ace
that objection which we put aside a little while ago; namely, that
perhaps it is not well to have a great deal of good art; and that it
should not be made too cheap.

"Nay," I can imagine some of the more generous among you exclaiming, "we
will not trouble you to disprove that objection; of course it is a
selfish and base one: good art, as well as other good things, ought to
be made as cheap as possible, and put as far as we can within the reach
of everybody."

63. Pardon me, I am not prepared to admit that. I rather side with the
selfish objectors, and believe that art ought not to be made cheap,
beyond a certain point; for the amount of pleasure that you can receive
from any great work, depends wholly on the quantity of attention and
energy of mind you can bring to bear upon it. Now, that attention and
energy depend much more on the freshness of the thing than you would at
all suppose; unless you very carefully studied the movements of your own
minds. If you see things of the same kind and of equal value very
frequently, your reverence for them is infallibly diminished, your
powers of attention get gradually wearied, and your interest and
enthusiasm worn out; and you cannot in that state bring to any given
work the energy necessary to enjoy it. If, indeed, the question were
only between enjoying a great many pictures each a little, or one
picture very much, the sum of enjoyment being in each case the same, you
might rationally desire to possess rather the larger quantity than the
small; both because one work of art always in some sort illustrates
another, and because quantity diminishes the chances of destruction.

64. But the question is not a merely arithmetical one of this kind. Your
fragments of broken admirations will not, when they are put together,
make up one whole admiration; two and two, in this case, do not make
four, nor anything like four. Your good picture, or book, or work of art
of any kind, is always in some degree fenced and closed about with
difficulty. You may think of it as of a kind of cocoanut, with very
often rather an unseemly shell, but good milk and kernel inside. Now, if
you possess twenty cocoanuts, and being thirsty, go impatiently from one
to the other, giving only a single scratch with the point of your knife
to the shell of each, you will get no milk from all the twenty. But if
you leave nineteen of them alone, and give twenty cuts to the shell of
one, you will get through i