more distinctly that half of the ideas of aestheticians had merely served
to hide the real nature of the art about which they wrote; I understood
that while analysing psychological meanings in pictures, they were
shutting their eyes to the form and the colour; that while they were
dreaming about woods and lakes, and love and death, they were not
listening to the music. I gradually took in the fact that most writers
on art were simply substituting psychological or mystic or poetic
enjoyment, due to their own literary activities, for the simple artistic
enjoyment which was alone and solely afforded by art itself. I saw that
the more value any work of art possessed in itself, and the greater
the amount of pleasure which it could afford, the more extraneous and
impertinent was the sort of interest with which aestheticians tried to
invest it. I became aware that writers, being unable to awaken with
their machinery of thoughts and feelings and words the activities
awakened by the intrinsic qualities, visible or audible, of statues or
pictures or music, had unconsciously substituted an appeal to other
mental activities with which the works of art had at best but little
connection. This gradual discovery amused me, but it also made me
indignant. Had mankind appeared to me to be merely placidly enjoying as
artistic effects those which were not artistic effects at all, it would
have been a mere matter for amusement; but it seemed to me that as a
consequence of this mankind was entirely missing much of the enjoyment
which art could give, and, moreover, which could be given only by art.
Besides, art was for ever attempting really to produce those imaginary,
imagined effects: sculpture was trying to give psychological amusement,
music was trying to play tragedies and paint landscapes, and write
religious meditations; and in so doing art was incapacitating itself
for its real work, even as mankind was incapacitating itself for
appreciating the real powers of art. Hence, in so far as I thought
at all about art in its absolute relations to artist and public (as
distinguished from art as a psychological, historical, merely scientific
study) my thoughts all tended towards getting rid of those foreign,
extra-artistic, irrelevant interests which aestheticians have since the
beginning of time interposed between art and those who are intended to
enjoy it; my work has, unconsciously enough, been to logically justify
that perfectly simple, dire