour ofmind and attention, rendering themselves impotent, from sheer fatigue, to enjoy the delights which life gives generously to all those whofervently seek them. And what for? Largely for the sake of thosepleasures which can be had only for money, but which can be enjoyedwithout using one's soul. 

X. 

[PARENTHETICAL]

"And these, you see, " I said, "are bay-trees, the laurels they usedthe leaves of to . .. "

I was going to say "to crown poets, " but I left my sentence inmid-air, because of course he knew that as well as I. 

"Precisely, " he answered with intelligent interest--"I have noticedthat the leaves are sometimes put in sardine boxes. "

Soon after this conversation I discovered the curious circumstancethat one of the greatest of peoples and perhaps the most favoured byApollo, calls Laurus Nobilis "Laurier-Sauce. " The name is French; thesymbol, alas, of universal application. 

This paragraph X. Had been intended to deal with "Art as it isunderstood by persons of fashion and eminent men of business. "

XI. 

Thus it is that real æsthetic keenness--and æsthetic keenness, as Ishall show you in my next chapter, means appreciating beauty, notcollecting beautiful properties--thus it is that all æsthetic keennessimplies a development of the qualities of patience, attention, reverence, and of that vigour of soul which is not called forth, butrather impaired, by the coarser enjoyments of the senses and ofvanity. So far, therefore, we have seen that the capacity for æstheticpleasure is allied to a certain nobility in the individual. I think Ican show that the preference for æsthetic pleasure tends also to ahappier relation between the individual and his fellows. 

But the cultivation of our æsthetic pleasures does not merelynecessitate our improvement in certain very essential moral qualities. It implies as much, in a way, as the cultivation of the intellect andthe sympathies, that we should live chiefly in the spirit, in whichalone, as philosophers and mystics have rightly understood, there issafety from the worst miseries and room for the most completehappiness. Only, we shall learn from the study of our æstheticpleasures that while the stoics and mystics have been right inaffirming that the spirit only can give the highest good, they havebeen fatally wrong in the reason they gave for their preference. Andwe may learn from our æsthetic experiences that the spirit is useful, not in detaching us from the enjoyable things of life, but, on thecontrary, in giving us their consummate possession. The spirit--one ofwhose most precious capacities is that it enables us to print off alloutside things on to ourselves, to store moods and emotions, torecombine and reinforce past impressions into present ones--the spiritputs pleasure more into our own keeping, making it more independent oftime and place, of circumstances, and, what is equally important, independent of other people's strivings after pleasure, by which ourown, while they clash and hamper, are so often impeded. 

XII. 

For our intimate commerce with beautiful things and beautiful thoughtsdoes not exist only, or even chiefly, at the moment of seeing, orhearing, or reading; nay, if the beautiful touched us only at suchseparate and special moments, the beautiful would play but aninsignificant part in our existence. 

As a fact, those moments represent very often only the act of_storage_, or not much more. Our real æsthetic life is in ourselves, often isolated from the beautiful words, objects, or sounds; sometimesalmost unconscious; permeating the whole rest of life in certainhighly æsthetic individuals, and, however mixed with other activities, as constant as the life of the intellect and sympathies; nay, asconstant as the life of assimilation and motion. We can live off abeautiful object, we can live by its means, even when its visible oraudible image is partially, nay, sometimes wholly, obliterated; forthe emotional condition can survive the image and be awakened at themere name, awakened sufficiently to heighten the emotion caused byother images of beauty. We can sometimes feel, so to speak, thespiritual companionship and comfort of a work of art, or of a scene innature, nay, almost its particular caress to our whole being, when thework of art or the scene has grown faint in our memory, but theemotion it awakened has kept warm. 

Now this possibility of storing for later use, of increasing bycombination, the impressions of beautiful things, makes art--and byart I mean all æsthetic activity, whether in the professed artist whocreates or the unconscious artist who assimilates--the type of suchpleasures as are within our own keeping, and makes the æsthetic lifetypical also of that life of the spirit in which alone we can realiseany kind of human freedom. We shall all of us meet with examplesthereof if we seek through our consciousness. That such thingsexisted was made clear to me during a weary period of illness, forwhich I shall always be grateful, since it taught me, in those monthsof incapacity for enjoyment, that there is a safe kind of pleasure, _the pleasure we can defer_. I spent part of that time at Tangier, surrounded by everything which could delight me, and in none of whichI took any real delight. I did not enjoy Tangier at the time, but Ihave enjoyed Tangier ever since, on the principle of the bee eatingits honey months after making it. The reality of Tangier, I mean thereality of my presence there, and the state of my nerves, were not inthe relation of enjoyment. But how often has not the image of Tangier, the remembrance of what I saw and did there, returned and haunted mein the most enjoyable fashion. 

After all, is it not often the case with pictures, statues, journeys, and the reading of books? The weariness entailed, the mere continuityof looking or attending, quite apart from tiresome accompanyingcircumstances, make the apparently real act, what we expect to be theact of enjoyment, quite illusory; like Coleridge, "we see, not _feel_, how beautiful things are. " Later on, all odious accompanyingcircumstances are utterly forgotten, eliminated, and the weariness isgone: we enjoy not merely unhampered by accidents, but in the very wayour heart desires. For we can choose--our mood unconsciously does itfor us--the right moment and right accessories for consuming some ofour stored delights; moreover, we can add what condiments and makewhat mixtures suit us best at that moment. We draw not merely upon onepast reality, making its essentials present, but upon dozens. Torevert to Tangier (whose experience first brought these possibilitiesclearly before me), I find I enjoy it in connection with Venice, themixture having a special roundness of tone or flavour. Similarly, Ionce heard Bach's _Magnificat_, with St. Mark's of Venice as abackground in my imagination. Again, certain moonlight songs ofSchumann have blended wonderfully with remembrances of old Italianvillas. King Solomon, in all his ships, could not have carried thethings which I can draw, in less than a second, from one tinyconvolution of my brain, from one corner of my mind. No wizard thatever lived had spells which could evoke such kingdoms and worlds asanyone of us can conjure up with certain words: Greece, the MiddleAges, Orpheus, Robin Hood, Mary Stuart, Ancient Rome, the Far East. 

XIII. 

And here, as fit illustration of these beneficent powers, which canfree us from a life where we stifle and raise us into a life where wecan breathe and grow, let me record my gratitude to a certain younggoat, which, on one occasion, turned what might have been a detestablehour into a pleasant one. 

The goat, or rather kid, a charming gazelle-like creature, withbudding horns and broad, hard forehead, was one of my fourteen fellowpassengers in a third-class carriage on a certain bank holidaySaturday. Riding and standing in such crowded misery had cast ageneral gloom over all the holiday makers; they seemed to haveforgotten the coming outing in sullen hatred of all their neighbours;and I confess that I too began to wonder whether Bank Holiday was analtogether delightful institution. But the goat had no such doubts. Leaning against the boy who was taking it holiday-making, it triedvery gently to climb and butt, and to play with its sulky fellowtravellers. And as it did so it seemed to radiate a sort of poetry oneverything: vague impressions of rocks, woods, hedges, the Alps, Italy, and Greece; mythology, of course, and that amusement of "joueravec des chèvres apprivoisées, " which that great charmer M. Renan hasattributed to his charming Greek people. Now, as I realised the joy ofthe goat on finding itself among the beech woods and short grass ofthe Hertfordshire hills, I began also to see my other fellowtravellers no longer as surly people resenting each other's presence, but as happy human beings admitted once more to the pleasant things oflife. The goat had quite put me in conceit with bank holiday. When itgot out of the train at Berkhampstead, the emptier carriage seemedsuddenly more crowded, and my fellow travellers more discontented. ButI remained quite pleased, and when I had alighted, found that insteadof a horrible journey, I could remember only a rather exquisite littleadventure. That beneficent goat had acted as Pegasus; and on its smallback my spirit had ridden to the places it loves. 

In this fashion does the true æsthete tend to prefer, even like theausterest moralist, the delights which, being of the spirit, are mostindependent of circumstances and most in the individual's own keeping. 

XIV. 

It was Mr. Pater who first pointed out how the habit of æstheticenjoyment makes the epicurean into an ascetic. He builds as little aspossible on the things of the senses and the moment, knowing howlittle, in comparison, we have either in our power. For, even if thedesired object, person, or circumstance comes, how often does it notcome at the wrong hour! In this world, which mankind fits still sobadly, the wish and its fulfilling are rarely in unison, rarely inharmony, but follow each other, most often, like vibrations ofdifferent instruments, at intervals which can only jar. The _n'est-ceque cela_, the inability to enjoy, of successful ambition andfavoured, passionate love, is famous; and short of love even andambition, we all know the flatness of long-desired pleasures. KingSolomon, who had not been enough of an ascetic, as we all know, andtherefore ended off in cynicism, knew that there is not only satietyas a result of enjoyment; but a sort of satiety also, an absence ofkeenness, an incapacity for caring, due to the deferring of enjoyment. He doubtless knew, among other items of vanity, that our wishes areoften fulfilled without our even knowing it, so indifferent have webecome through long waiting, or so changed in our wants. 

XV. 

There is another reason for such ascetism as was taught in _Marius theEpicurean_ and in Pater's book on Plato: the modest certainty of allpleasure derived from the beautiful will accustom the perfect æstheteto seek for the like in other branches of activity. Accustomed to thehappiness which is in his own keeping, he will view with suspicion allcraving for satisfactions which are beyond his control. He will notask to be given the moon, and he will not even wish to be given it, lest the wish should grow into a want; he will make the best ofcandles and glowworms and of distant heavenly luminaries. Moreover, being accustomed to enjoy the mere sight of things as much as otherfolk do their possession, he will probably actually prefer that themoon should be hanging in the heavens, and not on his staircase. 

Again, having experience of the æsthetic pleasures which involve, inwhat Milton called their sober waking bliss, no wear and tear, noreaction of satiety, he will not care much for the more rapturouspleasures of passion and success, which always cost as much as theyare worth. He will be unwilling to run into such debt with his ownfeelings, having learned from æsthetic pleasure that there areactivities of the soul which, instead of impoverishing, enrich it. 

Thus does the commerce with beautiful things and beautiful thoughtstend to develop in us that healthy kind of asceticism so requisite toevery workable scheme of greater happiness for the individual and theplurality: self-restraint, choice of aims, consistent andthorough-paced subordination of the lesser interest to the greater;above all, what sums up asceticism as an efficacious means towardshappiness, preference of the spiritual, the unconditional, thedurable, instead of the temporal, the uncertain, and the fleeting. 

The intimate and continuous intercourse with the Beautiful teaches us, therefore, the renunciation of the unnecessary for the sake of thepossible. It teaches asceticism leading not to indifference andNervana, but to higher complexities of vitalisation, to a morecomplete and harmonious rhythm of individual existence. 

XVI. 

Art can thus train the soul because art is free; or, more strictlyspeaking, because art is the only complete expression, the onlyconsistent realisation of our freedom. In other parts of our life, business, affection, passion, pursuit of utility, glory or truth, weare for ever _conditioned_. We are twisting perpetually, perpetuallystopped short and deflected, picking our way among the visible andbarely visible habits, interests, desires, shortcomings, of others andof that portion of ourselves which, in the light of that particularmoment and circumstance, seems to be foreign to us, to be another's. We can no more follow the straight line of our wishes than can thepassenger in Venice among those labyrinthine streets, whoseeverlasting, unexpected bends are due to canals which the streetsthemselves prevent his seeing. Moreover, in those gropings amonglooming or unseen obstacles, we are pulled hither and thither, checkedand misled by the recurring doubt as to which, of these thwarted andyielding selves, may be the chief and real one, and which, of the goalswe are never allowed finally to touch, is the goal we spontaneouslytend to. 

Now it is different in the case of Art, and of all those æstheticactivities, often personal and private, which are connected with Artand may be grouped together under Art's name. Art exists to please, and, when left to ourselves, we feel in what our pleasure lies. Art isa free, most open and visible space, where we disport ourselvesfreely. Indeed, it has long been remarked (the poet Schiller workingout the theory) that, as there is in man's nature a longing for mereunconditioned exercise, one of Art's chief missions is to give us freescope to be ourselves. If therefore Art is the playground where eachindividual, each nation or each century, not merely toils, butuntrammelled by momentary passion, unhampered by outer cares, freelyexists and feels itself, then Art may surely become the training-placeof our soul. Art may teach us how to employ our liberty, how to selectour wishes: employ our liberty so as to respect that of others; selectour wishes in such a manner as to further the wishes of ourfellow-creatures. 

For there are various, and variously good or evil ways of followingour instincts, fulfilling our desires, in short, of being independentof outer circumstances; in other words, there are worthy and worthlessways of using our leisure and our surplus energy, of seeking ourpleasure. And Art--Art and all Art here stands for--can train us to doso without injuring others, without wasting the material and spiritualriches of the world. Art can train us to delight in the higherharmonies of existence; train us to open our eyes, ears and souls, instead of shutting them, to the wider modes of universal life. 

In such manner, to resume our symbol of the bay laurel which theroad-mender stuck on to the front of that tramcar, can our love forthe beautiful avert, like the plant of Apollo, many of the storms, andcure many of the fevers, of life. 

"NISI CITHARAM. "

I. 

It is well that this second chapter--in which I propose to show how agenuine æsthetic development tends to render the individual moreuseful, or at least less harmful, to his fellow-men--should begin, like the first, with a symbol, such as may sum up my meaning, andpoint it out in the process of my expounding it. The symbol iscontained in the saying of the Abbot Joachim of Flora, one of thegreat precursors of St. Francis, to wit: "He that is a true monkconsiders nothing his own except a lyre--_nihil reputat esse suum nisicitharam_. " Yes; nothing except a lyre. 

II. 

But that lyre, our only real possession, is our _Soul_. It must beshaped, and strung, and kept carefully in tune; no easy matter insurroundings little suited to delicate instruments and delicate music. Possessing it, we possess, in the only true sense of possession, thewhole world. For going along our way, whether rough or even, there areformed within us, singing the beauty and wonder of _what is_ or _whatshould_ be, mysterious sequences and harmonies of notes, new everytime, answering to the primæval everlasting affinities betweenourselves and all things; our souls becoming musical under the touchof the universe. 

Let us bear this in mind, this symbol of the lyre which Abbot Joachimallowed as sole property to the man of spiritual life. And let usremember that, as I tried to show in my previous chapter, the trueLover of the Beautiful, active, self-restrained, and indifferent tolower pleasures and interests, is in one sense your man of realspiritual life. For the symbol of Abbot Joachim's lyre will make iteasier to follow my meaning, and easier to forestall it, while I tryto convince you that art, and all æsthetic activity, is important as atype of the only kind of pleasure which reasonable beings should admitof, the kind of pleasure which tends not to diminish by wastefulnessand exclusive appropriation, but to increase by sympathy, the possiblepleasures of other persons. 

III. 

'Tis no excessive puritanism to say that while pleasure, in theabstract, is a great, perhaps the greatest, good; pleasures, ouractual pleasures in the concrete, are very often evil. 

Many of the pleasures which we allow ourselves, and which all theworld admits our right to, happen to be such as waste wealth and time, make light of the advantage of others, and of the good of our ownsouls. This fact does not imply either original sinfulness ordegeneracy--religious and scientific terms for the same thing--in poormankind. It means merely that we are all of us as yet very undevelopedcreatures; the majority, moreover, less developed than the minority, and the bulk of each individual's nature very much in the rear of hisown aspirations and definitions. Mankind, in the process of adaptingitself to external circumstances, has perforce evolved a certainamount of intellectual and moral quality; but that intellectual andmoral quality is, so far, merely a means for rendering materialexistence endurable; it will have to become itself the origin and aimof what we must call a spiritual side of life. In the meanwhile, humanbeings do not get any large proportion of their enjoyment from whatthey admit to be their nobler side. 

Hence it is that even when you have got rid of the mere struggle forexistence--fed, clothed, and housed your civilised savage, and securedfood, clothes, and shelter for his brood--you have by no meansprovided against his destructive, pain-giving activities. He has sparetime and energy; and these he will devote, ten to one, to recreationsinvolving, at the best, the slaughter of harmless creatures; at theworst, to the wasting of valuable substance, of what might be otherpeople's food; or else to the hurting of other people's feelings invarious games of chance or skill, particularly in the great skilledgame of brag called "Society. "

Our gentlemanly ancestors, indeed, could not amuse themselves withoutemptying a certain number of bottles and passing some hours under thetable; while our nimble-witted French neighbours, we are told, included in their expenditure on convivial amusements a curious itemcalled _la casse_, to wit, the smashing of plates and glasses. TheSpaniards, on the other hand, have bull-fights, most shockingspectacles, as we know, for we make it a point to witness them whenwe are over there. Undoubtedly we have immensely improved in suchmatters, but we need a great deal of further improvement. Most peopleare safe only when at work, and become mischievous when they begin toplay. They do not know how to _kill time_ (for that is the way inwhich we poor mortals regard life) without incidentally killingsomething else: proximately birds and beasts, and their neighbours'good fame; more remotely, but as surely, the constitution of theirdescendants, and the possible wages of the working classes. 

It is quite marvellous how little aptness there is in the existinghuman being for taking pleasure either in what already exists ready tohand, or in the making of something which had better be there; in whatcan be enjoyed without diminishing the enjoyment of others, as nature, books, art, thought, and the better qualities of one's neighbours. Infact, one reason why there is something so morally pleasant in cricketand football and rowing and riding and dancing, is surely that theyfurnish on the physical plane the counterpart of what is so sadlylacking on the spiritual: amusements which do good to the individualand no harm to his fellows. 

Of course, in our state neither of original sinfulness nor ofdegeneracy, but of very imperfect development, it is still useless andabsurd to tell people to make use of intellectual and moral resourceswhich they have not yet got. It is as vain to preach to the majorityof the well-to-do the duty of abstinence from wastefulness, rivalry, and ostentation as it is vain to preach to the majority of thebadly-off abstinence from alcohol; without such pleasures their lifewould be unendurably insipid. 

But inevitable as is such evil in the present, it inevitably bringsits contingent of wretchedness; and it is therefore the business ofall such as _could_ become the forerunners of a better state of thingsto refuse to follow the lead of their inferiors. Exactly because themajority is still so hopelessly wasteful and mischievous, does itbehove the minority not merely to work to some profit, but to playwithout damage. To do this should become the mark of Nature'saristocracy, a sign of liberality of spiritual birth and breeding, aquestion of _noblesse oblige_. 

IV. 

And here comes in the immense importance of Art as a type of pleasure:of Art in the sense of æsthetic appreciation even more than ofæsthetic creation; of Art considered as the extracting and combiningof beauty in the mind of the obscure layman quite as much as theembodiment of such extracted and combined beauty in the visible oraudible work of the great artist. 

For experience of true æsthetic activity must teach us, in proportionas it is genuine and ample, that the enjoyment of the beautiful is notmerely independent of, but actually incompatible with, that tendencyto buy our satisfaction at the expense of others which remains more orless in all of us as a survival from savagery. The reasons why genuineæsthetic feeling inhibits these obsolescent instincts of rapacity andruthlessness, are reasons negative and positive, and may be roughlydivided into three headings. Only one of them is generally admitted toexist, and of it, therefore, I shall speak very briefly, I mean thefact that the enjoyment of beautiful things is originally andintrinsically one of those which are heightened by sharing. We know itinstinctively when, as children, we drag our comrades and elders tothe window when a regiment passes or a circus parades by; we learn itmore and more as we advance in life, and find that we must get otherpeople to see the pictures, to hear the music, to read the books whichwe admire. It is a case of what psychologists call the _contagion ofemotion_, by which the feeling of one individual is strengthened bythe expression of similar feeling in his neighbour, and is explicable, most likely, by the fact that the greatest effort is always requiredto overcome original inertness, and that two efforts, like two horsesstarting a carriage instead of one, combined give more than double thevalue of each taken separately. The fact of this æsthetic sociabilityis so obvious that we need not discuss it any further, but merely holdit over to add, at last, to the result of the two other reasons, negative and positive, which tend to make æsthetic enjoyment the typeof unselfish, nay, even of altruistic pleasure. 

V. 

The first of these reasons, the negative one, is that æstheticpleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personalownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leavinginactive, of beginning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion forexclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottomof all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. Butbefore entering on this discussion I would beg my reader to call tomind that curious saying of Abbot Joachim's; and to consider that Iwish to prove that, like his true monk, the true æsthete, who nowadaysloves and praises creation much as the true monk did in formercenturies, can really possess as sole personal possession only amusical instrument--to wit, his own well-strung and resonant soul. Having said this, we will proceed to the question of Luxury, by whichI mean the possession of such things as minister only to weakness andvanity, of such things as we cannot reasonably hope that all men maysome day equally possess. 

When we are young--and most of us remain mere withered children, neverattaining maturity, in similar matters--we are usually attracted byluxury and luxurious living. We are possessed by that youthfulinstinct of union, fusion, marriage, so to speak, with what our souldesires; we hanker after close contact and complete possession; and wefancy, in our inexperience, that luxury, the accumulation ofvaluables, the appropriation of opportunities, the fact of rejectingfrom our life all that is not costly, brilliant, and dainty, impliessuch fusion of our soul with beauty. 

But, as we reach maturity, we find that this is all delusion. Welearn, from the experience of occasions when our soul has trulypossessed the beautiful, or been possessed by it, that if such unionwith the harmony of outer things is rare, perhaps impossible, amongsqualor and weariness, it is difficult and anomalous in the conditionwhich we entitle luxury. 

We learn that our assimilation of beauty, and that momentary renewalof our soul which it effects, rarely arises from our own ownership;but comes, taking us by surprise, in presence of hills, streams, memories of pictures, poets' words, and strains of music, which arenot, and cannot be, our property. The essential character of beauty isits being a relation between ourselves and certain objects. Theemotion to which we attach its name is produced, motived by somethingoutside us, pictures, music, landscape, or whatever it may be; but theemotion resides in us, and it is the emotion, and not merely itsobject, which we desire. Hence material possession has no æstheticmeaning. We possess a beautiful object with our soul; the possessionthereof with our hands or our legal rights brings us no nearer thebeauty. Ownership, in this sense, may empower us to destroy or hidethe object and thus cheat others of the possession of its beauty, butdoes not help _us_ to possess that beauty. It is with beauty as withthat singer who answered Catherine II. , "Your Majesty's policemen canmake me _scream_, but they cannot make me _sing_;" and she might haveadded, for my parallel, "Your policemen, great Empress, even couldthey make _me_ sing, would not be able to make _you_ hear. "

VI. 

Hence all strong æsthetic feeling will always prefer ownership of themental image to ownership of the tangible object. And any desire formaterial appropriation or exclusive enjoyment will be merely so muchweakening and adulteration of the æsthetic sentiment. Since the mentalimage, the only thing æsthetically possessed, is in no way diminishedor damaged by sharing; nay, we have seen that by one of the mostgracious coincidences between beauty and kindliness, the æstheticemotion is even intensified by the knowledge of co-existence inothers: the delight in each person communicating itself, like amusical third, fifth, or octave, to the similar yet different delightin his neighbour, harmonic enriching harmonic by stimulating freshvibration. 

If, then, we wish to possess casts, copies, or photographs of certainworks of art, this is, æsthetically considered, exactly as we wish tohave the means--railway tickets, permissions for galleries, and soforth--of seeing certain pictures or statues as often as we wish. Forwe feel that the images in our mind require renewing, or that, incombination with other more recently acquired images, they will, ifrenewed, yield a new kind of delight. But this is quite another matterfrom wishing to own the material object, the thing we call _work ofart itself_, forgetting that it is a work of art only for the soulcapable of instating it as such. 

Thus, in every person who truly cares for beauty, there is a necessarytendency to replace the illusory legal act of ownership by the realspiritual act of appreciation. Charles Lamb already expressed thisdelightfully in the essay on the old manor-house. Compared with hispossession of its beauties, its walks, tapestried walls and familyportraits, nay, even of the ghosts of former proprietors, thepossession by the legal owner was utterly nugatory, unreal:

 "Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its twelve Cæsars;. .. Mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority. .. . Mine, too--whose else?--thy costly fruit-garden . .. Thy ampler pleasure-garden . .. Thy firry wilderness. .. . I was the true descendant of those old W----'s, and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places. "

How often have not some of us felt like that; and how much might notthose of us who never have, learn, could they learn, from those wordsof Elia?

VII. 

I have spoken of _material, actual_ possession. But if we look closerat it we shall see that, save with regard to the things which areactually consumed, destroyed, disintegrated, changed to something elsein their enjoyment, the notion of ordinary possession is a meredelusion. It can be got only by a constant obtrusion of a mere idea, the _idea of self_, and of such unsatisfactory ideas as one's right, for instance, to exclude others. 'Tis like the tension of a muscle, this constant keeping the consciousness aware by repeating"Mine--mine--_mine_ and not _theirs_; not _theirs_, but _mine_. " Andthis wearisome act of self-assertion leaves little power forappreciation, for the appreciation which others can have quiteequally, and without which there is no reality at all in ownership. 

Hence, the deeper our enjoyment of beauty, the freer shall we becomeof the dreadful delusion of exclusive appropriation, despising suchunreal possession in proportion as we have tasted the real one. Weshall know the two kinds of ownership too well apart to let ourselvesbe cozened into cumbering our lives with material properties and theirresponsibilities. We shall save up our vigour, not for obtaining andkeeping (think of the thousand efforts and cares of ownership, eventhe most negative) the things which yield happy impressions, but forreceiving and storing up and making capital of those impressions. Weshall seek to furnish our mind with beautiful thoughts, not our houseswith pretty things. 

VIII. 

I hope I have made clear enough that æsthetic enjoyment is hostile tothe unkind and wasteful pleasures of selfish indulgence and selfishappropriation, because the true possession of the beautiful things ofNature, of Art, and of thought is spiritual, and neither damages, nordiminishes, nor hoards them; because the lover of the beautiful seeksfor beautiful impressions and remembrances, which are vested in hissoul, and not in material objects. That is the negative benefit of thelove of the beautiful. Let us now proceed to the positive and activeassistance which it renders, when genuine and thorough-paced, to suchthought as we give to the happiness and dignity of others. 

IX. 

I have said that our pleasure in the beautiful is essentially aspiritual phenomenon, one, I mean, which deals with our ownperceptions and emotions, altering the contents of our mind, whileleaving the beautiful object itself intact and unaltered. This beingthe case, it is easy to understand that our æsthetic pleasure will becomplete and extensive in proportion to the amount of activity of oursoul; for, remember, all pleasure is proportionate to activity, and, as I said in my first chapter, great beauty does not merely _take us_, but _we_ must give _ourselves to it_. Hence, an increase in thecapacity for æsthetic pleasure will mean, _cæeteris paribus_, anincrease in a portion of our spiritual activity, a greater readinessto take small hints, to connect different items, to reject the lessergood for the greater. Moreover, a great, perhaps the greater, part ofour æsthetic pleasure is due, as I also told you before, to thestoring of impressions in our mind, and to the combining of them therewith other impressions. Indeed, it is for this reason that I have madeno difference, save in intensity between æsthetic creation, so called, and æsthetic appreciation; telling you, on the contrary, that theartistic layman creates, produces something new and personal, only ina less degree than the professed artist. 

For the æsthetic life does not consist merely in the perception of thebeautiful object, not merely in the emotion of that spiritual contactbetween the beautiful product of art or of nature and the soul of theappreciator: it is continued in the emotions and images and thoughtswhich are awakened by that perception; and the æsthetic life _is_life, is something continuous and organic, just because new forms, however obscure and evanescent, are continually born, in their turncontinually to give birth, of that marriage between the beautifulthing outside and the beautiful soul within. 

Hence, full æsthetic life means the creating and extending of ever newharmonies in the mind of the layman, the unconscious artist who merelyenjoys, as a result of the creating and extending of new harmonies inthe work of the professed artist who consciously creates. This beingthe case, the true æsthete is for ever seeking to reduce hisimpressions and thoughts to harmony; and is for ever, accordingly, being pleased with some of them, and disgusted with others. 

X. 

The desire for beauty and harmony, therefore, in proportion as itbecomes active and sensitive, explores into every detail, establishescomparisons between everything, judges, approves, and disapproves; andmakes terrible and wholesome havoc not merely in our surroundings, butin our habits and in our lives. And very soon the mere thought ofsomething ugly becomes enough to outweigh the actual presence ofsomething beautiful. I was told last winter at San Remo, that thescent of the Parma violet can be distilled only by the oil of theflower being passed through a layer of pork fat; and since thatrevelation violet essence has lost much of the charm it possessed forme: the thought of the suet counterbalanced the reality of theperfume. 

Now this violet essence, thus obtained, is symbolic of many of theapparently refined enjoyments of our life. We shall find that luxuryand pomp, delightful sometimes in themselves, are distilled through alayer of coarse and repulsive labour by other folk; and the thought ofthe pork suet will spoil the smell of the violets. For the more disheswe have for dinner, the greater number of cooking-pots will have to becleaned; the more carriages and horses we use, the more washing andgrooming will result; the more crowded our rooms with furniture andnicknacks, the more dust will have to be removed; the more numerousand delicate our clothes, the more brushing and folding there willbe; and the more purely ornamental our own existence, the lessornamental will be that of others. 

