THE EMOTIONS. 471 



tliouglit of the object and coguition of its quality ; unless 

 we actually laugh at the neatness of the demonstration or 

 witticism ; unless we thrill at the case of justice, or tingle 

 at the act of magnanimity; our state of mind can hardly be 

 called emotional at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual 

 perception of how certain things are to be called — neat, 

 right, witty, generous, and the like. Such a judicial state 

 of mind as this is to be classed among awarenesses of truth; 

 it is a cognitive act. As a matter of fact, however, the 

 moral and intellectual cognitions hardly ever do exist thus 

 unaccompanied. The bodily sounding-board is at work, as 

 careful introspection will show, far more than we usually 

 suppose. Still, where long familiarity with a certain class 

 of effects, even aesthetic ones, has blunted mere emotional 

 excitability as much as it has sharpened taste and judg- 

 ment, we do get the intellectual emotion, if such it can be 

 called, pure and iiudefiled. And the dryness of it, the 

 paleness, the absence of all glow, as it may exist in a 

 thoroughly expert critic's mind, not only shows us what 

 an altogether different thing it is from the 'coarser' emo- 

 tions we considered first, but makes us suspect that almost 

 the entire difference lies in the fact that the bodily sound- 

 ing-board, vibrating in the one case, is in the other mute. 

 "Not so very bad " is, in a person of consummate taste, 

 apt to be the highest limit of approving expression. " Rien 

 ne me chogue" is said to have been Chopin's superlative of 

 praise of neAV music. A sentimental layman would feel, 

 and ought to feel, horrified, on being admitted into such a 

 critic's mind, to see how cold, how thin, how void of human 

 significance, are the motives for favor or disfavor that 

 there prevail. The capacity to make a nice spot on the 

 wall will outweigh a picture's whole content ; a foolish 

 trick of words will preserve a poem ; an utterly meaning- 

 less fitness of sequence in one musical composition set at 

 naught any amount of ' expressiveness ' in another, 



I remember seeing an English couple sit for more than 

 an hour on a piercing February day in the Academy at 

 Yenice before the celebrated ' Assumption ' by Titian ; 

 and when I, after being chased from room to room by the 

 cold, concluded to get into the sunshine as fast as possible 



