I hope I have been able to indicate how, by its essential nature, by
the primordial power it embodies, all Beauty, and particularly Beauty
in art, tends to fortify and refine the spiritual life of the
individual.
But this is only half of the question, for, in order to get the full
benefit of beautiful things and beautiful thoughts, to obtain in the
highest potency those potent æsthetic emotions, the individual must
undergo a course of self-training, of self-initiation, which in its
turn elicits and improves some of the highest qualities of his soul.
Nay, as every great writer on art has felt, from Plato to Ruskin, but
none has expressed as clearly as Mr. Pater, in all true æsthetic
training there must needs enter an ethical element, almost an ascetic
one.
The greatest art bestows pleasure just in proportion as people are
capable of buying that pleasure at the price of attention,
intelligence, and reverent sympathy. For great art is such as is
richly endowed, full of variety, subtlety, and suggestiveness; full of
delightfulness enough for a lifetime, the lifetime of generations and
generations of men; great art is to its true lovers like Cleopatra to
Antony--"age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety."
Indeed, when it is the greatest art of all, the art produced by the
marvellous artist, the most gifted race, and the longest centuries, we
find ourselves in presence of something which, like Nature itself,
contains more beauty, suggests more thought, works more miracles than
anyone of us has faculties to appreciate fully. So that, in some of
Titian's pictures and Michael Angelo's frescoes, the great Greek
sculptures, certain cantos of Dante and plays of Shakespeare, fugues
of Bach, scenes of Mozart and quartets of Beethoven, we can each of
us, looking our closest, feeling our uttermost, see and feel perhaps
but a trifling portion of what there is to be seen and felt, leaving
other sides, other perfections, to be appreciated by our neighbours.
Till it comes to pass that we find different persons very differently
delighted by the same masterpiece, and accounting most discrepantly
for their delight in it.
Now such pleasure as this requires not merely a vast amount of
activity on our part, since all pleasure, even the lowest, is the
expression of an activity; it requires a vast amount of attention, of
intelligence, of what, in races or in individuals, means special
training.