Art | Page 9

a world with emotions of its
own.
To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense
of form and colour and a knowledge of three-dimensional space. That
bit of knowledge, I admit, is essential to the appreciation of many great
works, since many of the most moving forms ever created are in three
dimensions. To see a cube or a rhomboid as a flat pattern is to lower its
significance, and a sense of three-dimensional space is essential to the
full appreciation of most architectural forms. Pictures which would be
insignificant if we saw them as flat patterns are profoundly moving
because, in fact, we see them as related planes. If the representation of
three-dimensional space is to be called "representation," then I agree
that there is one kind of representation which is not irrelevant. Also, I
agree that along with our feeling for line and colour we must bring with
us our knowledge of space if we are to make the most of every kind of
form. Nevertheless, there are magnificent designs to an appreciation of
which this knowledge is not necessary: so, though it is not irrelevant to
the appreciation of some works of art it is not essential to the
appreciation of all. What we must say is that the representation of
three-dimensional space is neither irrelevant nor essential to all art, and
that every other sort of representation is irrelevant.
That there is an irrelevant representative or descriptive element in many
great works of art is not in the least surprising. Why it is not surprising
I shall try to show elsewhere. Representation is not of necessity baneful,
and highly realistic forms may be extremely significant. Very often,
however, representation is a sign of weakness in an artist. A painter too

feeble to create forms that provoke more than a little aesthetic emotion
will try to eke that little out by suggesting the emotions of life. To
evoke the emotions of life he must use representation. Thus a man will
paint an execution, and, fearing to miss with his first barrel of
significant form, will try to hit with his second by raising an emotion of
fear or pity. But if in the artist an inclination to play upon the emotions
of life is often the sign of a flickering inspiration, in the spectator a
tendency to seek, behind form, the emotions of life is a sign of
defective sensibility always. It means that his aesthetic emotions are
weak or, at any rate, imperfect. Before a work of art people who feel
little or no emotion for pure form find themselves at a loss. They are
deaf men at a concert. They know that they are in the presence of
something great, but they lack the power of apprehending it. They
know that they ought to feel for it a tremendous emotion, but it happens
that the particular kind of emotion it can raise is one that they can feel
hardly or not at all. And so they read into the forms of the work those
facts and ideas for which they are capable of feeling emotion, and feel
for them the emotions that they can feel--the ordinary emotions of life.
When confronted by a picture, instinctively they refer back its forms to
the world from which they came. They treat created form as though it
were imitated form, a picture as though it were a photograph. Instead of
going out on the stream of art into a new world of aesthetic experience,
they turn a sharp corner and come straight home to the world of human
interests. For them the significance of a work of art depends on what
they bring to it; no new thing is added to their lives, only the old
material is stirred. A good work of visual art carries a person who is
capable of appreciating it out of life into ecstasy: to use art as a means
to the emotions of life is to use a telescope for reading the news. You
will notice that people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions
remember pictures by their subjects; whereas people who can, as often
as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture is. They have never
noticed the representative element, and so when they discuss pictures
they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations and quantities of
colours. Often they can tell by the quality of a single line whether or no
a man is a good artist. They are concerned only with lines and colours,
their relations and quantities and qualities; but from these they win an
emotion more profound and far more sublime than any that can be

given by the description of facts and ideas.
This last sentence