Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/126

to concentrate upon a single leading conception, the conception of the way in which an object of imagination can be expressive of feeling, and the consequences of this way of expression for the feeling so expressed. And what I should like to have effected, from a negative point of view, so far as it is still necessary in these days, would be to have torn away the gilded veil, the glamour, so to speak, which hangs over the face of beauty and separates it from life. We are not advocating what is miscalled realism; our account of imaginative vision makes that a mere absurdity. But I am trying to prove, and not merely to prove but to help ourselves to realise, how the whole world of beauty, from the Greek key pattern on the one hand and our admiration of the curve of a waterfall on the other, up to the intricacies of the greatest architecture or the tension of Shakespearean tragedy, is the individual operation of a single impulse, the same in spectator and creative artist, and best discerned when we penetrate the heart of