the product of their activity is a special,
separate one. So, in your desire to appreciate a work of art, you have,
after a fashion, created a new one, good or bad, and having created it,
there are a hundred chances against one that you will henceforward
perceive your creation and not the original work; that you will no
longer perceive lines or sounds, but fancies and feelings, in short,
that instead of appreciating the work of art itself, you will appreciate
merely your intellectual equivalent of it, that is to say, something
which most distinctly and emphatically is _not_ the work of art.

The process of association is even commoner: you have taken interest in
some story, or some form, your mind has worked upon it; you are shown a
work of art whose name, often nothing more, connects it with this story
or poem, and your thoughts being full of the latter, you apply to the
work of art the remarks you had made about the story or poem; you see
in the work of art the details of that story or poem; you look at it
as a mere illustration; very often you do not look at it at all; for
although your bodily eyes may be fixed on the picture or statue, your
intellectual eyes are busy with some recollection or impression in your
mind; it is the case of the bas-relief of the Villa Albani, the pleasure
received from Virgil's lines being re-awakened by the mere circumstance
of the bas-relief being called, rightly or wrongly, Orpheus and Eurydice;
it is the story of a hundred interpretations of works of art, of people
seeing a comic expression in a certain group at the Villa Ludovisi
because they imagined it to represent Papirius and his mother, while
other people found the same group highly tragic, because they fancied it
represented Electra and Orestes; it is the old story of violent emotion,
attributed to wholly unemotional music, because the words to which it
is arbitrarily connected happen to be pathetic; the endless story of
delusions of all sorts, of associations of feelings and ideas as
accidental as those which make certain tunes or sights depress us
because we happened to be in a melancholy mood when we first saw or
heard them.

What becomes of the real, inherent effect of the work of art itself in
the midst of such concatenations of fancies and associations? How can
we listen to its own magic speech, its language of lines and colours
and sounds, when our mind is full of confused voices telling us of
different and irrelevant