Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/57

42 is a square pattern; and you may have one — the early draughtsmen were very fond of them — which not only is a pattern on paper or on gold, but which represents, say, a bull hunt.

This is a new factor, and it introduces not only quite a different motive in art, but the entire problem of what passes as the beauty of nature. Because obviously a drawing of a bull hunt recalls to us things rather than patterns. For a pattern, as a rule, you want the help of a draughtsman; but for things you can see all round you every day, you seem to want no help at all. Only they do not prima facie show you simple abstract patterns; and so, how do you bring them to act as an aesthetic embodiment of feeling?

And the same difficulty applies to a whole great branch of the activity of fine art. It may draw for you a bull hunt, or sculpture Phoebus Apollo, or sing to you the story of Troy. All this is on a quite different footing from what we called the a priori form of aesthetic expression.