Delight in beautiful things and in beautiful thoughts requires,
therefore, a considerable exercise of the will and the attention, such
as is not demanded by our lower enjoyments. Indeed, it is probably
this absence of moral and intellectual effort which recommends such
lower kinds of pleasure to a large number of persons. I have said
lower _kinds_ of pleasure, because there are other enjoyments besides
those of the senses which entail no moral improvement in ourselves:
the enjoyments connected with vanity and greed. We should not--even if
any of us could be sure of being impeccable on these points--we should
not be too hard on the persons and the classes of persons who are
conscious of no other kind of enjoyment. They are not necessarily
base, not necessarily sensual or vain, because they care only for
bodily indulgence, for notice and gain. They are very likely not base,
but only apathetic, slothful, or very tired. The noble sport, the
intellectual problem, the great work of art, the divinely beautiful
effect in Nature, require that one should _give oneself_; the
French-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 Zola
or the well-groomed heroes of Balzac, require no such coming forward
of the soul: they _take_ us, without any need for our giving
ourselves. Hence, as I have just said, the preference for them does
not imply original baseness, but only lack of higher energy. We can
judge of the condition of those who can taste no other pleasures by
remembering what the best of us are when we are tired or ill: vaguely
craving for interests, sensations, emotions, variety, but quite unable
to procure them through our own effort, and longing for them to come
to us from without. Now, in our still very badly organised world, an
enormous number of people are condemned by the tyranny of poverty or
the tyranny of fashion, to be, when the day's work or the day's
business is done, in just such a condition of fatigue and languor, of
craving, therefore, for the baser kinds of pleasure. We all recognise
that this is the case with what we call _poor people_, and that this
is why poor people are apt to prefer the public-house to the picture
gallery or the concert-room. It would be greatly to the purpose were
we to acknowledge that it is largely the case with the rich, and that
for that reason the rich are apt to take more pleasure in ostentatious
display of their properties than in contemplation of such beauty as is
accessible to all men. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of the
barbarous condition we are pleased to call _civilisation_, that so
many rich men--thousands daily--are systematically toiling and moiling
till they are unable to enjoy any pleasure which requires vigour of
mind and attention, rendering themselves impotent, from sheer fatigue,
to enjoy the delights which life gives generously to all those who
fervently seek them. And what for? Largely for the sake of those
pleasures which can be had only for money, but which can be enjoyed
without using one's soul.