10 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
tarian act; and since a utilitarian act aims always at obtain-
ing a pleasure and therefore at keeping off a pain, art,
considered in its own nature, has nothing to do with the
useful and with pleasure and pain, as such. It will be ad-
mitted, indeed, without much difficulty, that a pleasure as a
pleasure, any sort of pleasure, is not of itself artistic; the
pleasure of a drink of water that slakes thirst, or a walk in
the open air that stretches our limbs and makes our blood
circulate more lightly, or the obtaining of a longed-for post
that settles us in practical life, and so on, is not artistic.
Finally, the difference between pleasure and art leaps to the
eyes in the relations that are developed between ourselves
and works of art, because the figure represented may be dear
to us and represent the most delightful memories, and at the
same time the picture may be ugly; or, on the other hand,
the picture may be beautiful and the figure represented hate-
ful to our hearts, or the picture itself, which we approve as
beautiful, may also cause us rage and envy, because it is the
work of our enemy or rival, for whom it will procure advan-
tage and on whom it will confer new strength : our practical
interests, with their relative pleasures and pains, mingle and
sometimes become confused with art and disturb, but are
never identified with, our aesthetic interest. At the most it
will be affirmed, with a view to maintaining more effectively
the definition of art as the pleasurable, that it is not the
pleasurable in general, but a particular form of the pleasur-
able. But such a restriction is no longer a defence, it is in-
deed an abandonment of that thesis; for given that art is a
particular form of pleasure, its distinctive character would
be supplied, not by the pleasurable, but by what distinguishes
that pleasurable from other pleasurables, and it would be
desirable to turn the attention to that distinctive element—