ain the difference between
"significant form" and "beauty"--that is to say, the difference between
form that provokes our aesthetic emotions and form that does not--by
saying that significant form conveys to us an emotion felt by its
creator and that beauty conveys nothing.

For what, then, does the artist feel the emotion that he is supposed to
express? Sometimes it certainly comes to him through material beauty.
The contemplation of natural objects is often the immediate cause of the
artist's emotion. Are we to suppose, then, that the artist feels, or
sometimes feels, for material beauty what we feel for a work of art? Can
it be that sometimes for the artist material beauty is somehow
significant--that is, capable of provoking aesthetic emotion? And if the
form that provokes aesthetic emotion be form that expresses something,
can it be that material beauty is to him expressive? Does he feel
something behind it as we imagine that we feel something behind the
forms of a work of art? Are we to suppose that the emotion which the
artist expresses is an aesthetic emotion felt for something the
significance of which commonly escapes our coarser sensibilities? All
these are questions about which I had sooner speculate than dogmatise.

Let us hear what the artists have got to say for themselves. We readily
believe them when they tell us that, in fact, they do not create works
of art in order to provoke our aesthetic emotions, but because only thus
can they materialise a particular kind of feeling. What, precisely, this
feeling is they find it hard to say. One account of the matter, given me
by a very good artist, is that what he tries to express 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
i