Art | Page 5

as to the presence or absence of the quality x. My
immediate object will be to show that significant form is the only
quality common and peculiar to all the works of visual art that move
me; and I will ask those whose aesthetic experience does not tally with
mine to see whether this quality is not also, in their judgment, common
to all works that move them, and whether they can discover any other
quality of which the same can be said.
Also at this point a query arises, irrelevant indeed, but hardly to be
suppressed: "Why are we so profoundly moved by forms related in a
particular way?" The question is extremely interesting, but irrelevant to
aesthetics. In pure aesthetics we have only to consider our emotion and
its object: for the purposes of aesthetics we have no right, neither is
there any necessity, to pry behind the object into the state of mind of
him who made it. Later, I shall attempt to answer the question; for by
so doing I may be able to develop my theory of the relation of art to life.
I shall not, however, be under the delusion that I am rounding off my
theory of aesthetics. For a discussion of aesthetics, it need be agreed
only that forms arranged and combined according to certain unknown

and mysterious laws do move us in a particular way, and that it is the
business of an artist so to combine and arrange them that they shall
move us. These moving combinations and arrangements I have called,
for the sake of convenience and for a reason that will appear later,
"Significant Form."
A third interruption has to be met. "Are you forgetting about colour?"
someone inquires. Certainly not; my term "significant form" included
combinations of lines and of colours. The distinction between form and
colour is an unreal one; you cannot conceive a colourless line or a
colourless space; neither can you conceive a formless relation of
colours. In a black and white drawing the spaces are all white and all
are bounded by black lines; in most oil paintings the spaces are
multi-coloured and so are the boundaries; you cannot imagine a
boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary line.
Therefore, when I speak of significant form, I mean a combination of
lines and colours (counting white and black as colours) that moves me
aesthetically.
Some people may be surprised at my not having called this "beauty."
Of course, to those who define beauty as "combinations of lines and
colours that provoke aesthetic emotion," I willingly concede the right
of substituting their word for mine. But most of us, however strict we
may be, are apt to apply the epithet "beautiful" to objects that do not
provoke that peculiar emotion produced by works of art. Everyone, I
suspect, has called a butterfly or a flower beautiful. Does anyone feel
the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a
cathedral or a picture? Surely, it is not what I call an aesthetic emotion
that most of us feel, generally, for natural beauty. I shall suggest, later,
that some people may, occasionally, see in nature what we see in art,
and feel for her an aesthetic emotion; but I am satisfied that, as a rule,
most people feel a very different kind of emotion for birds and flowers
and the wings of butterflies from that which they feel for pictures, pots,
temples and statues. Why these beautiful things do not move us as
works of art move is another, and not an aesthetic, question. For our
immediate purpose we have to discover only what quality is common
to objects that do move us as works of art. In the last part of this

chapter, when I try to answer the question--"Why are we so profoundly
moved by some combinations of lines and colours?" I shall hope to
offer an acceptable explanation of why we are less profoundly moved
by others.
Since we call a quality that does not raise the characteristic aesthetic
emotion "Beauty," it would be misleading to call by the same name the
quality that does. To make "beauty" the object of the aesthetic emotion,
we must give to the word an over-strict and unfamiliar definition.
Everyone sometimes uses "beauty" in an unaesthetic sense; most
people habitually do so. To everyone, except perhaps here and there an
occasional aesthete, the commonest sense of the word is unaesthetic. Of
its grosser abuse, patent in our chatter about "beautiful huntin'" and
"beautiful shootin'," I need not take account; it would be open to the
precious to reply that they never do so abuse it. Besides, here there is
no danger of confusion between the aesthetic and the