#1
It is improbable that more nonsense has been written about aesthetics than about anything else: The
literature of the subject is not large enough for that. It is certain, however, that about no subject
with which I am acquainted has so little been said that is at all to the purpose. The explanation is
discoverable. He who would elaborate a plausable theory of aesthetics must possess two
qualities-artistic sensability and a turn for clear thinking. Without sensability a man can have no
aesthetic experience, and, obviously, theories not based on broad and deep aesthetic experience
are worthless. Only those for whom art is a constant source of passionate emotion can possess the
data from which profitable theories may be deduced; but to deduce profitable theories even form
accurate data involves a certain amount of brain-work, and, unfortunately, robust intellects and
delicate sensibilities are not inseparable. As often as not, the hardest thinkers have had no aesthetic
experience whatever. I have a friend blessed with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he
takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an
aesthetic emotion. So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt
to rear up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art.
This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much of its value; for it has ever been a
maxim that faultless logic can win but little credit for conclusions that are based on premises
notoriously false. Every cloud, however, has its silver lining, and this insensibility, though unlucky 
in that it makes my friend incapable of choosing a sound basis for his argument, mercifully blinds 
him to the absurdity of his conclusions while leaving him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic.
People who set out from the hypothesis that Sir Edwin Landseer was the finest painter that ever
lived will feel no uneasiness about an aesthetic which proves that Giotto was the worst. So, my
friend, when he arrives very logically at the conclusion that a work of art should be small or round
or smooth, or that to appreciate fully a picture you should pace smartly before it or set it spinning
like a top, cannot guess why I ask him whether he has lately been to Cambridge, a place he
sometimes visits. 

#2
On the other hand, people who respond immediately and surely to works of art, though, in my
judgment, more enviable than men of massive intellect but slight sensibility, are often quite as
incapable of talking sense about aesthetics. Their heads are not always very clear. They possess
the data on which any system must be based; but, generally, they want the power that draws
correct inferences from true data. Having received aesthetic emotions from works of art, they are in
a position to seek out the quality common to all that have moved them, but, in fact, they do nothing
of the sort. I do not blame them. Why should they bother to examine their feelings when for them to
feel is enough? Why should they stop to think when they are not very good at thinking? Why
should they hunt for a common quality in all objects that move them in a particular way when they
can linger over the many delicious and peculiar charms of each as it comes? So, if they write
criticism and call it aesthetics, if they imagine that they are talking about Art when they are talking
about particular works of art or even about the technique of painting, if loving particular works they
find tedious the consideration of art in general, perhaps they have chosen the better part. If they are
not curious about the nature of their emotion, nor about the quality common to all objects that
provoke it, they have my sympathy, and, as what they say is often charming and suggestive, my
admiration too. Only let no one suppose that what they write and talk is aesthetics; it is criticism, or
just "shop." 

#3
The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar
emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that
there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. I do not mean, of course, that all works
provoke the same emotion. On the contrary, every work produces a different emotion. But all
these emotions are recognisably the same in kind; so far, at any rate, the best opinion is on my side.
That there is a particular kind of emotion provoked by works of visual art, and that this emotion is
provoked by every kind of visual art, by pictures, sculptures, buildings, pots, carvings, textiles, &c.,
&c., is not disputed, I think, by anyone capable of feeling it. This emotion is called the aesthetic
emotion; and if we can discover some quality common and peculiar to all the objects that provoke
it, we shall have solved what I take to be the central problem of aesthetics. We shall have
discovered the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of art from all
other classes of objects. 

#4
For either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of "works of art"
we gibber. Everyone speaks of "art," making a mental classification by which he distinguishes the
class "works of art" from all other classes. What is the justification of this classification? What is 
the quality common and peculiar to all members of this class? Whatever it be, no doubt it is often 
found in company with other qualities; but they are adventitious-it is essential. There must be some 
one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no 
work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that 
provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to St. Sophia and the windows at 
Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and 
the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems 
possible-significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms 
and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and 
colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant Form" is the 
one quality common to all works of visual art. 

