rive, 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?

IX.

Beauty is an especial quality in visible or audible shapes and movements
which imposes on our soul a certain rhythm and pattern of feeling entirely
_sui generis_, but unified, harmonious, and, in a manner, consummate.
Beauty is a power in our life, because, however intermittent its
action and however momentary, it makes us live, by a kind of sympathy
with itself, a life fuller, more vivid, and at the same time more
peaceful. But, as the word _sympathy_, _with-feeling_--(_Einfuehlen_,
"feeling into," the Germans happily put it)--as the word _sympathy_ is
intended to suggest, this subduing and yet liberating, this enlivening
and pacifying power of beautiful form over our feelings is exercised
only when our feelings enter, and are absorbed into, the form we
perceive; so that (very much as