II.

I AM desirous of beginning this second chapter, in which I propose to show how a genuine æsthetic development tends to render the individual more useful, or at least less harmful, to his fellow-men-I am also desirous of beginning this chapter also with a symbol, such as may sum up my meaning, and point it out in the process of my expounding it. The symbol is contained in the saying of the Abbot Joachim of Flora, one of the great precursors of St. Francis, to wit: He that is a true monk considers nothing as belonging to him except a lyrenihil reputit esse suum nisi citharam." Yes; nothing except a lyre.

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But that lyre, our only real possession, is our soul. It must be shaped, and strung, and carefully kept in tune, no easy matter in surroundings little suited to delicate instruments and delicate music. Possessing it, we possess, in the only true sense of possession, the whole world. For going along our way, whether rough or even, there are formed within us, singing the beauty and wonder of the world, mysterious sequences and harmonies of notes, new every time, answering to the primæval everlasting affinities between ourselves and all things; our souls becoming musical under the touch of the uni

verse.

Let us bear this in mind, this symbol of the lyre which Abbot Joachim allowed as sole property to the man of spiritual life; and let us remember that, as I tried to show in my previous chapter, the true lover of the Beautiful, active, self-restrained, and indifferent to lower pleasures and interests, is your man of true spiritual life in one sense. For the symbol of Abbot Joachim's lyre will make it easier to follow my meaning, and easier to forestall it, while I try to convince you that art, and all æsthetic activity, is important as a type of the only kind of pleasure which reasonable beings should admit of, the kind of pleasure which tends

not to diminish by wastefulness and exclusive appropriation, but to increase by sympathy the possible pleasures of other persons.

Now, it so happens that many of the pleasures which we allow ourselvespleasures which all the world admits our right to-are pleasures which waste wealth and time, make light of the advantage of others, and light of the good of our souls. This fact does not imply either original sinfulness or degeneracy

religious and scientific terms for the same thing--in poor mankind. It merely means that we are all of us as yet very undeveloped creatures; the majority, moreover, less developed than the minority, and the bulk of each individual's nature very much in the rear of his own aspirations and definitions. Mankind, in the process of adapting itself to external circumstances, has perforce evolved a certain amount of intellectual and moral quality; but that intellectual and moral quality is, so far, merely a means for rendering material existence endurable; it will have to become itself the origin and aim of what we must call a spiritual side of life. In the meanwhile, human beings do not get any large proportion of their enjoyment from what they admit to be their nobler side.

Hence it is that even when you have got rid of the mere struggle for existence-fed, clothed, and housed your civilized savage, and secured food, clothes, and shelter for his brood, you have by no means provided against his destructive, pain-giving activities. He has spare time and energy; and these he will devote, ten to one, to recreations involving, at the best, the slaughter of harmless creatures; at the worst, to the wasting of valuable substance, of what might be other people's food; or else to the hurting of other people's feelings in various games of chance or skill, particularly in the great skilled game of brag called social life.

Our gentlemanly ancestors, indeed, could not amuse themselves without

emptying a certain number of bottles and passing some hours under the table; while our nimble-witted French neighbors, we are told, included in their expenditure on convivial amusements a curious item called la casse, to wit, the smashing of plates and glasses. The Spaniards, on the other hand, have bull-fights, most shocking spectacles as we know, for we make it a point to witness them when we are over there.

