Mode"; days when even Giorgione's Pastoral may (as
in Rossetti's sonnet) mean nothing beyond the languid pleasure of
sitting on the grass after a burning day and listening to the plash of
water and the tuning of instruments; the same thought and emotion,
the same interest and pleasure, being equally obtainable from an
inn-parlour oleograph. Then, as regards scientific interest and pleasure,
there may be days when the diarist will be quite delighted with a
hideous picture, because it affords some chronological clue, or new
point of comparison. "This _dates_ such or such a style"--"_Plein
Air_ already attempted by a Giottesque! Degas forestalled by a Cave
Dweller!" etc. etc. And finally days when the Diarist is haunted by
the thought of what the represented person will do next: "Would
Michelangelo's Jeremiah knock his head if he got up?"--"How will
the Discobolus recover when he has let go the quoit?"--or haunted
by thoughts even more frivolous (though not any less aesthetically
irrelevant!) like "How wonderfully like Mrs So and So!" "The living
image of Major Blank!"--"How I detest auburn people with
sealing-wax lips!" _ad lib._

Such different _thinkings away from the shapes_ are often traceable
to previous orientation of the thoughts or to special states of body
and feelings. But explicable or not in the particular case, these
varieties of one's own aesthetic responsiveness will persuade the
Reader who has verified their existence, that contemplative
satisfaction in shapes and its specific emotion cannot be given by the
greatest artist or the finest tradition, unless the beholder meets their
efforts more than half way.

The spontaneous collaboration of the beholder is especially
indispensable for Aesthetic Empathy. As we have seen, empathic
modes of movement and energy and intention are attributed to
shapes and to shape elements, in consequence of the modes of
movement and energy involved in mere shape perception; but shape
perception does not necessarily call forth empathic imagination. And
the larger or smaller dynamic dramas of effort, resistance,
reconciliation, cooperation which constitute the most poignant
interest of a pictorial or plastic composition, are inhibited by bodily
or mental states of a contrary character. We cease to _feel_
(although we may continue, like Coleridge, to _see_) that the lines
of a mountain or a statue _are rising,_ if we ourselves happen to feel
as if our feet were of lead and our j