Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/48

Rh ments of music or the drama, it is plain, I think, that the aesthetic attitude must be imaginative. That is to say, it must be the attitude of a mind which freely tracks and pursues the detail of experience for the sake of a particular kind of satisfaction — not the satisfaction of complete and self-consistent theory, but the automatic satisfaction, so to speak, of a complete embodiment of feeling. The important point seems to me to be that “contemplation” should not mean “inertness,” but should include from the beginning a creative element. I have avoided, indeed, throughout this lecture, the word which I myself believe to be the keyword to a sound aesthetic, because it is not altogether a safe word to employ until we have made ourselves perfectly certain of the true/ relation between feeling and its embodiment. But to say that the aesthetic attitude is an attitude of expression, contains I believe if rightly understood the whole truth of the matter. Only, if we are going to use this language, we must