Now art, to my mind, should be one of our main sources of happiness;
and under the inappropriate word _art_, I am obliged, as usual, to
group all such activities of soul as deal with beauty, quite as much
when it exists in what is (in this sense) not art's antithesis, but
art's origin and completion, nature. Nay, art--the art exercised by
the craftsman, but much more so the art, the selecting, grouping
process performed by our own feelings--art can do more towards our
happiness than increase the number of its constituent items: it can
mould our preferences, can make our souls more resisting and flexible,
teach them to keep pace with the universal rhythm.
Now, there is not room enough in the world, and not stuff enough in
us, for much rapture, or for any excess. The space, as it were, the
material which these occupy and exhaust, has to be paid for; rapture
is paid for by subsequent stinting, and excess by subsequent
bankruptcy.
We all know this in even trifling matters; the dulness, the lassitude
or restlessness, the incapacity for enjoyment following any very acute
or exciting pleasure. A man after a dangerous ride, a girl after her
first wildly successful ball, are not merely exhausted in body and in
mind; they are momentarily deprived of the enjoyment of slighter
emotions; 'tis like the inability to hear one's own voice after
listening to a tremendous band.
The gods, one might say in Goethian phrase, did not intend us to share
their own manner of being; or, if you prefer it, in the language of
Darwin or Weissmann, creatures who died of sheer bliss, were unable to
rear a family and to found a species. Be it as it may, rapture must
needs be rare, because it destroys a piece of us (makes our precious
piece of chagrin skin, as in Balzac's story, shrink each time). And,
as we have seen, it destroys (which is more important than destruction
of mere life) our sensibility to those diffuse, long-drawn, gentle,
restorative pleasures which are not merely durable, but, because they
invigorate our spirit, are actually reproductive of themselves,
multiplying, like all sane desirable things, like grain and fruit,
ten-fold. Pleasures which I would rather call, but for the cumbersome
words, items of happiness. It is therefore no humiliating circumstance
if art and beauty should be unable to excite us like a game of cards,
a steeplechase, a fight, or some violent excitement of our senses or
our vanity. This inability, on the contrary, constitutes our chief
reason for considering our pleasure in beautiful sights, sounds, and
thoughts, as in a sense, holy.