Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/50

Rh The manual practice of art is not, I take it, an obstacle to this creative work of imagination, but on the contrary, as we shall see, is its essential medium and intensification. And the spectator’s attitude I take to be merely a faint analogue of the creative rapture of the artist.

The relation of the purely critical attitude to that of the spectator who enjoys and the artist who creates, does not seem to me altogether an easy problem. I think we shall be on the right lines if we demand in principle that the substratum of the critical attitude shall be the full imaginative experience, certainly of the spectator who enjoys, and as far as possible of the artist who creates. The true critic, indeed, is he, and he only, who can teach us rightly to enjoy. And we must bear in mind that the imagination itself is necessarily very sensitive to checks and failures in its efforts after satisfactory form — and this genuine sensitiveness, I should suppose, must be the basis of the true critical estimate.