All our arts and
occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface
that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and
to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked
by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar
way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers
an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our
analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. And
perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those
disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so
perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those
conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy
of the serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the power
to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of
the sense finer than we conceive, and hints of ancient
harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least is largely
irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty,
for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the
mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will
always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be
stated but never can wholly be explained; nay, on the
principle laid down in HUDIBRAS, that
'Still the less they understand,
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,'
many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in
the ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that
well-known character, the general reader, that I am here
embarked upon a most distasteful business: taking down the
picture from the wall and looking on the back; and, like the
inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.
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