art
beautiful!") of plenitude and consummation, have always come when our
activity was already flowing, our attention stimulated, and when, so
to speak, the special artistic impressions were caught up into our
other interests, and woven by them into our life. We can all recall
unexpected delights like Hazlitt's in the odd volume of Rousseau found
on the window-seat, and discussed, with his savoury supper, in the
roadside inn, after his long day's pleasant tramp.

Indeed, this preparing of the artistic impression by many others, or
focussing of others by it, accounts for the keenness of our aesthetic
pleasure when on a journey; we are thoroughly alive, and the seen or
heard thing of beauty lives _into_, us, or we into it (there is an
important psychological law, a little too abstract for this moment of
expansiveness, called "the Law of the Summation of Stimuli"). The
truth of what I say is confirmed by the frequent fact that the work of
art which gives us this full and vivid pleasure (actually refreshing!
for here, at last, is refreshment!) is either fragmentary or by no
means first-rate. We have remained arid, hard, incapable of absorbing,
while whole Joachim quartets flowed and rippled all _round_, but never
_into_, us; and then, some other time, our soul seems to have drunk
up (every fibre blissfully steeping) a few bars of a sonata (it was
Beethoven's 10th violin, and they were stumbling through it for the
first time) heard accidentally while walking up and down under an open
window.

It is the same with painting and sculpture. I shall never forget the
exquisite poetry and loveliness of that Matteo di Giovanni, "The
Giving of the Virgin's Girdle," when I saw it for the first time, in
the chapel of that villa, once a monastery, near Siena. Even through
the haze of twenty years (like those delicate blue December mists
which lay between the sunny hills) I can see that picture, illumined
piecemeal by the travelling taper on the sacristan's reed, far more
distinctly than I see it to-day with bodily eyes in the National
Gallery. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that where it hangs in
that gallery it has not once given me one half-second of real
pleasure. It is a third-rate picture now; but even the masterpieces,
Perugino's big fresco, Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne," Pier della
Francesca's "Baptism"; have they ever given me the complete and steady
delight which that mediocre Sienese gave me at the end of the wintry
d