Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/66

I take it that the real underlying interest is in the conquest of the difference of the medium. So that really, in the naïve praise of successful imitation, we have, if we read it rightly, the germ of the fundamental doctrine of aesthetic semblance. That is to say, what matters is not the thing, but the appearance which you can carry off, and deal with apart from it, and recreate. And the real sting of even the crudest glorification of copying is this wonder that you can carry off with you a thing’s soul, and leave its body behind. It is quite natural to misconceive this miracle as if the merit lay in making the soul as near as possible a replica of the body. But if you treat the soul as the body at its very best, that is not a bad analogy for the problem of representation in dealing with the aesthetic semblance. See how pregnant this praise of copying is. Dante, in the same passage, says that the carvings put to shame “not only Polycleitus, but Nature herself.” It is the spirit of Whistler’s “Nature’s creeping up.”