III

THE METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESIS

For the present I have said enough about the aesthetic problem and about Post-Impressionism; I want now to consider that metaphysical question—­“Why do certain arrangements and combinations of form move us so strangely?” For aesthetics it suffices that they do move us; to all further inquisition of the tedious and stupid it can be replied that, however queer these things may be, they are no queerer than anything else in this incredibly queer universe.  But to those for whom my theory seems to open a vista of possibilities I willingly offer, for what they are worth, my fancies.

It seems to me possible, though by no means certain, that created form moves us so profoundly because it expresses the emotion of its creator.  Perhaps the lines and colours of a work of art convey to us something that the artist felt.  If this be so, it will explain that curious but undeniable fact, to which I have already referred, that what I call material beauty (e.g. the wing of a butterfly) does not move most of us in at all the same way as a work of art moves us.  It is beautiful form, but it is not significant form.  It moves us, but it does not move us aesthetically.  It is tempting to explain the difference between “significant form” and “beauty”—­that is to say, the difference between form that provokes our aesthetic emotions and form that does not—­by saying that significant form conveys to us an emotion felt by its creator and that beauty conveys nothing.

For what, then, does the artist feel the emotion that he is supposed to express?  Sometimes it certainly comes to him through material beauty.  The contemplation of natural objects is often the immediate cause of the artist’s emotion.  Are we to suppose, then, that the artist feels, or sometimes feels, for material beauty what we feel for a work of art?  Can it be that sometimes for the artist material beauty is somehow significant—­that is, capable of provoking aesthetic emotion?  And if the form that provokes aesthetic emotion be form that expresses something, can it be that material beauty is to him expressive?  Does he feel something behind it as we imagine that we feel something behind the forms of a work of art?  Are we to suppose that the emotion which the artist expresses is an aesthetic emotion felt for something the significance of which commonly escapes our coarser sensibilities?  All these are questions about which I had sooner speculate than dogmatise.

Let us hear what the artists have got to say for themselves.  We readily believe them when they tell us that, in fact, they do not create works of art in order to provoke our aesthetic emotions, but because only thus can they materialise a particular kind of feeling.  What, precisely, this feeling is they find it hard to say.  One account of the matter, given me by a very good artist, is that what he tries to express