There is a _pensée_ of Pascal's to the effect that a fop carries onhis person the evidence of the existence of so many people devoted tohis service. This thought may be delightful to a fop; but it is notpleasant to a mind sensitive to beauty and hating the bare thought ofugliness: for while vanity takes pleasure in lack of harmony betweenoneself and one's neighbour, æsthetic feeling takes pleasure only inharmonious relations. The thought of the servile lives devoted to makeour life more beautiful counterbalances the pleasure of the beauty;'tis the eternal question of the violet essence and the pork suet. Nowthe habit of beauty, the æsthetic sense, becomes, as I said, more andmore sensitive and vivacious; you cannot hide from it the knowledge ofevery sort of detail, you cannot prevent its noticing the ugly side, the ugly lining of certain pretty things. 'Tis a but weak and sleepykind of æstheticism which "blinks and shuts its apprehension up" atyour bidding, which looks another way discreetly, and discreetlyrefrains from all comparisons. The real æsthetic activity _is_ anactivity; it is one of the strongest and most imperious powers ofhuman nature; it does not take orders, it only gives them. It is, whenfull grown, a kind of conscience of beautiful and ugly, analogous tothe other conscience of right and wrong, and it is equally difficultto silence. If you can silence your æsthetic faculty and bid it besatisfied with the lesser beauty, the lesser harmony, instead of thegreater, be sure that it is a very rudimentary kind of instinct; andthat you are no more thoroughly æsthetic than if you could make yoursense of right and wrong be blind and dumb at your convenience, youcould be thoroughly moral. 

Hence, the more æsthetic we become, the less we shall tolerate suchmodes of living as involve dull and dirty work for others, as involvethe exclusion of others from the sort of life which we consideræsthetically tolerable. We shall require such houses and such habitsas can be seen, and, what is inevitable in all æsthetical development, as can also be _thought of_, in all their details. We shall require ahomogeneous impression of decorum and fitness from the lives of othersas well as from our own, from what we actually see and from what wemerely know: the imperious demand for beauty, for harmony will beapplied no longer to our mere material properties, but to that otherpossession which is always with us and can never be taken from us, theimages and feelings within our soul. Now, that other human beingsshould be drudging sordidly in order that we may be idle and showymeans a thought, a vision, an emotion which do not get on in our mindin company with the sight of sunset and sea, the taste of mountain airand woodland freshness, the faces and forms of Florentine saints andAntique gods, the serene poignancy of great phrases of music. This isby no means all. Developing in æsthetic sensitiveness we grow to thinkof ourselves also, our own preferences, moods and attitudes, as moreor less beautiful or ugly; the inner life falling under the samecriticism as the outer one. We become aristocratic and epicurean aboutour desires and habits; we grow squeamish and impatient towardsluxury, towards all kinds of monopoly and privilege on account of themean attitude, the graceless gesture they involve on our own part. 

XI. 

This feeling is increasing daily. Our deepest æsthetic emotions are, we are beginning to recognise, connected with things which we do not, cannot, possess in the vulgar sense. Nay, the deepest æstheticemotions depend, to an appreciable degree, on the very knowledge thatthese things are either not such as money can purchase, or that theyare within the purchasing power of all. The sense of being shareableby others, of being even shareable, so to speak, by other kinds ofutility, adds a very keen attraction to all beautiful things andbeautiful actions, and, of course, _vice versâ_. And things which arebeautiful, but connected with luxury and exclusive possession, come toaffect one as, in a way, _lacking harmonics_, lacking those additionalvibrations of pleasure which enrich impressions of beauty byimpressions of utility and kindliness. 

Thus, after enjoying the extraordinary lovely tints--oleander pink, silver-grey, and most delicate citron--of the plaster which covers thecommonest cottages, the humblest chapels, all round Genoa, there issomething _short and acid_ in the pleasure one derives from equallycharming colours in expensive dresses. Similarly, in Italy, much ofthe charm of marble, of the sea-cave shimmer, of certain palace-yardsand churches, is due to the knowledge that this lovely, noblesubstance is easy to cut and quarried in vast quantities hard by: nowretched rarity like diamonds and rubies, which diminish by the worthof a family's yearly keep if only the cutter cuts one hair-breadthwrong!

Again, is not one reason why antique sculpture awakens a state of mindwhere stoicism, humaneness, simplicity, seem nearer possibilities--isnot one reason that it shows us the creature in its nakedness, in suchbeauty and dignity as it can get through the grace of birth only?There is no need among the gods for garments from silken Samarkand, for farthingales of brocade and veils of Mechlin lace like those ofthe wooden Madonnas of Spanish churches; no need for the ruffles andplumes of Pascal's young beau, showing thereby the number of hisvalets. The same holds good of trees, water, mountains, and theirrepresentation in poetry and painting; their dignity takes no accountof poverty or riches. Even the lilies of the field please us, notbecause they toil not neither do they spin, but because they do notrequire, while Solomon does, that other folk should toil and spin tomake them glorious. 

XII. 

Again, do we not prefer the books which deal with habits simpler thanour own? Do we not love the Odyssey partly because of Calypso weavingin her cave, and Nausicaa washing the clothes with her maidens? Doesit not lend additional divinity that Christianity should have arisenamong peasants and handicraftsmen?

Nay more, do we not love certain objects largely because they areuseful; boats, nets, farm carts, ploughs; discovering therein a gracewhich actually exists, but which might else have remained unsuspected?And do we not feel a certain lack of significance and harmony offulness of æsthetic quality in our persons when we pass in ouridleness among people working in the fields, masons building, orfishermen cleaning their boats and nets; whatever beauty such thingsmay have being enhanced by their being common and useful. 

In this manner our æsthetic instinct strains vaguely after a doublechange: not merely giving affluence and leisure to others, but givingsimplicity and utility to ourselves?

XIII. 

And, even apart from this, does not all true æstheticism tend todiminish labour while increasing enjoyment, because it makes thealready existing more sufficient, because it furthers the joys of thespirit, which multiply by sharing, as distinguished from the pleasuresof vanity and greediness, which only diminish?

XIV. 

You may at first feel inclined to pooh-pooh the notion that mere loveof beauty can help to bring about a better distribution of the world'sriches; and reasonably object that we cannot feed people on images andimpressions which multiply by sharing; they live on bread, and not onthe _idea_ of bread. 

But has it ever struck you that, after all, the amount of materialbread--even if we extend the word to everything which is consumed forbodily necessity and comfort--which any individual can consume isreally very small; and that the bad distribution, the shocking wasteof this material bread arises from being, so to speak, usedsymbolically, used as spiritual bread, as representing those _ideas_for which men hunger: superiority over other folk, power of havingdependants, social position, ownership, and privilege of all kinds?For what are the bulk of worldly possessions to their owners: houses, parks, plate, jewels, superfluous expenditure of all kinds [and armiesand navies when we come to national wastefulness]--what are all theseill-distributed riches save _ideas_, ideas futile and ungenerous, foodfor the soul, but food upon which the soul grows sick and corrupteth?

Would it not be worth while to reorganise this diet of ideas? Toreorganise that part of us which is independent of bodily sustenanceand health, which lives on spiritual commodities--the part of usincluding ambition, ideal, sympathy, and all that I have called_ideas_? Would it not be worth while to find such ideas as all peoplecan live upon without diminishing each other's share, instead of the_ideas_, the imaginative satisfactions which each must refuse to hisneighbour, and about which, therefore, all of us are bound to fightlike hungry animals? Thus to reform our notions of what is valuableand distinguished would bring about an economic reformation; or, ifother forces were needed, would make the benefits of such economicreformation completer, its hardships easier to bear; and, altering ourviews of loss and gain, lessen the destructive struggle of snatchingand holding. 

Now, as I have been trying to show, beauty, harmony, fitness, are ofthe nature of the miraculous loaves and fishes: they can feedmultitudes and leave basketfuls for the morrow. 

But the desire for such spiritual food is, you will again object, itself a rarity, a product of leisure and comfort, almost a luxury. 

Quite true. And you will remember, perhaps, that I have alreadyremarked that they are not to be expected either from the poor inmaterial comfort, nor from the poor in soul, since both of these arecondemned, the first by physical wretchedness, the second by spiritualinactivity, to fight only for larger shares of material bread; withthe difference that this material bread is eaten by the poor, and madeinto very ugly symbols of glory by the rich. 

But, among those of us who are neither hungry nor vacuous, there isnot, generally speaking, much attempt to make the best of ourspiritual privileges. We teach our children, as we were taughtourselves, to give importance only to the fact of exclusiveness, expense, rareness, already necessarily obtruded far too much by ourstruggling, imperfect civilisation. We are indeed angry with littleboys and girls if they enquire too audibly whether certain people arerich or certain things cost much money, as little boys and girls areapt to do in their very far from innocence; but we teach them by ourexample to think about such things every time we stretch a point inorder to appear richer or smarter than we are. While, on the contrary, we rarely insist upon the intrinsic qualities for which things arereally valuable, without which no trouble or money would be spent onthem, without which their difficulty of obtaining would, as in thecase of Dr. Johnson's musical performance, become identical withimpossibility. I wonder how many people ever point out to a child thatthe water in a tank may be more wonderful and beautiful in its berylsand sapphires and agates than all the contents of all the jewellers'shops in Bond Street? Moreover, we rarely struggle against thestandards of fashion in our habits and arrangements; which standards, in many cases, are those of our ladies' maids, butlers, tradesfolk, and in all cases the standards of our less intelligent neighbours. Nay, more, we sometimes actually cultivate in ourselves, we superfineand æsthetic creatures, a preference for such kinds of enjoyment asare exclusive and costly; we allow ourselves to be talked into thenotion that solitary egoism, laborious self-assertion of ownership (asin the poor mad Ludwig of Bavaria) is a badge of intellectualdistinction. We cherish a desire for the new-fangled and far-fetched, the something no other has had before; little suspecting, orforgetting, that to extract more pleasure not less, to enjoy the samethings longer, and to be able to extract more enjoyment out of morethings, is the sign of æsthetic vigour. 

XV. 

Still, on the whole, such as can care for beautiful things andbeautiful thoughts are beginning to care for them more fully, and aregrowing, undoubtedly, in a certain moral sensitiveness which, as Ihave said, is coincident with æsthetic development. 

This strikes me every time that I see or think about a certainpriest's house on a hillside by the Mediterranean: a little housebuilt up against the village church, and painted and roofed, like thechurch, a most delicate grey, against which the yellow of thespalliered lemons sings out in exquisite intensity; alongside, a wallwith flower pots, and dainty white curtains to the windows. Such ahouse and the life possible in it are beginning, for many of us, tobecome the ideal, by whose side all luxury and worldly grandeurbecomes insipid or vulgar. For such a house as this embodies thepossibility of living with grace and decorum _throughout_ by dint ofloving carefulness and self-restraining simplicity. I say with graceand decorum _throughout_, because all things which might begetugliness in the life of others, or ugliness in our own attitudetowards others, would be eliminated, thrown away like the fossil whichThoreau threw away because it collected dust. Moreover, such a life asthis is such as all may reasonably hope to have; may, in some moreprosperous age, obtain because it involves no hoarding of advantagefor self or excluding therefrom of others. 

And such a life we ourselves may attain at least in the spirit, if webecome strenuous and faithful lovers of the beautiful, æsthetes andascetics who recognise that their greatest pleasure, their only truepossessions are in themselves; knowing the supreme value of their ownsoul, even as was foreshadowed by the Abbot Joachim of Flora, when hesaid that the true monk can hold no property except his lyre. 

HIGHER HARMONIES. 

I. 

 "To use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is; this, my dear Socrates, " said the prophetess of Mantineia, "is that life, above all others, which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute. Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth not images of beauty, but realities; for he has hold not of an image, but of a reality; and bringing forth and educating true virtue to become the friend of God, and be immortal, if mortal man may?"

Such are the æsthetics of Plato, put into the mouth of that mysteriousDiotima, who was a wise woman in many branches of knowledge. As weread them nowadays we are apt to smile with incredulity not unmixedwith bitterness. Is all this not mere talk, charming and momentarilyelating us like so much music; itself mere beauty which, because welike it, we half voluntarily confuse with _truth_? And, on the otherhand, is not the truth of æsthetics, the bare, hard fact, a verydifferent matter? For we have learned that we human creatures willnever know the absolute or the essence, that notions, which Plato tookfor realities, are mere relative conceptions; that virtue and truthare social ideals and intellectual abstractions, while beauty is aquality found primarily and literally only in material existences andsense-experiences; and every day we are hearing of new discoveriesconnecting our æsthetic emotions with the structure of eye and ear, the movement of muscles, the functions of nerve centres, nay, evenwith the action of heart and lungs and viscera. Moreover, all round usschools of criticism and cliques of artists are telling us foreverthat so far from bringing forth and educating true virtue, art has thesovereign power, by mere skill and subtlety, of investing good andevil, healthy and unwholesome, with equal merit, and obliterating thedistinctions drawn by the immortal gods, instead of helping theimmortal gods to their observance. 

Thus we are apt to think, and to take the words of Diotima as merelyso much lovely rhetoric. But--as my previous chapters must have ledyou to expect--I think we are so far mistaken. I believe that, although explained in the terms of fantastic, almost mythicalmetaphysic, the speech of Diotima contains a great truth, deposited inthe heart of man by the unnoticed innumerable experiences of centuriesand peoples; a truth which exists in ourselves also as an instinctiveexpectation, and which the advance of knowledge will confirm andexplain. For in that pellucid atmosphere of the Greek mind, untroubledas yet by theoretic mists, there may have been visible the very thingswhich our scientific instruments are enabling us to see andreconstruct piecemeal, great groupings of reality metamorphosed intoFata Morgana cities seemingly built by the gods. 

And thus I am going to try to reinstate in others' belief, as it isfully reinstated in my own, the theory of higher æsthetic harmonies, which the prophetess of Mantineia taught Socrates: to wit, thatthrough the contemplation of true beauty we may attain, by theconstant purification--or, in more modern language, the constantselecting and enriching--of our nature, to that which transcendsmaterial beauty; because the desire for harmony begets the habit ofharmony, and the habit thereof begets its imperative desire, and thuson in never-ending alternation. 

II. 

Perhaps the best way of expounding my reasons will be to follow theprocess by which I reached them; for so far from having started withthe theory of Diotima, I found the theory of Diotima, when I re-readit accidentally after many years' forgetfulness, to bring toconvergence the result of my gradual experience. 

 * * * * *

Thinking about the Hermes of Olympia, and the fact that so far he ispretty well the only Greek statue which historical evidenceunhesitatingly gives us as an original masterpiece, it struck me that, could one become really familiar with him, could eye and soul learnall the fulness of his perfection, we should have the truestarting-point for knowledge of the antique, for knowledge, in greatmeasure, of all art. 

Yes, and of more than art, or rather of art in more than one relation. 

Is this a superstition, a mere myth, perhaps, born of words? I thinknot. Surely if we could really arrive at knowing such a masterpiece, so as to feel rather than see its most intimate organic principles, and the great main reasons separating it from all inferior works andmaking it be itself: could we do this, we should know not merely whatart is and should be, but, in a measure, what life should be and mightbecome: what are the methods of true greatness, the sensations of truesanity. 

It would teach us the eternal organic strivings and tendencies of oursoul, those leading in the direction of life, leading away from death. 

If this seems mere allegory and wild talk, let us look at facts andsee what art is. For is not art inasmuch as untroubled by thepractical difficulties of existence, inasmuch as the free, unconsciousattempt of all nations and generations to satisfy, outside life, thosecravings which life still leaves unsatisfied--is not art a delicateinstrument, showing in its sensitive oscillations the most intimatemovements and habits of the soul? Does it not reveal our mostrecondite necessities and possibilities, by sifting and selecting, reinforcing or attenuating, the impressions received from without;showing us thereby how we must stand towards nature and life, how wemust feel and be?

And this most particularly in those spontaneous arts which, first inthe field, without need of adaptations of material or avoidance of thealready done, without need of using up the rejected possibilities ofprevious art, or awakening yet unknown emotions, are the simple, straightforward expression, each the earliest satisfactory one in itsown line, of the long unexpressed, long integrated, organic wants andwishes of great races of men: the arts, for instance, which have givenus that Hermes, Titian's pictures, and Michael Angelo's and Raphael'sfrescoes; given us Bach, Gluck, Mozart, the serener parts ofBeethoven, music of yet reserved pathos, braced, spring-like strength, learned, select: arts which never go beyond the universal, averagedexpression of the soul's desires, because the desires themselves aresifted, limited to the imperishable and unchangeable, like theartistic methods which embody them, reduced to the essential by thelong delay of utterance, the long--century long--efforts to utter. 

Becoming intimate with such a statue as the Olympian Hermes, andcomparing the impressions received from it with the impressions bothof inferior works of the same branch of art and with the impressionsof equally great works--pictures, buildings, musical compositions--ofother branches of art, becoming conversant with the difference betweenan original and a copy, great art and poor art, we gradually becomeaware of a quality which exists in all good art and is absent in allbad art, and without whose presence those impressions summed up asbeauty, dignity, grandeur, are never to be had. This peculiarity, which most people perceive and few people define--explaining it awaysometimes as _truth_, or taking it for granted under the name of_quality_--this peculiarity I shall call for convenience' sakeharmony; for I think you will all of you admit that the absence orpresence of harmony is what distinguishes bad art from good. Harmony, in this sense--and remember that it is this which connoisseurs mostusually allude to as _quality_--harmony may be roughly defined as theorganic correspondence between the various parts of a work of art, thefunctional interchange and interdependence thereof. In this sense thereis harmony in every really living thing, for otherwise it could not live. If the muscles and limbs, nay, the viscera and tissues, did not adjustthemselves to work together, if they did not in this combinationestablish a rhythm, a backward-forward, contraction-relaxation, taking-in-giving-out, diastole-systole in all their movements, therewould be, instead of a living organism, only an inert mass. In allliving things, and just in proportion as they are really alive (for inmost real things there is presumably some defect of rhythm tending tostoppage of life), there is bound to be this organic interdependenceand interchange. Natural selection, the survival of such individualsand species as best work in with, are most rhythmical to, theirsurroundings--natural selection sees to that. 

III. 

In art the place of natural selection is taken by man's selection; andall forms of art which man keeps and does not send into limbo, all artwhich man finds suitable to his wants, rhythmical with his habits, must have that same quality of interdependence of parts, ofinterchange of function. Only in the case of art, the organicnecessity refers not to outer surroundings, but to man's feeling; infact, man's emotion constitutes necessity towards art, as surroundingnature constitutes necessity for natural objects. Now man requiresorganic harmony, that is, congruity and co-ordination of processes, because his existence, the existence of every cell of him, dependsupon it, is one complete microcosm of interchange, of give-and-take, diastole-systole, of rhythm and harmony; and therefore all such thingsas give him impressions of the reverse thereof, go against him, and ina greater or lesser degree, threaten, disturb, paralyse, in a waypoison or maim him. Hence he is for ever seeking such congruity, suchharmony; and his artistic creativeness is conditioned by the desirefor it, nay, is perhaps mainly seeking to obtain it. Whenever hespontaneously and truly creates artistic forms, he obeys the imperiousvital instinct for congruity; nay, he seeks to eke out theinsufficient harmony between himself and the things which he _cannot_command, the insufficient harmony between the uncontrollable parts ofhimself, by a harmony created on purpose in the things which he _can_control. To a large extent man feels himself tortured by discordantimpressions coming from the world outside and the world inside him;and he seeks comfort and medicine in harmonious impressions of his ownmaking, in his own strange inward-outward world of art. 

This, I think, is the true explanation of that much-disputed-over_ideal_, which, according to definitions, is perpetually beingenthroned and dethroned as the ultimate aim of all art: the ideal, the imperatively clamoured-for mysterious something, is neitherconformity to an abstract idea, nor conformity to actual reality, norconformity to the typical, nor conformity to the individual; it is, Itake it, simply conformity to man's requirements, to man's inborn andperemptory demand for greater harmony, for more perfect co-ordinationand congruity in his feelings. 

Now, when, in the exercise of the artistic instincts, mankind arepartially obeying some other call than this one--the desire for money, fame, or for some intellectual formula--things are quite different, and there is no production of what I have called harmony. There is nocongruity when even great people set about doing pseudo-antiquesculpture in Canova-Thorwaldsen fashion because Winckelmann and Goethehave made antique sculpture fashionable; there is no congruity whenpeople set to building pseudo-Gothic in obedience to the romanticmovement and to Ruskin. For neither the desire for making a mark, northe most conscientious pressure of formula gives that instinct ofselection and co-ordination characterising even the most rudimentaryartistic efforts in the most barbarous ages, when men are impelledmerely and solely by the æsthetic instinct. Moreover, where people donot want and need (as they want and need food or drink or warmth orcoolness) one sort of effect, that is to say, one arrangement ofimpressions rather than another, they are sure to be deluded by themere arbitrary classification, the mere _names_ of things. They willthink that smooth cheeks, wavy hair, straight noses, limbs of such orsuch measure, attitude, and expression, set so, constitute theAntique; that clustered pillars, cross vaulting, spandrils, and Tudorroses make Gothic. But the Antique quality is the particular and allpermeating relation between all its items; and Gothic the particularand all permeating relation between those other ones; and unless youaim at the _specific emotion_ of Antique or Gothic, unless you feelthe imperious call for the special harmony of either, all themeasurements and all the formulas will not avail. While, on thecontrary, people without any formula or any attempt at imitation, likethe Byzantine architects and those of the fifteenth century, merelybecause they are obeying their own passionate desire for congruity ofimpressions, for harmony of structure and function, will succeed increating brand-new, harmonious, organic art out of the actual details, sometimes the material ruins, of an art which has passed away. 

If we become intimate with any great work of art, and intimate in sofar with the thoughts and emotions it awakens in ourselves, we shallfind that it possesses, besides this congruity within itself whichassimilates it to all really living things, a further congruity, notnecessarily found in real objects, but which forms the peculiarity ofthe work of art, a congruity with ourselves; for the great work of artis vitally connected with the habits and wants, the whole causalityand rhythm of mankind; it has been fitted thereto as the boat to thesea. 

IV. 

In this manner can we learn from art the chief secret of life: thesecret of action and reaction, of causal connection, of suitability ofpart to part, of organism, interchange, and growth. 

And when I say _learn_, I mean learn in the least official and themost efficacious way. I do not mean merely that, looking at a statuelike the Hermes, a certain fact is borne in upon our intelligence, thefact of all vitality being dependent on harmony. I mean that perhaps, nay probably, without any such formula, our whole nature becomesaccustomed to a certain repeated experience, our whole nature becomesadapted thereunto, and acts and reacts in consequence, by what we callintuition, instinct. It is not with our intellect alone that wepossess such a fact, as we might intellectually possess that twice twois four, or that Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII. , knowingcasually what we may casually also forget; we possess, in such a waythat forgetting becomes impossible, with our whole soul and our wholebeing, re-living that fact with every breath that we draw, with everymovement we make, the first great lesson of art, that vitality meansharmony. Let us look at this fact, and at its practical applications, apart from all æsthetic experience. 

All life is harmony; and all improvement in ourselves is therefore, however unconsciously, the perceiving, the realising, or theestablishing of harmonies, more minute or more universal. Yes, curiousand unpractical as it may seem, harmonies, or, under their humblerseparate names--arrangements, schemes, classifications, are the chiefmeans for getting the most out of all things, and particularly themost out of ourselves. 

For they mean, first of all, unity of means for the attaining of unityof effect, that is to say, incalculable economy of material, of time, and of effort; and secondly, unity of effect produced, that is to say, economy even greater in our power of perceiving and feeling: nothingto eliminate, nothing against whose interruptions we waste our energy, our power of becoming more fit in the course of striving. 

When there exists harmony one impression leads to, enhances another;we, on the other hand, unconsciously recognise at once what is doingto us, what we in return must do; the mood is indicated, fulfilled, consummated; in plenitude we feel, we are; and in plenitude of feelingand being, we, in our turn, _do_. Neither is such habit of harmony, ofscheme, of congruity, a mere device for sucking the full sweetness outof life, although, heaven knows, that were important enough. As muchas such a habit husbands, and in a way multiplies, life's sweetness;so likewise does it husband and multiply man's power. For there is noquicker and more thorough mode of selecting among our feelings andthoughts than submitting them to a standard of congruity; nothing moreefficacious than the question: "Is such or such a notion or proceedingharmonious with what we have made the rest of our life, with what wewish our life to be?" This is, in other words, the power of the_ideal_, the force of _ideas_, of thought-out, recognised habits, asdistinguished from blind helter-skelter impulse. This is what weldslife into one, making its forces work not in opposition but inconcordance; this is what makes life consecutive, using the earlieract to produce the later, tying together existence in an organicfatality of _must be_: the fatality not of the outside and theunconscious, but of the conscious, inner, upper man. Nay, it is whatmakes up the _Ego_. For the _ego_, as we are beginning to understand, is no mysterious separate entity, still less a succession ofdisconnected, conflicting, blind impulses; the _ego_ is the congruous, perceived, nay, thought-out system of habits, which feels allincongruity towards itself as accidental and external. Hence, when weask which are the statements we believe in, we answer instinctively(logic being but a form of congruity) those statements which accordwith themselves and with other statements; when we ask, which are thepersons we trust? we answer, those persons whose feelings and actionsare congruous with themselves and with the feelings and actions ofothers. And, on the contrary, it is in the worthless, in thedegenerate creature, that we note moods which are destructive to oneanother's object, ideas which are in flagrant contradiction; and it isin the idiot, the maniac, the criminal, that we see thoughtsdisconnected among themselves, perceptions disconnected withsurrounding objects, and instincts and habits incompatible with thoseof other human beings. Nay, if we look closely, we shall recognise, moreover, that those emotions of pleasure are the healthy, the safeones, which are harmonious not merely in themselves (as a musical noteis composed of even vibrations), but harmonious with all preceding andsucceeding pleasures in ourselves, and harmonious, congruous, with thepresent and future pleasures in others. 

V. 

The instinct of congruity, of subordination of part to whole, thedesire for harmony which is fostered above all things by art, is oneof the most precious parts of our nature, if only, obeying its owntendency to expand, we apply it to ever wider circles of being; notmerely to the accessories of living, but to life itself. 

For this love of harmony and order leads us to seek what is mostnecessary in our living: a selection of the congruous, an arrangementof the mutually dependent in our thoughts and feelings. 

Much of the work of the universe is done, no doubt, by what seems theexercise of mere random energy, by the thinking of apparentlydisconnected thoughts and the feeling of apparently sporadic impulses;but if the thought and the impulse remained really disconnected andsporadic, half would be lost and half would be distorted. It is one ofthe economical adaptations of nature that every part of us tends notmerely to be consistent with itself, to eliminate the hostile, tobeget the similar, but tends also to be connected with other parts; sothat, action coming in contact with action, thought in contact withthought, and feeling in contact with feeling, each single one will bestrengthened or neutralised by the other. And it is the especialbusiness of what we may call the central consciousness, the dominantthought or emotion, to bring these separate thoughts and impulses, these separate groups thereof, into more complex relations, tocontinue on a far vaster scale that vital contact, that trying of allthings by the great trial of affinity or repulsion, of congruity orincongruity. Thus we make trial of ourselves; and by the selfsameprocess, by the test of affinity and congruity, the silent forces ofthe universe make trial of _us_, rejecting or accepting, allowing us, our thoughts, our feelings to live and be fruitful, or condemning usand them to die in barrenness. 

Whither are we going? In what shape shall the various members of oursoul proceed on their journey; which forming the van, which the rearand centre? Or shall there be neither van, nor rear, nor wedge-likeforward flight?

If this question remains unasked or unanswered, our best qualities, our truest thoughts and purest impulses, may be hopelessly scatteredinto distant regions, become defiled in bad company, or, at least, barren in isolation; the universal life rejecting or annihilatingthem. 

How often do we not see this! Natures whose various parts have rambledasunder, or have come to live, like strangers in an inn, casually, promiscuously, each refusing to be his brother's keeper: instincts ofkindliness at various ends, unconnected, unable to coalesce and conquer;thoughts separated from their kind, incapable of application; and, inconsequence, strange superficial comradeships, shoulder-rubbings oftrue and false, good and evil, become indifferent to one another, incapable of looking each other in the face, careless, unblushing. Nay, worse. For lack of all word of command, of all higher control, hostile tendencies accommodating themselves to reign alternate, sharing the individual in distinct halves, till he becomes like untothat hero of Gautier's witch story, who was a pious priest one-half ofthe twenty-four hours and a wicked libertine the other: all power ofselection, of reaction gone in this passive endurance of conflictingtendencies; all identity gone, save a mere feeble outsider looking onat the alternations of intentions and lapses, of good and bad. And thesoul of such a person--if, indeed, we can speak of one soul or oneperson where there exists no unity--becomes like a jangle of notesbelonging to different tonalities, alternating and mingling in hideousconfusion for lack of a clear thread of melody, a consistent system ofharmony, to select, reject, and keep all things in place. 

Melody, harmony: the two great halves of the most purely æsthetic ofall arts, symbolise, as we might expect, the two great forces of life:consecutiveness and congruity, under their different names ofintention, fitness, selection, adaptation. These are what make thehuman soul like a conquering army, a fleet freighted with riches, aband of priests celebrating a rite. And this is what art, by no paltryformula, but by the indelible teaching of habit, of requirement, andexpectation become part of our very fibre--this is what art can teachto those who will receive its highest lesson. 

VI. 

Those who can receive that lesson, that is to say, those in whom itcan expand and ramify to the fulness and complexity which is its veryessence. For it happens frequently enough that we learn only a portionof this truth, which by this means is distorted into error. We acceptthe æsthetic instinct as a great force of Nature; but, instead ofacknowledging it as our master, as one of the great lords of life, ofwhom Emerson spoke, we try to make it our servant. We attempt to getcongruity between the details of our everyday existence, and refuse toseek for congruity between ourselves and the life which is greaterthan ours. 

