Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/23

8 gain, no advance, no new depth of experience promoted by the connection. But if you have the power to draw out or give imaginative shape to the object and material of your sorrowful experience, then it must undergo a transformation. The feeling is submitted to the laws of an object. It must take on permanence, order, harmony, meaning, in short value. It ceases to be a mere self-absorption. One may think of the little poem at the close of the book of Georgian poetry, or, on a larger scale, of In Memoriam. The values of which the feeling is capable have now been drawn out and revealed as by cutting and setting a gem. When I say “of which the feeling is capable,” I only record the fact that the feeling has been thus developed. For, of course, it is transformed, and the feeling as finally expressed is a new creation, not the simple pain, without large significance, which was felt at first.

It is just the same in principle if the embodiment is found and not created; it may be a mountain or a flower. You have