Undoubtedly we have immensely improved on all this, but we are susceptible of a great deal of further improvement. Most people are safe only when at work, and become mischievous when they begin to play. They do not know how to kill time (for that is the way in which we poor mortals regard life) without incidentally killing something else proximately themselves, birds and beast, and their neighbors' good fame; more remotely, but as surely, the constitution of their descendants, and the possible wages of the working classes. It is quite marvellous how little aptness there is in the existing human being for taking pleasure either in what already exists ready to hand, or in the making of something which had better be there; in what can be enjoyed without diminishing the enjoyment of others, as nature, books, art, thought, and the better qualities of one's neighbors. In fact, one reason why there is something so morally pleasant in cricket and football and rowing and riding and dancing, is surely that they furnish on the physical plane the counterpart of what is so sadly lacking on the spiritual -amusements which do good to the individual and no harm to his fellows. Of course, in our state neither of original sinfulness nor of degeneracy, but of very imperfect development, it is still useless and absurd to tell people to make use of intellectual and moral resources which they have not yet got. It is as vain to preach to the majority of the well to-do the duty of abstinence from wastefulness, rivalry, and ostentation as it is vain to preach to the majority of the badly off abstinence from alcohol; without such pleasures their life would be unendurably insipid. But inevitable as is such evil in the present, it inevitably brings its contingent of wretchedness; and it is there

fore the business of all such as could become the forerunners of a better state of things to refuse to follow the lead of their inferiors. Exactly because the majority is still so hopelessly wasteful and mischievous, does it behoove the minority not merely to work to some profit, but to play without damage. To do this should become the mark of Nature's aristocracy, a sign of liberality of spiritual birth and breeding, a question of noblesse oblige.

And here comes in the immense importance of art-and by art I mean aesthetic appreciation even more than æsthetic creation; I mean the extracting and combining of beauty in the mind of the obscure layman quite as much as the embodiment of such extracted and combined beauty in the visible or audible work of the great artist-and here comes in the immense importance of art as a type of pleasure. For experience of true aesthetic activity must teach us, in proportion as it is genuine and ample, that the enjoyment of the Beautiful is not merely independent of, but actually incompatible with, that tendency to buy our satisfaction at the expense of others which remains more or less in all of us as a survival from savagery. why this mischievous tendency is combated by true æstheticism are both negative and positive, and may be roughly divided into three headings. Only one of them is generally admitted to exist, and of it, therefore, I shall speak very briefly: I mean the fact that the enjoyment of beautiful things is originally and intrinsically one of those which are heightened by sharing we know it instinctively when, as children, we drag our comrades and elders to the window when a regiment passes or a circus parades by; we learn it more and more as we advance in life, and find that we must get other people to see the pictures, to hear the music, to read the books which we admire. It is a case of what peychologists call the contagion of emotion, by which the. feeling of one individual is strengthened by the expression of similar feeling in his neighbor, and is explicable, most likely, by the fact that the greatest effort is always required to overcome original inertness, and that two efforts,

like two horses starting a carriage instead of one, combined give more than the value of each taken separately. The fact is so obvious that we need not discuss it any further, but merely hold it over to add, at last, to the result of the two other reasons, negative and positive, which tend to make æsthetic enjoyment the type of unselfish, nay, even of altruistic pleasure.

The first of these reasons, the negative one, is that æsthetic pleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personal ownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leaving inactive, of condemning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion for exclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottom of all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. And here I would beg my reader to call to mind that curious saying of Abbot Joachim's, and to consider that I wish to prove that, like his true monk, the true aesthete, who now adays loves and praises creation much as the true monk did in former centuries, can really possess as sole personal possession only a musical instrumentto wit, his own well-strung and resonant soul. And now, as to luxury, by which I mean the possession of such things as minister only to weakness and vanity, the possession of such things as we cannot reasonably hope that all men may some day equally possess.

When we are young-and most of us remain mere withered children, never attaining maturity in such matterswe are usually attracted by luxury and luxurious living. We are possessed by that youthful instinct of union, fusion, marriage, so to speak, with what our soul desires; we hanker after close contact and complete possession; and we fancy, in our inexperience, that luxury, the accumulation of valuables, the appropriation of opportunities, the fact of rejecting from our life all that is not costly, brilliant, and dainty, implies such fusion of our soul with beauty.

