ecting
from our life all that is not costly, brilliant, and dainty, implies
such fusion of our soul with beauty.

But, as we reach maturity, we find that this is all delusion. We
learn, from the experience of occasions when our soul has truly
possessed the beautiful, or been possessed by it, that if such union
with the harmony of outer things is rare, perhaps impossible, among
squalor and weariness, it is difficult and anomalous in the condition
which we entitle luxury.

We learn that our assimilation of beauty, and that momentary renewal
of our soul which it effects, rarely arises from our own ownership;
but comes, taking us by surprise, in presence of hills, streams,
memories of pictures, poets' words, and strains of music, which are
not, and cannot be, our property. The essential character of beauty is
its being a relation between ourselves and certain objects. The
emotion to which we attach its name is produced, motived by something
outside us, pictures, music, landscape, or whatever it may be; but the
emotion resides in us, and it is the emotion, and not merely its
object, which we desire. Hence material possession has no aesthetic
meaning. We possess a beautiful object with our soul; the possession
thereof with our hands or our legal rights brings us no nearer the
beauty. Ownership, in this sense, may empower us to destroy or hide
the object and thus cheat others of the possession of its beauty, but
does not help _us_ to possess that beauty. It is with beauty as with
that singer who answered Catherine II., "Your Majesty's policemen can
make me _scream_, but they cannot make me _sing_;" and she might have
added, for my parallel, "Your policemen, great Empress, even could
they make _me_ sing, would not be able to make _you_ hear."

VI.

Hence all strong aesthetic feeling will always prefer ownership of the
mental image to ownership of the tangible object. And any desire for
material appropriation or exclusive enjoyment will be merely so much
weakening and adulteration of the aesthetic sentiment. Since the mental
image, the only thing aesthetically possessed, is in no way diminished
or damaged by sharing; nay, we have seen that by one of the most
gracious coincidences between beauty and kindliness, the aesthetic
emotion is even intensified by the knowledge of co-existence in
others: the delight in each person communicating itself, like a
musical third, fifth, or octave, to the similar yet different delight
in