Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/109

94 of counter-expression the normal, all of it, plus a further point of view, caricatured, chargé, loaded or burdened with an abnormal emphasis.

Thus, here again, you have the more, as compared with the normal experience of the beautiful; you have a wide range of forms, all of them distinguished by an attitude taken up towards the conventional attitude. And this demands both a complexity of expression and a complexity of mood, departing widely from the lines of the ordinary moods of serious life, and even of serious aesthetic experience. Comedy always shocks many people.

So much for difficult beauty. Now the object of thus insisting on these two grades of beauty was twofold.

First, to defend, as not merely convenient but right, the extension of the term beauty to all that is aesthetically excellent. For the insight of gifted persons regards it all as one; and the recognition of the same nature in it throughout in consequence of sincere self-education is a