Hence all strong æsthetic feeling will always prefer ownership of the
mental image to ownership of the tangible object. And any desire for
material appropriation or exclusive enjoyment will be merely so much
weakening and adulteration of the æsthetic sentiment. Since the mental
image, the only thing æsthetically possessed, is in no way diminished
or damaged by sharing; nay, we have seen that by one of the most
gracious coincidences between beauty and kindliness, the æsthetic
emotion is even intensified by the knowledge of co-existence in
others: the delight in each person communicating itself, like a
musical third, fifth, or octave, to the similar yet different delight
in his neighbour, harmonic enriching harmonic by stimulating fresh
vibration.
If, then, we wish to possess casts, copies, or photographs of certain
works of art, this is, æsthetically considered, exactly as we wish to
have the means--railway tickets, permissions for galleries, and so
forth--of seeing certain pictures or statues as often as we wish. For
we feel that the images in our mind require renewing, or that, in
combination with other more recently acquired images, they will, if
renewed, yield a new kind of delight. But this is quite another matter
from wishing to own the material object, the thing we call _work of
art itself_, forgetting that it is a work of art only for the soul
capable of instating it as such.
Thus, in every person who truly cares for beauty, there is a necessary
tendency to replace the illusory legal act of ownership by the real
spiritual act of appreciation. Charles Lamb already expressed this
delightfully in the essay on the old manor-house. Compared with his
possession of its beauties, its walks, tapestried walls and family
portraits, nay, even of the ghosts of former proprietors, the
possession by the legal owner was utterly nugatory, unreal:
"Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic
pavements, and its twelve Cæsars;... mine, too, thy lofty Justice
Hall, with its one chair of authority.... Mine, too--whose
else?--thy costly fruit-garden ... thy ampler pleasure-garden ...
thy firry wilderness.... I was the true descendant of those old
W----'s, and not the present family of that name, who had fled the
old waste places."
How often have not some of us felt like that; and how much might not
those of us who never have, learn, could they learn, from those words
of Elia?