se that the powers
of creating beauty of the composer of _Tristram_, is after all akin to
the beauty making genius of the composer of _Semiramis_. Meanwhile, he
who merely enjoys is able to enjoy; is able (oh wonder of wonders) to be
what the man of theories never can be: just, because he can be grateful
for every amount of bestowed good.

There is another objection which you may make, which (though perhaps
unformulated) you certainly will feel, against me and my book. You have
an uncomfortable sense that in some way, although our artistic life may
gain, a certain amount of life which goes on in or about art--we do not
clearly know which--is being cramped: a life of the fancy and feelings,
which weave between ourselves and the things which surround us and the
things which are absent, between the present moment and the long-gone
past, strange crossed and recrossed threads, webs of association,
infinitely fine, iridescently connected by almost invisible filaments,
floating and oscillating in the vacuum of our lives, for ever changing,
breaking; reknotting their sensitive filaments. For in most of the
things which we see and hear with free, unpractical mind in the moments
when we belong to ourselves and to the present, there exists a capacity
for importance, nay for fascination, quite independent of beauty and of
the pleasures which beauty can give. There is in such things more than
what they can give alike to every one; there is also what they can give
to each separate; they have, besides the clear language of form, which
is equally intelligible to all men, a half articulate language for every
individual man, a language of associations, vague, poor, if you will,
broken by something which might be a laugh or a sob; an imperfect
irrational language, which is yet, even when spoken by some trifling
thing, by a bar or two of trivial melody, by a door such as we have many
times passed through, or a chair such as we have looked at when not,
as now, empty; by a mere scent or touch; is yet, this mumble-jumble
language, more dear to us than all the eloquence and poetry which our
soul hears from a great work of art. I grant you all this. But I do not
think that such things need be interfered with by looking at art simply
and with straightforwardness; interfered with they cannot be. Nor could
I wish it to be otherwise. For in some ways I do think that almost
better than the mere perception of the work of another, than the mere
percep