oints turning to water. The
coordinated interplay of empathic movement which makes certain
mediaeval floor patterns, and also Leonardo's compositions, into
whirling harmonies as of a planetary system, cannot take place in
our imagination on days of restlessness and lack of concentration.
Nay it may happen that arrangements of lines which would flutter
and flurry us on days of quiet appreciativeness, will become in every
sense "sympathetic" on days when we ourselves feel fluttered and
flurried. But lack of responsiveness may be due to other causes. As
there are combinations of lines which take longer to perceive
because their elements or their coordinating principles are
unfamiliar, so, and even more so, are there empathic schemes (or
dramas) which baffle dynamic imagination when accustomed to
something else and when it therefore meets the new demand with an
unsuitable empathic response. Empathy is, even more than mere
perception, a question of our activities and therefore of our habits;
and the aesthetic sensitiveness of a time and country (say the
Florentine fourteenth century) with a habit of round arch and
horizontals like that of Pisan architecture, could never take with
enthusiasm to the pointed ogeeval ellipse, the oblique directions and
unstable equilibrium, the drama of touch and go strain and resistance,
of French Gothic; whence a constant readmission of the round
arched shapes into the imported style, and a speedy return to the
familiar empathic schemes in the architecture of the early
Renaissance. On the other hand the persistence of Gothic detail in
Northern architecture of the sixteenth and occasionally the
seventeenth century, shows how insipid the round arch and straight
entablature must have felt to people accustomed to the empathy of
Gothic shapes. Nothing is so routinist as imagination and emotion;
and empathy, which partakes of both, is therefore more dependent
on familiarity than is the perception by which it is started: Spohr,
and the other professional contemporaries of Beethoven, probably
heard and technically understood all the peculiarities of his last
quartets; but they liked them none the better.

On the other hand continued repetition notoriously begets
indifference. We cease to look at a shape which we "know by heart"
and we cease to interpret in terms of our own activities and
intentions when curiosity and expectation no longer let loose our
dynamic imagination. Hence while utter unfamili