impossible, among squalor and weariness, it is difficult and anomalous in the condition which we entitle luxury. We learn that our assimilation of beauty, and that momentary renewal of our soul which it effects, rarely takes place in connection with our own ownership, but comes, taking us by surprise, in presence of hills, streams, memories of pictures, poets' words, and strains of music, which are not, and cannot be, our property. The essential character of beauty is its being, so to speak, a relation between ourselves and certain objects. The emotion to which we attach its name is produced, motived by something outside us, pictures. music, landscape, or whatever it may be; but the emotion resides in us, and it is the emotion, and not merely its object, which we desire. Hence material possession has no æsthetic meaning. We possess a beautiful object with our soul; the possession thereof with our hands or our legal rights brings us no whit nearer the beauty. Ownership, in this sense, may empower us to smash the object and thus cheat others of the possession of its beauty, but does not help us to possess that beauty. It is with beauty as with that singer who answered Catherine II., "Your Majesty's policemen can make me scream, but they cannot make me sing;" and she might have added, for my parallel, “ Your policemen, great Empress, even could they make me sing, would not be able to make you hear.

Hence all strong æsthetic feeling will always prefer ownership of the mental image to ownership of the tangible object; and any desire for material appropriation or exclusive enjoyment will be merely so much weakening and

If, then, we wish to possess casts, copies, or photographs of certain works of art, this is aesthetically considered exactly as we wish to have the means railway tickets, permissions for galleries, and so forth-of seeing certain pictures or statues as often as we wish. For we feel that the images in our mind may require renewing, or that, in combination with other more recently acquired images, they will, if renewed, yield a new kind of delight. But this is quite another matter from wishing to own the material object, the thing we call work of art itself, forgetting that it is a work of art only for the soul capable of instating it as such.

Thus, in every person who truly cares for beauty, there is a necessary tendency to replace the legal illusory act of owning by the real spiritual act of appreciation. Charles Lamb already expressed this delightfully in the essay on the old manor-house; compared with his possession of its beauties, its walks, tapestried walls and family portraits, nay, even of the ghosts of former proprietors, the possession 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 gar. den thy ampler pleasure-garden. thy firry wilderness. I was the true de scendant 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 not those of us who never have, learn, could they learn, from those words of Elia!

I have spoken of material, actual possession. But if we look closer at it we shall see that, save with regard to the things which are actually consumed, destroyed, disintegrated, changed to something else in their enjoyment, the notion of ordinary possession is a mere delusion. It is obtainable 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, the constant keeping the sciousness aware by repeating -nine-mine and not the theirs, but mine." And

some act of self-assertion leaves little power for appreciation, for the appreciation which others can have quite equally, and without which there is no reality at all in ownership.

Hence, the deeper our enjoyment of beauty, the freer shall we become of the dreadful delusion of exclusive appropriation, despising such unreal possession in proportion as we have tasted the real one. We shall know the two kinds of ownership too well apart to let ourselves be cozened into cumbering our lives with material properties and their responsibilities. We shall save up our vigor, not for obtaining and keeping (think of the thousand efforts and cares of ownership, even the most negative) the things which yield happy impressions, but for receiving and storing up and making capital of those impressions. We shall seek to furnish our mind with beautiful thoughts, not our houses with pretty things.

I hope I have made it clear enough that æsthetic enjoyment is hostile to the unkind and wasteful pleasures of selfish indulgence and selfish appropriation, because the true possession of the beautiful things of Nature, of art, and of thought is spiritual, and neither damages, nor diminishes, nor hoards them, because the lover of the Beautiful seeks for beautiful impressions and remembrances, which are vested in his soul, and not in material objects. That is the negative benefit of the love of the Beautiful. Let us now proceed to the positive and active assistance which it renders, when genuine and thoroughpaced, to such thought as we give to the happiness and dignity of others.

I have said that our pleasure in the Beautiful is essentially a spiritual phenomenon, one, I mean, which takes place in our own sensations and emotions, altering the contents of our mind, while leaving the beautiful object itself intact and unaltered. This being the case, it is easy to understand that our aesthetic pleasure will be complete and extensive in proportion to the amount of activity of our soul; 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

give ourselves to it. Hence, an crease in the capacity for æsthetic