The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 33
artistic spirit outside the synthesis; they will have existence
from another point of view in another plane of knowledge,
and feeling will be the practical aspect of the spirit that
loves and hates, desires and dislikes, and the image will be
the inanimate residue of art, the withered leaf, prey of the
wind of imagination and of amusement’s caprice. All this has
no concern with the artist or the æsthetieian: just as art is no
vain fancying, so is it not tumultuous passionality, but the
uplifting of that act by means of another act, or, if it be pre-
ferred, the substitution of that tumult for another tumult,
that of the longing to create and to contemplate for the joys
and the sorrows of artistic creation. It is therefore indifferent,
or a question of terminological opportunity, whether we
should present art as content or as form, provided it be al-
ways recognised that the content is formed and the form
filled, that feeling is figurative feeling and the figure a fig-
ure that is felt. And it is only owing to historical deference
toward him who better than others caused the concept of
the autonomy of art to be appreciated, and wished to affirm
this autonomy with the word “form,” thus opposing alike the
abstract theory of the content of the philosophisers and
moralists and the abstract formalism of the academicians,—
in deference, I say, to De Sanctis, and also because of the
ever active polemic against the attempts to absorb art in
other modes of spiritual activity,—that the æsthetie of the in-
tuition can be called “Æsthetic of form.” It is useless to re-
fute an objection that certainly might be made (but rather
with the sophistry of the advocate than with the acuteness
of the scientist), namely, that tire æsthetic of the intuition al-
so, since it describes the content of art as feeling or state of
the soul, qualifies it outside the intuition, and seems to ad-
mit that a content, which is not feeling or a state of the soul,

<<   <   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   >   >>