Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/124

Rh is an ambiguous term. If it means some given ideal which lays restrictions beforehand upon individual expressiveness, something of the nature of the easy beauty, which rules out what is beyond our capacity to grasp at a given moment, then it is very dangerous to say that beauty is the aim of art. It is dangerous, that is, if it means to us that we know beforehand what sort or type of thing our beauty is to be. For beauty is above all a creation, a new individual expression in which a new feeling comes to exist. And if we understand it so, there is not much meaning in saying that it is the aim of art, for we do not know beforehand what that is to be. If we understand it otherwise, as a rule previously prescribed, then it is something which must be hostile to free and complete expression for expression’s sake. In that case the aim of art is not the full aim, but only the art in the aim, and that is a fatal separation.

Of “art for art’s sake” the same criticism, I think, holds true. It tells you