lights burned in upper rooms. There were a
thousand pretty secrets in the ways of people to each other. Then,
too, there were ideas, as thick as sparrows in an ivied wall. One had
but to clap one's hands and cry out, and there was a fluttering {195}
of innumerable wings; life was as full of bubbles, forming, rising into
amber foam, as a glass of sparkling wine.[12]

To this delight which the casual environment affords a sensitive
observer, art may add through a decorous furnishing of city and house.
Or the instruments of other interests may be made to give pleasure of
themselves, so that there may be no long periods of deferred reward.
Thus to the hire of manual labor may be added the immediate
compensation which comes from a love of the tools, or from the
satisfaction taken in the aspect of work done; to physical exercise may
be added the love of nature, to scholarship the love of scientific
form, and to social intercourse the love of personal beauty or of
conversation. In these ways, and in countless ways beside, the
aesthetic interest may multiply the richness of life.

Society is, on the whole, protected against the danger of overemphasis
on the aesthetic interest, through the habitual subordination of it in
public opinion to standards of efficiency. Men commonly believe, and
are justified in so believing, that a life delivered wholly to the
aesthetic interest is frivolous; amusing itself with "bubbles" and
"amber foam," while supported by a community in whose graver and more
urgent concerns it takes no part. Probably no one has {196} done more
than Pater to persuade men of the present generation that it is worth
while to "catch at any exquisite passion, . . . or any stirring of the
senses"; and yet he is not a prophet in our day. Is it possibly
because in that same famous conclusion to the _Renaissance_ he said,
"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end," [13]
and thus exposed himself to misunderstanding, if not to refutation, at
the hands of any one of average moral enlightenment? The moral lesson
is one that none have escaped, and that only a few are permitted to
forget. This lesson has taught with unvarying reiteration that acts
are to be judged by their consequences; that all purposes are
constructive, and so far as wise fitted into the building of
civilization; that experience itself, in Pater's sense, is possible
only as a fruit of experience. A life in which the aesthetic i