I Knew Well Enough, But Had Never
Put It Into Plain Words For My Own Satisfaction.
We are all pretty familiar from experience with the
limitations of the sense of smell and the fact that agreeable
odours please us only fitfully; the sensation comes as a
pleasing shock, a surprise, and is quickly gone.
If we
attempt to keep it for some time by deliberately smelling a
fragrant flower or any perfume, we begin to have a sense of
failure as if we had exhausted the sense, keen as it was a
moment ago.
There must be an interval of rest for the nerve before the
sensation can be renewed in its first freshness. Now it is
the same, though in a less degree, with the more important
sense of sight. We look long and steadily at a thing to know
it, and the longer and more fixedly we look the better, if it
engages the reasoning faculties; but an aesthetic pleasure
cannot be increased or retained in that way. We must look,
merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again,
with intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we
receive the "nimble emanation" of a flower, and the image is
all the brighter for coming intermittently. In a large
prospect we are not conscious of this limitation because of
the wideness of the field and the number and variety of
objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither
and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series
of pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most
beautiful object in nature or art does but diminish the
pleasure.
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