days (I confess I do not know exactly when), art may have been
perceived pretty much in the same manner in which we perceive nature:
that the enjoyed perception of a beautiful statue, of a picture, of a
grand song, may have come interrupting, with pleasant interludes of
quiet self-unconscious pleasure, the matter-of-fact, but not monotonous
business of life; even as my work now, my conscientious, deliberate,
attempted work, is for ever being interrupted by the flicker of the
lime-leaf shadows, light and clear, on my paper, by the breeze which
sweeps the branches and carries away the drying manuscript on the grass.

Now it seems to me quite evident that art cannot be any such thing, as
long as its enjoyment or supposed enjoyment is a sort of deliberate
mental gymnastics, which our desire for well-balanced activity, or our
wish to display a certain unnecessary gracefulness of intellectual
motions, impose upon us; setting aside a certain portion of our time for
counteracting, in the artistic gymnasiums (rows of soaped poles, and
hurdles, and ladders, and expanses of padded floor, quite as unlike as
may be from the climbable trees and jumpable brooks which we ought
to meet in our walks), called galleries, concerts, etc., the direful
slackening of our muscles and stiffening of our joints, almost
inevitable in our cramped intellectual shop life of to-day. We writhe,
clinging with arms and legs, up the soaped poles of aesthetic feeling,
slipping and rising again, straining and twisting, to plop down at last
on to the padding and the sawdust; we dangle, with constrained grace,
high in aesthetic contemplation, flying, with a clutching swing, from
idea to idea: distant, oscillating in mid air, like so many trapeze
acrobats; and then we think that an hour or so, every now and then, of
such exercise is all (except brutal slumber) that can be required as
repose in our intellectual life. For we are all of us getting more
and more into the habit of enjoying, not so much art, as the feelings
and thoughts, the theories and passions, for which we make it the
excuse. "Nay," you will say "you yourself have written, are printing,
correcting, and publishing a whole volume of whims and ideas about
art, you yourself are for ever theorising and becoming angry on the
subject--what right have you to object thereto in others?"

None, perhaps; I have never pretended that I am not as bad as my
neighbours; but the whole gist of these my theorisings i