#5
At this point it may be objected that I am making aesthetics a purely subjective business, since my
only data are personal experiences of a particular emotion. It will be said that the objects that
provoke this emotion vary with each individual, and that therefore a system of aesthetics can have
no objective validity. It must be replied that any system of aesthetics which pretends to be based
on some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth discussing. We have no other
means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic
emotion vary with each individual. Aesthetic judgments are, as the saying goes, matters of taste;
and about tastes, as everyone is proud to admit, there is no disputing. A good critic may be able to
make me see in a picture that had left me cold things that I had overlooked, till at last, receiving the
aesthetic emotion, I recognise it as a work of art. To be continually pointing out those parts, the
sum, or rather the combination, of which unite to produce significant form, is the function of
criticism. But it is useless for a critic to tell me that something is a work of art; he must make me
feel it for myself. This he can do only by making me see; he must get at my emotions through my
eyes. Unless he can make me see something that moves me, he cannot force my emotions. I have
no right to consider anything a work of art to which I cannot react emotionally; and I have no right
to look for the essential quality in anything that I have not felt to be a work of art. The critic can
affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics
must be based on personal experience-that is to say, they must be subjective. 

#6
Yet, though all aesthetic theories must be based on aesthetic judgments, and ultimately all aesthetic
judgments must be matters of personal taste, it would be rash to assert that no theory of aesthetics
can have general validity. For, though A, B, C, D are the works that move me, and A, D, E, F the
works that move you, it may well be that x is the only quality believed by either of us to be
common to all the works in his list. We may all agree about aesthetics, and yet differ about
particular works of art. We may differ 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. 

#7
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." 

#8
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. 

#9
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. 

#10
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 non-aesthetic
use; but when we speak of a beautiful woman there is. When an ordinary man speaks of a beautiful
woman he certainly does not mean only that she moves him aesthetically; but when an artist calls a
withered old hag beautiful he may sometimes mean what he means when he calls a battered torso
beautiful. The ordinary man, if he be also a man of taste, will call the battered torso beautiful, but 
he will not call a withered hag beautiful because, in the matter of women, it is not to the aesthetic
quality that the hag may possess, but to some other quality that he assigns the epithet. Indeed, most
of us never dream of going for aesthetic emotions to human beings, from whom we ask something
very different. This "something," when we find it in a young woman, we are apt to call "beauty." 
We live in a nice age. With the man-in-the-street "beautiful" is more often than not synonymous 
with "desirable"; the word does not necessarily connote any aesthetic reaction whatever, and I am
tempted to believe that in the minds of many the sexual flavour of the word is stronger than the
aesthetic. I have noticed a consistency in those to whom the most beautiful thing in the world is a
beautiful woman, and the next most beautiful thing a picture of one. The confusion between
aesthetic and sensual beauty is not in their case so great as might be supposed. Perhaps there is
none; for perhaps they have never had an aesthetic emotion to confuse with their other emotions.
The art that they call "beautiful" is generally closely related to the women. A beautiful picture is a
photograph of a pretty girl; beautiful music, the music that provokes emotions similar to those
provoked by young ladies in musical farces; and beautiful poetry, the poetry that recalls the same
emotions felt, twenty years earlier, for the rector’s daughter. Clearly the word "beauty" is used to
connote the objects of quite distinguishable emotions, and that is a reason for not employing a term
which would land me inevitably in confusions and misunderstandings with my readers. 

#11
On the other hand, with those who judge it more exact to call these combinations and arrangements
of form that provoke our aesthetic emotions, not "significant form," but "significant relations of
form," and then try to make the best of two worlds, the aesthetic and the metaphysical, by calling
these relations "rhythm," I have no quarrel whatever. Having made it clear that by "significant 
form" I mean arrangements and combinations that move us in a particular way, I willingly join 
hands with those who prefer to give a different name to the same thing. 

#12
The hypothesis that significant form is the essential quality in a work of art has at least one merit
denied to many more famous and more striking-it does help to explain things. We are all familiar
with pictures that interest us and excite our admiration, but do not move us as works of art. To this
class belongs what I call "Descriptive Painting"-that is, painting in which forms are used not as
objects of emotion, but as means of suggesting emotion or conveying information. Portraits of
psychological and historical value, topographical works, pictures that tell stories and suggest
situations, illustrations of all sorts, belong to this class. That we all recognize the distinction is 
clear, for who has not said that such and such a drawing was excellent as illustration, but as 
a work of art worthless? Of course many descriptive pictures possess, amongst other qualities, 
formal significance, and are therefore works of art: but many more do not. They interest us; they 
may move us too in a hundred different ways, but they do not move us aesthetically. According 
to my hypothesis they are not works of art. They leave untouched our aesthetic emotions 
because it is not their forms but the ideas or information suggested or conveyed by their forms 
that affect us. 

