nd invigorate the whole of human life.
This is far removed from the view that the end of art is to give
pleasure. Art does usually cause pleasure, singular and intense, and to
that which causes such pleasure we give the name of Beauty. But to
produce and enjoy Beauty is not the function of art. Beauty--or rather,
the sensation of Beauty--is what the Greeks would call an _epigignomenon
ti telos_, words hard to translate, something between a by-product and a
supervening perfection, a thing like--as Aristotle[54] for once
beautifully says of pleasure--"the bloom of youth to a healthy young
body."

That this is so we see most clearly in the simple fact that, when the
artist begins to aim direct at Beauty, he usually misses it. We all
know, perhaps by sad experience, that the man who seeks out pleasure for
herself fails to find her. Let him do his work well for that work's
sake, exercise his faculties, "energize" as Aristotle would say, and he
will find pleasure come out unawares to meet him with her shining face;
but let him look for her, think of her, even desire her, and she hides
her head. A man goes out hunting, thinks of nothing but following the
hounds and taking his fences, being in at the death: his day is
full--alas! of pleasure, though he has scarcely known it. Let him forget
the fox and the fences, think of pleasure, desire her, and he will be in
at pleasure's death.

So it is with the artist. Let him feel strongly, and see raptly--that
is, in complete detachment. Let him cast this, his rapt vision and his
intense emotion, into outside form, a statue or a painting; that form
will have about it a nameless thing, an unearthly aroma, which we call
beauty; this nameless presence will cause in the spectator a sensation
too rare to be called pleasure, and we shall call it a "sense of
beauty." But let the artist aim direct at Beauty, and she is gone, gone
before we hear the flutter of her wings.

* * * * *

The sign manual, the banner, as it were, of artistic creation is for the
creative artist not pleasure, but something better called joy.
Pleasure, it has been well said, is no more than an instrument contrived
by Nature to obtain from the individual the preservation and the
propagation of life. True joy is not the lure of life, but the
consciousness of the triumph of creation. Wherever joy is, creation has
been.[55] It may be the joy of a mother in the physical creation of a
child;