in a picture is “a passionate apprehension of form.”  I have set myself to discover what is meant by “a passionate apprehension of form,” and, after much talking and more listening, I have arrived at the following result.  Occasionally when an artist—­a real artist—­looks at objects (the contents of a room, for instance) he perceives them as pure forms in certain relations to each other, and feels emotion for them as such.  These are his moments of inspiration:  follows the desire to express what has been felt.  The emotion that the artist felt in his moment of inspiration he did not feel for objects seen as means, but for objects seen as pure forms—­that is, as ends in themselves.  He did not feel emotion for a chair as a means to physical well-being, nor as an object associated with the intimate life of a family, nor as the place where someone sat saying things unforgettable, nor yet as a thing bound to the lives of hundreds of men and women, dead or alive, by a hundred subtle ties; doubtless an artist does often feel emotions such as these for the things that he sees, but in the moment of aesthetic vision he sees objects, not as means shrouded in associations, but as pure forms.  It is for, or at any rate through, pure form that he feels his inspired emotion.

Now to see objects as pure forms is to see them as ends in themselves.  For though, of course, forms are related to each other as parts of a whole, they are related on terms of equality; they are not a means to anything except emotion.  But for objects seen as ends in themselves, do we not feel a profounder and a more thrilling emotion than ever we felt for them as means?  All of us, I imagine, do, from time to time, get a vision of material objects as pure forms.  We see things as ends in themselves, that is to say; and at such moments it seems possible, and even probable, that we see them with the eye of an artist.  Who has not, once at least in his life, had a sudden vision of landscape as pure form?  For once, instead of seeing it as fields and cottages, he has felt it as lines and colours.  In that moment has he not won from material beauty a thrill indistinguishable from that which art gives?  And, if this be so, is it not clear that he has won from material beauty the thrill that, generally, art alone can give, because he has contrived to see it as a pure formal combination of lines and colours?  May we go on to say that, having seen it as pure form, having freed it from all casual and adventitious interest, from all that it may have acquired from its commerce with human beings, from all its significance as a means, he has felt its significance as an end in itself?