The first of these reasons, the negative one, is that æsthetic
pleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personal
ownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leaving
inactive, of beginning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion for
exclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottom
of all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. But
before entering on this discussion I would beg my reader to call to
mind that curious saying of Abbot Joachim's; and to consider that I
wish to prove that, like his true monk, the true æsthete, who nowadays
loves and praises creation much as the true monk did in former
centuries, can really possess as sole personal possession only a
musical instrument--to wit, his own well-strung and resonant soul.
Having said this, we will proceed to the question of Luxury, by which
I mean the possession of such things as minister only to weakness and
vanity, of such things as we cannot reasonably hope that all men may
some day equally possess.
When we are young--and most of us remain mere withered children, never
attaining maturity, in similar matters--we are usually attracted by
luxury and luxurious living. We are possessed by that youthful
instinct of union, fusion, marriage, so to speak, with what our soul
desires; we hanker after close contact and complete possession; and we
fancy, in our inexperience, that luxury, the accumulation of
valuables, the appropriation of opportunities, the fact of rejecting
from our life all that is not costly, brilliant, and dainty, implies
such fusion of our soul with beauty.
But, as we reach maturity, we find that this is all delusion. We
learn, from the experience of occasions when our soul has truly
possessed the beautiful, or been possessed by it, that if such union
with the harmony of outer things is rare, perhaps impossible, among
squalor and weariness, it is difficult and anomalous in the condition
which we entitle luxury.
We learn that our assimilation of beauty, and that momentary renewal
of our soul which it effects, rarely arises from our own ownership;
but comes, taking us by surprise, in presence of hills, streams,
memories of pictures, poets' words, and strains of music, which are
not, and cannot be, our property. The essential character of beauty is
its being a relation between ourselves and certain objects. The
emotion to which we attach its name is produced, motived by something
outside us, pictures, music, landscape, or whatever it may be; but the
emotion resides in us, and it is the emotion, and not merely its
object, which we desire. Hence material possession has no æsthetic
meaning. We possess a beautiful object with our soul; the possession
thereof with our hands or our legal rights brings us no nearer the
beauty. Ownership, in this sense, may empower us to destroy or hide
the object and thus cheat others of the possession of its beauty, but
does not help _us_ to possess that beauty. It is with beauty as with
that singer who answered Catherine II., "Your Majesty's policemen can
make me _scream_, but they cannot make me _sing_;" and she might have
added, for my parallel, "Your policemen, great Empress, even could
they make _me_ sing, would not be able to make _you_ hear."