There is a sad confusion in men's minds on the very essential subject
of pleasure. We tend, most of us, to oppose the idea of pleasure to
the idea of work, effort, strenuousness, patience; and, therefore,
recognise as pleasures only those which cost none of these things, or
as little as possible; pleasures which, instead of being produced
through our will and act, impose themselves upon us from outside. In
all art--for art stands halfway between the sensual and emotional
experiences and the experiences of the mere reasoning intellect--in
all art there is necessarily an element which thus imposes itself upon
us from without, an element which takes and catches us: colour,
strangeness of outline, sentimental or terrible quality, rhythm
exciting the muscles, or clang which tickles the ear. But the art
which thus takes and catches our attention the most easily, asking
nothing in return, or next to nothing, is also the poorest art: the
oleograph, the pretty woman in the fashion plate, the caricature, the
representation of some domestic or harrowing scene, children being put
to bed, babes in the wood, railway accidents, etc.; or again, dance or
march music, and the equivalents of all this in verse. It catches your
attention, instead of your attention conquering it; but it speedily
ceases to interest, gives you nothing more, cloys, or comes to a dead
stop. It resembles thus far mere sensual pleasure, a savoury dish, a
glass of good wine, an excellent cigar, a warm bed, which impose
themselves on the nerves without expenditure of attention; with the
result, of course, that little or nothing remains, a sensual
impression dying, so to speak, childless, a barren, disconnected
thing, without place in the memory, unmarried as it is to the memory's
clients, thought and human feeling.
If so many people prefer poor art to great, 'tis because they refuse
to give, through inability or unwillingness, as much of their soul
as great art requires for its enjoyment. And it is noticeable that
busy men, coming to art for pleasure when they are too weary for
looking, listening, or thinking, so often prefer the sensation-novel,
the music-hall song, and such painting as is but a costlier kind of
oleograph; treating all other art as humbug, and art in general as a
trifle wherewith to wile away a lazy moment, a trifle about which
every man _can know what he likes best_.
Thus it is that great art makes, by coincidence, the same demands as
noble thinking and acting. For, even as all noble sports develop
muscle, 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 acquisition
of habits of accuracy, of patience, of respectfulness, and suspension
of judgment, of preference of future good over present, of harmony and
clearness, of sympathy (when we come to literary art), judgment and
kindly fairness, which are all of them useful to our neighbours and
ourselves in the many contingencies and obscurities of real life. Now
this is not so with the pleasures of the senses: the pleasures of the
senses do not increase by sharing, and sometimes cannot be shared at
all; they are, moreover, evanescent, leaving us no richer; above all,
they cultivate in ourselves qualities useful only for that particular
enjoyment. Thus, a highly discriminating palate may have saved the
life of animals and savages, but what can its subtleness do nowadays
beyond making us into gormandisers and winebibbers, or, at best, into
cooks and tasters for the service of gormandising and winebibbing
persons?