A friend of mine, who had many better ways of spending her money, wasunable one day to resist the temptation of buying a beautiful oldmajolica inkstand, which, not without a slight qualm of conscience, she put into a very delightful old room of her house. The room had aninkstand already, but it was of glass, and modern. "This one is inharmony with the rest of the room, " she said, and felt fully justifiedin her extravagance. It is this form, or rather this degree, ofæstheticism, which so often prevents our realising the higher æstheticharmonies. In obedience to a perception of what is congruous on asmall scale we often do oddly incongruous things: spend money we oughtto save, give time and thought to trifles while neglecting to come toconclusions about matters of importance; endure, or even cultivate, persons with whom we have less than no sympathy; nay, sometimes, froma keen sense of incongruity, tune down our thoughts and feelings tothe flatness of our surroundings. The phenomenon of what may thusresult from a certain æsthetic sensitiveness is discouraging, and Iconfess that it used to discourage and humiliate me. But thephilosophy which the prophetess of Mautineia taught Socrates settlesthe matter, and solves, satisfactorily what in my mind I always thinkof as the question of the majolica inkstand. 

Diotima, you will remember, did not allow her disciple to remainengrossed in the contemplation of one kind of beauty, but particularlyinsisted that he should use various fair forms as steps by which toascend to the knowledge of ever higher beauties. And this I shouldtranslate into more practical language by saying that, in questionslike that of the majolica inkstand, we require not a lessersensitiveness to congruity, but a greater; that we must look notmerely at the smaller, but at the larger items of our life, askingourselves, "Is this harmonious? or is it, seen in some widerconnection, even like that clumsy glass inkstand in the oak panelledand brocade hung room?" If we ask ourselves this, and endeavour toanswer it faithfully--with that truthfulness which is itself an itemof _consistency_--we may find that, strange as it may seem, the glassinkstand, ugly as it is in itself, and out of harmony with thefurniture, is yet more congruous, and that we actually prefer it tothe one of majolica. 

And it is in connection with this that I think that many persons whoare really æsthetic, and many more who imagine themselves to be so, should foster a wholesome suspicion of the theory which makes it aduty to accumulate certain kinds of possessions, to seek exclusivelycertain kinds of impressions, on the score of putting beauty anddignity into our lives. 

Put beauty, dignity, harmony, serenity into our lives. It sounds veryfine. But _can_ we? I doubt it. We may put beautiful objects, dignified manners, harmonious colours and shapes, but can we putdignity, harmony, or beauty? Can we put them into an individual life;can anything be put into an individual life save furniture andgarments, intellectual as well as material? For an individual life, taken separately, is a narrow, weak thing at the very best; andeverything we can put into it, everything we lay hold of for the sakeof putting in, must needs be small also, merely the chips or dust ofgreat things; or if it have life, must be squeezed, cut down, made sosmall before it can fit into that little receptacle of our egoism, that it will speedily be a dead, dry thing: thoughts once thought, feelings once felt, now neither thought nor felt, merely lying thereinert, as a dead fact, in our sterile self. Do we not see this on allsides, examples of life into which all the dignified things have beencrammed and all the beautiful ones, and which despite the statues, pictures, poems, and symphonies within its narrow compass, is yet sofar from dignified or beautiful?

But we need not trouble about dignity and beauty coming to our life solong as we veritably and thoroughly _live_; that is to say, so long aswe try not to put anything into our life, but to put our life into thelife universal. The true, expanding, multiplying life of the spiritwill bring us in contact, we need not fear, with beauty and dignityenough, for there is plenty such in creation, in things around us, andin other people's souls; nay, if we but live to our utmost power thelife of all things and all men, seeing, feeling, understanding for themere joy thereof, even our individual life will be invested withdignity and beauty in our own eyes. 

But furniture will not do it, nor dress, nor exquisite householdappointments; nor any of the things, books, pictures, houses, parks, of which we can call ourselves owners. I say _call_ ourselves: for canwe be sure we really possess them? And thus, if we think only of ourlife, and the decking thereof, it is only furniture, garments, andhousehold appointments we can deal with; for beauty and dignity cannotbe confined in so narrow a compass. 

VII. 

I have spoken so far of the conscious habit of harmony, and of itsconscious effect upon our conduct. I have tried to show that thedesire for congruity, which may seem so trivial a part of meredilettanteist superfineness, may expand and develop into such love ofharmony between ourselves and the ways of the universe as shall makeus wince at other folks' loss united to our gain, at ourdeterioration united to our pleasure, even as we wince at a false noteor a discordant arrangement of colours. 

But there is something more important than conscious choice, andsomething more tremendous than definite conduct, because consciouschoice and conduct are but its separate and plainly visible results. Imean unconscious way of feeling and organic way of living: that which, in the language of old-fashioned medicine, we might call thecomplexion or habit of the soul. 

This is undoubtedly affected by conscious knowledge and reason, as itundoubtedly manifests itself in both. But it is, I believe, much morewhat we might call a permanent emotional condition, a particular wayof feeling, of reacting towards the impressions given us by theuniverse. And I believe that the individual is sound, that he iscapable of being happy while increasing the happiness of others, orthe reverse, according as he reacts harmoniously or inharmoniouslytowards those universal impressions. And here comes in what seems tome the highest benefit we can receive from art and from the æstheticactivities, which, as I have said before, are in art merelyspecialised and made publicly manifest. 

VIII. 

The habit of beauty, of harmony, is but the habit, engrained in ournature by the unnoticed experiences of centuries, of _life_ in oursurroundings and in ourselves; the habit of beauty is the habit, Ibelieve scientific analysis of nature's ways and means will showus--of the growing of trees, the flowing of water, the perfect playof perfect muscles, all registered unconsciously in the very structureof our soul. And for this reason every time we experience afresh theparticular emotion associated with the quality _beautiful_, we areadding to that rhythm of life within ourselves by recognising the lifeof all things. There is not room within us for two conflicting wavesof emotion, for two conflicting rhythms of life, one sane and oneunsound. The two may possibly alternate, but in most cases the weakerwill be neutralised by the stronger; and, at all events, they cannotco-exist. We can account, only in this manner, for the indisputablefact that great emotion of a really and purely æsthetic nature has amorally elevating quality, that as long as it endures--and in finerorganisations its effect is never entirely lost--the soul is moreclean and vigorous, more fit for high thoughts and high decisions. Allunderstanding, in the wider and more philosophical sense, is but akind of becoming: our soul experiences the modes of being which itapprehends. Hence the particular religious quality (all faiths andrituals taking advantage thereof) of a high and complex æstheticemotion. Whenever we come in contact with real beauty, we becomeaware, in an unformulated but overwhelming manner, of some of theimmense harmonies of which all beauty is the product, of which allseparate beautiful things are, so to speak, the single patternshappening to be in our line of vision, while all around other patternsconnect with them, meshes and meshes of harmonies, spread out, outsideour narrow field of momentary vision, an endless web, like theconstellations which, strung on their threads of mutual dependence, cover and fill up infinitude. 

In the moments of such emotional perception, our soul also, ourselves, become in a higher degree organic, alive, receiving and giving out thelife of the universe; come to be woven into the patterns of harmonies, made of the stuff of reality, homogeneous with themselves, consubstantial with the universe, like the living plant, the flowingstream, the flying cloud, the great picture or statue. 

And in this way is realised, momentarily, but with ever-increasingpower of repetition, that which, after the teaching of Diotima, Socrates prayed for--"the harmony between the outer and the innerman. "

But this, I know, many will say, is but a delusion. Rapture ispleasant, but it is not necessarily, as the men of the Middle Agesthought, a union with God. And is this the time to revive, or seek torevive, when science is for ever pressing upon us the conclusion thatsoul is a function of matter--is this the time to revive discreditedoptimistic idealisms of an unscientific philosophy?

But if science become omniscient, it will surely recognise and explainthe value of such recurring optimistic idealisms; and if the soul be afunction of matter, will not science recognise but the more, that thesoul is an integral and vitally dependent portion of the materialuniverse?

IX. 

Be this as it may, one thing seems certain, that the artisticactivities are those which bring man into emotional communion withexternal nature; and that such emotional communion is necessary forman's thorough spiritual health. Perception of cause and effect, generalisation of law, reduces the universe indeed to what man'sintellect can grasp; but in the process of such reduction to the lawsof man's thought, the universe is shorn of its very power to moveman's emotion and overwhelm his soul. The abstract which we have madedoes not vivify us sufficiently. And the emotional communion of manwith nature is through those various faculties which we call æsthetic. It is not to no purpose that poetry has for ever talked to us of skiesand mountains and waters; we require, for our soul's health, to thinkabout them otherwise than with reference to our material comfort anddiscomfort; we require to feel that they and ourselves are brethrenunited by one great law of life. And what poetry suggests in explicitwords, bidding us love and be united in love to external nature; art, in more irresistible because more instinctive manner, forces upon ourfeelings, by extracting, according to its various kinds, the variousvital qualities of the universe, and making them act directly upon ourmind: rhythms of all sorts, static and dynamic, in the spatial arts ofpainting and sculpture; in the half spatial, half temporal art ofarchitecture: in music, which is most akin to life, because it is theart of movement and change. 

X. 

We can all remember moments when we have seemed conscious, even tooverwhelming, of this fact. In my own mind it has become indissolublyconnected with a certain morning at Venice, listening to the organ inSt. Mark's. 

Any old and beautiful church gives us all that is most moving andnoblest--organism, beauty, absence of all things momentary andworthless, exclusion of grossness, of brute utility and meancompromise, equality of all men before God; moreover, time, eternity, the past, and the great dead. All noble churches give us this; howmuch more, therefore, this one, which is noblest and most venerable!

It has, like no other building, been handed over by man to Nature;Time moulding and tinting into life this structure already so organic, so fit to live. For its curves and vaultings, its cupolas mutuallysupported, the weight of each carried by all; the very colour of themarbles, brown, blond, living colours, and the irregular symmetry, flower-like, of their natural patterning, are all seemingly organic andready for life. Time has added that, with the polish and dimmingalternately of the marbles, the billowing of the pavement, theslanting of the columns, and last, but not least, the tarnishing ofthe gold and the granulating of the mosaic into an uneven surface: thegold seeming to have become alive and in a way vegetable, and to havefaded and shrunk like autumn leaves. 

XI. 

The morning I speak of they were singing some fugued composition by Iknow not whom. How well that music suited St. Mark's! The constantinterchange of vault and vault, cupola and cupola, column and column, handing on their energies to one another; the springing up of newdetails gathered at once into the great general balance of lines andforces; all this seemed to find its natural voice in that fugue, toexpress, in that continuous revolution of theme chasing, envelopingtheme, its own grave emotion of life everlasting: Being, becoming;becoming, being. 

XII. 

It is such an alternation as this, ceaseless, rhythmic, whichconstitutes the upward life of the soul: that life of which the wisewoman of Mantineia told Socrates that it might be learned throughfaithful and strenuous search for ever widening kinds of beauty, the"life above all, " in the words of Diotima, "which a man should live. "

The life which vibrates for ever between being better and conceivingof something better still; between satisfaction in harmony and cravingfor it. The life whose rhythm is that of happiness actual andhappiness ideal, alternating for ever, for ever pressing one anotherinto being, as the parts of a fugue, the dominant and the tonic. Being, becoming; becoming, being; idealising, realising; realising, idealising. 

BEAUTY AND SANITY. 

I. 

Out of London at last; at last, though after only two months! Not, indeed, within a walk of my clump of bay-trees on the Fiesole hill;but in a country which has some of that Tuscan grace and sereneausterity, with its Tweed, clear and rapid in the wide shingly bed, with its volcanic cones of the Eildons, pale and distinct in thedistance: river and hills which remind me of the valley where thebay-trees grow, and bring to my mind all that which the bay-treesstand for. 

There is always something peculiar in these first hours of findingmyself once more alone, once more quite close to external things; thehuman jostling over, an end, a truce at least, to "all the neighbours'talk with man and maid--such men--all the fuss and trouble of streetsounds, window-sights" (how he knew these things, the poet!); oncemore in communion with the things which somehow--nibbled grass andstone-tossed water, yellow ragwort in the fields, blue cranesbillalong the road, big ash-trees along the river, sheep, birds, sunshine, and showers--somehow contrive to keep themselves in health, to live, grow, decline, die, be born again, without making a mess or creating afuss. The air, under the grey sky, is cool, even cold, with infinitebriskness. And this impression of briskness, by no means excluded bythe sense of utter isolation and repose, is greatly increased by aspecial charm of this place, the quantity of birds to listen to andwatch; great blackening flights of rooks from the woods along thewatercourses and sheltered hillsides (for only solitary ashes andwind-vexed beeches will grow in the open); peewits alighting withsqueals in the fields; blackbirds and thrushes in the thick coverts (Ifound a poor dead thrush with a speckled chest like a toad, laid outamong the beech-nuts); wagtails on the shingle, whirling over thewater, where the big trout and salmon leap; every sort of swallow;pigeons crossing from wood to wood; wild duck rattling up, andseagulls circling above the stream; nay, two herons, standingimmovable, heraldic, on the grass among the sheep. 

In such moments, with that briskness transferred into my feelings, life seems so rich and various. All pleasant memories come to my mindlike tunes, and with real tunes among them (making one realise thatthe greatest charm of music is often when no longer materiallyaudible). Pictures also of distant places, tones of voice, glance ofeyes of dear friends, visions of pictures and statues, and scraps ofpoems and history. More seems not merely to be brought to me, but moreto exist, wherewith to unite it all, within myself. 

Such moments, such modes of being, ought to be precious to us; theyand every impression, physical, moral, æsthetic, which is akin tothem, and we should recognise their moral worth. Since it would seemthat even mere bodily sensations, of pure air, bracing temperature, vigor of muscles, efficiency of viscera, accustom us not merely tohealth of our body, but also, by the analogies of our inner workings, to health of our soul. 

II. 

How delicate an organism, how alive with all life's dangers, is thehuman character; and how persistently do we consider it as the thingof all others most easily forced into any sort of position, mostsafely handled in ignorance! Surely some of the misery, much of thewaste and deadlock of the world are due to our all being made of suchobscure, unguessed at material; to our not knowing it betimes, andothers not admitting it even late in the day. When, for instance, shall we recognise that the bulk of our psychic life is unconscious orsemi-unconscious, the life of long-organised and automatic functions;and that, while it is absurd to oppose to these the more recent, unaccustomed and fluctuating activity called _reason_, this samereason, this conscious portion of ourselves, may be usefully employedin understanding those powers of nature (powers of chaos sometimes)within us, and in providing that these should turn the wheel of lifein the right direction, even like those other powers of nature outsideus, which reason cannot repress or alter, but can understand and putto profit. Instead of this, we are ushered into life thinkingourselves thoroughly conscious throughout, conscious beings of adefinite and stereotyped pattern; and we are set to do things we donot understand with mechanisms which we have never even been shown:Told to be good, not knowing why, and still less guessing how!

Some folk will answer that life itself settles all that, with itsjostle and bustle. Doubtless. But in how wasteful, destructive, unintelligent, and cruel a fashion! Should we be satisfied with thiskind of surgery, which cures an ache by random chopping off a limb;with this elementary teaching, which saves our body from the fire byburning our fingers? Surely not; we are worth more care on our ownpart. 

The recognition of this, and more especially of the manner in which wemay be damaged by dangers we have never thought of as dangers, oursouls undermined and made boggy by emotions not yet classified, bringshome to me again the general wholesomeness of art; and also the factthat, wholesome as art is, in general, and, compared with the lessabstract activities of our nature, there are yet differences in art'swholesomeness, there are categories of art which can do only good, andothers which may also do mischief. 

Art, in so far as it moves our fancies and emotions, as it builds upour preferences and repulsions, as it disintegrates or restores ourvitality, is merely another of the great forces of nature, and werequire to select among its activities as we select among theactivities of any other natural force. .. . When, I wonder, I wonder, will the forces _within_ us be recognised as natural, in the samesense as those _without_; and our souls as part of the universe, prospering or suffering, according to which of its rhythms theyvibrate to: the larger rhythm, which is for ever increasing, and whichmeans happiness; the smaller, for ever slackening, which meansmisery?

III. 

But since life has got two rhythms, why should art have only one? Ourpoor mankind by no means always feel braced, serene, and energetic;and we are far from necessarily keeping step with the movements of theuniverse which imply happiness. 

Let alone the fact of wretched circumstances beyond our control, ofnatural decay and death, and loss of our nearest and dearest; theuniverse has made it excessively difficult, nay, impossible, for us tofollow constantly its calm behest, "Be as healthy as possible. " It isall very fine to say _be healthy_. Of course we should be willingenough. But it must be admitted that the Powers That Be have nottroubled about making it easy. Be healthy indeed! When health is sonicely balanced that it is at the mercy of a myriad of microscopicgerms, of every infinitesimal increase of cold or heat, or damp ordryness, of alternations of work and play, oscillation of want andexcess incalculably small, any of which may disturb the beautifulneedle-point balance and topple us over into disease. Such Job'scomforting is one of the many sledge-hammer ironies with which theCosmos diverts itself at our expense; and of course the Cosmos maypermit itself what it likes, and none of us can complain. But is itpossible for one of ourselves, a poor, sick, hustled human being, totake up the jest of the absentee gods of Lucretius, and say to hisfellow-men: "Believe me, you would do much better to be quite healthy, and quite happy?"

And, as art is one of mankind's modes of expressing itself, why in theworld should we expect it to be the expression only of mankind'shealth and happiness? Even admitting that the very existence of therace proves that the healthy and happy states of living must on thewhole preponderate (a matter which can, after all, not be proved soeasily), even admitting that, why should mankind be allowed artisticemotions only at those moments, and requested not to express itself orfeel artistically during the others? Bay-trees are delightful things, no doubt, and we are all very fond of them off and on. But why must wepretend to enjoy them when we don't; why must we hide the fact thatthey sometimes irritate or bore us, and that every now and then wevery much prefer--well, weeping-willows, upas-trees, and all the lividor phosphorescent eccentricities of the various _fleurs du mal_?

Is it not stupid thus to "blink and shut our apprehension up?" Nay, worse, is it not positively heartless, brutal?

IV. 

This argument, I confess, invariably delights and humiliates me: it isso full of sympathy for all sorts and conditions of men, and soappreciative of what is and what is not. It is so very human andhumane. There is in it a sort of quite gentle and dignified PrometheusVinctus attitude towards the Powers That Be; and Zeus, with histhunderbolts and chains, looks very much like a brute by contrast. 

But what is to be done? Zeus exists with his chains and thunderbolts, and all the minor immortals, lying down, colossal, dim, like mountainsat night, at Schiller's golden tables, each with his fine attribute, olive-tree, horse, lyre, sun and what not, by his side; also his ownparticular scourge, plague, dragon, wild boar, or sea monster, readyto administer to recalcitrant, insufficiently pious man. And the godshave it their own way, call them what you will, children of Chaos orchildren of Time, dynasty succeeding dynasty, but only for the sameold gifts and same old scourges to be handed on from one to the other. 

In more prosaic terms, we cannot get loose of nature, the nature ofourselves; we cannot get rid of the fact that certain courses, certainhabits, certain preferences are to our advantage, and certain othersto our detriment. And therefore, to return to art, and to the variousimaginative and emotional activities which I am obliged to label bythat very insufficient name, we cannot get rid of the fact that, however much certain sorts of art are the natural expression ofcertain recurring and common states of being; however much certainpreferences correspond to certain temperaments or conditions, we mustnevertheless put them aside as much as possible, and give ourattention to the opposite sorts of art and the opposite sorts ofpreference, for the simple reason that the first make us less fit forlife and less happy in the long run, while the second make us more fitand happier. 

It is a question not of what we _are_, but of what _we shall be_. 

V. 

A distinguished scientific psychologist, who is also a psychologist inthe unscientific sense, and who writes of Intellect and Will less inthe spirit (and, thank heaven, less in the style) of Mr. Spencer thanin that of Monsieur de Montaigne, has objected to music (and, Ipresume, in less degree to other art) that it runs the risk ofenfeebling the character by stimulating emotions without affordingthem a corresponding outlet in activity. I agree (as will be seenfarther on) that music more particularly may have an unwholesomeinfluence, but not for the reason assigned by Professor James, whoseems to me to mistake the nature and functions of artistic emotion. 

I doubt very much whether any non-literary art, whether even music hasthe power, in the modern man, of stimulating tendencies to action. Itmay have had in the savage, and may still have in the civilised child;but in the ordinary, cultivated grown-up person, the excitementproduced by any artistic sight, sound, or idea will most probably beused up in bringing to life again some of the many millions of sights, sounds, and ideas which lie inert, stored up in our mind. The artisticemotion will therefore not give rise to an active impulse, but to thatvague mixture of feelings and ideas which we call a _mood_; and if anyalteration occur in subsequent action, it will be because all externalimpressions must vary according to the mood of the person who receivesthem, and consequently undergo a certain selection, some being allowedto dominate and lead to action, while others pass unnoticed, areneutralised or dismissed. 

More briefly, it seems to me that artistic emotion is of practicalimportance, not because it discharges itself in action, but, on thecontrary, because it produces a purely internal rearrangement of ourthoughts and feelings; because, in short, it helps to formconcatenations of preferences, habits of being. 

Whether or not Mr. Herbert Spencer be correct in deducing all artisticactivities from our primæval instincts of play, it seems to me certainthat these artistic activities have for us adults much the sameimportance as the play activities have for a child. They represent theonly perfectly free exercise, and therefore, free development, of ourpreferences. Now, everyone will admit, I suppose, that it is extremelyundesirable that a child should amuse itself acquiring unwholesomepreferences and evil habits, indulging in moods which will make it orits neighbours less comfortable out of play-time?

Mind, I do not for a moment pretend that art is to become theconscious instrument of morals, any more than (Heaven forbid!) playshould become the conscious preparation of infant virtue. All Icontend is that if some kinds of infant amusement result in damage, wesuppress them as a nuisance; and that, if some kinds of artdisorganise the soul, the less we have of them the better. 

Moreover, the grown-up human being is so constituted, is so full offine connections and analogies throughout his nature, that, while thesense of emulation and gain lends such additional zest to hisamusements, the sense of increasing spiritual health and power, wherever it exists, magnifies almost incredibly the pleasure derivablefrom beautiful impressions. 

VI. 

The persons who maintained just now (and who does not feel ahard-hearted Philistine for gainsaying them?) that we have no right toostracise, still less to stone, unwholesome kinds of art, make much ofthe fact that, as we are told in church, "We have no health in us. "But it is the recognition of this lack of health which hardens myheart to unwholesome persons and things. If we must be wary of whatmoods and preferences we foster in ourselves, it is because so few ofus are congenitally sound--perhaps none without some organic weakness;and because, even letting soundness alone, very few of us lead livesthat are not, in one respect or another, strained or starved orcramped. Gods and archangels might certainly indulge exclusively inthe literature and art for which Baudelaire may stand in thisdiscussion. But gods and archangels require neither filters nordisinfectants, and may slake their thirst in the veriest decoction oftyphoid. 

VII. 

The Greeks, who were a fortunate mixture of Conservatives andAnarchists, averred that the desire for the impossible (I do notquote, for, alas! I should not understand the quotation) is a diseaseof the soul. 

It is not, I think, the desire for the impossible (since few can tellwhat seems impossible, and fewer care for what indubitably is so) somuch as the desire for the topsy-turvy. Baudelaire, who admiredpersons thus afflicted, has a fine line:

 "De la réalité grands esprits contempteurs";

but what they despised was not the real, but the usual. Now the usual, of the sort thus despised, happens to represent the necessities of ourorganisms and of that wider organism which we call circumstances. Wemay modify it, always in the direction in which it tends spontaneouslyto evolve; but we cannot subvert it. You might as well try to subvertgravitation: "Je m'en suis aperçu étant par terre, " is the onlyresult, as in Molière's lesson of physics. 

VIII. 

Also, when you come to think of it, there is nothing showing a finerorganisation in the incapacity for finding sugar sweet and vinegarsour. The only difference is that, as sugar happens to be sweet andvinegar sour, an organisation which perceives the reverse is at sixesand sevens with the universe, or a bit of the universe; and, exactlyto the extent to which this six-and-sevenness prevails, is likely tobe mulcted of some of the universe's good things. 

How may I bring this home, without introducing a sickly atmosphere ofdecadent art and literature into my valley of the bay-trees? And yet, an instance is needed. Well; there is an old story, originatingperhaps in Suetonius, handed on by Edgar Poe, and repeated, withvariations, by various modern French writers, of sundry persons who, among other realities, despise the fact that sheets and table-linenare usually white; and show the subtlety of their organisation (theEmperor Tiberius, a very subtle person, was one of the earliest toapply the notion) by taking their sleep and food in an arrangement ofblack materials; a sort of mourning warehouse of beds anddining-tables. 

Now this means simply that these people have bought "distinction" atthe price of one of mankind's most delightful birthrights, thepleasure in white, the queen, as Leonardo put it, of all colours. Ourminds, our very sensations are interwoven so intricately of all mannerof impressions and associations, that it is no allegory to say thatwhite is good, and that the love of white is akin somehow to the loveof virtue. For the love of white has come to mean, thanks to thepractice of all centuries and to the very structure of our nerves, strength, cleanness, and newness of sensation, capacity forre-enjoying the already enjoyed, for preferring the already preferred, for discovering new interest and pleasureableness in old things, instead of running to new ones, as one does when not the old ones areexhausted, but one's own poor vigour. The love of white means, furthermore, the appreciation of certain circumstances, delightful andvaluable in themselves, without which whiteness cannot be present: inhuman beings, good health and youth and fairness of life; in houses(oh! the white houses of Cadiz, white between the blue sky and bluesea!), excellence of climate, warmth, dryness and clearness of air;and in all manner of household goods and stuff, care, order, daintiness of habits, leisure and affluence. All things these which, quite as much as any peculiarity of optic function, give for thehealthy mind a sort of restfulness, of calm, of virtue, and I mightalmost say, of regal or priestly quality to white; a quality whichsuits it to the act of restoring our bodies with food and wine, aboveall, to the act of spiritual purification, the passing through thecool, colourless, stainless, which constitutes true sleep. 

All this the Emperor Tiberius and his imitators forego with theirbogey black sheets and table-cloths. .. . 

IX. 

But what if we _do not care for white_? What if we are so constitutedthat its insipidity sickens _us_ as much as the most poisonous andputrescent colours which Blake ever mixed to paint hell and sin? Nay, if those grumous and speckly viscosities of evil green, orange, poppypurple, and nameless hues, are the only things which give us anypleasure?

Is it a reason, because you arcadian Optimists of Evolution extract, or imagine you extract, some feeble satisfaction out of white, that weshould pretend to enjoy it, and the Antique and Outdoor Nature, andEarly Painters, and Mozart and Gluck, and all the whitenesses physicaland moral? You say we are abnormal, unwholesome, decaying; very good, then why should we not get pleasure in decaying, unwholesome, andabnormal things? We are like the poison-monger's daughter in NathanielHawthorne's story. Other people's poison is our meat, and we should bekilled by an antidote; that is to say, bored to death, which, in ouropinion, is very much worse. 

To this kind of speech, common since the romantic and pre-Raphaelitemovement, and getting commoner with the spread of theories ofintellectual anarchy and nervous degeneracy, one is often tempted toanswer impatiently, "Get out of the way, you wretched young people;don't you see that there isn't room or time for your posing?"

But unfortunately it is not all pose. There are a certain number ofpeople who really are _bored with white_; for whom, as a result ofconstitutional morbidness, of nervous exhaustion, or of that verydisintegration of soul due to unwholesome æsthetic self-indulgence, tothe constant quest for violent artistic emotion, our soul's best foodhas really become unpalatable and almost nauseous. These people cannotlive without spiritual opium or alcohol, although that opium oralcohol is killing them by inches. It is absurd to be impatient withthem. All one can do is to let them go in peace to their undoing, andhope that their example will be rather a warning than a model toothers. 

X. 

But, letting alone the possibility of art acting as a poison for thesoul, there remains an important question. As I said, although art isone of the most wholesome of our soul's activities, there are yetkinds of art, or (since it is a subjective question of profit ordamage to ourselves) rather kinds of artistic effect, which, for someevident reason, or through some obscure analogy or hidden point ofcontact awaken those movements of the fancy, those states of theemotions which disintegrate rather than renew the soul, and accustomus rather to the yielding and proneness which we shun, than to theresistance and elasticity which we seek throughout life to increase. 

I was listening, last night, to some very wonderful singing of modernGerman songs; and the emotion that still remains faintly within mealongside of the traces of those languishing phrases and passionateintonations, the remembrance of the sense of--how shall I callit?--violation of the privacy of the human soul which haunted methroughout that performance, has brought home to me, for the hundredthtime, that the Greek legislators were not so fantastic in consideringmusic a questionable art, which they thought twice before admittinginto their ideal commonwealths. For music can do more by our emotionsthan the other arts, and it can, therefore, separate itself from themand their holy ways; it can, in a measure, actually undo the good theydo to our soul. 

But, you may object, poetry does the very same; it also expresses, strengthens, brings home our human, momentary, individual emotions, instead of uniting with the arts of visible form, with the harmoniousthings of nature, to create for us another kind of emotion, theemotion of the eternal, unindividual, universal life, in whosecontemplation our souls are healed and made whole after thedisintegration inflicted by what is personal and fleeting. 

It is true that much poetry expresses merely such personal and momentaryemotion; but it does so through a mechanism differing from that of music, and possessing a saving grace which the emotion-compelling mechanismof music does not. For by the very nature of the spoken or writtenword, by the word's strictly intellectual concomitants, poetry, evenwhile rousing emotion, brings into play what is most different toemotion, emotion's sifter and chastener, the great force which reducesall things to abstraction, to the eternal and typical: reason. Youcannot express in words, even the most purely instinctive, half-conscious feeling, without placing that dumb and blind emotion inthe lucid, balanced relations which thought has given to words;indeed, words rarely, if ever, reproduce emotion as it is, butinstead, emotion as it is instinctively conceived, in its setting ofcause and effect. Hence there is in all poetry a certain reasonableelement which, even in the heyday of passion, makes us superior topassion by explaining its why and wherefore; and even when the poetsucceeds in putting us in the place of him who feels, we enter onlyinto one-half of his personality, the half which contemplates whilethe other suffers: we _know_ the feeling, rather than _feel_ it. 

