And are we really much refreshed? Watching the face and manner,
listless, perfunctory or busily attentive, of our fellow-creatures in
galleries and exhibitions, and in great measure in concert rooms and
theatres, one would imagine that, on the contrary, they were
fulfilling a social duty or undergoing a pedagogical routine. The
object of the proceeding would rather seem to be negative; one might
judge that they had come lest their neighbours should suspect that
they were somewhere else, or perhaps lest their neighbours should come
instead, according to our fertile methods of society intercourse and
of competitive examinations. At any rate, they do not look as if they
came to be refreshed, or as if they had taken the right steps towards
such spiritual refreshment: the faces and manner of children in a
playground, of cricketers on a village green, of Sunday trippers on
the beach, or of German townsfolk walking to the beerhouse or café in
the deep fragrant woods, present a different appearance. And if we
examine into our own feelings, we shall find that even for the most
art-loving of us the hours spent in galleries of pictures and statues,
or listening to music at concerts, are largely stolen from our real
life of real interests and real pleasures; that there enters into them
a great proportion of effort and boredom; at the very best that we do
not enjoy (nor expect to enjoy) them at all in the same degree as a
good dinner in good company, or a walk in bright, bracing weather, let
alone, of course, fishing, or hunting, or digging and weeding our
little garden.
Of course, if we are really artistic, and if we have the power of
analysing our own feelings and motives, we shall know that the gallery
or the concert afford occasion for laying in a store of pleasurable
impressions, to be enjoyed at the right moment and in the right mood
later: outlines of pictures, washes of colour, grouped masses of
sculpture, bars of melody, clang of especial chords or timbre
combinations, and even the vague æsthetic emotion, the halo
surrounding blurred recollections of sights and sounds. And knowing
this, we are content that the act of garnering, of preparing, for such
future enjoyment, should lack any steady or deep pleasurableness about
itself. But, thinking over the matter, there seems something wrong,
derogatory to art and humiliating to ourselves, in this admission that
the actual presence of the work of art, sometimes the masterpiece,
should give us the minimum, and not the maximum, of our artistic
enjoyment. And comparing the usual dead level of such merely potential
pleasure with certain rare occasions when we have enjoyed art more at
the moment than afterwards, quite vividly, warmly and with the proper
reluctant clutch at the divine minute as it passes; making this
comparison, we can, I think, guess at the nature of the mischief and
the possibility of its remedy.
Examining into our experience, we shall find that, while our lack of
enjoyment (our state of æsthetic _aridity_, to borrow the expression
of religious mystics) had coincided with a deliberate intention to see
or hear works of art, and a consequent clearing away of other claims,
and on our attention, in fact, to an effort made more or less in
_vacuo_; on the contrary, our Faust-moments ("Stay, thou art
beautiful!") of plenitude and consummation, have always come when our
activity was already flowing, our attention stimulated, and when, so
to speak, the special artistic impressions were caught up into our
other interests, and woven by them into our life. We can all recall
unexpected delights like Hazlitt's in the odd volume of Rousseau found
on the window-seat, and discussed, with his savoury supper, in the
roadside inn, after his long day's pleasant tramp.
Indeed, this preparing of the artistic impression by many others, or
focussing of others by it, accounts for the keenness of our æsthetic
pleasure when on a journey; we are thoroughly alive, and the seen or
heard thing of beauty lives _into_, us, or we into it (there is an
important psychological law, a little too abstract for this moment of
expansiveness, called "the Law of the Summation of Stimuli"). The
truth of what I say is confirmed by the frequent fact that the work of
art which gives us this full and vivid pleasure (actually refreshing!
for here, at last, is refreshment!) is either fragmentary or by no
means first-rate. We have remained arid, hard, incapable of absorbing,
while whole Joachim quartets flowed and rippled all _round_, but never
_into_, us; and then, some other time, our soul seems to have drunk
up (every fibre blissfully steeping) a few bars of a sonata (it was
Beethoven's 10th violin, and they were stumbling through it for the
first time) heard accidentally while walking up and down under an open
window.
It is the same with painting and sculpture. I shall never forget the
exquisite poetry and loveliness of that Matteo di Giovanni, "The
Giving of the Virgin's Girdle," when I saw it for the first time, in
the chapel of that villa, once a monastery, near Siena. Even through
the haze of twenty years (like those delicate blue December mists
which lay between the sunny hills) I can see that picture, illumined
piecemeal by the travelling taper on the sacristan's reed, far more
distinctly than I see it to-day with bodily eyes in the National
Gallery. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that where it hangs in
that gallery it has not once given me one half-second of real
pleasure. It is a third-rate picture now; but even the masterpieces,
Perugino's big fresco, Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne," Pier della
Francesca's "Baptism"; have they ever given me the complete and steady
delight which that mediocre Sienese gave me at the end of the wintry
drive, in the faintly illumined chapel? More often than not, as
Coleridge puts it, I have "seen, not _felt_, how beautiful they are."
But, apart even from fortunate circumstances or enhancing activities,
we have all of us experienced how much better we see or hear a work of
art with the mere dull help of some historical question to elucidate
or technical matter to examine into; we have been able to follow a
piece of music by watching for some peculiarity of counterpoint or
excellence or fault of execution; and our attention has been carried
into a picture or statue by trying to make out whether a piece of
drapery was repainted or an arm restored. Indeed, the irrelevant
literary programme of concerts and all that art historical lore
(information about things of no importance, or none to us) conveyed in
dreary monographs and hand-books, all of them perform a necessary
function nowadays, that of bringing our idle and alien minds into some
sort of relation of business with the works of art which we should
otherwise, nine times out of ten, fail really to approach.
And here I would suggest that this necessity of being, in some way,
busy about beautiful things in order thoroughly to perceive them, may
represent some sterner necessity of life in general; art being, in
this as in so many other cases, significantly typical of what is
larger than itself. Can we get the full taste of pleasure sought for
pleasure's own sake? And is not happiness in life, like beauty in art,
rather a means than an aim: the condition of going on, the
replenishing of force; in short, the thing by whose help, not for the
sake of which, we feel and act and live?