d
Painting--all the various products of art--as but translations into
different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative
thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in
painting--of sound, in music--of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this
way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art
that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a
clear apprehension of the opposite principle--that the sensuous material
of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty,
untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions
distinct in kind--is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For,
as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the
"imaginative reason" through the senses, there are differences of kind
in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the
gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar
and incommunicable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching
the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material. One
of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define these limitations;
to estimate the degree in which a given work of art fulfils its
responsibilities to its special material; to note in a picture that true
pictorial charm, which is neither a mere poetical thought nor sentiment,
on the one hand, nor a mere result of communicable technical skill in
colour or design, on the other; to define in a poem that true poetical
quality, which is neither descriptive nor meditative merely, but comes
of an inventive handling of rhythmical language--the element of song in
the singing; to note in music the musical charm--that essential music,
which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable
from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.

To such a philosophy of the variations of the beautiful, Lessing's
analysis of the spheres of sculpture and poetry, in the Laocoon, was a
very important contribution. But a true appreciation of these things is
possible only in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries.
And it is in the criticism of painting that this truth most needs
enforcing, for it is in popular judgments on pictures that that false
generalisation of all art into forms of poetry is most prevalent. To
suppose that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or touch,
working through and a