emotionally prepossessed against them. On the other hand, once
the favourable emotional condition is supplied to us, often by means
of words, our perceptive and empathic activities follow with twice
the ease they would if the business had begun with them. It is quite
probable that a good deal of the enhancement of aesthetic
appreciation by fashion or sympathy should be put to the account,
not merely of gregarious imitativeness, but of the knowledge that a
favourable or unfavourable feeling is "in the air." The emotion
precedes the appreciation, and both are genuine.

A more personally humiliating aesthetic experience may be
similarly explained. Unless we are very unobservant or very
self-deluded, we are all familiar with the sudden checking (often almost
physically painful) of our aesthetic emotion by the hostile criticism
of a neighbour or the superciliousness of an expert: "Dreadfully
old-fashioned," "_Archi-connu,_""second-rate school work,"
"completely painted over," "utterly hashed in the performance" (of a
piece of music), "mere prettiness"--etc. etc. How often has not a
sentence like these turned the tide of honest incipient enjoyment;
and transformed us, from enjoyers of some really enjoyable quality
(even of such old-as-the-hills elements as clearness, symmetry,
euphony or pleasant colour!) into shrivelled cavillers at everything
save brand-new formulae and tip-top genius! Indeed, while teaching
a few privileged persons to taste the special "quality" which
Botticelli has and Botticelli's pupils have not, and thus occasionally
intensifying aesthetic enjoyment by distinguishing whatever
differentiates the finer artistic products from the commoner, modern
art-criticism has probably wasted much honest but shamefaced
capacity for appreciating the qualities common, because
indispensable, to, all good art. It is therefore not without a certain
retributive malignity that I end these examples of the storage and
transfer of aesthetic emotion, and of the consequent bias to artistic
appreciation, with that of the Nemesis dogging the steps of the
connoisseur. We have all heard of some purchase, or all-but-purchase,
of a wonderful masterpiece on the authority of some famous
expert; and of the masterpiece proving to be a mere school
imitation, and occasionally even a certified modern forgery. The
foregoing remarks on the storage and transfer of aesthetic emotion,
joined with what we have learned about shape-perception and