#13
Few pictures are better known or liked than Frith’s "Paddington Station"; certainly I should be the
last to grudge it its popularity. Many a weary forty minutes have I whiled away disentangling its
fascinating incidents and forging for each an imaginary past and an improbable future. But certain
though it is that Frith’s masterpiece, or engravings of it, have provided thousands with half-hours of
curious and fanciful pleasure, it is not less certain that no one has experienced before it one
half-second of aesthetic rapture-and this although the picture contains several pretty passages of
colour, and is by no means badly painted. "Paddington Station" is not a work of art; it is an
interesting and amusing document. In it line and colour are used to recount anecdotes, suggest
ideas, and indicate the manners and customs of an age: they are not used to provoke aesthetic
emotion. Forms and the relations of forms were for Frith not objects of emotion, but means of
suggesting emotion and conveying ideas. 

#14
The ideas and information conveyed by "Paddington Station" are so amusing and so well presented
that the picture has considerable value and is well worth preserving. But, with the perfection of
photographic processes and of the cinematograph, pictures of this sort are becoming otiose. Who
doubts that one of those Daily Mirror photographers in collaboration with a Daily Mail reporter
can tell us far more about "London day by day" than any Royal Academician? For an account of
manners and fashions we shall go, in future, to photographs, supported by a little bright journalism,
rather than to descriptive painting. Had the imperial academicians of Nero, instead of manufacturing
incredibly loathsome imitations of the antique, recorded in fresco and mosaic the manners and
fashions of their day, their stuff, though artistic rubbish, would now be an historical gold-mine. If
only they had been Friths instead of being Alma Tademas! But photography has made impossible
any such transmutation of modern rubbish. Therefore it must be confessed that pictures in the Frith
tradition are grown superfluous; they merely waste the hours of able men who might be more
profitably employed in works of a wider beneficence. Still, they are not unpleasant, which is more
than can be said for that kind of descriptive painting of which "The Doctor" is the most flagrant
example. Of course "The Doctor" is not a work of art. In it form is not used as an object of
emotion, but as a means of suggesting emotions. This alone suffices to make it nugatory; it is worse
than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false. What it suggests is not pity and admiration
but a sense of complacency in our own pitifulness and generosity. It is sentimental. Art is above
morals, or, rather, all art is moral because, as I hope to show presently, works of art are immediate
means to good. Once we have judged a thing a work of art, we have judged it ethically of the first
importance and put it beyond the reach of the moralist. But descriptive pictures which are not
works of art, and, therefore, are not necessarily means to good states of mind, are proper objects
of the ethical philosopher’s attention. Not being a work of art, "The Doctor" has none of the
immense ethical value possessed by all objects that provoke aesthetic ecstasy; and the state of
mind to which it is a means, as illustration, appears to me undesirable. 

#15
The works of those enterprising young men, the Italian Futurists, are notable examples of
descriptive painting. Like the Royal Academicians, they use form, not to provoke aesthetic
emotions, but to convey information and ideas. Indeed, the published theories of the Futurists
prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art. Their social and political
theories are respectable, but I would suggest to young Italian painters that it is possible to become
a Futurist in thought and action and yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be born one. To
associate art with politics is always a mistake. Futurist pictures are descriptive because they aim at
presenting in line and colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment; their forms are not
intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information. These forms, by the way,
whatever may be the nature of the ideas they suggest, are themselves anything but revolutionary. In
such Futurist pictures as I have seen-perhaps I should except some by Severini-the drawing,
whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is found to be in that soft and common
convention brought into fashion by Besnard some thirty years ago, and much affected by
Beaux-Art students ever since. As works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible; but they are not
to be judged as works of art. A good Futurist picture would succeed as a good piece of
psychology succeeds; it would reveal, through line and colour, the complexities of an interesting
state of mind. If Futurist pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation, not in a lack of artistic
qualities that they never were intended to possess, but rather in the minds the states of which they
are intended to reveal. 

