Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/119

104 is looked for in the beautiful, and its opposite found” (Solger). That is to say, the appearance must suggest an adequate embodiment of a feeling, and also frustrate it. The imagination must be at once excited in a particular direction and thwarted in it. The pain of a discord in music, it has been said, is like trying to do a sum in your head, and finding the numbers too high. A nickering light is another simple example; if the period of flickering is just enough to begin to satisfy the eye, and then to check its activity, it is exceedingly painful.

Then, going back on our account of the embodiment of feeling and the experience of the rising mountain, we see that any sudden check or break in a pattern, e.g. an obvious want of symmetry, if it is not explained to the imagination, must have this effect of arousing the mind in a certain direction, and then obstructing it in that same direction. This double effect may be brought under the general head of the inexpressive. But of course it is not the