* * * * *

The sign manual, the banner, as it were, of artistic creation is for the creative artist not pleasure, but something better called joy.  Pleasure, it has been well said, is no more than an instrument contrived by Nature to obtain from the individual the preservation and the propagation of life.  True joy is not the lure of life, but the consciousness of the triumph of creation.  Wherever joy is, creation has been.[55] It may be the joy of a mother in the physical creation of a child; it may be the joy of the merchant adventurer in pushing out new enterprise, or of the engineer in building a bridge, or of the artist in a masterpiece accomplished; but it is always of the thing created.  Again, contrast joy with glory.  Glory comes with success and is exceedingly pleasant; it is not joyous.  Some men say an artist’s crown is glory; his deepest satisfaction is in the applause of his fellows.  There is no greater mistake; we care for praise just in proportion as we are not sure we have succeeded.  To the real creative artist even praise and glory are swallowed up in the supreme joy of creation.  Only the artist himself feels the real divine fire, but it flames over into the work of art, and even the spectator warms his hands at the glow.

We can now, I think, understand the difference between the artist and true lover of art on the one hand, and the mere aesthete on the other.  The aesthete does not produce, or, if he produces, his work is thin and scanty.  In this he differs from the artist; he does not feel so strongly and see so clearly that he is forced to utterance.  He has no joy, only pleasure.  He cannot even feel the reflection of this creative joy.  In fact, he does not so much feel as want to feel.  He seeks for pleasure, for sensual pleasure as his name says, not for the grosser kinds, but for pleasure of that rarefied kind that we call a sense of beauty.  The aesthete, like the flirt, is cold.  It is not even that his senses are easily stirred, but he seeks the sensation of stirring, and most often feigns it, not finds it.  The aesthete is no more released from his own desires than the practical man, and he is without the practical man’s healthy outlet in action.  He sees life, not indeed in relation to action, but to his own personal sensation.  By this alone he is debarred for ever from being an artist.  As M. Andre Beaunier has well observed, by the irony of things, when we see life in relation to ourselves we cannot really represent it at all.  The profligate thinks he knows women.  It is his irony, his curse that, because he sees them always in relation to his own desires, his own pleasure, he never really knows them at all.