Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/121

106 quite unprovoked, is, as we said, a typical case.

Thus we approach the general result that the principal region in which to look for insuperable ugliness is that of conscious attempts at beautiful expression — in a word, the region of insincere and affected art. Here you necessarily have the very root of ugliness — the pretension to pure expression, which alone can have a clear and positive failure. It is possible, I take it, for the appearances of nature to have the same effect, and therefore to be genuinely ugly. But there is a wide difference of principle between the two provinces, because to nature we can never impute the conscious effort at beautiful expression; and therefore the particular context in which we seem to see such an effort negatived must always be one of our own choosing. The ugly effect must therefore be in some degree imputable to our own mis-selection rather than to the being of nature herself; although, of course, one may argue that just because she has no