Now, it is different with music. Its relations to our nerves are suchthat it can reproduce emotion, or, at all events, emotional moods, directly and without any intellectual manipulation. We weep, but knownot why. Its specifically artistic emotion, the power it shares withall other arts of raising our state of consciousness to something morecomplete, more vast, and more permanent--the specific musical emotionof music can become subservient to the mere awakening of our latentemotional possibilities, to the stimulating of emotions oftenundesirable in themselves, and always unable, at the moment, to findtheir legitimate channel, whence enervation and perhaps degradation ofthe soul. There are kinds of music which add the immense charm, thesubduing, victorious quality of art, to the power of mere emotion assuch; and in these cases we are pushed, by the delightfulness ofbeauty and wonder, by the fascination of what is finer than ourselves, into deeper consciousness of our innermost, primæval, chaotic self:the stuff in which soul has not yet dawned. We are made to enjoy whatwe should otherwise dread; and the dignity of beauty, and beauty'sfrankness and fearlessness, are lent to things such as we regard, under other circumstances, as too intimate, too fleeting, too obscure, too unconscious, to be treated, in ourselves and our neighbours, otherwise than with decorous reserve. 

It is astonishing, when one realises it, that the charm of music, thegood renown it has gained in its more healthful and more decorousdays, can make us sit out what we do sit out under its influence:violations of our innermost secrets, revelations of the hiddenpossibilities of our own nature and the nature of others; strippingaway of all the soul's veils; nay, so to speak, melting away of thesoul's outward forms, melting away of the soul's active structure, itsbone and muscle, till there is revealed only the shapeless primævalnudity of confused instincts, the soul's vague viscera. 

When music does this, it reverts, I think, towards being the nuisancewhich, before it had acquired the possibilities of form and beauty itnow tends to despise, it was felt to be by ancient philosophers andlaw-givers. At any rate, it sells its artistic birthright. Itrenounces its possibility of constituting, with the other great arts, a sort of supplementary contemplated nature; an element wherein tobuoy up and steady those fluctuations which we express in speech; avast emotional serenity, an abstract universe in which our small andfleeting emotions can be transmuted, and wherein they can losethemselves in peacefulness and strength. 

XI. 

I mentioned this one day to my friend the composer. His answer ispartly what I was prepared for: this emotionally disintegratingelement ceases to exist, or continues to exist only in the veryslightest degree, for the real musician. The effect on the nerves isoverlooked, neutralised, in the activity of the intellect; much as theemotional effect of the written word is sent into the background bythe perception of cause and effect which the logical associations ofthe word produce. For the composer, even for the performer, says myfriend, music has a logic of its own, so strong and subtle as tooverpower every other consideration. 

But music is not merely for musicians; the vast majority will alwaysreceive it not actively through the intellect, but passively throughthe nerves; the mood will, therefore, be induced before, so to speak, the image, the musical structure, is really appreciated. And, meanwhile, the soul is being made into a sop. 

"For the moment, " answers my composer, "perhaps; but only for themoment. Once the nerves accustomed to those modulations and rhythms;once the form perceived by the mind, the emotional associations willvanish; the hearer will have become what the musician originallywas. .. . How do you know that, in its heyday, all music may not haveaffected people as Wagner's music affects them nowadays? What proofhave you got that the strains of Mozart and Gluck, nay, those ofPalestrina, which fill our soul with serenity, may not have been fullof stress and trouble when they first were heard; may not have laidbare the chaotic elements of our nature, brought to the surface itsprimæval instincts? Historically, all you know is that Gluck's_Orpheus_ made our ancestors weep; and that Wagner's _Tristram_ makesour contemporaries sob. .. . "

This is the musician's defence. Does it free his art from my rathermiserable imputation? I think not. If all this be true, if _Orpheus_has been what _Tristram_ is, all one can say is _the more's the pity_. If it be true, all music would require the chastening influence oftime, and its spiritual value would be akin to that of the Past andDistant; it would be innocuous, because it had lost half of itsvitality. We should have to lay down music, like wine, for the future;poisoning ourselves with the acrid fumes of its must, the heady, enervating scent of scum and purpled vat, in order that our childrenmight drink vigour and warmth after we were dead. 

XII. 

But I doubt very much whether this is true. It is possible that themusic of Wagner may eventually become serene like the music of Handel;but was the music of Handel ever morbid like the music of Wagner?

I do not base my belief on any preference from Handel'scontemporaries. We may, as we are constantly being told, be_degenerates_; but there was no special grace whence to degenerate inour perruked forefathers. Moreover, I believe that any veryspontaneous art is to a very small degree the product of one or eventwo or three generations of men. It has been growing to be what it isfor centuries and centuries. Its germ and its necessities of organismand development lie far, far back in the soul's world-history; and itis but later, if at all, when the organic growth is at an end, thattimes and individuals can fashion it in their paltry passing image. No; we may be as strong and as pure as Handel's audiences, and ourmusic yet be less strong and pure than theirs. 

My reason for believing in a fundamental emotional difference betweenthat music and ours is of another sort. I think that in art, as in allother things, the simpler, more normal interest comes first, and themore complex, less normal, follows when the simple and normal hasbecome, through familiarity, the insipid. While pleasure unspiced bypain is still a novelty there is no reason thus to spice it. 

XIII. 

The question can, however, be tolerably settled by turning over themeans which enable music to awaken emotion--emotion which we recogniseas human, as distinguished from the mere emotion of pleasure attachedto all beautiful sights and sounds. Once we have understood what thesemeans are, we can enquire to what extent they are employed in themusic of various schools and epochs, and thus judge, with some chanceof likelihood, whether the music which strikes us as serene andvigorous could have affected our ancestors as turbid and enervating. 

'Tis a dull enough psychological examination; but one worth making, not merely for the sake of music itself, but because music, being themost emotional of all the arts, can serve to typify the good ormischief which all art may do, according to which of our emotions itfosters. 

 * * * * *

'Tis repeating a fact in different words, not stating anything new, tosay that all beautiful things awaken a specific sort of emotion, theemotion or the mood of the beautiful. Yet this statement, equivalentto saying that hot objects give us the sensation of heat, and wetobjects the sensation of wetness, is well worth repeating, because weso often forget that the fact of beauty in anything is merely the factof that thing setting up in ourselves a very specific feeling. 

 * * * * *

Now, besides this beauty or quality producing the emotion of thebeautiful, there exist in things a lot of other qualities alsoproducing emotion, each according to its kind; or rather, thebeautiful thing may also be qualified in some other way, as the thingwhich is useful, useless, old, young, common, rare, or whatever youchoose. And this coincidence of qualities produces a coincidence ofstates of mind. We shall experience the feeling not merely of beautybecause the thing is beautiful, but also of surprise because it isstartling, of familiarity because we meet it often, of attraction(independently of beauty) because the thing suits or benefits us, orof repulsion (despite the beauty) because the thing has done us a badturn or might do us one. This is saying that beauty is only one ofvarious relations possible between something not ourselves and ourfeelings, and that it is probable that other relations between themmay exist at the same moment, in the same way that a woman may be aman's wife, but also his cousin, his countrywoman, his school-boardrepresentative, his landlady, and his teacher of Latin, without onequalification precluding the others. 

Now, in the arts of line, colour, and projection, the arts whichusually copy the appearance of objects existing outside the art, theseother qualities, these other relations between ourselves and theobject which exists in the relation of beauty, are largely a matter ofsuperficial association--I mean, of association which may vary, and ofwhich we are most often conscious. 

We are reminded by the picture or statue of qualities which do notexist in it, but in its prototype in reality. A certain face willawaken disgust when seen in a picture, or reverence or amusement, besides the specific impression of beauty (or its reverse), because wehave experienced disgust, awe, amusement in connection with a similarface outside the picture. 

So far, therefore, as art is imitative, its non-artistic emotionalcapacities are due (with a very few exceptions) to association; forthe feelings traceable directly to fatigue or disintegration of theperceptive faculty usually, indeed almost always, prevent the objectfrom affecting us as beautiful. It is quite otherwise when we come tomusic. Here the coincidence of other emotion resides, I believe, notin the _musical thing itself_, not in the musician's creation withoutprototype in reality, resembling nothing save other musicalstructures; the coincidence resides in the elements out of which thatstructure is made, and which, for all its complexities, are still verystrongly perceived by our senses. For instance, certain rhythmsexisting in music are identical with, or analogous to, the rhythm ofour bodily movements under varying circumstances: we knowalternations of long and short, variously composed regularities andirregularities of movement, fluctuations, reinforcements orsubsidences, from experience other than that of music; we know them inconnection with walking, jumping, dragging; with beating of heart andarteries, expansion of throat and lungs; we knew them, long beforemusic was, as connected with energy or oppression, sickness or health, elation or depression, grief, fear, horror, or serenity and happiness. And when they become elements of a musical structure theirassociations come along with them. And these associations are the morepowerful that, while they are rudimentary, familiar like our ownbeing, perhaps even racial, the musical structure into which theyenter is complete, individual, _new_: 'tis comparing the efficacy of, say, Mozart Op. So-and-so, with the efficacy of somebody sobbing ordancing in our presence. 

So far for the associational power of music in awakening emotions. Butmusic has another source of such power over us. Existing as it does ina sequence, it is able to give sensations which the arts dealing withspace, and not with time, could not allow themselves, since for them adisagreeable effect could never prelude an agreeable one, but merelyco-exist with it; whereas for music a disagreeable effect iseffaceable by an agreeable one, and will even considerably heightenthe latter by being made to precede it. Now we not merely associatefatigue or pain with any difficult perception, we actually feel it; weare aware of real discomfort whenever our senses and attention arekept too long on the stretch, or are stimulated too sharply bysomething unexpected. In these cases we are conscious of somethingwhich is exhausting, overpowering, unendurable if it lasted:experiences which are but too familiar in matters not musical, and, therefore, evoke the remembrance of such non-musical discomfort, whichreacts to increase the discomfort produced by the music; the reversetaking place, a sense of freedom, of efficiency, of strength arisingin us whenever the object of perception can be easily, thoughenergetically, perceived. Hence intervals which the ear has difficultyin following, dissonances to which it is unaccustomed, and phrases toolong or too slack for convenient scansion, produce a degree ofsensuous and intellectual distress, which can be measured by theimmense relief--relief as an acute satisfaction--of return to easierintervals, of consonance, and of phrases of normal rhythm and length. 

Thus does it come to pass that music can convey emotional suggestionssuch as painting and sculpture, for all their imitations of reality, can never match in efficacy; since music conveys the suggestions notof mere objects which may have awakened emotion, but of emotionitself, of the expression thereof in our bodily feelings andmovements. And hence also the curious paradox that musical emotion isstrong almost in proportion as it is vague. A visible object may, andprobably will, possess a dozen different emotional values, accordingto our altering relations therewith; for one relation, one mood, oneemotion succeeds and obliterates the other, till nothing very potentcan remain connected with that particular object. But it matters nothow different the course of the various emotions which have expressedthemselves in movements of slackness, agitation, energy, or confusion;it matters not through what circumstances our vigour may have leakedaway, our nerves have been harrowed, our attention worn out, so longas those movements, those agitations, slackenings, oppressions, reliefs, fatigues, harrowings, and reposings are actually taking placewithin us. In briefer phrase, while painting and sculpture present usonly with objects possibly connected with emotions, but probablyconnected with emotions too often varied to affect us strongly; musicgives us the actual bodily consciousness of emotion; nay (in so far asit calls for easy or difficult acts of perception), the actual mentalreality of comfort or discomfort. 

XIV. 

The emotion uppermost in the music of all these old people is thespecific emotion of the beautiful; the emotional possibilities, latentin so many elements of the musical structure, never do more thanqualify the overwhelming impression due to that structure itself. Themusic of Handel and Bach is beautiful, with a touch of awe; that ofGluck, with a tinge of sadness; Mozart's and his contemporaries' isbeautiful, with a reminiscence of all tender and happy emotions; thenagain, there are the great Italians of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, Carissimi, Scarlatti the elder, Marcello, whose musicalbeauty is oddly emphasised with energy and sternness, due to theirpowerful, simple rhythms and straightforward wide intervals. Butwhatever the emotional qualification, the chief, the never varying, all-important characteristic, is the beauty; the dominant emotion isthe serene happiness which beauty gives: happiness, strong anddelicate; increase of our vitality; evocation of all cognate beauty, physical and moral, bringing back to our consciousness all that whichis at once wholesome and rare. For beauty such as this is bothdesirable and, in a sense, far-fetched; it comes naturally to us, andwe meet it half-way; but it does not come often enough. 

Hence it is that the music of these masters never admits us into thepresence of such feelings as either were better not felt, or at allevents, not idly witnessed. There is not ever anything in the joy orgrief suggested by this music, in the love of which it is anexpression, which should make us feel abashed in feeling orwitnessing. The whole world may watch _Orpheus_ or _Alcestis_, as thewhole world may stand (with Bach or Pergolese to make music) at thefoot of the Cross. But may the whole world sit idly watching theraptures and death-throes of Tristram and Yseult?

Surely the world has grown strangely intrusive and unblushing. 

XV. 

I have spoken of this old music as an expression of love; and this, inthe face of the emotional effects of certain modern composers, maymake some persons smile. 

Perhaps I should rather have said that this old music expresses, aboveeverything else, the _lovable_; for does not eminent beauty inevitablyawaken love, either as respect or tenderness; the lovable, _loveliness_? And at the same time the love itself such lovelinessawakens. Love far beyond particular cases or persons, fitting allnoble things, real and imaginary, complex or fragmentary. Love as alyric essence. 

XVI. 

But why not more than merely that? I used at one time to have frequentdiscussions on art and life with a certain poor friend of mine, whoshould have found sweetness in both, giving both sweetness in return, but, alas, did neither. We were sitting in the fields where thefrost-bitten green was just beginning to soften into minute starlikebuds and mosses, and the birds were learning to sing in the leaflesslilac hedgerows, the sunshine, as it does in spring, seeming to holdthe world rather than merely to pour on to it. "You see, " said myfriend, "you see, there is a fundamental difference between us. Youare satisfied with what you call _happiness_; but I want _rapture andexcess_. "

Alas, a few years later, the chance of happiness had gone. That doorwas opened, of which Epictetus wrote that we might always pass throughit; in this case not because "the room was too full of smoke, " but, what is sadder by far, because the room was merely whitewashed andcleanly swept. 

But those words "rapture and excess, " spoken in such childlikesimplicity of spirit, have always remained in my mind. Should we notteach our children, among whom there may be such as that one was, thatthe best thing life can give is just that despised thing _happiness_?

XVII. 

Now art, to my mind, should be one of our main sources of happiness;and under the inappropriate word _art_, I am obliged, as usual, togroup all such activities of soul as deal with beauty, quite as muchwhen it exists in what is (in this sense) not art's antithesis, butart's origin and completion, nature. Nay, art--the art exercised bythe craftsman, but much more so the art, the selecting, groupingprocess performed by our own feelings--art can do more towards ourhappiness than increase the number of its constituent items: it canmould our preferences, can make our souls more resisting and flexible, teach them to keep pace with the universal rhythm. 

Now, there is not room enough in the world, and not stuff enough inus, for much rapture, or for any excess. The space, as it were, thematerial which these occupy and exhaust, has to be paid for; raptureis paid for by subsequent stinting, and excess by subsequentbankruptcy. 

We all know this in even trifling matters; the dulness, the lassitudeor restlessness, the incapacity for enjoyment following any very acuteor exciting pleasure. A man after a dangerous ride, a girl after herfirst wildly successful ball, are not merely exhausted in body and inmind; they are momentarily deprived of the enjoyment of slighteremotions; 'tis like the inability to hear one's own voice afterlistening to a tremendous band. 

The gods, one might say in Goethian phrase, did not intend us to sharetheir own manner of being; or, if you prefer it, in the language ofDarwin or Weissmann, creatures who died of sheer bliss, were unable torear a family and to found a species. Be it as it may, rapture mustneeds be rare, because it destroys a piece of us (makes our preciouspiece of chagrin skin, as in Balzac's story, shrink each time). And, as we have seen, it destroys (which is more important than destructionof mere life) our sensibility to those diffuse, long-drawn, gentle, restorative pleasures which are not merely durable, but, because theyinvigorate our spirit, are actually reproductive of themselves, multiplying, like all sane desirable things, like grain and fruit, ten-fold. Pleasures which I would rather call, but for the cumbersomewords, items of happiness. It is therefore no humiliating circumstanceif art and beauty should be unable to excite us like a game of cards, a steeplechase, a fight, or some violent excitement of our senses orour vanity. This inability, on the contrary, constitutes our chiefreason for considering our pleasure in beautiful sights, sounds, andthoughts, as in a sense, holy. 

XVIII. 

Yesterday morning, riding towards the cypress woods, I had the firstimpression of spring; and, in fact, to-day the first almond-tree hadcome out in blossom on our hillside. 

A cool morning; loose, quickly moving clouds, and every now and then agust of rain swept down from the mountains. The path followed a brook, descending in long, steep steps from the hillside; water perfectlyclear, bubbling along the yellow stones between the grassy banks andmaking now and then a little leap into a lower basin; along the streamgreat screens of reeds, sere, pale, with barely a pennon of leaves, rustling ready for the sickle; and behind, beneath the watery sky, rainy but somehow peaceful, the russet oak-scrub of the hill. Ofspring there was indeed visible only the green of the young wheatbeneath the olives; not a bud as yet had moved. And still, it isspring. The world is renewing itself. One feels it in the gusts ofcool, wet wind, the songs of the reeds, the bubble of the brook; onefeels it, above all, in oneself. All things are braced, elastic, readyfor life. 

THE ART AND THE COUNTRY. 

TUSCAN NOTES. 

 ". .. All these are inhabitants of truly mountain cities, Florence being as completely among the hills as Innsbruck is, only the hills have softer outlines. "--_Modern Painters_, iv. , chap. Xx. 

I. 

Sitting in the January sunshine on the side of this Fiesole hill, overlooking the opposite quarries (a few long-stalked daisies at myfeet in the gravel, still soft from the night's frost), my thoughtstook the colour and breath of the place. They circled, as these pathscircle round the hill, about those ancient Greek and old Italiancities, where the cyclopean walls, the carefully-terraced olives, followed the tracks made first by the shepherd's and the goat's foot, even as we see them now on the stony hills all round. Whatcivilisations were those, thus sowed on the rock like the wild mintand grey myrrh-scented herbs, and grown under the scorch of sun uponstone, and the eddy of winds down the valleys! They are gone, disappeared, and their existence would be impossible in our days. Butthey have left us their art, the essence they distilled from theirsurroundings. And that is as good for our souls as the sunshine andthe wind, as the aromatic scent of the herbs of their mountains. 

II. 

I am tempted to think that the worst place for getting to know, getting to _feel_, any school of painting, is the gallery, and thebest, perhaps, the fields: the fields (or in the case of theVenetians, largely the waters), to which, with their qualities of air, of light, their whole train of sensations and moods, the artistictemperament, and the special artistic temperament of a local school, can very probably be traced. 

For to appreciate any kind of art means, after all, not to understandits relations with other kinds of art, but to feel its relations withourselves. It is a matter of living, thanks to that art, according tothe spiritual and organic modes of which it is an expression. Now, togo from room to room of a gallery, allowing oneself to be played uponby very various kinds of art, is to prevent the formation of anydefinite mood, and to set up what is most hostile to all mood, to allunity of being: comparison, analysis, classification. You may knowquite exactly the difference between Giotto and Simon Martini, betweena Ferrarese and a Venetian, between Praxiteles and Scopas; and yet beignorant of the meaning which any of these might have in your life, and unconscious of the changes they might work in your being. Andthis, I fear, is often the case with connoisseurs and archæologists, accounting for the latent suspicion of the ignoramus and the goodphilistine, that such persons are somehow none the better for theirintercourse with art. 

All art which is organic, short of which it cannot be efficient, depends upon tradition. To say so sounds a truism, because we rarelyrealise all that tradition implies: on the side of the artist, _whatto do_, and on the side of his public, _how to feel_: a habit, anexpectation which accumulates the results of individual creativegenius and individual appreciative sensibility, giving to each itsgreatest efficacy. When one remembers, in individual instances--Kant, Darwin, Michel Angelo, Mozart--how very little which is absolutelynew, how slight a variation, how inevitable a combination, marks, after all, the greatest strokes of genius in all things, it seemsquite laughable to expect the mediocre person, mere looker-on orlistener, far from creative, to reach at once, without a similarsequence of initiation, a corresponding state of understanding andenjoyment. But, as a rule, this thought does not occur to us; and, while we expatiate on the creative originality of artists and poets, we dully take for granted the instant appreciation of their creation;forgetting, or not understanding, in both cases, the wonderfulefficacy of tradition. 

As regards us moderns, for whom the tradition of, say, Tuscan art hasso long been broken off or crossed by various other and very differentones--as regards ourselves, I am inclined to think that we can bestrecover it by sympathetic attention to those forms of art, humbler ormore public, which must originally have prepared and kept up theinterest of the people for whom the Tuscan craftsmen worked. 

Pictures and statues, even in a traditional period, embody a largeamount of merely personal peculiarities of individual artists, testifying to many activities--imitation, self-assertion, rivalry--which have no real æsthetic value. And, during the fifteenthcentury and in Tuscany especially, the flow of traditional æstheticfeeling is grievously altered and adulterated by the merest scientifictendencies: a painter or sculptor being often, in the first instance, a student of anatomy, archæology or perspective. One may, therefore, be familiar for twenty years with Tuscan Renaissance painting orsculpture, and yet remain very faintly conscious of the specialæsthetic character, the _virtues_ (in the language of herbals) ofTuscan art. Hence I should almost say, better let alone the picturesand statues until you are sufficiently acquainted with the particularquality lurking therein to recognise, extricate and assimilate it, despite irrelevant ingredients. Learn the _quality_ of Tuscan art fromthose categories of it which are most impersonal, most traditional, and most organic and also freer from scientific interference, sayarchitecture and decoration; and from architecture rather in itshumble, unobtrusive work than in the great exceptional creations whichimply, like the cupola of Florence, the assertion of a personality, the surmounting of a difficulty, and even the braving of other folks'opinion. I believe that if one learned, not merely to know, but tofeel, to enjoy very completely and very specifically, the quality ofdistinctness and reserve, slightness of means and greatness ofproportions, of the domestic architecture and decoration of thefifteenth century, if one made one's own the mood underlying thespecial straight lines and curves, the symmetry and hiatus of thecolonnades, for instance, inside Florentine houses; of the little bitsof carving on escutcheon and fireplace of Tuscan hillside farms; letalone of the plainest sepulchral slabs in Santa Croce, one would bein better case for really appreciating, say, Botticelli or Pier dellaFrancesca than after ever so much comparison of their work with thatof other painters. For, through familiarity with that humbler, morepurely impersonal and traditional art, a certain mode of being inoneself, which is the special æsthetic mood of the Tuscan's would havebecome organised and be aroused at the slightest indication of thequalities producing it, so that their presence would never escape one. This, I believe, is the secret of all æsthetic training: the growingaccustomed, as it were automatically, to respond to the work of art'sbidding; to march or dance to Apollo's harping with the irresistibleinstinct with which the rats and the children followed the piedpiper's pipe. This is the æsthetic training which quite unconsciouslyand incidentally came to the men of the past through daily habit ofartistic forms which existed and varied in the commonest objects justas in the greatest masterpieces. And through it alone was the highestart brought into fruitful contact with even the most everyday persons:the tradition which already existed making inevitable the traditionwhich followed. 

But to return to us moderns, who have to reconstitute deliberately avanished æsthetic tradition, it seems to me that such familiarity withTuscan art once initiated, we can learn more, producing and canalisingits special moods, from a frosty afternoon like this one on thehillside, with its particular taste of air, its particular line ofshelving rock and twisting road and accentuating reed or cypress inthe delicate light, than from hours in a room where Signorelli andLippi, Angelico and Pollaiolo, are all telling one different thingsin different languages. 

III. 

These thoughts, and the ones I shall try to make clear as I go on, began to take shape one early winter morning some ten years ago, whileI was staying among the vineyards in the little range of hills whichseparate the valley of the Ombrone from the lower valley of the Arno. Stony hills, stony paths between leafless lilac hedges, stony outlinesof crest, fringed with thin rosy bare trees; here and there a fewbright green pines; for the rest, olives and sulphur-yellow sere vinesamong them; the wide valley all a pale blue wash, and Monte Morelloopposite wrapped in mists. It was visibly snowing on the greatApennines, and suddenly, though very gently, it began to snow herealso, wrapping the blue distance, the yellow vineyards, in thin veils. Brisk cold. At the house, when I returned from my walk, the childrenwere flattened against the window-panes, shouting for joy at the snow. We grown-up folk, did we live wiser lives, might be equally delightedby similar shows. 

A very Tuscan, or rather (what I mean when I make use of that word, for geographically Tuscany is very large and various) a veryFlorentine day. Beauty, exquisiteness, serenity; but not withoutausterity carried to a distinct bitingness. And this is the qualitywhich we find again in all very characteristic Tuscan art. Such acountry as this, scorched in summer, wind-swept in winter, andconstantly stony and uphill, a country of eminently dry, clear, movingair, puts us into a braced, active, self-restrained mood; there is init, as in these frosty days which suit it best, something which giveslife and demands it: a quality of happy effort. The art produced bypeople in whom such a condition of being is frequent, must necessarilyreproduce this same condition of being in others. 

Therefore the connection between a country and its art must be soughtmainly in the fact that all art expresses a given state of being, ofemotion, not human necessarily, but vital; that is to say, expressesnot whether we love or hate, but rather _how_ we love or hate, how we_are_. The mountain forms, colour, water, etc. , of a country areincorporated into its art less as that art's object of representation, than as the determinant of a given mode of vitality in the artist. Hence music and literature, although never actually reproducing anypart of them, may be strongly affected by their character. The _VitaNuova_, the really great (not merely historically interesting)passages of the Divine Comedy, and the popular songs of Tigri'scollection, are as much the outcome of these Tuscan mountains andhills, as is any picture in which we recognise their outlines andcolours. Indeed, it happens that of literal rendering (asdistinguished from ever-present reference to quality of air or light, to climbing, to rock and stone as such) there is little in the_Commedia_, none at all in either the old or the more modern lyrics, and not so much even in painted landscape. The Tuscan backgrounds ofthe fifteenth century are _not_ these stony places, sun-burnt orwind-swept; they are the green lawns and pastures in vogue with thewhole international Middle Ages, but rendered with that braced, selecting, finishing temper which _is_ the product of those stonyhills. Similarly the Tuscans must have been influenced by the grace, the sparseness, the serenity of the olive, its inexhaustible vigourand variety; yet how many of them ever painted it? That a peopleshould never paint or describe their landscape may mean that they havenot consciously inventoried the items; but it does not mean that theyhave not æsthetically, so to speak _nervously_, felt them. Theirquality, their virtue, may be translated into that people's way oftalking of or painting quite different things: the Tuscan quality is aquality of form, because it is a quality of mood. 

IV. 

This Tuscan, and more than Attic, quality--for there is something akinto it in certain Greek archaic sculpture--is to be found, alreadyperfect and most essential, in the façades of the early mediævalchurches of Pistoia. _Is to be found_; because this quality, tense andrestrained and distributed with harmonious evenness, reveals itselfonly to a certain fineness and carefulness of looking. The littlechurches (there are four or five of them) belong to the style calledPisan-Romanesque; and their fronts, carved arches, capitals, lintels, and doorposts, are identical in plan, in all that the mind rapidlyinventories, with the fronts of the numerous contemporary churches ofLucca. But a comparison with these will bring out most vividly thespecial quality of the Pistoia churches. The Lucchese ones (of some ofwhich, before their restoration, Mr. Ruskin has left some marvellouscoloured drawings at Oxford) run to picturesqueness and evensomething more; they do better in the picture than in the reality, and weathering and defacement has done much for them. Whereas thelittle churches at Pistoia, with less projection, less carving in theround, few or no animal or clearly floral forms, and, as a rule, pilasters or half-pillars instead of columns, must have been asperfect the day they were finished; the subtle balancings and tensionsof lines and curves, the delicate fretting and inlaying of flatsurface pattern, having gained only, perhaps, in being drawn moreclearly by dust and damp upon a softer colour of marble. I havementioned these first, because their apparent insignificance--tinyflat façades, with very little decoration--makes it in a way easier tograsp the special delicate austerity of their beauty. But they arehumble offshoots, naturally, of two great and complex masterpieces, and very modest sisters of a masterpiece only a degree lessmarvellous: Pisa Cathedral, the Baptistery of Florence and SanMiniato. The wonderful nature of the most perfect of these threebuildings (and yet I hesitate to call it so, remembering the apse andlateral gables of Pisa) can be the better understood that, standingbefore the Baptistery of Florence, one has by its side Giotto's verybeautiful belfry. Looking at them turn about, one finds that theGothic boldness of light and shade of the Campanile makes the windows, pillars and cornices of the Baptistery seem at first very flat anduninteresting. But after the first time, and once that sense offlatness overcome, it is impossible to revert to the belfry with thesame satisfaction. The eye and mind return to the greater perfectionof the Baptistery; by an odd paradox there is deeper feeling in thoseapparently so slight and superficial carvings, those lintels andfluted columns of green marble which scarcely cast a shadow on theirivory-tinted wall. The Tuscan quality of these buildings is the betterappreciated when we take in the fact that their architectural itemshad long existed, not merely in the Romanesque, but in the Byzantineand late Roman. The series of temple-shaped windows on the outside ofthe Florence Baptistery and of San Miniato, has, for instance, itsoriginal in the Baptistery of Ravenna and the arch at Verona. What theTuscans have done is to perfect the inner and subtler proportions, torestrain and accentuate, to phrase (in musical language) every detailof execution. By an accident of artistic evolution, this style ofarchitecture, rather dully elaborated by a worn-out civilisation, hashad to wait six centuries for life to be put into it by a finer-strungpeople at a chaster and more braced period of history. Nor should webe satisfied with such loose phrases as this, leading one to think, ina slovenly fashion (quite unsuitable to Tuscan artistic lucidity), that the difference lay in some vague metaphysical entity called_spirit_: the spirit of the Tuscan stonemasons of the early MiddleAges altered the actual tangible forms in their proportions anddetails: this spiritual quality affects us in their carved and inlaidmarbles, their fluted pilasters and undercut capitals, as a result ofactual work of eye and of chisel: they altered the expression byaltering the stone, even as the frosts and August suns and tricklingwater had determined the expression, by altering the actual surface, of their lovely austere hills. 

