arity baffles
aesthetic responsiveness, excessive familiarity prevents its starting
at all. Indeed both perceptive clearness and empathic intensity reach
their climax in the case of shapes which afford the excitement of
tracking familiarity in novelty, the stimulation of acute comparison,
the emotional ups and downs of expectation and partial recognition,
or of recognition when unexpected, the latter having, as we know
when we notice that a stranger has the trick of speech or gesture of
an acquaintance, a very penetrating emotional warmth. Such
discovery of the novel in the familiar, and of the familiar in the new,
will he frequent in proportion to the definiteness and complexity of
the shapes, and in proportion also to the sensitiveness and steadiness
of the beholder's attention; while on the contrary "obvious" qualities
of shape and superficial attention both tend to exhaust interest and
demand change. This exhaustion of interest and consequent demand
for change unites with the changing non-aesthetic aims imposed on
art, together producing innovation. And the more superficial the
aesthetic attention given by the beholders, the quicker will style
succeed style, and shapes and shape-schemes be done to death by
exaggeration or left in the lurch before their maturity; a state of
affairs especially noticeable in our own day.

The above is a series of illustrations of the fact that aesthetic
pleasure depends as much on the activities of the beholder as on
those of the artist. Unfamiliarity or over-familiarity explain a large
part of the aesthetic non-responsiveness summed up in the saying
_that there is no disputing of tastes._ And even within the circle of
habitual responsiveness to some particular style, or master, there are,
as we have just seen, days and hours when an individual beholder's
perception and empathic imagination do not act in such manner as to
afford the usual pleasure. But these occasional, even frequent, lapses
must not diminish our belief either in the power of art or in the
deeply organised and inevitable nature of aesthetic preference as a
whole. What the knowledge of such fluctuations ought to bring
home is that beauty of shape is most spontaneously and completely
appreciated when the attention, instead of being called upon, as in
galleries and concerts, for the mere purpose of aesthetic enjoyment,
is on the contrary, directed to the artistic or "natural" beauty of
shapes, in consequence of some othe