I have said that our pleasure in the beautiful is essentially a
spiritual phenomenon, one, I mean, which deals with our own
perceptions and emotions, altering the contents of our mind, while
leaving the beautiful object itself intact and unaltered. This being
the case, it is easy to understand that our æsthetic pleasure will be
complete and extensive in proportion to the amount of activity of our
soul; for, remember, all pleasure is proportionate to activity, and,
as I said in my first chapter, great beauty does not merely _take us_,
but _we_ must give _ourselves to it_. Hence, an increase in the
capacity for æsthetic pleasure will mean, _cæeteris paribus_, an
increase in a portion of our spiritual activity, a greater readiness
to take small hints, to connect different items, to reject the lesser
good for the greater. Moreover, a great, perhaps the greater, part of
our æsthetic pleasure is due, as I also told you before, to the
storing of impressions in our mind, and to the combining of them there
with other impressions. Indeed, it is for this reason that I have made
no difference, save in intensity between æsthetic creation, so called,
and æsthetic appreciation; telling you, on the contrary, that the
artistic layman creates, produces something new and personal, only in
a less degree than the professed artist.
For the æsthetic life does not consist merely in the perception of the
beautiful object, not merely in the emotion of that spiritual contact
between the beautiful product of art or of nature and the soul of the
appreciator: it is continued in the emotions and images and thoughts
which are awakened by that perception; and the æsthetic life _is_
life, is something continuous and organic, just because new forms,
however obscure and evanescent, are continually born, in their turn
continually to give birth, of that marriage between the beautiful
thing outside and the beautiful soul within.
Hence, full æsthetic life means the creating and extending of ever new
harmonies in the mind of the layman, the unconscious artist who merely
enjoys, as a result of the creating and extending of new harmonies in
the work of the professed artist who consciously creates. This being
the case, the true æsthete is for ever seeking to reduce his
impressions and thoughts to harmony; and is for ever, accordingly,
being pleased with some of them, and disgusted with others.