Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/46

Rh and the nature-lover, which is wholly alien to that of the creative artist, can be the true aesthetic attitude. The arts which appeal to the eye exercise too much glamour over us. Think of singing, acting, dancing; the feeling of following music or reading poetry with true poetic appreciation.

Then go back to the simple case, say, of a mountain, or of the sea in a storm, when you call it splendid. Surely we enter into these objects in some way; we are absorbed; they carry us away. I find some difficulty here in recent aesthetic books; they want you to maintain a contemplative attitude and yet to be absorbed in the object, which involves, I should say, being carried away by it, e.g. in music.

You find the same problem if you look for the aesthetic attitude in the “judgment of taste.” It implies a tradition which is not altogether wholesome. Taste, a metaphor drawn, we note, from an unaesthetic sense, suggests a rather superficial judgment