lage green, of Sunday trippers on
the beach, or of German townsfolk walking to the beerhouse or cafe 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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic _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