d: you can be utterly perfunctory towards a work of art
without hurrying away from in front of it, or setting about some
visible business in its presence. Standing ten minutes before a
picture or sitting an hour at a concert, with fixed sight or tense
hearing, you may yet be quite hopelessly inattentive if, instead of
following the life of the visible or audible forms, and _living
yourself_ into their pattern and rhythm, you wander off after dramatic
or sentimental associations suggested by the picture's subject; or if
you let yourself be hypnotised, as pious Wagnerians are apt to be,
into monotonous over response (and over and over again response) to
the merely emotional stimulation of the sounds. The activity of the
artist's soul has been in vain for you, since you do not let your soul
follow its tracks through the work of art; he has not created for you,
because you have failed to create his work afresh in vivid
contemplation.

But attention cannot be forced on to any sort of contemplation, or at
least it cannot remain, steady and abiding, by any act of forcing.
Attention, to be steady, must be held by the attraction of the thing
attended to; and, to be spontaneous and easy, must be carried by some
previous interest within the reach of that attractiveness. Above all,
attention requires that its ways should have been made smooth by
repetition of similar experience; it is excluded, rebutted by the dead
wall of utter novelty; for seeing, hearing, understanding is
interpreting the unknown by the known, assimilation in the literal
sense also of rendering similar the new to the less new. This will
explain why it is useless trying to enjoy a totally unfamiliar kind of
art: as soon expect to take pleasure in dancing a dance you do not
know, and whose rhythm and step you fail as yet to follow. And it is
not only music, as Nietzsche said, but all art, that is but a kind of
dancing, a definite rhythmic carrying and moving of the soul. And for
this reason there can be no artistic enjoyment without preliminary
initiation and training.

Art cannot be enjoyed without initiation and training. I repeat this
statement, desiring to impress it on the reader, because, by a
coincidence of misunderstanding, it happens to constitute the
weightiest accusation in the whole of Tolstoi's very terrible (and,
in part, terribly justified) recent arraignment of art. For of what
use is the restorative and refreshing power, this quality called
bea