And here comes in the immense importance of Art as a type of pleasure:
of Art in the sense of æsthetic appreciation even more than of
æsthetic creation; of Art considered as the extracting and combining
of beauty in the mind of the obscure layman quite as much as the
embodiment of such extracted and combined beauty in the visible or
audible work of the great artist.
For experience of true æsthetic activity must teach us, in proportion
as it is genuine and ample, that the enjoyment of the beautiful is not
merely independent of, but actually incompatible with, that tendency
to buy our satisfaction at the expense of others which remains more or
less in all of us as a survival from savagery. The reasons why genuine
æsthetic feeling inhibits these obsolescent instincts of rapacity and
ruthlessness, are reasons negative and positive, and may be roughly
divided into three headings. Only one of them is generally admitted to
exist, and of it, therefore, I shall speak very briefly, I mean the
fact that the enjoyment of beautiful things is originally and
intrinsically one of those which are heightened by sharing. We know it
instinctively when, as children, we drag our comrades and elders to
the window when a regiment passes or a circus parades by; we learn it
more and more as we advance in life, and find that we must get other
people to see the pictures, to hear the music, to read the books which
we admire. It is a case of what psychologists call the _contagion of
emotion_, by which the feeling of one individual is strengthened by
the expression of similar feeling in his neighbour, and is explicable,
most likely, by the fact that the greatest effort is always required
to overcome original inertness, and that two efforts, like two horses
starting a carriage instead of one, combined give more than double the
value of each taken separately. The fact of this æsthetic sociability
is so obvious that we need not discuss it any further, but merely hold
it over to add, at last, to the result of the two other reasons,
negative and positive, which tend to make æsthetic enjoyment the type
of unselfish, nay, even of altruistic pleasure.