Let no one imagine that representation is bad in itself; a realistic
form may be as significant, in its place as part of the design, as an
abstract. But if a representative form has value, it is as form, not as
representation. The representative element in a work of art may or may
not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of
art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas
and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from
the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a
moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and
memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life. The pure
mathematician rapt in his studies knows a state of mind which I take to
be similar, if not identical. He feels an emotion for his speculations
which arises from no perceived relation between them and the lives of
men, but springs, inhuman or super-human, from the heart of an abstract
science. I wonder, sometimes, whether the appreciators of art and of
mathematical solutions are not even more closely allied. Before we feel
an aesthetic emotion for a combination of forms, do we not perceive
intellectually the rightness and necessity of the combination? If we do,
it would explain the fact that passing rapidly through a room we
recognise a picture to be good, although we cannot say that it has
provoked much emotion. We seem to have recognised intellectually the
rightness of its forms without staying to fix our attention, and
collect, as it were, their emotional significance. If this were so, it
would be permissible to inquire whether it was the forms themselves or
our perception of their rightness and necessity that caused aesthetic
emotion. But I do not think I need linger to discuss the matter here. I
have been inquiring why certain combinations of forms move us; I should
not have travelled by other roads had I enquired, instead, why certain
combinations are perceived to be right and necessary, and why our
perception of their rightness and necessity is moving. What I have to
say is this: the rapt philosopher, and he who contemplates a work of
art, inhabit a world with an intense and peculiar significance of its
own; that significance is unrelated to the significance of life. In
this world the emotions of life find no place. It is a world with
emotions of its own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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