#16
Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves them most the greater part
is what scholars call "Primitive." Of course there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember
going, full of enthusiasm, to see one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers
(Notre-Dame-la-Grande), and finding it as ill-proportioned, over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy
as any better class building by one of those highly civilised architects who flourished a thousand
years earlier or eight hundred later. But such exceptions are rare. As a rule primitive art is
good-and here again my hypothesis is helpful-for, as a rule, it is also free from descriptive qualities.
In primitive art you will find no accurate representation; you will find only significant form. Yet no
other art moves us so profoundly. Whether we consider Sumerian sculpture or predynastic
Egyptian art, or archaic Greek, or the Wei and T’ang masterpieces, or those early Japanese works
of which I had the luck to see a few superb examples (especially two wooden Bodhisattvas) at the
Shepherd’s Bush Exhibition in 1910, or whether, coming nearer home, we consider the primitive
Byzantine art of the sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the Western barbarians,
or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic art that flourished in Central and
South America before the coming of the white men, in every case we observe three common
characteristics-absence of representation, absence of technical swagger, sublimely impressive form.
Nor is it hard to discover the connection between these three. Formal significance loses itself in
preoccupation with exact representation and ostentatious cunning. 

#17
Naturally, it is said that if there is little representation and less saltimbancery in primitive art, that is
because the primitives were unable to catch a likeness or cut intellectual capers. The contention is
beside the point. There is truth in it, no doubt, though, were I a critic whose reputation depended
on a power of impressing the public with a semblance of knowledge, I should be more cautious
about urging it than such people generally are. For to suppose that the Byzantine masters wanted
skill, or could not have created an illusion had they wished to do so, seems to imply ignorance of
the amazingly dexterous realism of the notoriously bad works of that age. Very often, I fear, the
misrepresentation of the primitives must be attributed to what the critics call, "willful distortion." 
Be that as it may, the point is that, either from want of skill or want of will, primitives neither 
create illusions, nor make display of extravagant accomplishment, but concentrate their energies 
on the one thing needful-the creation of form. Thus have they created the finest works of art that 
we possess. 

#18
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 is 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.

#19
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. 

#20
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. 

#21
This last sentence has a very confident ring-over-confident, some may think. Perhaps I shall be able
to justify it, and make my meaning form clearer too, if I give an account of my own feelings about
music. I am not really musical. I do not understand music well. I find musical form exceedingly
difficult to apprehend, and I am sure that the profounder subtleties of harmony and rhythm more
often than not escape me. The form of a musical composition must be simple indeed if I am to grasp 
it honestly. My opinion about music is not worth having. Yet, sometimes, at a concert, though my
appreciation of the music is limited and humble, it is pure. Sometimes, though I have a poor
understanding, I have a clean palate. Consequently, when I am feeling bright and clear and intent, at
the beginning of a concert for instance, when something that I can grasp is being played, I get from
music that pure aesthetic emotion that I get from visual art. It is less intense, and the rapture is
evanescent; I understand music too ill for music to transport me far into the world of pure aesthetic
ecstasy. But at moments I do appreciate music as pure musical form, as sounds combined
according to the laws of a mysterious necessity, as pure art with a tremendous significance of its
own and no relation whatever to the significance of life; and in those moments I lose myself in that
infinitely sublime state of mind to which pure visual form transports me. How inferior is my normal
state of mind at a concert. Tired or perplexed, I let slip my sense of form, my aesthetic emotion
collapses, and I begin weaving into the harmonies, that I cannot grasp, the ideas of life. Incapable
of feeling the austere emotions of art, I begin to read into the musical forms human emotions of
terror and mystery, love and hate, and spend the minutes, pleasantly enough, in a world of turbid
and inferior feeling. At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation-the
song of the bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons - to be
introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should be pleased; they
would afford new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know
very well what has happened. I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading
into it the ideas of life. I have been cutting blocks with a razor. I have tumbled from the superb
peaks of aesthetic exaltation to the snug foothills of warm humanity. It is a jolly country. No one
need be ashamed of enjoying himself there. Only no one who has ever been on the heights can help
feeling a little crestfallen in the cosy valleys. And let no one imagine, because he has made merry in
the warm tilth and quaint nooks of romance, that he can even guess at the austere and thrilling
raptures of those who have climbed the cold, white peaks of art. 

