not on his staircase.

Again, having experience of the aesthetic pleasures which involve, in
what Milton called their sober waking bliss, no wear and tear, no
reaction of satiety, he will not care much for the more rapturous
pleasures of passion and success, which always cost as much as they
are worth. He will be unwilling to run into such debt with his own
feelings, having learned from aesthetic pleasure that there are
activities of the soul which, instead of impoverishing, enrich it.

Thus does the commerce with beautiful things and beautiful thoughts
tend to develop in us that healthy kind of asceticism so requisite to
every workable scheme of greater happiness for the individual and the
plurality: self-restraint, choice of aims, consistent and
thorough-paced subordination of the lesser interest to the greater;
above all, what sums up asceticism as an efficacious means towards
happiness, preference of the spiritual, the unconditional, the
durable, instead of the temporal, the uncertain, and the fleeting.

The intimate and continuous intercourse with the Beautiful teaches us,
therefore, the renunciation of the unnecessary for the sake of the
possible. It teaches asceticism leading not to indifference and
Nervana, but to higher complexities of vitalisation, to a more
complete and harmonious rhythm of individual existence.

XVI.

Art can thus train the soul because art is free; or, more strictly
speaking, because art is the only complete expression, the only
consistent realisation of our freedom. In other parts of our life,
business, affection, passion, pursuit of utility, glory or truth, we
are for ever _conditioned_. We are twisting perpetually, perpetually
stopped short and deflected, picking our way among the visible and
barely visible habits, interests, desires, shortcomings, of others and
of that portion of ourselves which, in the light of that particular
moment and circumstance, seems to be foreign to us, to be another's.
We can no more follow the straight line of our wishes than can the
passenger in Venice among those labyrinthine streets, whose
everlasting, unexpected bends are due to canals which the streets
themselves prevent his seeing. Moreover, in those gropings among
looming or unseen obstacles, we are pulled hither and thither, checked
and misled by the recurring doubt as to which, of these thwarted and
yielding selves, may be the chief and real one, and which, of the goals
we are never allowed