Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/67

52 You can copy a thing so splendidly that your copy will be more beautiful than the thing.

Thus we are prepared to understand the place and value of representation, which has always been something of a theoretical difficulty in aesthetic. It introduces prima facie an enormously larger and deeper world than the world of non-representative pattern- designing, to be the instrument of the embodiment of feeling. But the difficulty is that qua a mere world of fact, it has no capacity for a priori expression; and the use of it for expressive purposes, the imaginative use of fact, is therefore subject to innumerable dangers, arising from unaesthetic interests, which attach themselves to actual reality and therefore also to its imitative reproduction. Why multiply, for example, scenes and stories of wickedness? Is there not enough of it in the world already? If you are simply copying what you find, revealing in it no new depth or passion, the question is unanswerable.