#22
About music most people are as willing to be humble as I am. If they cannot grasp musical form
and win from it a pure aesthetic emotion, they confess that they understand music imperfectly or not
at all. They recognise quite clearly that there is a difference between the feeling of the musician for
pure music and that of the cheerful concertgoer for what music suggests. The latter enjoys his own
emotions, as he has every right to do, and recognises their inferiority. Unfortunately, people are apt
to be less modest about their powers of appreciating visual art. Everyone is inclined to believe that
out of pictures, at any rate, he can get all that there is to be got; everyone is ready to cry "humbug"
and "impostor" at those who say that more can be had. The good faith of people who feel pure
aesthetic emotions is called in question by those who have never felt anything of the sort. It is the
prevalence of the representative element, I suppose, that makes the man in the street so sure that
he knows a good picture when he sees one. For I have noticed that in matters of architecture,
pottery, textiles, &c., ignorance and ineptitude are more willing to defer to the opinions of those
who have been blest with peculiar sensibility. It is a pity that cultivated and intelligent men and
women cannot be induced to believe that a great gift of aesthetic appreciation is at least as rare in
visual as in musical art. A comparison of my own experience in both has enabled me to discriminate
very clearly between pure and impure appreciation. Is it too much to ask that others should be as
honest about their feelings for pictures as I have been about mine for music? For I am certain that
most of those who visit galleries do feel very much what I feel at concerts. They have their
moments of pure ecstasy; but the moments are short and unsure. Soon they fall back into the world
of human interests and feel emotions, good no doubt, but inferior. I do not dream of saying that 
what they get from art is bad or nugatory; I say that they do not get the best that art can give. I do 
not say that they cannot understand art; rather I say that they cannot understand the state of mind 
of those who understand it best. I do not say that art means nothing or little to them; I say they 
miss its full significance. I do not suggest for one moment that their appreciation of art is a thing to 
be ashamed of; the majority of the charming and intelligent people with whom I am acquainted 
appreciate visual art impurely; and, by the way, the appreciation of almost all great writers has 
been impure. But provided that there be some fraction of pure aesthetic emotion, even a mixed 
and minor appreciation of art is, I am sure, one of the most valuable things in the world-so 
valuable, indeed, that in my giddier moments I have been tempted to believe that art might prove 
the world’s salvation.

#23
Yet, though the echoes and shadows of art enrich the life of the plains, her spirit dwells on the
mountains. To him who woos, but woos impurely, she returns enriched what is brought. Like the
sun, she warms the good seed in good soil and causes it to bring forth good fruit. But only to the
perfect lover does she give a new strange gift-a gift beyond all price. Imperfect lovers bring to art
and take away the ideas and emotions of their own age and civilisation. In twelfth-century Europe a
man might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque church and found nothing in a T’ang picture.
To a man of a later age, Greek sculpture meant much and Mexican nothing, for only to the former
could he bring a crowd of associated ideas to be the objects of familiar emotions. But the perfect
lover, he who can feel the profound significance of form, is raised above the accidents of time and
place. To him the problems of archaeology, history, and hagiography are impertinent. If the forms
of a work are significant its provenance is irrelevant. Before the grandeur of those Sumerian figures
in the Louvre he is carried on the same flood of emotion to the same aesthetic ecstasy as, more
than four thousand years ago, the Chaldean lover was carried. It is the mark of great art that its
appeal is universal and eternal. Significant form stands charged with the power to provoke aesthetic
emotion in anyone capable of feeling it. The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats; men change
their institutions and their customs as they change their coats; the intellectual triumphs of one age
are the follies of another; only great art remains stable and unobscure.  Great art remains stable
and unobscure because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place, because 
its kingdom is not of this world. To those who have and hold a sense of the significance of form 
what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before 
yesterday or in Babylon fifty centuries ago? The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by 
the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

END OF CHAPTER ONE