V. 

The Tuscan quality in architecture must not be sought for during thehundred years of Gothic--that is to say, of foreign--supremacy andinterregnum. The stonemasons of Pisa and of Florence did indeed applytheir wholly classic instincts to the detail and ornament of thisalien style; and one is struck by the delicacy and self-restraint of, say, the Tuscan ones among the Scaliger tombs compared with the morepicturesque looseness of genuine Veronese and Venetian Gothicsculpture. But the constructive, and, so to speak, space enclosing, principles of the great art of mediæval France were even lessunderstood by the Tuscan than by any other Italian builders; and, asthe finest work of Tuscan façade architecture was given before theGothic interregnum, so also its most noble work, as actual spatialarrangement, must be sought for after the return to the round arch, the cupola and the entablature of genuine Southern building. And then, by a fortunate coincidence (perhaps because this style affords no realunity to vast naves and transepts), the architectural masterpieces ofthe fifteenth century are all of them (excepting, naturally, Brunelleschi's dome) very small buildings: the Sacristies of S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito, the chapel of the Pazzi, and the late, butexquisite, small church of the Carceri at Prato. The smallness ofthese places is fortunate, because it leaves no doubt that the senseof spaciousness--of our being, as it were, enclosed with a great partof world and sky around us--is an artistic illusion got byco-ordination of detail, greatness of proportions, and, most of all, perhaps, by quite marvellous distribution of light. These smallsquares, or octagons, most often with a square embrasure for thealtar, seem ample habitations for the greatest things; one would wishto use them for Palestrina's music, or Bach's, or Handel's; and thenone recognises that their actual dimensions in yards would notaccommodate the band and singers and the organ! Such music must remainin our soul, where, in reality, the genius of those Florentinearchitects has contrived the satisfying ampleness of their buildings. 

That they invented nothing in the way of architectural ornament, nay, took their capitals, flutings, cornices, and so forth, mostmechanically from the worst antique, should be no real drawback tothis architecture; it was, most likely, a matter of negative instinct. For these meagre details leave the mind free, nay, force it rather, tosoar at once into the vaultings, into the serene middle space oppositethe windows, and up into the enclosed heaven of the cupolas. 

VI. 

The Tuscan sculpture of this period stands, I think, midway betweenthe serene perfection of the buildings (being itself sprung from thearchitecture of the Gothic time), and the splendid but fragmentaryaccomplishment of the paintings, many of whose disturbing problems, ofanatomy and anatomic movement, it shared to its confusion. It is notfor beautiful bodily structure or gesture, such as we find even inpoor antiques, that we should go to the Florentine sculptors, save, perhaps, the two Robbias. It is the almost architectural distributionof space and light, the treatment of masses, which makes theimmeasurable greatness of Donatello, and gives dignity to his greatestcontemporary, Jacopo della Quercia. And it is again an architecturalquality, though in the sense of the carved portals of Pistoia, theflutings and fretwork and surface pattern of the Baptistery and S. Miniato, which gives such poignant pleasure in the work of a verydifferent, but very great, sculptor, Desiderio. The marvel (for it isa marvel) of his great monument in Santa Croce, depends not onanatomic forms, but on the exquisite variety and vivacity of surfacearrangement; the word symphony (so often misapplied) fitting exactlythis complex structure of minute melodies and harmonies of rhythms andaccents in stone. 

But the quality of Tuscan sculpture exists in humbler, often anonymousand infinitely pathetic work. I mean those effigies of knights andburghers, coats of arms and mere inscriptions, which constitute solarge a portion of what we walk upon in Santa Croce. Things not muchthought of, maybe, and ruthlessly defaced by all posterity. But themasses, the main lines, were originally noble, and defacement has onlymade their nobleness and tenderness more evident and poignant: theyhave come to partake of the special solemnity of stone worn by frostand sunshine. 

VII. 

There are a great many items which go to make up Tuscany and thespecially Tuscan mood. The country is at once hilly and mountainous, but rich in alluvial river valleys, as flat and as wide, very often, as plains; and the chains which divide and which bound it are asvarious as can be: the crystalline crags of Carrara, the washed awaycones and escarpments of the high Apennines, repeating themselves incounter forts and foothills, and the low, closely packed ridges of thehills between Florence and Siena. Hence there is always a view, definite and yet very complex, made up of every variety of line, butalways of clearest perspective: perfect horizontals at one's feet, perfect perpendiculars opposite the eye, a constant alternation oflooking up and looking down, a never-failing possibility of looking_beyond_, an outlet everywhere for the eye, and for the breath; andendless intricacy of projecting spur and engulfed ravine, of valleyabove valley, and ridge beyond ridge; and all of it, whetherdefinitely modelled by stormy lights or windy dryness, or washed tomere outline by sunshine or mist, always massed into intelligible, harmonious, and ever-changing groups. Ever changing as you move, hillsrising or sinking as you mount or descend, furling or unfurling as yougo to the right or to the left, valleys and ravines opening or closingup, the whole country altering, so to speak, its attitude and gestureas quickly almost, and with quite as perfect consecutiveness, as doesa great cathedral when you walk round it. And, for this reason, neverletting you rest; keeping _you_ also in movement, feet, eyes andfancy. Add to all this a particular topographical feeling, very strongand delightful, which I can only describe as that of seeing all thekingdoms of the earth. In the high places close to Florence (and withthat especial lie of the land everything is a _high place_) a view isnot only of foregrounds and backgrounds, river troughs and mountainlines of great variety, but of whole districts, or at leastindications of districts--distant peaks making you feel the places attheir feet--which you know to be extremely various: think of theCarraras with their Mediterranean seaboard, the high Apennines withLombardy and the Adriatic behind them, the Siena and Volterra hillsleading to the Maremma, and the great range of the Falterona, with theTiber issuing from it, leading the mind through Umbria to Rome!

The imagination is as active among these Florentine hills as is theeye, or as the feet and lungs have been, pleasantly tired, delightingin the moment's rest, after climbing those steep places among thepines or the myrtles, under the scorch of the wholesome summer sun, orin the face of the pure, snowy wind. The wind, so rarely at rest, hashelped to make the Tuscan spirit, calling for a certain resolutenessto resist it, but, in return, taking all sense of weight away, makingthe body merge, so to speak, into eye and mind, and turning one, for alittle while, into part of the merely visible and audible. Thefrequent possibility of such views as I have tried to define, of suchmoments of fulness of life, has given, methinks, the quality ofdefiniteness and harmony, of active, participated in, greatness, tothe art of Tuscany. 

VIII. 

It is a pity that, as regards painting, this Tuscan feeling (forGiottesque painting had the cosmopolitan, as distinguished from local, quality of the Middle Ages and of the Franciscan movement) should havebeen at its strongest just in the century when mere scientificinterest was uppermost. Nay, one is tempted to think that matters weremade worse by that very love of the strenuous, the definite, thelucid, which is part of the Tuscan spirit. So that we have to pickout, in men like Donatello, Uccello, Pollaiolo and Verrocchio, nay, even in Lippi and Botticelli, the fragments which correspond to whatwe get quite unmixed and perfect in the Romanesque churches of Pisa, Florence, and Pistoia, in the sacristies and chapels of Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Sangallo, and in a hundred exquisite cloisters andloggias of unnoticed town houses and remote farms. But perhaps thereis added a zest (by no means out of keeping with the Tuscan feeling)to our enjoyment by the slight effort which is thus imposed upon us:Tuscan art does not give its exquisiteness for nothing. 

Be this as it may, the beauty of Florentine Renaissance painting mustbe sought, very often, not in the object which the picture represents, but in the mode in which that object is represented. Our habits ofthought are so slovenly in these matters, and our vocabulary so poorand confused, that I find it difficult to make my exact meaning clearwithout some insistence. I am not referring to the mere moralqualities of care, decision, or respectfulness, though the recognitionthereof adds undoubtedly to the noble pleasure of a work of art; stillless to the technical or scientific lucidity which the pictureexhibits. The beauty of fifteenth-century painting is a visiblequality, a quality of the distribution of masses, the arrangement ofspace; above all, of the lines of a picture. But it is independent ofthe fact of the object represented being or not what in real life weshould judge beautiful; and it is, in large works, unfortunately evenmore separate from such arrangement as will render a complicatedcomposition intelligible to the mind or even to the eye. The problemsof anatomy, relief, muscular action, and perspective which engrossedand in many cases harassed the Florentines of the Renaissance, turnedtheir attention away from the habit of beautiful general compositionwhich had become traditional even in the dullest and most effete oftheir Giottesque predecessors, and left them neither time norinclination for wonderful new invention in figure distribution likethat of their contemporary Umbrians. Save in easel pictures, therefore, there is often a distressing confusion, a sort of drearyrandom packing, in the works of men like Uccello, Lippi, Pollaiolo, Filippino, Ghirlandaio, and even Botticelli. And even in the moresimply and often charmingly arranged easel pictures, the men and womenrepresented, even the angels and children, are often very far frombeing what in real life would be deemed beautiful, or remarkable byany special beauty of attitude and gesture. They are, in truth, studies, anatomical or otherwise, although studies in nearly everycase dignified by the habit of a very serious and tender devoutness:rarely soulless or insolent studio drudgery or swagger such as camewhen art ceased to be truly popular and religious. Studies, however, with little or no selection of the reality studied, and less thoughteven for the place or manner in which they were to be used. 

But these studies are executed, however scientific their intention, under the guidance of a sense and a habit of beauty, subtle andimperious in proportion, almost, as it is self-unconscious. Thesefigures, sometimes ungainly, occasionally ill-made, and thesefeatures, frequently homely or marred by some conspicuous ugliness, are made up of lines as enchantingly beautiful, as seriouslysatisfying, as those which surrounded the Tuscans in their landscape. And it is in the extracting of such beauty of lines out of thebewildering confusion of huge frescoes, it is in the seeing asarrangements of such lines the sometimes unattractive men and womenand children painted (and for that matter, often also sculptured) bythe great Florentines of the fifteenth century, that consists the trueappreciation and habitual enjoyment of Tuscan Renaissance painting. The outline of an ear and muscle of the neck by Lippi; the throw ofdrapery by Ghirlandaio; the wide and smoke-like rings of heavy hair byBotticelli; the intenser, more ardent spiral curls of Verrocchio orthe young Leonardo; all that is flower-like, flame-like, that has theswirl of mountain rivers, the ripple of rocky brooks, the solemn andpoignant long curves and sudden crests of hills, all this exists inthe paintings of the Florentines; and it is its intrinsic nobility andexquisiteness, its reminiscence and suggestion of all that isloveliest and most solemn in nature, its analogy to all that isstrongest and most delicate in human emotion, which we should seek forand cherish in their works. 

IX. 

The hour of low lights, which the painters of the past almostexclusively reproduced, is naturally that in which we recogniseeasiest, not only the identity of mood awakened by the art and by thecountry, but the closer resemblance between the things which art wasable to do, and the things which the country had already done. Evenmore, immediately after sunset. The hills, becoming uniform masses, assert their movement, strike deep into the valley, draw themselvesstrongly up towards the sky. The valleys also, with their purpledarkness, rising like smoke out of them, assert themselves in theirturn. And the sky, the more diaphanous for all this dark solidityagainst it, becomes sky more decisively; takes, moreover, colour whichonly fluid things can have; turns into washes of pale gold, of palesttea-rose pink and beryl green. Against this sky the cypresses aredelicately finished off in fine black lacework, even as in thebackground of Botticelli's _Spring_, and Leonardo's or Verrocchio's_Annuniciation_. One understands that those passionate lovers of lineloved the moment of sunset apart even from colour. The ridges of pinesand cypresses soon remain the only distinguishable thing in thevalleys, pulling themselves (as one feels it) rapidly up, like greatprehistoric shapes of Saurians. Soon the sky only and mountains willexist. Then begins the time, before the starlit night comes to say itssay, when everything grows drowsy, a little vague, and the blurredmountains go to sleep in the smoke of dusk. Then only, due west, thegreat Carrara peaks stand out against the sanguine sky, long pointedcurves and flame-shaped sudden crests, clear and keen beyond the powerof mortal hand to draw. 

X. 

The quality of such sights as these, as I have more than oncerepeated, requires to be diligently sought for, and extricated frommany things which overlay or mar it, throughout nearly the whole ofFlorentine Renaissance painting. But by good luck there is one painterin whom we can enjoy it as subtle, but also as simple, as in thehills and mountains outlined by sunset or gathered into diaphanousfolds by the subduing radiance of winter moon. I am speaking, ofcourse, of Pier della Francesca; although an over literal school ofcriticism stickles at classing him with the other great Florentines. Nay, by a happy irony of things, the reasons for this exclusion areprobably those to which we owe the very purity and perfection of thisman's Tuscan quality. For the remoteness of his home on thesouthernmost border of Tuscany, and in a river valley--that of theUpper Tiber--leading away from Florence and into Umbria, may have kepthim safe from that scientific rivalry, that worry and vexation ofprofessional problems, which told so badly on so many Florentinecraftsmen. And, on the other hand, the north Italian origin of one ofhis masters, the mysterious Domenico Veneziano, seems to have givenhim, instead of the colouring, always random and often coarse, ofcontemporary Florence, a harmonious scheme of perfectly delicate, clear, and flower-like colour. These two advantages are so distinctivethat, by breaking through the habits one necessarily gets into withhis Florentine contemporaries, they have resulted in setting apart, and almost outside the pale of Tuscan painting, the purest of allTuscan artists. For with him there is no need for making allowances ordisentangling essentials. The vivid organic line need not be sought indetails nor, so to speak, abstracted: it bounds his figures, formsthem quite naturally and simply, and is therefore not thought aboutapart from them. And the colour, integral as it is, and perfectlyharmonious, masses the figures into balanced groups, bossiness andbulk, detail and depth, all unified, co-ordinated, satisfying as inthe sun-merged mountains and shelving valleys of his country; and withthe immediate charm of whiteness as of rocky water, pale blue ofwashed skies, and that ineffable lilac, russet, rose, which makes thebasis of all southern loveliness. One thinks of him, therefore, assomething rather apart, a sort of school in himself, or at most withDomenico, his master, and his follower, della Gatta. But more carefullooking will show that his greatest qualities, so balanced and soclear in him, are shared--though often masked by the ungainlinesses ofhurried artistic growth--by Pollaiolo, Baldovinetti, Pesellino, letalone Uccello, Castagno, and Masaccio; are, in a word, Tuscan, Florentine. But more than by such studies, the kinship and nationalityof Pier della Francesca is proved by reference to the other branchesof Tuscan art: his peculiarities correspond to the treatment of lineand projection by those early stonemasons of the Baptistery and thePistoia churches, to the treatment of enclosed spaces and manipulatedlight in those fifteenth-century sacristies and chapels, to thetreatment of mass and boundary in the finest reliefs of Donatello andDonatello's great decorative follower Desiderio. To persons, however, who are ready to think with me that we may be trained to art in fieldsand on hillsides, the essential Tuscan character of Pier dellaFrancesca is brought home quite as strongly by the particularsatisfaction with which we recognise his pictures in some unlikelyplace, say a Northern gallery. For it is a satisfaction, _sui generis_and with its own emotional flavour, like that which we experience onreturn to Tuscany, on seeing from the train the white houses on theslopes, the cypresses at the cross roads, the subtler, lower lines ofhills, the blue of distant peaks, on realising once more our depth oftranquil love for this austere and gentle country. 

XI. 

Save in the lushness of early summer, Tuscany is, on the whole, pale;a country where the loveliness of colour is that of its luminousness, and where light is paramount. From this arises, perhaps, the austerityof its true summer--summer when fields are bare, grass burnt todelicate cinnamon and russet, and the hills, with their sere herbs andbushes, seem modelled out of pale rosy or amethyst light; an austerityfor the eye corresponding to a sense of healthfulness given by steady, intense heat, purged of all damp, pure like the scents of dry leaves, of warm, cypress resin and of burnt thyme and myrrh of the stonyravines and stubbly fields. On such August days the plain and the moredistant mountains will sometimes be obliterated, leaving only theinexpressible suavity of the hills on the same side as the sun, madeof the texture of the sky, lying against it like transparent and stillluminous shadows. All pictures of such effects of climate are false, even Perugino's and Claude's, because even in these the eye is notsufficiently attracted and absorbed away from the foreground, from theearth to the luminous sky. That effect is the most powerful, sweetest, and most restorative in all nature perhaps; a bath for the soul inpure light and air. That is the incomparable buoyancy and radiance ofdeepest Tuscan summer. But the winter is, perhaps, even more Tuscanand more austerely beautiful. I am not even speaking of the fact thatthe mountains, with their near snows and brooding blue storms and evercontending currents of wind and battles and migrations of greatclouds, necessarily make much of winter very serious and solemn, as itsweeps down their ravines and across their ridges. I am thinking ofthe serene winter days of mist and sun, with ranges of hills made of aluminous bluish smoke, and sky only a more luminous and liquid kind, and the olives but a more solid specimen, of the mysterious silverysubstance of the world. The marvellous part of it all, and quiteimpossible to convey, is that such days are not pensive, buteffulgent, that the lines of the landscape are not blurred, butexquisitely selected and worked. 

XII. 

A quality like that of Tuscan art is, as I have once before remarked, in some measure, abstract; a general character, like that of acomposite photograph, selected and compounded by the repetition of themore general and the exclusion of more individual features. In so far, therefore, it is something rather tended towards in reality thanthoroughly accomplished; and its accomplishment, to whatever extent, is naturally due to a tradition, a certain habit among artists andpublic, which neutralises the refractory tendencies of individuals(the personal morbidness evident, for instance, in Botticelli) andmakes the most of what the majority may have in common--that dominantinterest, let us say, in line and mass. Such being the case, thisTuscan quality comes to an end with the local art of the middle ages, and can no longer be found, or only imperfect, after the breaking upand fusion of the various schools, and the arising of eclecticpersonalities in the earliest sixteenth century. After the paintersborn between 1450 and 1460, there are no more genuine Tuscans. Leonardo, once independent of Verrocchio and settled in Lombardy, isbarely one of them; and Michel Angelo never at all--Michel Angelo withhis moods all of Rome or the great mountains, full of trouble, always, and tragedy. These great personalities, and the other eclectics, Raphael foremost, bring qualities to art which it had lacked before, and are required to make its appeal legitimately universal. I shouldshrink from judging their importance, compared with the older and morelocal and traditional men. Still further from me is it to prefer thisTuscan art to that, as local and traditional in its way, of Umbria orVenetia, which stands to this as the most poignant lyric or therichest romance stands, let us say, to the characteristic quality, sober yet subtle, of Dante's greatest passages. There is, thankheaven, wholesome art various enough to appeal to many various healthytemperaments; and perhaps for each single temperament more than onekind of art is needful. My object in the foregoing pages has not beento put forward reasons for preferring the art of the Tuscans any morethan the climate and landscape of Tuscany; but merely to bring homewhat the especial charm and power of Tuscan art and Tuscan nature seemto me to be. More can be gained by knowing any art lovingly in itselfthan by knowing twenty arts from each other through dry comparison. 

I have tried to suggest rather than to explain in what way the art ofa country may answer to its natural character, by inducing recurrentmoods of a given kind. I would not have it thought, however, that suchmoods need be dominant, or even exist at all, in all the inhabitantsof that country. Art, wide as its appeal may be, is no more a productof the great mass of persons than is abstract thought or specialinvention, however largely these may be put to profit by thegenerality. The bulk of the inhabitants help to make the art byfurnishing the occasional exceptionally endowed creature called anartist, by determining his education and surroundings, in so far as heis a mere citizen; and finally by bringing to bear on him thestored-up habit of acquiescence in whatever art has been accepted bythat public from the artists of the immediate past. In fact, themajority affects the artist mainly as itself has been affected by hispredecessors. If, therefore, the scenery and climate call forth moodsin a whole people definite enough to influence the art, this will bedue, I think, to some especially gifted individual having, at one timeor another, brought home those moods to them. 

Therefore we need feel no surprise if any individual, peasant or manof business or abstract thinker, reveal a lack, even a total lack, ofsuch impressions as I am speaking of; nor even if among those who loveart a great proportion be still incapable of identifying those vaguecontemplative emotions from which all art is sprung. It is not merelythe special endowment of eye, ear, hand, not merely what we callartistic talent, which is exceptional and vested in individuals only. It takes a surplus of sensitiveness and energy to be determined inone's moods by natural surroundings instead of solely by one's ownwants or circumstances or business. Now art is born of just thissurplus sensitiveness and energy; it is the response not to theimpressions made by our private ways and means, but to the impressionsmade by the ways and means of the visible, sensible universe. 

But once produced, art is received, and more or less assimilated, bythe rest of mankind, to whom it gives, in greater or less degree, moreof such sensitiveness and energy than it could otherwise have had. Artthus calls forth contemplative emotions, otherwise dormant, andcreates in the routine and scramble of individual wants and habits asanctuary where the soul stops elbowing and trampling, and beingelbowed and trampled; nay, rather, a holy hill, neither ploughed norhunted over, a free high place, in which we can see clearly, breathewidely, and, for awhile, live harmlessly, serenely, fully. 

XIII. 

Thinking these thoughts for the hundredth time, feeling them in a wayas I feel the landscape, I walk home by the dear rock path girdlingFiesole, within sound of the chisels of the quarries. Blackthorn isnow mixed in the bare purple hedgerows, and almond blossom, here andthere, whitens the sere oak, and the black rocks above. These are theheights from which, as tradition has it, Florence descended, thepeople of which Dante said--

 "Che discese da Fiesole ab antico, E tiene ancor del monte e del macigno, "

meaning it in anger. But it is true, and truer, in the good sensealso. Mountain and rock! the art of Tuscany is sprung from it, fromits arduous fruitfulness, with the clear stony stream, and the sparsegentle olive, and the cypress, unshaken by the wind, unscorched by thesun, and shooting inflexibly upwards. 

ART AND USEFULNESS. 

 "Time was when everybody that made anything made a work of art besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make it. "--WILLIAM MORRIS, Address delivered at Burslem, 1881. 

I. 

Among the original capitals removed from the outer colonnade of theducal palace at Venice there is a series devoted to the teaching ofnatural history, and another to that of such general facts about theraces of man, his various moral attributes and activities, as theVenetians of the fourteenth century considered especially important. First, botany, illustrated by the fruits most commonly in use, piledup in baskets which constitute the funnel-shaped capital; each kindseparate, with the name underneath in funny Venetian spelling: _Huva_, grapes; _Fici_, figs; _Moloni_, melons; _Zuche_, pumpkins; and_Persici_, peaches. Then, with Latin names, the various animals:_Ursus_, holding a honeycomb with bees on it; _Chanis_, mumbling onlya large bone, while his cousins, wolf and fox, have secured a duck anda cock; _Aper_, the wild boar, munching a head of millet or similargrain. 

Now had these beautiful carvings been made with no aim besides theirown beauty, had they represented and taught nothing, they would havereceived only a few casual glances, quite insufficient to make theirexcellence familiar or even apparent; at best the occasionaldiscriminative examination of some art student; while the pleased, spontaneous attentiveness which carries beauty deep into the soul andthe soul's storehouse would have been lacking. But consider thesecapitals to have been what they undoubtedly were meant for: thepicture books and manuals off which young folks learned, and olderpersons refreshed, their notions of natural history, of geography, ethnology, and even of morals, and you will realise at once how muchattention, and of how constant and assimilative a kind, they must havereceived. The child learns off them that figs (which he never seessave packed in baskets in the barges at Rialto) have leaves like funnygloves, while _huva_, grapes, have leaves all ribbed and looking liketattered banners; that the bear is blunt-featured and eats honeycomb;that foxes and wolves, who live on the mainland, are very like thedogs we keep in Venice, but that they steal poultry instead of beinggiven bones from the kitchen. Also that there are in the world, besides these clean-shaved Venetians in armour or doge's cap, beardedAsiatics and thick-lipped negroes--the sort of people with whom uncleand cousins traffic in the big ships, or among whom grandfather helpedthe Doge to raise the standard of St. Mark. Also that carpenters workwith planes and vices, and stonemasons with mallets and chisels; andthat good and wise men are remembered for ever: for here is the storyof how Solomon discovered the true mother, and here again the EmperorTrajan going to the wars, and reining in his horse to do justice firstto the poor widow. The child looks at the capitals in order to seewith his eyes all these interesting things of which he has been told;and, during the holiday walk, drags his parents to the spot, to lookagain, and to beg to be told once more. And later, he looks at thefamiliar figures in order to show them to his children; or, perhaps, more wistfully, loitering along the arcade in solitude, to rememberthe days of his own childhood. And in this manner, the thingsrepresented, fruit, animals and persons, and the exact form in whichthey are rendered: the funnel shape of the capitals, the cling andcurl of the leafage, the sharp black undercutting, the clear, lightlyincised surfaces, the whole pattern of line and curve, light andshade, the whole pattern of the eye's progress along it, of the rhythmof expansion and restraint, of pressure and thrust, in short, the realwork of art, the visible form--become well-known, dwelling in thememory, cohabiting with the various moods, and haunting the fancy; apart of life, familiar, everyday, liked or disliked, discriminated inevery particular, become part and parcel of ourselves, for better orfor worse, like the tools we handle, the boats we steer, the horses weride and groom, and the furniture and utensils among which and throughwhose help we live our lives. 

II. 

Furniture and utensils; things which exist because we require them, which we know because we employ them, these are the type of all greatworks of art. And from the selfsame craving which insists that theseshould be shapely as well as handy, pleasant to the eye as well asrational; through the selfsame processes of seeing and remembering andaltering their shapes--according to the same æsthetic laws of line andcurve, of surface and projection, of spring and restraint, ofclearness and compensation; and for the same organic reasons and bythe same organic methods of preference and adaptation as thesehumblest things of usefulness, do the proudest and seemingly freestworks of art come to exist; come to be _just what they are_, and evencome _to be at all_. 

I should like to state very clearly, before analysing its reasons, what seems to me (and I am proud to follow Ruskin in this as in somany essential questions of art and life) the true formula of thismatter. Namely: that while beauty has always been desired and obtainedfor its own sake, the works in which we have found beauty embodied, and the arts which have achieved beauty's embodying, have alwaysstarted from impulses or needs, and have always aimed at purposes orproblems entirely independent of this embodiment of beauty. 

III. 

The desire for beauty stands to art as the desire for righteousnessstands to conduct. People do not feel and act from a desire to feel andact righteously, but from a hundred different and differently-combinedmotives; the desire for righteousness comes in to regulate this feelingand acting, to subject it all to certain preferences and repugnanceswhich have become organic, if not in the human being, at least in humansociety. Like the desire for righteousness, the desire for beauty is nota spring of action, but a regulative function; it decides the _how_ ofvisible existence; in accordance with deep-seated and barely guessed atnecessities of body and soul, of nerves and perceptions, of brain andjudgments; it says to all visible objects: since you needs must be, youshall be in _this_ manner, and not in that other. The desire for beauty, with its more potent negative, the aversion to ugliness, has, like thesense of right and wrong, the force of a categorical imperative. 

Such, to my thinking, is the æsthetic instinct. And I call _Art_whatever kind of process, intellectual and technical, creates, incidentally or purposely, visible or audible forms, and creates themunder the regulation of this æsthetic instinct. Art, therefore, is artwhenever any object or any action, or any arrangement, besides beingsuch as to serve a practical purpose or express an emotion or transfera thought, is such also as to afford the _sui generis_ satisfactionwhich we denote by the adjective: beautiful. 

But, asks the reader, if every human activity resulting in visible oraudible form is to be considered, at least potentially, as art; whatbecomes of _art_ as distinguished from _craft_, or rather what is thedifference between what we all mean by art and what we all mean by_craft_?

To this objection, perfectly justified by the facts of our own day, Iwould answer quite simply: There is no necessary or essentialdistinction between what we call _art_ and what we call _craft_. It isa pure accident, and in all probability a temporary one, which hasmomentarily separated the two in the last hundred years. Throughoutthe previous part of the world's history art and craft have been oneand the same, at the utmost distinguishable only from a differentpoint of view: _craft_ from the practical side, _art_ from thecontemplative. Every trade concerned with visible or audible objectsor movements has also been an art; and every one of those greatcreative activities, for which, in their present isolation, we nowreserve the name of _art_, has also been a craft; has been connectedand replenished with life by the making of things which have a use, orby the doing of deeds which have a meaning. 

IV. 

