The Breviary of Aesthetic 39
tainly not that he would have been a great painter if the
sense of design and colour had been wanting to him.
And (be it noted in passing, for I must condense as I pro-
ceed) this apparent transformation of the intuitions into
physical things—altogether analogous with the apparent
transformation of wants and economic labour into things
and into merchandise—also explains how people have come
to talk not only of “artistic things” and of “beautiful things,”
but also of “a beautiful of nature.” It is evident that, besides
the instruments that are made for the reproduction of im-
ages, objects already existing can be met with, whether pro-
duced by man or not, which perform such a service—that is
to say, are more or less adapted to fixing the memory of our
intuitions; and these things take the name of “natural beau-
ties,” and exercise their fascination only when we know how
to understand them with the same soul with which the art-
ist or artists have taken and appropriated them, giving value
to them and indicating the “point of view” from which we
must look at them, thus connecting them with their own in-
tuitions. But the always imperfect adaptability, the fugitive
nature, the mutability of “natural beauties” also justify the
inferior place accorded to them, compared with beauties
produced by art. Let us leave it to rhetoricians or madmen
to affirm that a beautiful tree, a beautiful river, a sublime
mountain, or even a beautiful horse or a beautiful human fig-
ure, are superior to the chisel-stroke of Michelangelo or the
verse of Dante; but let us say, with greater propriety, that
“Nature” is stupid compared with Art, and that she is “mute,”
if man does not make her speak.
A third distinction, which also labours to distinguish the
indistinguishable, is attached to the concept of the æsthetie
expression, and divides it into two moments of expression