y in the spirit, in which
alone, as philosophers and mystics have rightly understood, there is
safety from the worst miseries and room for the most complete
happiness. Only, we shall learn from the study of our aesthetic
pleasures that while the stoics and mystics have been right in
affirming that the spirit only can give the highest good, they have
been fatally wrong in the reason they gave for their preference. And
we may learn from our aesthetic experiences that the spirit is useful,
not in detaching us from the enjoyable things of life, but, on the
contrary, in giving us their consummate possession. The spirit--one of
whose most precious capacities is that it enables us to print off all
outside things on to ourselves, to store moods and emotions, to
recombine and reinforce past impressions into present ones--the spirit
puts pleasure more into our own keeping, making it more independent of
time and place, of circumstances, and, what is equally important,
independent of other people's strivings after pleasure, by which our
own, while they clash and hamper, are so often impeded.

XII.

For our intimate commerce with beautiful things and beautiful thoughts
does not exist only, or even chiefly, at the moment of seeing, or
hearing, or reading; nay, if the beautiful touched us only at such
separate and special moments, the beautiful would play but an
insignificant part in our existence.

As a fact, those moments represent very often only the act of
_storage_, or not much more. Our real aesthetic life is in ourselves,
often isolated from the beautiful words, objects, or sounds; sometimes
almost unconscious; permeating the whole rest of life in certain
highly aesthetic individuals, and, however mixed with other activities,
as constant as the life of the intellect and sympathies; nay, as
constant as the life of assimilation and motion. We can live off a
beautiful object, we can live by its means, even when its visible or
audible image is partially, nay, sometimes wholly, obliterated; for
the emotional condition can survive the image and be awakened at the
mere name, awakened sufficiently to heighten the emotion caused by
other images of beauty. We can sometimes feel, so to speak, the
spiritual companionship and comfort of a work of art, or of a scene in
nature, nay, almost its particular caress to our whole being, when the
work of art or the scene has grown faint in our memory, but the
emotion it awakened has kept warm.