ow when a regiment passes or a circus parades by; we learn it
more and more as we advance in life, and find that we must get other
people to see the pictures, to hear the music, to read the books which
we admire. It is a case of what psychologists call the _contagion of
emotion_, by which the feeling of one individual is strengthened by
the expression of similar feeling in his neighbour, and is explicable,
most likely, by the fact that the greatest effort is always required
to overcome original inertness, and that two efforts, like two horses
starting a carriage instead of one, combined give more than double the
value of each taken separately. The fact of this aesthetic sociability
is so obvious that we need not discuss it any further, but merely hold
it over to add, at last, to the result of the two other reasons,
negative and positive, which tend to make aesthetic enjoyment the type
of unselfish, nay, even of altruistic pleasure.

V.

The first of these reasons, the negative one, is that aesthetic
pleasure is not in the least dependent upon the fact of personal
ownership, and that it therefore affords an opportunity of leaving
inactive, of beginning to atrophy by inactivity, the passion for
exclusive possession, for individual advantage, which is at the bottom
of all bad luxury, of all ostentation, and of nearly all rapacity. But
before entering on this discussion I would beg my reader to call to
mind that curious saying of Abbot Joachim's; and to consider that I
wish to prove that, like his true monk, the true aesthete, who nowadays
loves and praises creation much as the true monk did in former
centuries, can really possess as sole personal possession only a
musical instrument--to wit, his own well-strung and resonant soul.
Having said this, we will proceed to the question of Luxury, by which
I mean the possession of such things as minister only to weakness and
vanity, of such things as we cannot reasonably hope that all men may
some day equally possess.

When we are young--and most of us remain mere withered children, never
attaining maturity, in similar matters--we are usually attracted by
luxury and luxurious living. We are possessed by that youthful
instinct of union, fusion, marriage, so to speak, with what our soul
desires; we hanker after close contact and complete possession; and we
fancy, in our inexperience, that luxury, the accumulation of
valuables, the appropriation of opportunities, the fact of rej