Thus it is that real æsthetic keenness--and æsthetic keenness, as I
shall show you in my next chapter, means appreciating beauty, not
collecting beautiful properties--thus it is that all æsthetic keenness
implies a development of the qualities of patience, attention,
reverence, and of that vigour of soul which is not called forth, but
rather impaired, by the coarser enjoyments of the senses and of
vanity. So far, therefore, we have seen that the capacity for æsthetic
pleasure is allied to a certain nobility in the individual. I think I
can show that the preference for æsthetic pleasure tends also to a
happier relation between the individual and his fellows.
But the cultivation of our æsthetic pleasures does not merely
necessitate our improvement in certain very essential moral qualities.
It implies as much, in a way, as the cultivation of the intellect and
the sympathies, that we should live chiefly in the spirit, in which
alone, as philosophers and mystics have rightly understood, there is
safety from the worst miseries and room for the most complete
happiness. Only, we shall learn from the study of our æsthetic
pleasures that while the stoics and mystics have been right in
affirming that the spirit only can give the highest good, they have
been fatally wrong in the reason they gave for their preference. And
we may learn from our æsthetic experiences that the spirit is useful,
not in detaching us from the enjoyable things of life, but, on the
contrary, in giving us their consummate possession. The spirit--one of
whose most precious capacities is that it enables us to print off all
outside things on to ourselves, to store moods and emotions, to
recombine and reinforce past impressions into present ones--the spirit
puts pleasure more into our own keeping, making it more independent of
time and place, of circumstances, and, what is equally important,
independent of other people's strivings after pleasure, by which our
own, while they clash and hamper, are so often impeded.