-recurrent discussion of this seeming contradiction is,
however, made an end of, once we recognise that art has many aims
besides its distinguishing one of increasing our contemplation of the
beautiful. Indeed some of art's many non-aesthetic aims may
themselves be foreign to elevation and purification, or even, as for
instance the lewd or brutal subjects of some painting and poetry, and
the nervous intoxication of certain music, exert a debasing or
enervating influence. But, as the whole of this book has tried to
establish, the contemplation of beautiful shapes involves perceptive
processes in themselves mentally invigorating and refining, and a
play of empathic feelings which realise the greatest desiderata of
spiritual life, viz. intensity, purposefulness and harmony; and such
perceptive and empathic activities cannot fail to raise the present
level of existence and to leave behind them a higher standard for
future experience. This exclusively elevating effect of beautiful
shape as such, is of course proportioned to the attention it receives
and the exclusion of other, and possibly baser, interests connected
with the work of art. On the other hand the purifying effects of
beautiful shapes depend upon the attention oscillating to and fro
between them and those other interests, e.g. _subject_ in the
_representative_ arts, _fitness_ in the _applied_ ones, and
_expression_ in music; all of which non-aesthetic interests benefit
(enhanced if noble, redeemed if base) by irradiation of the nobler
feelings wherewith they are thus associated. For we must not forget
that where opposed groups of feeling are elicited, whichever
happens to be more active and complex will neutralise its opponent.
Thus, while an even higher intensity and complexity of aesthetic
feelings is obtained when the "subject" of a picture, the use of a
building or a chattel, or the expression of a piece of music, is in
itself noble; and a Degas ballet girl can never have the dignity of a
Phidian goddess, nor a gambling _casino_ that of a cathedral, nor
the music to Wilde's Salome that of Brahms' _German Requiem,_
yet whatever of beauty there may be in the shapes will divert the
attention from the meanness or vileness of the non-aesthetic
suggestion. We do not remember the mercenary and libertine
allegory embodied in Correggio's _Danae,_ or else we reinterpret
that sorry piece of mythology in terms of cosmic occurrences, of the
Earth's wealth increased by the