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the beauty of gems or of a butterfly's wing,
the beauty that pleases, but does not seem to
provoke that peculiar thrill that we call an
aesthetic emotion. I suggested very cautiously
that the explanation of this difference might
lie in the fact that the forms created by an
artist express, or in some way transmit, an
emotion felt by their creator, whereas the forms
of nature, so far as most of us are concerned,
do not seem to hand on anything so definite.
But about this part of my theory I was, and
still am, extremely diffident, and I mention it
here only in the hope of
justifying what has
seemed to many sensible people a silly name.
At the beginning of my book I was at some
pains to explain why I held that all systems of
aesthetics must be based on personal experience.
I said that my purpose
quality common and peculiar
was to discover some
to all works
that moved me aesthetically, and I invited
those whose experience did not tally with
mine and whose experience does tally exactly
with that of any one else ? to discover some
other quality common and peculiar to all the
objects that so moved them. I said that in
elaborating a theory of aesthetics an author
must depend entirely on his own experience,
and in my book I depended entirely on mine.
There are people to whom a simple statement
of this sort comes as a pressing invitation to