Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/59

44 of expression; to use our experience of the character and qualities which things have really and in actuality, to help our imagination in its exploration of the forms which respond satisfactorily to feeling.

It is plain that we are not to lose hold of what we have got; the simple pattern or rhythm which we ventured to call expressive a priori. Every work of art and every thing of beauty presents such a pattern, so to speak, on its surface. But we must contrive to understand how the same principle can extend into the sphere of the representation of things; of which things, prima facie, we know only what we have learned from experience, and can say, it would seem, little that is necessary or inevitable as to the connection of appearances with any character or quality which could help to embody feeling. For instance, a man’s laughing might be the expression of pain or anger, if we had not learned by experience that it is otherwise. Green trees might be the withering ones, and brown trees the flourishing ones;