Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/531

SUGGESTIONS ON ESTHETIC. 515 place of, and is, the greater. I am exhilarated by perceiving victorious power: trammels fall away; what is not, neverthe- less is ; the half is indeed more than the whole. I need phrases like these to describe my sensation ; to speak of the gratefulness of mere contrast is to my own feeling meagre. Do such cases reveal any part of the secret ? Can it be that the sense of victory and freedom which we gain in life generally through making the insufficient suffice, is what leads us to be ready to make the insufficient suffice in aesthetic ? For it must be remembered, of course, that the sense of beauty develops, and varies ; it seems to have been from the first and still to be largely modified, or nourished, or again stifled, by extraneous causes. Before proceeding, let us place this last instance and the previous one side by side, for the sake of clearness : different as they are, they are capable of resting on the same principle. 1. We welcome the subtle human quality when it persists onwards into the contradictory medium of stone. 2. We welcome the subtle quality that first appears as nine-syllabled-ness when it persists onwards into the contra- dictory medium of five-syllabled-riess. Precisely the same account should be given of the tendency in modern art to specialise the general or the ideal. This tendency appears in many forms. Suppose you are about to see one of Shakespeare's greatest plays performed, and that the greatest of living actors, whom you have never yet seen, is to present the chief character. You will, consciously or unconsciously, expect an ideal rendering : the rendering. Hitherto you have only seen makeshift Hamlets : this will be Hamlet indeed. When you hear the play, you may possibly find what was to have been an ideal rendering specialised by all kinds of particularities of manner, voice and reading, which the actor by no means tries to subdue in himself, but rather accentuates. He will give you Hamlet in an extreme of individuality ; and you will not, now-a-days, be displeased. Once more, quality holds its own in spite of difficulty : the ideal can be maintained even within the special. Sameness holds good in the extreme of difference. In every case of " beauty of expressiveness" I would give a similar analysis. I do not feel that the mere fact of ex- pressiveness in itself constitutes beauty. Beauty arises, not merely when we have the nature of a thing expressed, but when we have concurrently present to consciousness that nature, and a true representation of it in a medium other than its own ; that is, an adverse medium. I am far from supposing that I have penetrated deep in using such phrases