We must, of course, understand _usefulness_ in its widest sense;otherwise we should be looking at the world in a manner too littleutilitarian, not too much so. Houses and furniture and utensils, clothes, tools and weapons, must undoubtedly exemplify utility firstand foremost because they serve our life in the most direct, indispensable and unvarying fashion, always necessary and necessary toeveryone. But once these universal unchanging needs supplied, a greatmany others become visible: needs to the individual or to individualsand races under definite and changing circumstances. The sonnet or theserenade are useful to the romantic lover in the same manner thatcarriage-horses and fine clothes are useful to the man who woos morepractically-minded ladies. The diamonds of a rich woman serve to markher status quite as much as to please the unpleasable eye of envy; inthe same way that the uniform, the robes and vestments, are needed toset aside the soldier, the magistrate or priest, and give him theright of dealing _ex officio_, not as a mere man among men. And theconsciousness of such apparent superfluities, whether they be theexpression of wealth or of hierarchy, of fashion or of caste, gives totheir possessor that additional self-importance which is quite as muchwanted by the ungainly or diffident moral man as the additional warmthof his more obviously needed raiment is by the poor, chilly, bodilyhuman being. I will not enlarge upon the practical uses which recentethnology has discovered in the tattooing, the painting, the masks, headdresses, feather skirts, cowries and beads, of all that elaborateornamentation with which, only a few years back, we were in the habitof reproaching the poor, foolish, naked savages; additional knowledgeof their habits having demonstrated rather our folly than theirs, intaking for granted that any race of men would prefer ornament toclothes, unless, as was the case, these ornaments were really moreindispensable in their particular mode of life. For an ornament whichterrifies an enemy, propitiates a god, paralyses a wild beast, orgains a wife, is a matter of utility, not of æsthetic luxury, so longas it happens to be efficacious, or so long as its efficacy isbelieved in. Indeed, the gold coach and liveried trumpeters of thenostrum vendor of bygone days, like their less enlivening equivalentsin many more modern professions, are of the nature of trade tools, although the things they fashion are only the foolish minds ofpossible customers. 

And this function of expressing and impressing brings us to the othergreat category of utility. The sculptured pediment or frescoed wall, the hieroglyph, or the map or the book, everything which records afact or transmits a feeling, everything which carries a message to menor gods, is an object of utility: the coat-of-arms painted on a panel, or the emblem carved upon a church front, as much as the helmet of theknight or the shield of the savage. A church or a religious ceremony, nay, every additional ounce of gilding or grain of incense, or day orhour, bestowed on sanctuary and ritual, are not useful only to theselfish devotee who employs them for obtaining celestial favours; theyare more useful and necessary even to the pure-minded worshipper, because they enable him to express the longing and the awe with whichhis heart is overflowing. For every oblation faithfully brought meansso much added moral strength; and love requires gifts to give as muchas hunger needs food and vanity needs ornament and wealth. All thingswhich minister to a human need, bodily or spiritual, simple orcomplex, direct or indirect, innocent or noble, or base or malignant, all such things exist for their use. They do exist, and would alwayshave existed equally if no such quality as beauty had ever arisen toenhance or to excuse their good or bad existence. 

V. 

The conception of art as of something outside, and almost opposed to, practical life, and the tendency to explain its gratuitous existenceby a special "play instinct" more gratuitous itself, are due in greatmeasure to our wrong way of thinking and feeling upon no less a matterthan human activity as such. The old-fashioned psychology which, ignoring instinct and impulse, explained all action as the result ofa kind of calculation of future pleasure and pain, has accustomed usto account for all fruitful human activity, whatever we call _work_, by a wish for some benefit or fear of some disadvantage. And, on theother hand, the economic systems of our time (or, at all events, thesystematic exposition of our economic arrangements) have furthermoreaccustomed us to think of everything like _work_ as done undercompulsion, fear of worse, or a kind of bribery. It is really taken asa postulate, and almost as an axiom, that no one would make or doanything useful save under the goad of want; of want not in the senseof _wanting to do or make that thing_, but of _wanting to have or beable to do something else_. Hence everything which is manifestly donefrom no such motive, but from an inner impulse towards the doing, comes to be thought of as opposed to _work_, and to be designated as_play_. Now art is very obviously carried on for its own sake:experience, even of our mercantile age, teaches that if a man does notpaint a picture or compose a symphony from an inner necessity asdisinterested as that which makes another man look at the picture orlisten to the symphony, no amount of self-interest, of disadvantagesand advantages, will enable him to do either otherwise than badly. Hence, as I said, we are made to think of art as _play_, or a kind ofplay. 

But play itself, being unaccountable on the basis of externaladvantage and disadvantage, being, from the false economic point ofview, unproductive, that is to say, pure waste, has in its turn to beaccounted for by the supposition of surplus energy occasionallyrequiring to be let off to no purpose, or merely to prevent themachine from bursting. This opposition of work and play is founded inour experience of a social state which is still at sixes and sevens;of a civilisation so imperfectly developed and organised that themajority does nothing save under compulsion, and the minority doesnothing to any purpose; and where that little boy's Scylla andCharybdis _all work_ and _all play_ is effectually realised in anightmare too terrible and too foolish, above all too wakingly true, to be looked at in the face without flinching. One wonders, incidentally, how any creature perpetually working from the reasonsgiven by economists, that is to say, working against the grain, fromno spontaneous wish or pleasure, can possibly store up, in suchexhausting effort, a surplus of energy requiring to be let off! Andone wonders, on the other hand, how any really good work of any kind, work not merely kept by dire competitive necessity up to a standard, but able to afford any standard to keep up to, can well be producedsave by the letting off of surplus energy; that is to say, how goodwork can ever be done otherwise than by impulses and instincts actingspontaneously, in fact as play. The reality seems to be that, imperfect as is our poor life, present and past, we are maligning it;founding our theories, for simplicity's sake and to excuse our lack ofhope and striving, upon its very worst samples. Wasteful as is themal-distribution of human activities (mal-distribution worse than thatof land or capital!), cruel as is the consequent pressure of want, there yet remains at the bottom of an immense amount of work an innerpush different from that outer constraint, an inner need as fruitfulas the outer one is wasteful: there remains the satisfaction in work, the wish to work. However outer necessity, "competition, " "minimum ofcost, " "iron law of wages, " call it what you choose, direct andmisdirect, through need of bread or greed of luxury, the applicationof human activity, that activity has to be there, and with it its ownalleviation and reward: pleasure in work. All decent human workpartakes (let us thank the great reasonablenesses of real things!) ofthe quality of play: if it did not it would be bad or ever on theverge of badness; and if ever human activity attains to fullestfruitfulness, it will be (every experience of our own best work showsit) when the distinction of _work_ and of _play_ will cease to have ameaning, play remaining only as the preparatory work of the child, asthe strength-repairing, balance-adjusting work of the adult. 

And meanwhile, through all the centuries of centuries, art, which isthe type and sample of all higher, better modes of life, art has givenus in itself the concrete sample, the unmistakable type of thatneedful reconciliation of work and play; and has shown us that thereis, or should be, no difference between them. For art has made thethings which are useful, and done the things which are needed, inthose shapes and ways of beauty which have no aim but oursatisfaction. 

VI. 

The way in which the work of art is born of a purpose, of somethinguseful to do or desirable to say, and the way in which the suggestionsof utility are used up for beauty, can best be shown by a reallyexisting object. Expressed in practical terms the object is humbleenough: a little trough with two taps built into a recess in a wall; aplace for washing hands and rinsing glasses, as you see the Dominicanbrothers doing it all day, for I am speaking of the _Lavabo_ byGiovanni della Robbia in the Sacristy of Santa Maria Novella inFlorence. The whole thing is small, and did not allow of the adjoiningroom usually devoted to this purpose. The washing and rinsing had totake place in the sacristy itself. But this being the case, it wasdesirable that the space set apart for these proceedings should atleast appear to be separate; the trough, therefore, was sunk in arecess, and the recess divided off from the rest of the wall bypillars and a gable, becoming in this manner, with no loss of realstanding room, a building inside a building; the operations, furthermore, implying a certain amount of wetting and slopping, thedryness of the rest of the sacristy, and particularly the _idea_ ofits dryness (so necessary where precious stuffs and metal vessels arekept) had to be secured not merely by covering a piece of wainscot andfloor with tiles, but by building the whole little enclosure (all savethe marble trough) of white and coloured majolica, which seemed to sayto the oaken and walnut presses, to the great table covered withvestments: "Don't be afraid, you shall not feel a drop from all thiswashing and rinsing. "

So far, therefore, we have got for our lavabo-trough a shallow recess, lined and paved with tiles, and cut off from the frescoed and panelledwalls by two pilasters and a rounded gable, of tile work also, thegeneral proportions being given by the necessity of two monks or twoacolytes washing the sacred vessels at the same moment. The word_sacred_ now leads us to another determining necessity of our work ofart. For this place, where the lavabo stands, is actually consecrated;it has an altar; and it is in it that take place all the preparationsand preliminaries for the most holy and most magnificent of rites. Thesacristy, like the church, is moreover an offering to heaven; and thelavabo, since it has to exist, can exist with fitness only if it alsobe offered, and made worthy of offering, to heaven. Besides, therefore, those general proportions which have had to be madeharmonious for the satisfaction not merely of the builder, but of thepeople whose eye rests on them daily and hourly; besides theshapeliness and dignity which we insist upon in all things needful; wefurther require of this object that it should have a certainsuperabundance of grace, that it should have colour, elaboratepattern, what we call _ornament_; details which will show that it is agift, and make it a fit companion for the magnificent embroideries anddamasks, the costly and exquisite embossed and enamelled vessels whichinhabit that place; and a worthy spectator of the sacred pageantrywhich issues from this sacristy. The little tiled recess, the troughand the little piece of architecture which frames it all, shall notonly be practically useful, they shall also be spiritually useful asthe expression of men's reverence and devotion. To whom? Why, to thedear mother of Christ and her gracious angels, whom we place, ineffigy, on the gable, white figures on a blue ground. And since thishumble thing is also an offering, what can be more appropriate than tohang it round with votive garlands, such as we bind to mark the courseof processions, and which we garnish (filling the gaps of glossy bayand spruce pine branches) with the finest fruits of the earth, lemons, and pears, and pomegranates, a grateful tithe to the Powers who makethe orchards fruitful. But, since such garlands wither and such fruitsdecay, and there must be no withering or decaying in the sanctuary, the bay leaves and the pine branches, and the lemons and pears andpomegranates, shall be of imperishable material, majolica colouredlike reality, and majolica, moreover, which leads us back, pleasantly, to the humble necessity of the trough, the spurting and slopping ofwater, which we have secured against by that tiled floor and wainscot. 

But here another suggestion arises. Water is necessary and infinitelypleasant in a hot country and a hot place like this domed sacristy. But we have very, oh, so very, little of it in Florence! We cannoteven, however great our love and reverence, offer Our Lady and theAngels the thinnest perennial spurt; we must let out the water onlyfor bare use, and turn the tap off instantly after. There is somethingvery disappointing in this; and the knowledge of that dearth of water, of those two taps symbolical of chronic drought, is positivelydisheartening. Beautiful proportions, delicate patterns, graciouseffigies of the Madonna and the angels we can have, and also the mostlovely garlands. But we cannot have a fountain. For it is uselesscalling this a fountain, this poor little trough with two taps. .. . 

But you _shall_ have a fountain! Giovanni della Robbia answers in hisheart; or, at least, you shall _feel_ as if you had one! And here wemay witness, if we use the eyes of the spirit as well as of the body, one of the strangest miracles of art, when art is married to apurpose. The idea of a fountain, the desirability of water, becomes, unconsciously, dominant in the artist's mind; and under its sway, asunder the divining rod, there trickle and well up every kind ofthought, of feeling, about water; until the images thereof, visible, audible, tactile, unite and steep and submerge every other notion. Nothing deliberate; and, in all probability, nothing even conscious;those watery thoughts merely lapping dreamily round, like a half-heardmurmur of rivers, the waking work with which his mind is busy. Nothingdeliberate or conscious, but all the more inevitable and efficacious, this multifold suggestion of water. 

And behold the result, the witness of the miracle: In the domedsacristy, the fountain cooling this sultry afternoon of June as it hascooled four hundred Junes and more since set up, arch and pilastersand statued gables hung with garlands by that particular Robbia;cooling and refreshing us with its empty trough and closed taps, without a drop of real water! For it is made of water itself, or theessence, the longing memory of water. It is water, this shining paleamber and agate and grass-green tiling and wainscotting, starred atregular intervals by wide-spread patterns as of floating weeds; waterwhich makes the glossiness of the great leaf-garlands and thejuiciness of the smooth lemons and cool pears and pomegranates; waterwhich has washed into ineffable freshness this piece of blue heavenwithin the gable; and water, you would say, as of some shiningfountain in the dusk, which has gathered together into the whiteglistening bodies and draperies which stand out against thatnewly-washed æther. All this is evident, and yet insufficient toaccount for our feelings. The subtlest and most potent half of thespell is hidden; and we guess it only little by little. In this littleGrecian tabernacle, every line save the bare verticals and horizontalsis a line suggestive of trickling and flowing and bubbles; a linesuggested by water and water's movement; and every light and shadow isa light or a shadow suggested by water's brightness or transparentgloom; it is water which winds in tiny meanders of pattern along theshallow shining pillars, and water which beads and dimples along theshady cornice. The fountain has been thought out in longing for water, and every detail of it has been touched by the memory thereof. Water!they wanted water, and they should have it. By a coincidence almost, Giovanni della Robbia has revealed the secret which himself mostprobably never guessed, in the little landscape of lilac and bluishtiles with which he filled up the arch behind the taps. Some Tuscanscene, think you? Hills and a few cypresses, such as hiscontemporaries used for background? Not a bit. A great lake, anestuary, almost a sea, with sailing ships, a flooded country, such asno Florentine had ever seen with mortal eyes; but such as, in hislonging for water, he must have dreamed about. Thus the landscape sumsup this dream, this realisation of every cool and trickling sight andtouch and sound which fills that sacristy as with a spray of waterythoughts. In this manner, with perhaps but a small effort of inventionand a small output of fancy, and without departing in the least fromthe general proportions and shapes and ornaments common in his day, has an artist of the second order left us one of the most exquisitelyshapely and poetical of works, merely by following the suggestions ofthe use, the place, the religious message and that humble human wishfor water where there was none. 

VII. 

It is discouraging and humiliating to think (and therefore we think itvery seldom) that nowadays we artists, painters of portraits andlandscapes, builders and decorators of houses, pianists, singers, fiddlers, and, quite as really though less obviously, writers, are allof us indirectly helping to keep up the greed which makes theprivileged and possessing classes cling to their monopolies andaccumulate their possessions. Bitter to realise that, disinterested aswe must mostly be (for good artistic work means talent, talentpreference, and preference disinterestedness), we are, as Ruskin hasalready told us, but the parasites of parasites. 

For of the pleasure-giving things we make, what portion really givesany pleasure, or comes within reach of giving pleasure, to those whosehands _as a whole class_ (as distinguished from the brain of anoccasional individual of the other class) produce the wealth we all ofus have to live, or try to live, upon? Of course there is the seemingconsolation that, like the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs, the Watteausand the Fragonards of the past, the Millais and the Sargents (charmingsitters, or the reverse, and all), and the Monets and Brabazons, willsooner or later become what we call public property in publicgalleries. But, meanwhile, the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs andWatteaus and Fragonards themselves, though the legal property ofeverybody, are really reserved for those same classes who own theirmodern equivalents, simply because those alone have the leisure andculture necessary to enjoy them. The case is not really different forthe one or two seemingly more independent and noble artisticindividualities, the great decorators like Watts or Besnard; their ownwork, like their own conscience, is indeed the purer and stronger fortheir intention of painting not for smoking-rooms and privatecollections, but for places where all men can see and understand; butthen all men cannot see--they are busy or too tired--and they cannotunderstand, because the language of art has become foreign to them. The same applies to composers and to writers: music and books arecheap enough, but the familiarity with musical forms and literarystyles, without which music and books are mere noise and waste-paper, is practically unattainable to the classes who till the ground, extract its stone and minerals, and make, with their hands, everymaterial thing (save works of art) that we possess. 

Indeed, one additional reason why, ever since the eighteenth century, art has been set up as the opposite of useful work, and explained as aform of play (though its technical difficulties grew more exorbitantand exhausting year by year) is probably that, in our moderncivilisations, art has been obviously produced for the benefit of theclasses who virtually do not work, and by artists born or bred tobelong to those idle classes themselves. For it is a fact that, as theartist nowadays finds his public only among the comparatively idle(or, at all events, those whose activity distributes wealth in theirown favour rather than creates it), so also he requires to be, moreand more, in sympathy with their mode of living and thinking: thefriend, the client, most often the son, of what we call (with terribleunperceived irony in the words) _leisured_ folk. As to the folk whohave no leisure (and therefore, according to our modern æsthetics, no_art_ because no _play_) they can receive from us privileged persons(when privilege happens to be worth its keep) no benefits save verypractical ones. The only kind of work founded on "leisure"--which doesin our day not merely increase the advantages of already well-offpersons, but actually filter down to help the unleisured producers ofour wealth--is not the work of the artist, but of the doctor, thenurse, the inventor, the man of science; who knows? Perhaps almost ofthe philosopher, the historian, the sociologist: the clearer away ofconvenient error, the unmaker and remaker of consciences. 

As I began by saying, it is not very comfortable, nowadays, to be anartist, and yet possess a mind and heart. And two of the greatestartists of our times, Ruskin and Tolstoi, have done their utmost tomake it more uncomfortable still. So that it is natural for ourartists to decide that art exists only for art's own sake, since itcannot nowadays be said to exist for the sake of anything else. And asto us, privileged persons, with leisure and culture fitting us forartistic enjoyment, it is even more natural to consider art as a kindof play: play in which we get refreshed after somebody else's work. 

VIII. 

And are we really much refreshed? Watching the face and manner, listless, perfunctory or busily attentive, of our fellow-creatures ingalleries and exhibitions, and in great measure in concert rooms andtheatres, one would imagine that, on the contrary, they werefulfilling a social duty or undergoing a pedagogical routine. Theobject of the proceeding would rather seem to be negative; one mightjudge that they had come lest their neighbours should suspect thatthey were somewhere else, or perhaps lest their neighbours should comeinstead, according to our fertile methods of society intercourse andof competitive examinations. At any rate, they do not look as if theycame to be refreshed, or as if they had taken the right steps towardssuch spiritual refreshment: the faces and manner of children in aplayground, of cricketers on a village green, of Sunday trippers onthe beach, or of German townsfolk walking to the beerhouse or café inthe deep fragrant woods, present a different appearance. And if weexamine into our own feelings, we shall find that even for the mostart-loving of us the hours spent in galleries of pictures and statues, or listening to music at concerts, are largely stolen from our reallife of real interests and real pleasures; that there enters into thema great proportion of effort and boredom; at the very best that we donot enjoy (nor expect to enjoy) them at all in the same degree as agood dinner in good company, or a walk in bright, bracing weather, letalone, of course, fishing, or hunting, or digging and weeding ourlittle garden. 

Of course, if we are really artistic, and if we have the power ofanalysing our own feelings and motives, we shall know that the galleryor the concert afford occasion for laying in a store of pleasurableimpressions, to be enjoyed at the right moment and in the right moodlater: outlines of pictures, washes of colour, grouped masses ofsculpture, bars of melody, clang of especial chords or timbrecombinations, and even the vague æsthetic emotion, the halosurrounding blurred recollections of sights and sounds. And knowingthis, we are content that the act of garnering, of preparing, for suchfuture enjoyment, should lack any steady or deep pleasurableness aboutitself. But, thinking over the matter, there seems something wrong, derogatory to art and humiliating to ourselves, in this admission thatthe actual presence of the work of art, sometimes the masterpiece, should give us the minimum, and not the maximum, of our artisticenjoyment. And comparing the usual dead level of such merely potentialpleasure with certain rare occasions when we have enjoyed art more atthe moment than afterwards, quite vividly, warmly and with the properreluctant clutch at the divine minute as it passes; making thiscomparison, we can, I think, guess at the nature of the mischief andthe possibility of its remedy. 

Examining into our experience, we shall find that, while our lack ofenjoyment (our state of æsthetic _aridity_, to borrow the expressionof religious mystics) had coincided with a deliberate intention to seeor hear works of art, and a consequent clearing away of other claims, and on our attention, in fact, to an effort made more or less in_vacuo_; on the contrary, our Faust-moments ("Stay, thou artbeautiful!") of plenitude and consummation, have always come when ouractivity was already flowing, our attention stimulated, and when, soto speak, the special artistic impressions were caught up into ourother interests, and woven by them into our life. We can all recallunexpected delights like Hazlitt's in the odd volume of Rousseau foundon the window-seat, and discussed, with his savoury supper, in theroadside inn, after his long day's pleasant tramp. 

Indeed, this preparing of the artistic impression by many others, orfocussing of others by it, accounts for the keenness of our æstheticpleasure when on a journey; we are thoroughly alive, and the seen orheard thing of beauty lives _into_, us, or we into it (there is animportant psychological law, a little too abstract for this moment ofexpansiveness, called "the Law of the Summation of Stimuli"). Thetruth of what I say is confirmed by the frequent fact that the work ofart which gives us this full and vivid pleasure (actually refreshing!for here, at last, is refreshment!) is either fragmentary or by nomeans first-rate. We have remained arid, hard, incapable of absorbing, while whole Joachim quartets flowed and rippled all _round_, but never_into_, us; and then, some other time, our soul seems to have drunkup (every fibre blissfully steeping) a few bars of a sonata (it wasBeethoven's 10th violin, and they were stumbling through it for thefirst time) heard accidentally while walking up and down under an openwindow. 

It is the same with painting and sculpture. I shall never forget theexquisite poetry and loveliness of that Matteo di Giovanni, "TheGiving of the Virgin's Girdle, " when I saw it for the first time, inthe chapel of that villa, once a monastery, near Siena. Even throughthe haze of twenty years (like those delicate blue December mistswhich lay between the sunny hills) I can see that picture, illuminedpiecemeal by the travelling taper on the sacristan's reed, far moredistinctly than I see it to-day with bodily eyes in the NationalGallery. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that where it hangs inthat gallery it has not once given me one half-second of realpleasure. It is a third-rate picture now; but even the masterpieces, Perugino's big fresco, Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne, " Pier dellaFrancesca's "Baptism"; have they ever given me the complete and steadydelight which that mediocre Sienese gave me at the end of the wintrydrive, in the faintly illumined chapel? More often than not, asColeridge puts it, I have "seen, not _felt_, how beautiful they are. "But, apart even from fortunate circumstances or enhancing activities, we have all of us experienced how much better we see or hear a work ofart with the mere dull help of some historical question to elucidateor technical matter to examine into; we have been able to follow apiece of music by watching for some peculiarity of counterpoint orexcellence or fault of execution; and our attention has been carriedinto a picture or statue by trying to make out whether a piece ofdrapery was repainted or an arm restored. Indeed, the irrelevantliterary programme of concerts and all that art historical lore(information about things of no importance, or none to us) conveyed indreary monographs and hand-books, all of them perform a necessaryfunction nowadays, that of bringing our idle and alien minds into somesort of relation of business with the works of art which we shouldotherwise, nine times out of ten, fail really to approach. 

And here I would suggest that this necessity of being, in some way, busy about beautiful things in order thoroughly to perceive them, mayrepresent some sterner necessity of life in general; art being, inthis as in so many other cases, significantly typical of what islarger than itself. Can we get the full taste of pleasure sought forpleasure's own sake? And is not happiness in life, like beauty in art, rather a means than an aim: the condition of going on, thereplenishing of force; in short, the thing by whose help, not for thesake of which, we feel and act and live?

IX. 

Beauty is an especial quality in visible or audible shapes and movementswhich imposes on our soul a certain rhythm and pattern of feeling entirely_sui generis_, but unified, harmonious, and, in a manner, consummate. Beauty is a power in our life, because, however intermittent itsaction and however momentary, it makes us live, by a kind of sympathywith itself, a life fuller, more vivid, and at the same time morepeaceful. But, as the word _sympathy_, _with-feeling_--(_Einfühlen_, "feeling into, " the Germans happily put it)--as the word _sympathy_ isintended to suggest, this subduing and yet liberating, this enliveningand pacifying power of beautiful form over our feelings is exercisedonly when our feelings enter, and are absorbed into, the form weperceive; so that (very much as in the case of sympathy with humanvicissitudes) we participate in the supposed life of the form while inreality lending _our_ life to it. Just as in our relations with ourfellow-men, so also in our subtler but even more potent relations withthe appearances of things and actions, our heart can be touched, purified, and satisfied only just in proportion as we _give_ ourheart. And even as it is possible to perceive other human beings andto adjust our action (sometimes heartlessly enough) to such qualitiesin them as we find practically important to ourselves, without puttingout one scrap of sympathy with their own existence as felt by them; soalso it is possible to recognise things and actions, to become rapidlyaware of such of their peculiarities as most frequently affect uspractically, and to consequently adjust our behaviour, without givingour sympathy to their form, without entering into and _living into_those forms; and in so far it is possible for us to remain indifferentto those forms' quality of beauty or ugliness, just as, in the hurryof practical life, we remain indifferent to the stuff our neighbours'souls are made of. This rapid, partial, superficial, perfunctory modeof dealing with what we see and hear constitutes the ordinary, constant, and absolutely indispensable act of recognising objects andactions, of _spotting_ their qualities and _twigging_ their meaning:an act necessarily tending to more and more abbreviation and rapidityand superficiality, to a sort of shorthand which reduces what has tobe understood, and enables us to pass immediately to understandingsomething else; according to that law of necessarily saving time andenergy. 

And so we rush on, recognising, naming, spotting, twigging, answering, using, or parrying; we need not fully _see_ the complete appearance ofthe word we read, of the man we meet, of the street we run along, ofthe water we drink, the fire we light, the adversary whom we pursue orwhom we evade; and in the selfsame manner we need not fully see theform of the building of which we say "This is a Gothic cathedral"--ofthe picture of which we say "Christ before Pilate"--or of the piece ofmusic of which we say "A cheerful waltz by Strauss" or "A melancholyadagio by Beethoven. " Now it is this fragmentary, superficialattention which we most often give to art; and giving thus little, wefind that art gives us little, perhaps nothing, in return. Forunderstand: you can be utterly perfunctory towards a work of artwithout hurrying away from in front of it, or setting about somevisible business in its presence. Standing ten minutes before apicture or sitting an hour at a concert, with fixed sight or tensehearing, you may yet be quite hopelessly inattentive if, instead offollowing the life of the visible or audible forms, and _livingyourself_ into their pattern and rhythm, you wander off after dramaticor sentimental associations suggested by the picture's subject; or ifyou let yourself be hypnotised, as pious Wagnerians are apt to be, into monotonous over response (and over and over again response) tothe merely emotional stimulation of the sounds. The activity of theartist's soul has been in vain for you, since you do not let your soulfollow its tracks through the work of art; he has not created for you, because you have failed to create his work afresh in vividcontemplation. 

But attention cannot be forced on to any sort of contemplation, or atleast it cannot remain, steady and abiding, by any act of forcing. Attention, to be steady, must be held by the attraction of the thingattended to; and, to be spontaneous and easy, must be carried by someprevious interest within the reach of that attractiveness. Above all, attention requires that its ways should have been made smooth byrepetition of similar experience; it is excluded, rebutted by the deadwall of utter novelty; for seeing, hearing, understanding isinterpreting the unknown by the known, assimilation in the literalsense also of rendering similar the new to the less new. This willexplain why it is useless trying to enjoy a totally unfamiliar kind ofart: as soon expect to take pleasure in dancing a dance you do notknow, and whose rhythm and step you fail as yet to follow. And it isnot only music, as Nietzsche said, but all art, that is but a kind ofdancing, a definite rhythmic carrying and moving of the soul. And forthis reason there can be no artistic enjoyment without preliminaryinitiation and training. 

Art cannot be enjoyed without initiation and training. I repeat thisstatement, desiring to impress it on the reader, because, by acoincidence of misunderstanding, it happens to constitute theweightiest accusation in the whole of Tolstoi's very terrible (and, in part, terribly justified) recent arraignment of art. For of whatuse is the restorative and refreshing power, this quality calledbeauty, if the quality itself cannot be recognised save after previoustraining? And what moral dignity, nay, what decent innocence, canthere be in a kind of relaxation from which lack of initiationexcludes the vast majority of men, the majority which really labours, and therefore has a real claim to relaxation and refreshment?

This question of Tolstoi's arises from that same limiting ofexamination to a brief, partial, and, as it happens, most transitionaland chaotic present, which has given us that cut-and-dried distinctionbetween work and play; and, indeed, the two misconceptions are veryclosely connected. For even as our present economic system ofproduction for exchange rather than for consumption has made usconceive _work_ as _work_ done under compulsion for someone else, and_play_ as _play_, with no result even to ourselves; so also has theeconomic system which employs the human hand and eye merely as aportion of a complicated, monotonously working piece of machinery, soalso has our present order of mechanical and individual productiondivided the world into a small minority which sees and feels what itis about, and a colossal majority which has no perception, noconception, and, consequently, no preferences attached to the objectsit is employed (by the methods of division of labour) to produce, soto speak, without seeing them. Tolstoi has realised that this is thepresent condition of human labour, and his view of it has beencorrected neither by historical knowledge nor by psychologicalobservation. He has shown us _art_, as it nowadays exists, divided andspecialised into two or three "fine arts, " each of which employsexceptional and highly trained talent in the production of objects soelaborate and costly, so lacking in all utility, that they can bepossessed only by the rich few; objects, moreover, so unfamiliar inform and in symbol that only the idle can learn to enjoy (or pretendto enjoy) them after a special preliminary initiation and training. 

X. 

