Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/418

414 recognized, are habitual visitors, and arouse often the joy of recognition. The St. James version of the Bible is perhaps an example of the best possible use of the English of its time. But of this we cannot be sure. As a book it has long been popular—on other grounds than those of style. Being popular it molded our forms of expression for generations. All our speech harks back to it. To read it is to catch in every phrase a pleasing echo of the language of our own time, and this regardless of the agreeable familiarity of thought and incident. We recognize it, and delight in it. If circumstance had cast that version into a different form we should, no doubt, admire it none the less; and our language would be different from what it now is, perhaps better.

Allied to both fashion and recognition as an element in esthetics is curiosity; not the inquiring curiosity of the seeker, but the passing curiosity which we take in uncommon things. The picture much talked about—this is the one we wish to see. Having seen it the emotional tension is relaxed, and we have an agreeable sense of satisfaction. Near to this and perhaps part of it is the pleasure given by the sight of a picture which is rare or ancient or high in price, or one which was made with much labor or with unusual technical skill. The patch-work quilt of a thousand pieces made by a woman of seventy-five without the use of glasses, this gives great pleasure to its observers. It is a curio. To most observers it is looked at with a pleasure of like origin to that with which they gaze upon a painting by an old master. I am not condemning this form of emotion. I am simply setting it down where it belongs as forming a part in many cases of the pleasure of picture-gazing, as a part of esthetic emotion. Much of the furnishing of the homes of people of wealth and cultivation—being rare, costly and representative of great labor and much technical skill—gives to its owners a pleasure of like origin with that imparted by the crazy quilt.

Kinship in knowledge is a bond of friendship. The beginning of sympathy is like-mindedness. We cannot care much for those we do not know; we know those who know the things that are known by us. Meeting in a distant land one alien to us in every way, but familiar with the same home scenes, a friend of friends of ours, we have for him at once a touch of sympathy, and find pleasure in our meeting. So, if we look upon a picture in company with others who are with us in our enjoyment—even when, as is most often the case, the enjoyment is born of fashion, habit and curiosity—we have a sense of companionship with them, a pleasurable feeling born of a common interest, which we ascribe as to its origin to the picture itself. In fact, the picture, as a work of art, is not the cause of our enjoyment at all. A tight-rope walker or a sacred relic would serve as well; perhaps better in many cases. We simply have widened and increased our