For our intimate commerce with beautiful things and beautiful thoughts
does not exist only, or even chiefly, at the moment of seeing, or
hearing, or reading; nay, if the beautiful touched us only at such
separate and special moments, the beautiful would play but an
insignificant part in our existence.
As a fact, those moments represent very often only the act of
_storage_, or not much more. Our real æsthetic life is in ourselves,
often isolated from the beautiful words, objects, or sounds; sometimes
almost unconscious; permeating the whole rest of life in certain
highly æsthetic individuals, and, however mixed with other activities,
as constant as the life of the intellect and sympathies; nay, as
constant as the life of assimilation and motion. We can live off a
beautiful object, we can live by its means, even when its visible or
audible image is partially, nay, sometimes wholly, obliterated; for
the emotional condition can survive the image and be awakened at the
mere name, awakened sufficiently to heighten the emotion caused by
other images of beauty. We can sometimes feel, so to speak, the
spiritual companionship and comfort of a work of art, or of a scene in
nature, nay, almost its particular caress to our whole being, when the
work of art or the scene has grown faint in our memory, but the
emotion it awakened has kept warm.
Now this possibility of storing for later use, of increasing by
combination, the impressions of beautiful things, makes art--and by
art I mean all æsthetic activity, whether in the professed artist who
creates or the unconscious artist who assimilates--the type of such
pleasures as are within our own keeping, and makes the æsthetic life
typical also of that life of the spirit in which alone we can realise
any kind of human freedom. We shall all of us meet with examples
thereof if we seek through our consciousness. That such things
existed was made clear to me during a weary period of illness, for
which I shall always be grateful, since it taught me, in those months
of incapacity for enjoyment, that there is a safe kind of pleasure,
_the pleasure we can defer_. I spent part of that time at Tangier,
surrounded by everything which could delight me, and in none of which
I took any real delight. I did not enjoy Tangier at the time, but I
have enjoyed Tangier ever since, on the principle of the bee eating
its honey months after making it. The reality of Tangier, I mean the
reality of my presence there, and the state of my nerves, were not in
the relation of enjoyment. But how often has not the image of Tangier,
the remembrance of what I saw and did there, returned and haunted me
in the most enjoyable fashion.
After all, is it not often the case with pictures, statues, journeys,
and the reading of books? The weariness entailed, the mere continuity
of looking or attending, quite apart from tiresome accompanying
circumstances, make the apparently real act, what we expect to be the
act of enjoyment, quite illusory; like Coleridge, "we see, not _feel_,
how beautiful things are." Later on, all odious accompanying
circumstances are utterly forgotten, eliminated, and the weariness is
gone: we enjoy not merely unhampered by accidents, but in the very way
our heart desires. For we can choose--our mood unconsciously does it
for us--the right moment and right accessories for consuming some of
our stored delights; moreover, we can add what condiments and make
what mixtures suit us best at that moment. We draw not merely upon one
past reality, making its essentials present, but upon dozens. To
revert to Tangier (whose experience first brought these possibilities
clearly before me), I find I enjoy it in connection with Venice, the
mixture having a special roundness of tone or flavour. Similarly, I
once heard Bach's _Magnificat_, with St. Mark's of Venice as a
background in my imagination. Again, certain moonlight songs of
Schumann have blended wonderfully with remembrances of old Italian
villas. King Solomon, in all his ships, could not have carried the
things which I can draw, in less than a second, from one tiny
convolution of my brain, from one corner of my mind. No wizard that
ever lived had spells which could evoke such kingdoms and worlds as
anyone of us can conjure up with certain words: Greece, the Middle
Ages, Orpheus, Robin Hood, Mary Stuart, Ancient Rome, the Far East.