_Initiation and training_, we have returned to those wretched words, for we also had recognised that without initiation and training therecould be no real enjoyment of art. But, looking not at this brief, transitional, and topsy-turvey present, but at the centuries andcenturies which have evolved, not only art, but the desire and habitthereof, we have seen what Tolstoi refused to see, namely, thatwherever and whenever (that is to say, everywhere and at all timessave these present European days) art has existed spontaneously, ithas brought with it that initiation and training. The initiation andtraining, the habit of understanding given qualities of form, thediscrimination and preference thereof, have come, I maintain, as aresult of practical utility. 

Or rather: out of practical utility has arisen the art itself, and theneed for it. The attention, the familiarity which made beautyenjoyable had previously made beauty necessary. It was because theearthenware lamp, the bronze pitcher, the little rude household idolsdisplayed the same arrangements of lines and surfaces, presented thesame patterns and features, embodied, in a word, the same visiblerhythms of being, that the Greeks could understand without beingtaught the temples and statues of Athens, Delphi or Olympia. It wasbecause the special form qualities of ogival art (so subtle inmovement, unstable in balance and poignant in emotion that a wholecentury of critical study has scarce sufficed to render them familiarto us) were present in every village tower, every window coping, everychair-back, in every pattern carved, painted, stencilled or wovenduring the Gothic period; it was because of this that every artisan ofthe Middle Ages could appreciate less consciously than we, but farmore deeply, the loveliness and the wonder of the great cathedrals. Nay, even in our own times we can see how, through the help of all thecheapest and most perishable household wares, the poorest Japanese isable to enjoy that special peculiarity and synthesis of line andcolour and perspective which strikes even initiated Westerns as soexotic, far-fetched and almost wilfully unintelligible. 

I have said that thanks to the objects and sights of everyday use andlife the qualities of art could be perceived and enjoyed. It may bethat it was thanks to them that art had any qualities and ever existedat all. For, however much the temple, cathedral, statue, fresco, theelaborate bronze or lacquer or coloured print, may have reacted on theform, the proportions and linear rhythms and surface arrangements, ofall common useful objects; it was in the making of these common usefulobjects (first making by man of genius and thousandfold minuteadaptation by respectful mediocrity) that the form qualities came toexist. One may at least hazard this supposition in the face of theextreme unlikeliness that the complexity and perfection of the greatworks of art could have been obtained solely in works so necessarilyrare and few; and that the particular forms constituting each separatestyle could have originated save under the repeated suggestion ofeveryday use and technique. And can we not point to the patterns grownout of the necessities of weaving or basket-making, the shapes startedby the processes of metal soldering or clay squeezing; let alone theinnumerable categories of form manifestly derived from the mereconvenience of handling or using, of standing, pouring, holding, hanging up or folding? This much is certain, that only the manifoldapplication of given artistic forms in useful common objects is ableto account for that very slow, gradual and unconscious alteration ofthem which constitutes the spontaneous evolution of artistic form; andonly such manifold application could have given that almost automaticcertainty of taste which allowed the great art of the past to continueperpetually changing, through centuries and centuries, and adaptingitself over immense geographical areas to every variation of climate, topography, mode of life, or religion. Unless the forms of ancient arthad been safely embodied in a hundred modest crafts, how could theyhave undergone the imperceptible and secure metamorphosis fromEgyptian to Hellenic, from Greek to Græco-Roman, and thence, fromByzantine, have passed, as one great half, into Italian mediæval art?or how, without such infinite and infinitely varied practice of minuteadaptation to humble needs, could Gothic have given us works sodifferent as the French cathedrals, the Ducal Palace, the tiny chapelat Pisa, and remained equally great and wonderful, equally _Gothic_, in the ornament of a buckle as in the porch of Amiens or of Reims?

Beauty is born of attention, as happiness is born of life, becauseattention is rendered difficult and painful by lack of harmony, evenas life is clogged, diminished or destroyed by pain. And therefore, when there ceases to exist a close familiarity with visible objects oractions; when the appearance of things is passed over in perfunctoryand partial use (as we see it in all mechanical and divided labour);when the attention of all men is not continually directed to shapethrough purpose, then there will cease to be spontaneous beauty andthe spontaneous appreciation of beauty, because there will be no needfor either. Beauty of music does not exist for the stone-deaf, norbeauty of painting for the purblind; but beauty of no kind whatever, nor in any art, can really exist for the inattentive, for theover-worked or the idle. 

XI. 

That music should be so far the most really alive of all our modernarts is a fact which confirms all I have argued in the foregoingpages. For music is of all arts the one which insists on mostco-operation on the part of its votaries. Requiring to be performed(ninety-nine times out of a hundred) in order to be enjoyed, it hasmade merely _musical people_ into performers, however humble; and hasby this means called forth a degree of attention, of familiarity, ofpractical effort, which makes the art enter in some measure intolife, and in that measure, become living. To play an instrument, however humbly, to read at sight, or to sing, if only in a choir, issomething wholly different from lounging in a gallery or wandering ona round of cathedrals: it means acquired knowledge, effort, comparison, self-restraint, and all the realities of manipulation;quite apart even from trying to read the composer's intentions, thereis in learning to strike the keys with a particular part of thefinger-tips, or in dealing out the breath and watching intonation andtimbre in one's own voice, an output of care and skill akin to thoseof the smith, the potter or the glass blower: all this has a purposeand is work, and brings with it disinterested work's reward, love. 

To find the analogy of this co-operation in the arts addressingthemselves to the eye, we require, nowadays, to leave the great numberwho merely enjoy (or ought to enjoy) painting, sculpture orarchitecture, and seek, now that craft is entirely divorced from art, among the small minority which creates, or tries to create. Artisticenjoyment exists nowadays mainly among the class of executive artists;and perhaps it is for this very reason, and because all chance ofseeing or making shapely things has ceased in other pursuits, that the"fine arts" are so lamentably overstocked; the man or woman who wouldhave been satisfied with playing the piano enough to read a score orsing sufficiently to take part in a chorus, has, in the case of otherarts, to undergo the training of a painter, sculptor or art critic, and often to delude himself or herself with grotesque ambitions in oneof these walks. 

XII. 

Be this as it may, and making the above happy and honourable exceptionin favour of music, it is no exaggeration to say that in our time itis only artists who get real pleasure out of art, because it is onlyartists who approach art from the side of work and bring to it work'sfamiliar attention and habitual energy. Indeed, paradoxical as it maysound, art has remained alive during the nineteenth century, and willremain alive during the twentieth, only and solely because there hasbeen a large public of artists. 

Of artists, I would add, of quite incomparable vigour and elasticityof genius, and of magnificent disinterestedness and purity of heart. For let us remember that they have worked without having the sympathyof their fellow-men, and worked without the aid and comfort of alliedcrafts: that they have created while cut off from tradition, unhelpedby the manifold suggestiveness of useful purpose or necessary message;separated entirely from the practical and emotional life of the worldat large; tiny little knots of voluntary outlaws from a civilisationwhich could not understand them; and, whatever worldly honours mayhave come to mock their later years, they have been weakened andembittered by early solitude of spirit. No artistic genius of the pasthas been put through such cruel tests, has been kept on such miserablyshort commons, as have our artists of the last hundred years, fromTurner to Rossetti and Watts, from Manet and Degas and Whistler toRodin and Albert Besnard. And if their work has shown lapses andfailings; if it has been, alas, lacking at times in health or joy ordignity or harmony, let us ask ourselves what the greatestindividualities of Antiquity and the Middle Ages would have producedif cut off from the tradition of the Past and the suggestion of thePresent--if reduced to exercise art outside the atmosphere of life;and let us look with wonder and gratitude on the men who have beenable to achieve great art even for only art's own sake. 

XIII. 

No better illustration of this could be found than the sections of theParis Exhibition which came under the heading of _Decorative Art_. 

Decoration. But decoration of what? In reality of nothing. All theobjects--from the jewellery and enamels to the furniture andhangings--which this decorative art is supposed to decorate, are themerest excuse and sham. Not one of them is the least useful, or at allevents useful once it is decorated. And nobody wants it to be useful. What _is_ wanted is a pretext, for _doing art_ on the side of theartist, for buying costly things on the side of the public. And behindthis pretext there is absolutely no genuine demand for any definiteobject serving any definite use; none of that insistence (which we seein the past) that the shape, material, and colour should be the verybest for practical purposes; and of that other insistence, marvellously blended with the requirements of utility, that the shape, material and colour should also be as beautiful as possible. Theinvaluable suggestions of real practical purpose, the organic dignityof integrated habit and necessity, the safety of tradition, thespiritual weightiness of genuine message, all these elements ofcreative power are lacking. And in default of them we see a greatamount of artistic talent, artificially fed and excited by theteaching and the example of every possible past or present art, exhausting itself in attempts to invent, to express, to be something, anything, so long as it is new. Hence forms gratuitous, withoutorganic quality or logical cogency, pulled about, altered andre-altered, carried to senseless finish and then wilfully blurred. Hence that sickly imitation, in a brand-new piece of work, of theeffects of time, weather, and of every manner of accident ordeterioration: the pottery and enamels reproducing the mere patina ofage or the trickles of bad firing; the relief work in marble or metalwhich looks as if it had been rolled for centuries in the sea, orcorroded by acids under ground. And the total effect, increased by allthese methods of wilful blunting and blurring, is an art withoutstamina, tired, impotent, short-lived, while produced by an excessiveexpense of talent and effort of invention. 

For here we have the mischief: all the artistic force is spent by theart in merely keeping alive; and there is no reserve energy for livingwith serenity and depth of feeling. The artist wears himself out, to agreat extent, in wondering what he shall do (there being no practicalreason for doing one thing more than another, or indeed anything atall), instead of applying his power, with steady, habitual certaintyof purpose and efficiency of execution, to doing it in the very bestway. Hence, despite this outlay of inventive force, or rather indirect consequence thereof, there is none of that completeness andmeasure and congruity, that restrained exuberance of fancy, that morethan adequate carrying out, that all-round harmony, which are possibleonly when the artist is altering to his individual taste some shapealready furnished by tradition or subduing to his pleasure someproblem insisted on by practical necessity. 

Meanwhile, all round these galleries crammed with useless objectsbarely pretending to any utility, round these pavilions of theDecorative Arts, the Exhibition exhibits (most instructive of all itsshows) samples of the most marvellous indifference not merely tobeauty, peace and dignity, but to the most rudimentary æsthetic andmoral comfort. For all the really useful things which men takeseriously because they increase wealth and power, because they savetime and overcome distance; all these "useful" things have the naïveand colossal ugliness of rudimentary animals, or of abortions, ofeverything hurried untimely into existence: machines, sheds, bridges, trams, motor-cars: not one line corrected, not one angle smoothed, forthe sake of the eye, of the nerves of the spectator. And all of it, both decorative futility and cynically hideous practicality (let alonethe various exotic raree shows from distant countries or more distantcenturies) expect to be enjoyed after a jostle at the doors and ascurry along the crowded corridors, and to the accompaniment of everyrattling and shrieking and jarring sound. For mankind in our daysintends to revel in the most complicated and far-fetched kinds ofbeauty while cultivating convenient callousness to the most elementaryand atrocious sorts of ugliness. The art itself reveals it; for evenin its superfine isolation and existence for its own sake only, artcannot escape its secondary mission of expressing and recording thespirit of its times. These elaborate æsthetic baubles of the"Decorative Arts" are full of quite incredibly gross barbarism. And, even as the iron chest, studded with nails, or the walnut press, unadorned save by the intrinsic beauty and dignity of theirproportions, and the tender irregularities of their hammered surface, the subtle bevelling of their panels; even as these humble objects insome dark corner of an Italian castle or on the mud floor of a Bretoncottage, symbolise in my mind the most intense artistic sensitivenessand reverence of the Past; so, here at this Exhibition, my impressionsof contemporary over-refinement and callousness are symbolised in acertain cupboard, visibly incapable of holding either linen orgarments or crockery or books, of costly and delicately polished wood, but shaped like a packing-case, and displaying with marvellousimpartiality two exquisitely cast and chased doorguard plates offar-fetched, many-tinted alloys of silver, and--a set of hinges, alock and a key, such as the village ironmonger supplies in blue paperparcels of a dozen. A mere coincidence, an accident, you may object;an unlucky oversight which cannot be fairly alleged against the art ofour times. Pardon me: there may be coincidences and accidents in othermatters, but there are none in art; because the essence of art is tosacrifice even the finest irrelevancies, to subordinate the mostrefractory details, to subdue coincidence and accident into seemingpurpose and harmony. And whatever our practical activity, in itsidentification of time and money, may allow itself in the way of"scamping" and of "shoddy"--art can never plead an oversight, becauseart, in so far as it _is_ art, represents those organic and organisedpreferences in the domain of form, those imperative and stringentdemands for harmony, which see everything, feel everything, and knowno law or motive save their own complete satisfaction. 

Art for art's sake! We see it nowhere revealed so clearly as in theExhibition, where it masks as "Decorative Art. " Art answering no claimof practical life and obeying no law of contemplative preference, artwithout root, without organism, without logical reason or moraldecorum, art for mere buying and selling, art which expresses onlyself-assertion on the part of the seller, and self-satisfaction on thepart of the buyer. A walk through this Exhibition is an object-lessonin a great many things besides æsthetics; it forces one to ask a goodmany of Tolstoi's angriest questions; but it enables one also, if dulyfamiliar with the art of past times, to answer them in a mannerdifferent from Tolstoi's. 

One carries away the fact, which implies so many others, that not oneof these objects is otherwise than expensive; expensive, necessarilyand intentionally, from the rarity both of the kind of skill and ofthe kind of material; these things are reserved by their price as wellas their uselessness, for a small number of idle persons. They have noconnection with life, either by penetrating, by serviceableness, deepinto that of the individual; or by spreading, by cheapness, over awide surface of the life of the nations. 

XIV. 

The moment has now come for that inevitable question, with whichfriendly readers unintentionally embarrass, and hostile ones purposelyinterrupt, any exposition of mal-adjustment in the order of theuniverse: But what remedy do you propose?

Mal-adjustments of a certain gravity are not set right by proposablearrangements: they are remedied by the fulness and extent of thefeeling against them, which employs for its purposes and compels intoits service all the unexpected and incalculable coincidences andaccidents which would otherwise be wasted, counteracted or even usedby some different kind of feeling. And the use that a writer canbe--even a Ruskin or a Tolstoi--is limited not to devising programmesof change (mere symptoms often that some unprogrammed change ispreparing), but to nursing the strength of that great motor whichcreates its own ways and instruments: impatience with evil conditions, desire for better. 

A cessation of the special æsthetic mal-adjustment of our times, bywhich art is divorced from life and life from art, is as difficult toforetell in detail as the new-adjustment between labour and the otherelements of production which will, most probably, have to precede it. 

A healthy artistic life has indeed existed in the past throughcenturies of social wrongness as great as our own, and even greater;indeed, such artistic life, more or less continuous until our day, attests the existence of great mitigations in the world's formerwretchedness (such as individuality in labour, spirit of co-operativesolidarity, religious feeling: but perhaps the most importantalleviations lie far deeper and more hidden)--mitigations withoutwhich there would not have been happiness and strength enough toproduce art; nor, for the matter of that, to produce what was then thefuture, including ourselves and our advantages and disadvantages. Theexistence of art has by no means implied, as Ruskin imagined, with histeleological optimism and tendency to believe in Eden and banishmentfrom Eden, that people once lived in a kind of millennium; it merelyshows that, however far from millennial their condition, there wasstability enough to produce certain alleviations, and notably thealleviations without which art cannot exist, and the alleviationswhich art itself affords. 

It is not therefore the badness of our present social arrangements (inmany ways far less bad than those of the past) which is responsiblefor our lack of all really vital, deep-seated, widely spread andhappiness-giving art; but merely the feature in this latter-daybadness which, after all, is our chief reason for hope: the fact thatthe social mal-adjustments of this century are, to an extent hithertounparalleled, the mal-adjustments incident to a state of over-rapidand therefore insufficiently deep-reaching change, of superficiallegal and material improvements extending in reality only to a verysmall number of persons and things, and unaccompanied by any realrenovation in the thought, feeling or mode of living of the majority;the mal-adjustment of transition, of disorder, and perfunctoriness, bythe side of which the regularly recurring disorders of the past--civilwars, barbarian invasions, plagues, etc. , are incidents leaving thefoundation of life unchanged, transitional disorders, which we fail toremark only because we are ourselves a part of the hurry, the scuffle, and the general wastefulness. How soon and how this transition periodof ours will come to an end, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, toforetell; but that it _must_ soon end is certain, if only for onereason: namely, that the changes accumulated during our times mustinevitably work their way below the surface; the new material andintellectual methods must become absorbed and organised, and therebyproduce some kind of interdependent and less easily disturbed newconditions; briefly, that the amount of alteration we have witnessedwill occasion a corresponding integration. And with this period ofintegration and increasing organisation and comparative stabilitythere will come new alleviations and adjustments in life, and withthese, the reappearance in life of art. 

XV. 

In what manner it is absurd, merely foolishly impatient or foolishlycavilling, to ask. Not certainly by a return to the past and itsmethods, but by the coming of the future with new methods having thesame result: the maintenance and tolerable quality of human life, ofbody and soul. Hence probably by a further development of democraticinstitutions and machine industry, but democratic institutions neitherauthoritative nor _laissez faire_; machinery of which the hand andmind of men will be the guide, not the slave. 

One or two guesses may perhaps be warranted. First, that thedistribution of wealth, or more properly of work and idleness, willgradually be improved, and the exploitation of individuals in greatgangs cease; hence that the workman will be able once more to see andshape what he is making, and that, on the other side, the possessor ofobjects will have to use them, and therefore learn their appearanceand care for them; also that many men will possess enough, andscarcely any men possess much more than enough, so that what there isof houses, furniture, chattels, books or pictures in privatepossession may be enjoyed at leisure and with unglutted appetite, andfor that reason be beautiful. We may also guess that willingco-operation in peaceful employments, that spontaneous formation ofgroups of opinion as well as of work, and the multiplication of smallcentres of activity, may create a demand for places of publiceducation and amusement and of discussion and self-expression, andrevive those celebrations, religious and civil, in which the art ofAntiquity and of the Middle Ages found its culmination; the service oflarge bodies and of the community absorbing the higher artistic giftsin works necessarily accessible to the multitude; and the humblertalents--all the good amateur quality at present wasted in ambitiousefforts--being applied in every direction to the satisfaction ofindividual artistic desire. 

If such a distribution of artistic activity should seem, to mycontemporaries, Utopian, I would point out that it has existedthroughout the past, and in states of society infinitely worse thanare ever likely to recur. For even slaves and serfs could make untothemselves some kind of art befitting their conditions; and even themost despotic aristocracies and priesthoods could adequately expresstheir power and pride only in works which even the slave and serf wasable to see. In the whole of the world's art history, it is thispresent of ours which forms the exception; and as the changes of thefuture will certainly be for greater social health and better socialorganisation, it is not likely that this bad exception will be thebeginning of a new rule. 

XVI. 

Meanwhile we can, in some slight measure, foretell one or two of thedirections in which our future artistic readjustment is most likely tobegin, even apart from that presumable social reorganisation andindustrial progress which will give greater leisure and comfort to theworkers, and make their individual character the guide, and not theslave, of this machinery. Such a direction is already indicated by oneof our few original and popular forms of art: the picture-book and theposter, which, by the new processes of our colour printing, haveplaced some of the most fanciful and delicate of our artists--men likeCaldecott and Walter Crane, like Cheret and Boutet de Monvel, at theservice of everyone equally. Moreover, it is probable that long beforemachinery is so perfected as to demand individual guidance, preferenceand therefore desire for beauty, and long before a correspondingreadjustment of work and leisure, the eye will have again becomeattentive through the necessities of rational education. The habit ofteaching both adults and children by demonstration rather thanprecept, by awaking the imagination rather than burdening the memory, will quite undoubtedly recall attention to visible things, and therebyopen new fields to art: geography, geology, natural history, let alonehistory in its vaster modern sociological and anthropological aspect, will insist upon being taught no longer merely through books, butthrough collections of visible objects; and, for all purposes ofreconstructive and synthetic conception, through pictures. 

And, what is more, the sciences will afford a new field for poeticcontemplation; while the philosophy born of such sciences willsynthetise new modes of seeing life and demand new visible symbols. The future will create cosmogonies and Divine Comedies more numerous, more various, than those on sculptured Egyptian temples and Gothiccathedrals, and Bibles more imaginative perhaps than the ones paintedin the Pisa Campo Santo and in the Sixtine Chapel. The future? Nay, wecan see a sample already in the present. I am alluding to the panelsby Albert Besnard in the School of Pharmacy in Paris, a seriesillustrating the making of medicinal drugs, their employment and themethod and subject-matter of the sciences on which pharmaceuticalpractice is based. Not merely the plucking and drying of the herbs insunny, quiet botanical gardens, and the sorting and mingling of earthsand metals among the furnaces of the laboratory; not merely the firsttremendous tragic fight between the sudden sickness and the physician, and the first pathetic, hard-won victory, the first weary butrapturous return out of doors of the convalescent; but the life of themen on whose science our power for life against death is based: thebotanists knee-deep in the pale spring woods; the geologists in thesnowy hollows of the great blue mountain; the men themselves, theyouths listening and the elder men teaching, grave and eagerintellectual faces, in the lecture rooms. And, finally, the thingswhich fill the minds of these men, their thoughts and dreams, thepoetry they have given to the world; the poetry of that infinitelyremote, dim past, evoked out of cavern remains and fossils--the lakedwellers among the mists of melting glaciers; the primæval horsesplaying on the still manless shores; the great saurians plunging inthe waves of long-dried seas; the jungles which are now our coal beds;and see! the beginning of organic life, the first callow vegetation onthe stagnant waters in the dawn-light of the world. The place is but amean boarded and glazed vestibule; full of the sickly fumes ofchemicals; and the people who haunt it are only future apothecaries. But the compositions are as spacious and solemn, the colours as tenderand brilliant, and the poetry as high and contemplative as that of anymediæval fresco; it is all new also, undreamed of, _sui generis_, inits impersonal cosmic suggestiveness, as in its colouring of opal, andmetallic patinas, and tea rose and Alpine ice cave. 

XVII. 

I have alluded already to the fact that, perhaps because of the partof actual participating work which it entails, music is the art whichhas most share in life and of life, nowadays. It seems probabletherefore that its especial mission may be to keep alive in us thefeeling and habit of art, and to transmit them back to those arts ofvisible form to which it owes, perhaps, the training necessary to itsown architectural structure and its own colour combinations. Comparedwith the arts of line and projection, music seems at a certain moraldisadvantage, as not being applicable to the things of everyday use, and also not educating us to the better knowledge of the beautiful andsignificant things of nature. In connection with this kind ofblindness, music is also compatible (as we see by its flourishing ingreat manufacturing towns) with a great deal of desecration of natureand much hand-to-mouth ruthlessness of life. But, on the other hand, music has the especial power of suggesting and regulating emotion, andthe still more marvellous faculty of creating an inner world foritself, inviolable because ubiquitous. 

And, therefore, with its audible rhythms and harmonies, its restrainedclimaxes and finely ordered hierarchies, music may discipline ourfeelings, or rather what underlies our feelings, the almostunconscious life of our nerves, to modalities of order and selection, and make the spaceless innermost of our spirit into some kind ofsanctuary, swept and garnished, until the coming of better days. 

XVIII. 

According to a certain class of thinkers, among whom I find Guyau andother men of note, art is destined partially to replace religion inour lives. But with what are you going to replace religion itself inart? For the religious feeling, whenever it existed, gave art anelement of thoroughness which the desire for pleasure and interest, even for æsthetic pleasure and interest, does not supply. An immensefulness of energy is due to the fact that beautiful things, asemployed by religion, were intended to be beautiful all through, adequate in the all-seeing eye of God or Gods, not merely beautiful onthe surface, on the side turned towards the glance of man. For, inreligious art, beautiful things are an oblation; they are the bestthat we can give, as distinguished from a pleasure arranged forourselves and got as cheap as possible. Herein lies the impassablegulf between the church and theatre, considered æsthetically; for itis only in the basest times, of formalism in art as in religion, ofsuperstition and sensualism, that we find the church imitating thetheatre in its paper glories and plaster painted like marble. Thereal, living religious spirit insists on bringing, as in St Mark's, agift of precious material, of delicate antique ornament, with everyshipload. The crown of the Madonna is not, like the tragedy queen's, of tinsel, the sacrament is not given in an empty chalice. The priest, even where he makes no effort to be holy as a man, is at least sacredas a priest; whereas there is something uncomfortable in the sensethat the actor is only pretending to be this or the other, and weourselves pretending to believe him; there is a thin and acid taste inthe shams of the stage and in all art which, like that of the stage, exists only to the extent necessary to please our fancy or excite ourfeelings. Why so? For is not pleasing the fancy and exciting thefeelings the real, final use of art? Doubtless. But there would seemto be in nature a law not merely of the greater economy of means, butalso of the greatest output of efficacy: effort helping effort, andfunction, function; and many activities, in harmonious interaction, obtaining a measure of result far surpassing their mere addition. Thecreations of our mind are, of course, mere spiritual existences, things of seeming, akin to illusions; and yet our mind can never restsatisfied with an unreality, because our mind is active, penetrativeand grasping, and therefore craves for realisation, for completenessand truth, and feels bruised and maimed whenever it hits against adead wall or is pulled up by a contradiction; nay, worst of all, itgrows giddy and faint when suddenly brought face to face withemptiness. All insufficiency and shallowness means loss of power; andit is such loss of power that we remark when we compare with thereligious art of past times the art which, every day more and more, isgiven us by the hurried and over-thrifty (may I say "Reach-me-down"?)hands of secularism. The great art of Greece and of the Middle Agesmost often represents something which, to our mind and feelings, is asimportant, and even as beautiful, as the representation itself; andthe representation, the actual "work of art" itself, gains by thatadded depth and reverence of our mood, is carried deeper (whilehelping to carry deeper) into our soul. Instead of which we modernstry to be satisfied with allowing the seeing part of us to light onsomething pleasant and interesting, while giving the mind onlytriviality to rest upon; and the mind goes to sleep or chafes to moveaway. We cannot live intellectually and morally in presence of theidea, say, of a jockey of Degas or one of his ballet girls incontemplation of her shoe, as long as we can live æsthetically in thearrangement of lines and masses and dabs of colour and interlacings oflight and shade which translate themselves into this _idea_ of jockeyor ballet girl; we are therefore bored, ruffled, or, what is worse, welearn to live on insufficient spiritual rations, and grow anæmic. Ourshortsighted practicality, which values means while disregarding ends, and conceives usefulness only as a stage in making some other_utility_, has led us to suppose that the desire for beauty iscompatible, nay commensurate, with indifference to reality: the _real_having come to mean that which you can plant, cook, eat or sell, notwhat you can feel and think. 

This notion credits us with an actual craving for something whichshould exist as little as possible, in one dimension only, so tospeak, or as upon a screen (for fear of occupying valuable space whichmight be given to producing more food than we can eat); whereas whatwe desire is just such beauty as will surround us on all sides, suchharmony as we can live in; our soul, dissatisfied with the realitywhich happens to surround it, seeks on the contrary to substitute anew reality of its own making, to rebuild the universe, like OmarKhayyam, according to the heart's desire. And nothing can be moredifferent than such an instinct from the alleged satisfaction inplaying with dolls and knowing that they are not real people. By anodd paradoxical coincidence, that very disbelief in the _real_character of art, and that divorce betwixt art and utility, is reallydue to our ultra-practical habit of taking seriously only theserviceable or instructive sides of things: the quality of beauty, which the healthy mind insists upon in everything it deals with, getting to be considered as an idle adjunct, fulfilling no kind ofpurpose; and therefore, as something detachable, separate, andspeedily relegated to the museum or lumber-room where we keep ourvarious shams: ideals, philosophies, all the playthings with which wesometimes wile away our idleness. Whereas in fact a great work of art, like a great thought of goodness, exists essentially for our morethorough, our more _real_ satisfaction: the soul goes into it with allits higher hankerings, and rests peaceful, satisfied, so long as it isenclosed in this dwelling of its own choice. And it is, on thecontrary, the flux of what we call real life, that is to say, of lifeimposed on us by outer necessities and combinations, which is so oftenone-sided, perfunctory, not to be dwelt upon by thought nor penetratedinto by feeling, and endurable only according to the angle or thelighting up--the angle or lighting up called "purpose" which we applyto it. 

XIX. 

With what, I ventured to ask just now, are you going to fill the placeof religion in art?

With nothing, I believe, unless with religion itself. Religion, perhaps externally unlike any of which we have historical experience;but religion, whether individual or collective, possessing, justbecause it is immortal, all the immortal essence of all past andpresent creeds. And just because religion is the highest form of humanactivity, and its utility is the crowning one of thoughtful andfeeling life, just for this reason will religion return, sooner orlater, to be art's most universal and most noble employer. 

XX. 

In the foregoing pages I have tried to derive the need of beauty fromthe fact of attention, attention to what we do, think and feel, aswell as see and hear; and to demonstrate therefore that allspontaneous and efficient art is _the making and doing of usefulthings in such manner as shall be beautiful_. During thisdemonstration I have, incidentally, though inexplicitly, pointed outthe utility of art itself and of beauty. For beauty is that mode ofexistence of visible or audible or thinkable things which imposes onour contemplating energies rhythms and patterns of unity, harmony andcompleteness; and thereby gives us the foretaste and the habit ofhigher and more perfect forms of life. Art is born of the utilities oflife; and art is in itself one of life's greatest utilities. 

WASTEFUL PLEASURES. 

 "Er muss lernen edler begehren, damit er nicht nötig habe, erhaben zu wollen. "--SCHILLER, "_Ästhetische Erziehung_. "

I. 

