A person so entirely pre-occupied with the purely formal meaning of a work of art, so entirely blind to all the overtones and associations of a picture like the Transfiguration is extremely rare. Nearly every one, even if highly sensitive to purely plastic and spatial appearances, will inevitably entertain some of those thoughts and feelings which are conveyed by implication and by reference back to life. The difficulty is that we frequently give wrong explanations of our feelings. I suspect, for instance, that Goethe was deeply moved by the marvellous discovery of design, whereby the upper and lower parts cohere in a single whole, but the explanation he gave of this feeling took the form of a moral and philosophical reflection.
It is evident also that owing to our difficulty in recognising the nature of our own feelings we are liable to have our æsthetic reaction interfered with by our reaction to the dramatic overtones and implications. I have chosen this picture of the Transfiguration precisely because its history is a striking example of this fact. In Goethe’s time rhetorical gesture was no bar to the appreciation of æsthetic unity. Later on in the nineteenth century, when the study of the Primitives had revealed to us the charm of dramatic sincerity and naturalness, these gesticulating figures appeared so false and unsympathetic that even people of æsthetic sensibility were unable to disregard them, and their dislike of the picture as illustration actually obliterated or prevented the purely æsthetic approval which they would probably otherwise have experienced. It seems to me that this attempt to isolate the elusive element of the pure æsthetic reaction from the compounds in which it occurs has been the most important advance of modern times in practical æsthetic.
The question which this simile suggests is full of problems; are these chemical compounds in the normal æsthetically gifted spectator, or are they merely mixtures due to our confused recognition of what goes on in the complex of our emotions? The picture I have chosen is also valuable, just at the present time, from this point of view. Since it presents in vivid opposition for most of us a very strong positive (pleasurable) reaction on the purely æsthetic side, and a violently negative (painful) reaction in the realm of dramatic association.