A pretty, Caldecott-like moment, or rather minute, when the huntsmenstood on the green lawn round the moving, tail-switching, dapple massof hounds; and the red coats trotted one by one from behind thescreens of bare trees, delicate lilac against the slowly moving greysky. A delightful moment, followed, as the hunt swished past, by thesudden sense that these men and women, thus whirled off into what maywell be the sole poetry of their lives, are but noisy intruders intothese fields and spinnies, whose solemn, secret speech they drown withclatter and yelp, whose mystery and charm stand aside on theirpassage, like an interrupted, a profaned rite. 

Gone; the yapping and barking, the bugle-tootling fade away in thedistance; and the trees and wind converse once more. 

This West Wind, which has been whipping up the wan northern sea, andrushing round the house all this last fortnight, singing its bigballads in corridor and chimney, piping its dirges and lullabies inone's back-blown hair on the sand dunes--this West Wind, with itsmany chaunts, its occasional harmonies and sudden modulations mockingfamiliar tunes, can tell of many things: of the different way in whichthe great trunks meet its shocks and answer vibrating throughinnermost fibres; the smooth, muscular boles of the beeches, shakingtheir auburn boughs; the stiff, rough hornbeams and thorns isolatedamong the pastures; the ashes whose leaves strew the roads with greenrushes; the creaking, shivering firs and larches. The West Wind tellsus of the way how the branches spring outwards, or balance themselves, or hang like garlands in the air, and carry their leaves, or needles, or nuts; and of their ways of bending and straightening, of swayingand trembling. It tells us also, this West Wind, how the sea is lashedand furrowed; how the little waves spring up in the offing, and thebig waves rise and run forward and topple into foam; how the rocks areshaken, the sands are made to hiss and the shingle is rattled up anddown; how the great breakers vault over the pier walls, leapthundering against the breakwaters, and disperse like smoke off thecannon's mouth, like the whiteness of some vast explosion. 

These are the things which the Wind and the Woods can talk about withus, nay, even the gorse and the shaking bents. But the hunting folkpass too quickly, and make too much noise, to hear anything savethemselves and their horses' hoofs and their bugle and hounds. 

II. 

I have taken fox-hunting as the type of a pleasure _which destroyssomething_, just because it is, in many ways, the most noble and, if Imay say so, the most innocent of such pleasures. The death, the, perhaps agonising, flight of the fox, occupy no part of the hunter'sconsciousness, and form no part of his pleasure; indeed, they could, but for the hounds, be dispensed with altogether. There is a finecommunity of emotion between men and creatures, horses and dogs addingtheir excitement to ours; there is also a fine lack of the merefeeling of trying to outrace a competitor, something of the collectiveand almost altruistic self-forgetfulness of a battle. There is thebreak-neck skurry, the flying across the ground and through the air atthe risk of limbs and life, and at the mercy of one's own and one'shorse's pluck, skill and good fellowship. All this makes up a rapturein which many ugly things vanish, and certain cosmic intuitions flashforth for some, at least, of the hunters. The element of poetry isgreater, the element of brutality less, in this form of intoxicationthan in many others. It has a handsomer bearing than its modernsuccessor, the motor-intoxication, with its passiveness and (for allbut the driver) its lack of skill, its confinement, moreover, tobeaten roads, and its petrol-stench and dustcloud of privilege and ofinconvenience to others. And the intoxication of hunting is, to mythinking at least, cleaner, wholesomer, than the intoxication of, letus say, certain ways of hearing music. But just because so much can besaid, both positive and negative, in its favour, I am glad thathunting, and not some meaner or some less seemly amusement, shouldhave set me off moralising about such pleasures as are wasteful ofother things or of some portion of our soul. 

III. 

For nothing can be further from scientific fact than thatcross-grained and ill-tempered puritanism identifying pleasure withsomething akin to sinfulness. Philosophically considered, Pain is sofar stronger a determinant than Pleasure, that its _vis a tergo_ mighthave sufficed to ensure the survival of the race, without the farmilder action of Pleasure being necessary at all; so that the veryexistence of Pleasure would lead us to infer that, besides itsfunction of selecting, like Pain, among life's possibilities, it hasthe function of actually replenishing the vital powers, and thusmaking amends, by its healing and invigorating, for the wear and tear, the lessening of life's resources through life's other great Power ofSelection, the terror-angel of Pain. This being the case, Pleasuretends, and should tend more and more, to be consistent with itself, tomean a greater chance of its own growth and spreading (as opposed toPain's dwindling and suicidal nature), and in so far to connect itselfwith whatsoever facts make for the general good, and to reject, therefore, all cruelty, injustice, rapacity and wastefulness ofopportunities and powers. 

Nay, paradoxical though such a notion may seem in the face of our pastand present state of barbarism, Pleasure, and hence amusement, shouldbecome incompatible with, be actually _spoilt by_, any element ofloss to self and others, of mischief even to the distant, the future, and of impiety to that principle of Good which is but the summing upof the claims of the unseen and unborn. 

IV. 

I was struck, the other day, by the name of a play on a theatreposter: _A Life of Pleasure_. The expression is so familiar that wehear and employ it without thinking how it has come to be. Yet, whenby some accident it comes to be analysed, its meaning startles with anodd revelation. Pleasure, a life of pleasure. .. . Other lives, to belivable, must contain more pleasure than pain; and we know, as a fact, that all healthy work is pleasurable to healthy creatures. Intelligentconverse with one's friends, study, sympathy, all give pleasure; andart is, in a way, the very type of pleasure. Yet we know that none ofall that is meant in the expression: a life of pleasure. A curiousthought, and, as it came to me, a terrible one. For that expression issymbolic. It means that, of all the myriads of creatures who surroundus, in the present and past, the vast majority identifies pleasuremainly with such a life; despises, in its speech at least, all othersorts of pleasure, the pleasure of its own honest strivings andaffections, taking them for granted, making light thereof. 

V. 

We are mistaken, I think, in taxing the generality of people withindifference to ideals, with lack of ideas directing their lives. Fewlives are really lawless or kept in check only by the _secular arm_, the judge or policeman. Nor is conformity to _what others do, what isfit for one's class_ or _seemly in one's position_ a result of mereunreasoning imitation or of the fear of being boycotted. The potencyof such considerations is largely that of summing up certain rules anddefining the permanent tendencies of the individual, or those he wouldwish to be permanent; in other words, we are in the presence of_ideals of conduct_. 

Why else are certain things _those which have to be done_; whenceotherwise such expressions as _social duties_ and _keeping up one'sposition_? Why such fortitude under boredom, weariness, constraint;such heroism sometimes in taking blows and snubs, in dancing on withbroken heart-strings like the Princess in Ford's play? All this meansan ideal, nay, a religion. Yes; people, quite matter-of-fact, worldlypeople, are perpetually sacrificing to ideals. And what is more, quitesuperior, virtuous people, religious in the best sense of the word, are apt to have, besides the ostensible and perhaps rather obsoleteone of churches and meeting-houses, another cultus, esoteric, unspokenbut acted upon, of which the priests and casuists are ladies'-maidsand butlers. 

Now, if one could only put to profit some of this wasted dutifulness, this useless heroism; if some of the energy put into the idealprogress (as free from self-interest most often as the _accumulatingmerit_ of Kim's Buddhist) called _getting on in the world_ could onlybe applied in _getting the world along_!

VI. 

An eminent political economist, to whom I once confided my aversionfor such _butler's and lady's-maid's ideals of life_, admonished methat although useless possessions, unenjoyable luxury, ostentation, and so forth, undoubtedly represented a waste of the world's energiesand resources, they should nevertheless be tolerated, inasmuch asconstituting a great incentive to industry. People work, he said, largely that they may be able to waste. If you repress wastefulnessyou will diminish, by so much, the production of wealth by thewasteful, by the luxurious and the vain. .. . 

This may be true. Habits of modesty and of sparingness might perhapsdeprive the world of as much wealth as they would save. But evensupposing this to be true, though the wealth of the world did notimmediately gain, there would always be the modesty and sparingness tothe good; virtues which, sooner or later, would be bound to make morewealth exist or to make existing wealth _go a longer way_. Appealingto higher motives, to good sense and good feeling and good taste, hasthe advantage of saving the drawbacks of lower motives, which _are_lower just because they have such drawbacks. You may get a man to do adesirable thing from undesirable motives; but those undesirablemotives will induce him, the very next minute, to do some undesirablething. The wages of good feeling and good taste is the satisfactionthereof. The wages of covetousness and vanity is the grabbing ofadvantages and the humiliating of neighbours; and these make lifepoorer, however much bread there may be to eat or money to spend. Whatare called higher motives are merely those which expand individuallife into harmonious connection with the life of all men; what we calllower motives bring us hopelessly back, by a series of viciouscircles, to the mere isolated, sterile egos. Sterile, I mean, in thesense that the supply of happiness dwindles instead of increasing. 

VII. 

Waste of better possibilities, of higher qualities, of what we call_our soul_. To denounce this is dignified, but it is also easy andmost often correspondingly useless. I wish to descend to more prosaicmatters, and, as Ruskin did in his day, to denounce the _mere waste ofmoney_. For the wasting of money implies nearly always all those otherkinds of wasting. And although there are doubtless pastimes (pastimespromoted, as is our wont, for fear of yet _other_ pastimes), which arein themselves unclean or cruel, these are less typically evil, justbecause they are more obviously so, than the amusements which implythe destruction of wealth, the destruction of part of the earth'sresources and of men's labour and thrift, and incidentally thereon ofhuman leisure and comfort and the world's sweetness. 

Do you remember La Bruyère's famous description of the peasants underLouis XIV. ? "One occasionally meets with certain wild animals, bothmale and female, scattered over the country; black, livid and parchedby the sun, bound to the soil which they scratch and dig up withdesperate obstinacy. They have something which sounds like speech, andwhen they raise themselves up they show a human face. And, as a fact, they are human beings. " The _Ancien Régime_, which had reduced them tothat, and was to continue reducing them worse and worse for anotherhundred years by every conceivable tax, tithe, toll, servage, andprivilege, did so mainly to pay for amusements. Amusements of the_Roi-Soleil_, with his Versailles and Marly and aqueducts andwaterworks, plays and operas; amusements of Louis XV. , with hisParc-aux-Cerfs; amusements of Marie-Antoinette, playing the virtuousrustic at Trianon; amusements of new buildings, new equipages, newribbons and bibbons, new diamonds (including the fatal necklace);amusements of hunting and gambling and love-making; amusementssometimes atrocious, sometimes merely futile, but all of them leavingnothing behind, save the ravaged grass and stench of brimstone ofburnt-out fireworks. 

Moreover, wasting money implies _getting more_. And the processes bywhich such wasted money is replaced are, by the very nature of thosewho do the wasting, rarely, nay, never, otherwise than wasteful inthemselves. To put into their pockets or, like Marshall Villeroi("a-t-on mis de l'or dans mes poches?"), have it put by their valets, to replace what was lost overnight, these proud and often honourablenobles would ante-chamber and cringe for sinecures, pensions, indemnities, privileges, importune and supplicate the King, the King'smistress, pandar or lacquey. And the sinecure, pension, indemnity orprivilege was always deducted out of the bread--rye-bread, straw-bread, grass-bread--which those parched, prone human animalsdescribed by La Bruyère were extracting "with desperateobstinacy"--out of the ever more sterile and more accursed furrow. 

It is convenient to point the moral by reference to those kings andnobles of other centuries, without incurring pursuit for libel, orwounding the feelings of one's own kind and estimable contemporaries. Still, it may be well to add that, odd though it appears, the viciouscircle (in both senses of the words) continues to exist; and that, even in our democratic civilisation, _you cannot waste money withoutwasting something else in getting more money to replace it_. 

Waste, and _lay waste_, even as if your pastime had consisted not inharmless novelty and display, in gentlemanly games or good-humouredsport, but in destruction and devastation for their own sake. 

VIII. 

It has been laid waste, that little valley which, in its delicate andaustere loveliness, was rarer and more perfect than any picture orpoem. Those oaks, ivy garlanded like Maenads, which guarded theshallow white weirs whence the stream leaps down; those ilexes, whosedark, loose boughs hung over the beryl pools like hair of drinkingnymphs; those trees which were indeed the living and divine owners ofthat secluded place, dryads and oreads older and younger than anymortals, --have now been shamefully stripped, violated and maimed, their shorn-off leafage, already withered, gathered into faggots ortrodden into the mud made by woodcutters' feet in the place of violetsand tender grasses and wild balm; their flayed bodies, hacked grosslyout of shape, and flung into the defiled water until the moment when, the slaughter and dishonour and profanation being complete, thedealers' carts will come cutting up the turf and sprouting reeds, andcarry them off to the station or timber-yard. The very stumps androots will be dragged out for sale; the earthy banks, raw and torn, will fall in, muddying and clogging that pure mountain brook; and thehillside, turning into sliding shale, will dam it into puddles withthe refuse from the quarries above. And thus, for less guineas thanwill buy a new motor or cover an hour of Monte Carlo, a corner of theworld's loveliness and peace will be gone as utterly as those chairsand tables and vases and cushions which the harlot in Zola's novelbroke, tore, and threw upon the fire for her morning's amusement. 

IX. 

There is in our imperfect life too little of pleasure and too much ofplay. This means that our activities are largely wasted inpleasureless ways; that, being more tired than we should be, we losemuch time in needed rest; moreover, that being, all of us more orless, slaves to the drudgery of need or fashion, we set a positivevalue on that negative good called freedom, even as the pause betweenpain takes, in some cases, the character of pleasure. 

There is in all play a sense not merely of freedom fromresponsibility, from purpose and consecutiveness, a possibility ofbreaking off, or slackening off, but a sense also of margin, ofpermitted pause and blank and change; all of which answer to ourbeing on the verge of fatigue or boredom, at the limit of our energy, as is normal in the case of growing children (for growth exhausts), and inevitable in the case of those who work without the renovation ofinterest in what they are doing. 

If you notice people on a holiday, you will see them doing a largeamount of "nothing, " dawdling, in fact; and "amusements" are, whenthey are not excitements, that is to say, stimulations to deficientenergy, full of such "doing nothing. " Think, for instance, of "amusingconversation" with its gaps and skippings, and "amusing" reading withits perpetual chances of inattention. 

All this is due to the majority of us being too weak, too badly bornand bred, to give full attention except under the constraint ofnecessary work, or under the lash of some sort of excitement; and as aconsequence to our obtaining a sense of real well-being only from thespare energy which accumulates during idleness. Moreover, under ourpresent conditions (as under those of slave-labour) "work" is rarelysuch as calls forth the effortless, the willing, the pleasedattention. Either in kind or length or intensity, work makes a greaterdemand than can be met by the spontaneous, happy activity of most ofus, and thereby diminishes the future chances of such spontaneousactivity by making us weaker in body and mind. 

Now, so long as work continues to be thus strained or against thegrain, play is bound to be either an excitement which leaves us poorerand more tired than before (the fox-hunter, for instance, at the closeof the day, or on the off-days), or else play will be mere dawdling, getting out of training, in a measure demoralisation. Fordemoralisation, in the etymological sense being _debauched_, is thecorrelative of over-great or over-long effort; both spoil, but the onespoils while diminishing the mischief made by the other. 

Art is so much less useful than it should be, because of this baddivision of "work" and "play, " between which two it finds no place. For Art--and the art we unwittingly practice whenever we take pleasurein nature--is without appeal either to the man who is straining atbusiness and to the man who is dawdling in amusement. 

Æsthetic pleasure implies energy during rest and leisureliness duringlabour. It means making the most of whatever beautiful and noblepossibilities may come into our life; nay, it means, in each singlesoul, _being_ for however brief a time, beautiful and noble becauseone is filled with beauty and nobility. 

X. 

To eat his bread in sorrow and the sweat of his face was, we are aptto forget, the first sign of man's loss of innocence. And havinglearned that we must reverse the myth in order to see its meaning(since innocence is not at the beginning, but rather at the end of thestory of mankind), we might accept it as part of whatever religion wemay have, that the evil of our world is exactly commensurate with thehardship of useful tasks and the wastefulness and destructiveness ofpleasures and diversions. Evil and also folly and inefficiency, foreach of these implies the existence of much work badly done, of muchwork to no purpose, of a majority of men so weak and dull as to beexcluded from choice and from leisure, and a minority of men so weakand dull as to use choice and leisure mainly for mischief. To reversethis original sinful constitution of the world is the sole realmeaning of progress. And the only reason for wishing inventions to beperfected, wealth to increase, freedom to be attained, and, indeed, the life of the race to be continued at all, lies in the belief thatsuch continued movement must bring about a gradual diminution ofpleasureless work and wasteful play. Meanwhile, in the wretched pastand present, the only aristocracy really existing has been that of theprivileged creatures whose qualities and circumstances must have beensuch that, whether artisans or artists, tillers of the ground orseekers after truth, poets, philosophers, or mothers and nurses, theirwork has been their pleasure. This means _love_; and love meansfruitfulness. 

XI. 

There are moments when, catching a glimpse of the frightful weight ofcare and pain with which mankind is laden, I am oppressed by thethought that all improvement must come solely through the continuedselfish shifting of that burden from side to side, from shoulder toshoulder; through the violent or cunning destruction of some of theintolerable effects of selfishness in the past by selfishness in thepresent and the future. And that in the midst of this terrible butsalutary scuffle for ease and security, the ideals of those who areprivileged enough to have any, may be not much more useful than thefly on the axle-tree. 

It may be, it doubtless is so nowadays, although none of us can tellto what extent. 

But even if it be so, let us who have strength and leisure forpreference and ideals prepare ourselves to fit, at least to acquiesce, in the changes we are unable to bring about. Do not let us seek ourpleasure in things which we condemn, or remain attached to those whichare ours only through the imperfect arrangements which we deplore. Weare, of course, all tied tight in the meshes of our often worthlessand cruel civilisation, even as the saints felt themselves caught inthe meshes of bodily life. But even as they, in their day, fixed theirhopes on the life disembodied, so let us, in our turn, prepare oursouls for that gradual coming of justice on earth which we shall neverwitness, by forestalling its results in our valuations and our wishes. 

XII. 

The other evening, skirting the Links, we came upon a field, where, among the brown and green nobbly grass, was gathered a sort ofparliament of creatures: rooks on the fences, seagulls and peewitswheeling overhead, plovers strutting and wagging their tails; and, undisturbed by the white darting of rabbits, a covey of youngpartridges, hopping leisurely in compact mass. 

Is it because we see of these creatures only their harmlessness to us, but not the slaughter and starving out of each other; or is it becauseof their closer relation to simple and beautiful things, to nature;or is it merely because they are _not human beings_--who shall tell?but, for whatever reason, such a sight does certainly bring up in us asense, however fleeting, of simplicity, _mansuetude_ (I like thecharming mediæval word), of the kinship of harmlessness. 

I was thinking this while wading up the grass this morning to thecraig behind the house, the fields of unripe corn a-shimmer anda-shiver in the light, bright wind; the sea and distant sky so mergedin delicate white mists that a ship, at first sight, seemed a birdpoised in the air. And, higher up, among the ragwort and tallthistles, I found in the coarse grass a dead baby-rabbit, shot and notkilled at once, perhaps; or shot and not picked up, as not worthtaking: a little soft, smooth, feathery young handful, laid out verydecently, as human beings have to be laid out by one another, indeath. 

It brought to my mind a passage where Thoreau, who understood suchmatters, says, that although the love of nature may be fostered bysport, such love, when once consummate, will make nature's loverlittle by little shrink from slaughter, and hanker after a dietwherein slaughter is unnecessary. 

It is sad, not for the beasts but for our souls, that, since we mustkill beasts for food (though may not science teach a cleaner, morehuman diet?) or to prevent their eating us out of house and home, itis sad that we should choose to make of this necessity (which ought tobe, like all our baser needs, a matter if not of shame at least ofdecorum) that we should make of this ugly necessity an opportunity foramusement. It is sad that nowadays, when creatures, wild and tame, are bred for killing, the usual way in which man is brought in contactwith the creatures of the fields and woods and streams (such man, Imean, as thinks, feels or is expected to) should be by slaughteringthem. 

Surely it might be more akin to our human souls, to gentleness ofbringing up, Christianity of belief and chivalry of all kinds, to be, rather than a hunter, a shepherd. Yet the shepherd is the lout in ouridle times; the shepherd, and the tiller of the soil; and alas, thenaturalist, again, is apt to be the _muff_. 

But may the time not come when, apart from every man having to do someuseful thing, something perchance like tending flocks, tilling theground, mowing and forestering--the mere love of beauty, the desirefor peace and harmony, the craving for renewal by communion with thelife outside our own, will lead men, without dogs or guns or rods, into the woods, the fields, to the river-banks, as to some ancientpalace full of frescoes, as to some silent church, with solemn ritesand liturgy?

XIII. 

The killing of creatures for sport seems a necessity nowadays. Thereis more than mere bodily vigour to be got by occasional interludes ofoutdoor life, early hours, discomfort and absorption in the ways ofbirds and beasts; there is actual spiritual renovation. The merereading about such things, in Tolstoi's _Cossacks_ and certainchapters of _Anna Karenina_ makes one realise the poetry attached tothem; and we all of us know that the genuine sportsman, the man ofgun and rod and daybreak and solitude, has often a curious halo ofpurity about him; contact with natural things and unfamiliarity withthe sordidness of so much human life and endeavour, amounting to akind of consecration. A man of this stamp once told me that no emotionin his life had ever equalled that of his first woodcock. 

You cannot have such open-air life, such clean and poetic emotionwithout killing. Men are men; they will not get up at cock-crow forthe sake of a mere walk, or sleep in the woods for the sake of thewood's noises: they must have an object; and what object is thereexcept killing beasts or birds or fish? Men have to be sportsmenbecause they can't all be either naturalists or poets. Killing animals(and, some persons would add, killing other men) is necessary to keepman manly. And where men are no longer manly they become cruel, notfor the sake of sport or war, but for their lusts and for cruelty'sown sake. And that seems to settle the question. 

XIV. 

But the question is not really settled. It is merely settled for thepresent, but not for the future. It is surely a sign of our weaknessand barbarism that we cannot imagine to-morrow as better than to-day, and that, for all our vaunted temporal progress and hypocritical talkof duty, we are yet unable to think and to feel in terms ofimprovement and change; but let our habits, like the vilest vestedinterests, oppose a veto to the hope and wish for better things. 

To realise that _what is_ does not mean what _will be_, constitutes, methinks, the real spirituality of us poor human creatures, allowingour judgments and aspirations to pass beyond our short and hideboundlife, to live on in the future, and help to make that _yonside of ourmortality_, which some of us attempt to satisfy with theosophicreincarnation and planchette messages!

But such spirituality, whose "it shall"--or "it shall not"--willbecome an ever larger part of all _it is_, depends upon the courage ofrecognising that much of what the past forces us to accept is not goodenough for the future; recognising that, odious as this may seem toour self-conceit and sloth, many of the things we do and like and are, will not bear even our own uncritical scrutiny. Above all, that thelesser evil which we prefer to the greater is an evil for all that, and requires riddance. 

Much of the world's big mischief is due to the avoidance of a biggerone. For instance, all this naïvely insisted on masculine inability toobtain the poet's or naturalist's joys without shooting a bird orhooking a fish, this inability to love wild life, early hours andwholesome fatigue unless accompanied by a waste of life and of money;in short, all this incapacity _for being manly without beingdestructive_, is largely due among us Anglo-Saxons to the bringing upof boys as mere playground dunces, for fear (as we are told by parentsand schoolmasters) that the future citizens of England should take toevil communications and worse manners if they did not play and talkcricket and football at every available moment. For what can youexpect but that manly innocence which has been preserved at theexpense of every higher taste should grow up into manly virtue unableto maintain itself save by hunting and fishing, shooting andhorse-racing; expensive amusements requiring, in their turn, a furthersacrifice of all capacities for innocent, noble and inexpensiveinterests, in the absorbing, sometimes stultifying, often debasingprocesses of making money?

The same complacency towards waste and mischief for the sake of moraladvantages may be studied in the case also of our womankind. Theabsorption in their _toilettes_ guards them from many dangers tofamily sanctity. And from how much cruel gossip is not society savedby the prevalent passion for bridge!

So at least moralists, who are usually the most complacentlydemoralised of elderly cynics, are ready to assure us. 

XV. 

"We should learn to have noble desires, " wrote Schiller, "in order tohave no need for sublime resolutions. " And morality might almost takecare of itself, if people knew the strong and exquisite pleasures tobe found, like the aromatic ragwort growing on every wall andstone-heap in the south, everywhere in the course of everyday life. But alas! the openness to cheap and simple pleasures means the finetraining of fine faculties; and mankind asks for the expensive andfar-fetched and unwholesome pleasures, because it is itself of poorand cheap material and of wholesale scamped manufacture. 

XVI. 

Biological facts, as well as our observation of our own self (which ispsychology), lead us to believe that, as I have mentioned before, Pleasure fulfils the function not merely of leading us along livableways, but also of creating a surplus of vitality. Itself an almostunnecessary boon (since Pain is sufficient to regulate our choice), Pleasure would thus tend to ever fresh and, if I may use the word, gratuitous supplies of good. Does not this give to Pleasure a certainfreedom, a humane character wholly different from the awful, unappeasable tyranny of Pain? For let us be sincere. Pain, and all thecruel alternatives bidding us obey or die, are scarcely things withwhich our poor ideals, our good feeling and good taste, have muchchance of profitable discussion. There is in all human life a sideakin to that of the beast; the beast hunted, tracked, starved, killingand killed for food; the side alluded to under decent formulæ like"pressure of population, " "diminishing returns, " "competition, " and soforth. Not but this side of life also tends towards good, but themeans by which it does so, nature's atrocious surgery, are evil, although one cannot deny that it is the very nature of Pain todiminish its own recurrence. This thought may bring some comfort inthe awful earnestness of existence, this thought that in its cruelfashion, the universe is weeding out cruel facts. But to pretend thatwe can habitually exercise much moral good taste, be of delicateforethought, squeamish harmony when Pain has yoked and is driving us, is surely a bad bit of hypocrisy, of which those who are beingstarved or trampled or tortured into acquiescence may reasonably bidus be ashamed. Indeed, stoicism, particularly in its discourses toothers, has not more sense of shame than sense of humour. 

But since our power of choosing is thus jeopardised by the presence ofPain, it would the more behove us to express our wish for goodness, our sense of close connection, wide and complex harmony with thehappiness of others, in those moments of respite and liberty which wecall happiness, and particularly in those freely chosen concerns whichwe call play. 

Alas, we cannot help ourselves from becoming unimaginative, unsympathising, destructive and brutish when we are hard pressed byagony or by fear. Therefore, let such of us as have stuff for finerthings, seize some of our only opportunities, and seek to becomeharmless in our pleasures. 

Who knows but that the highest practical self-cultivation would not becompassed by a much humbler paraphrase of Schiller's advice: let uslearn to like what does no harm to the present or the future, in ordernot to throw away heroic efforts or sentimental intentions, in doingwhat we don't like for someone else's supposed benefit. 

XVII. 

The various things I have been saying have been said, or, betterstill, taken for granted, by Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Stevenson, by all our poets in verse and prose. What I wish toadd is that, being a poet, seeing and feeling like a poet, meansquite miraculously multiplying life's resources for oneself andothers; in fact the highest practicality conceivable, the realtransmutation of brass into gold. Now what we all waste, more eventhan money, land, time and labour, more than we waste the efforts andrewards of other folk, and the chances of enjoyment of unborngenerations (and half of our so-called practicality is nothing butsuch waste), what we waste in short more than anything else, is ourown and our children's inborn capacity to see and feel as poets do, and make much joy out of little material. 

XVIII. 

There is no machine refuse, cinder, husk, paring or rejected materialof any kind which modern ingenuity cannot turn to profit, makinguseful and pleasant goods out of such rubbish as we would willingly, at first sight, shoot out of the universe into chaos. Every materialthing can be turned, it would seem, into new textures, clean metal, manure, fuel or what not. But while we are thus economical with ourdust-heaps, what horrid wastefulness goes on with our sensations, impressions, memories, emotions, with our souls and all the thingsthat minister to their delight!

XIX. 

An ignorant foreign body--and, after all, everyone is a foreignersomewhere and ignorant about something--once committed the enormity ofasking his host, just back from cub-hunting, whether the hedgerows, when he went out of a morning, were not quite lovely with those dewycobwebs which the French call Veils of the Virgin. It had to beexplained that such a sight was the most unwelcome you could imagine, since it was a sure sign there would be no scent. The poor foreignerwas duly crestfallen, as happens whenever one has nearly spoilt afriend's property through some piece of blundering. 

But the blunder struck me as oddly symbolical. Are we not most of uspursuing for our pleasure, though sometimes at risk of our necks, afox of some kind: worth nothing as meat, little as fur, good only togallop after, and whose unclean scent is incompatible with thosesparkling gossamers flung, for everyone's delight, over gorse andhedgerow?

 * * * * *

THE END. 

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

The edition from which this text was drawn is volume 4175 of theTauchnitz Edition of British Authors, where it appeared together with_The Spirit of Rome_, also by Vernon Lee. The volume was published in1910. 

The following changes were made to the text:

 solely for the purpose or solely for the purpose of

 coeteris paribus cæeteris paribus

 Mautineia (Higher Harmonies I) Mantineia

 The Gothic boldness of light and The Gothic boldness of light and shade of the Campanile make shade of the Campanile makes

 Tuskan Tuscan

 the workmen will be able (. .. ) the workman will be able (. .. )

 learn their appearance and care learn their appearance and care for it for them

 The death, (. .. ) the (. .. ) The death, (. .. ) the (. .. ) flight of the fox, occupy no part flight of the fox, occupy no part (. .. ) and forms no part (. .. ) and form no part

 the Monnets the Monets