Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/77

62 for instance, recognised him, in this respect at least, as his master.

The differences of the great arts then are simply such differences as those between clay-modelling, wood-carving, and wrought-iron work, developed on an enormous scale, and with their inevitable consequences for whole provinces of aesthetic imagination.

For this is a fact of the highest importance. Every craftsman, we saw, feels the peculiar delight and enjoys the peculiar capacity of his own medium. This delight and sense of capacity are of course not confined to the moments when he is actually manipulating his work. His fascinated imagination lives in the powers of his medium; he thinks and feels in terms of it; it is the peculiar body of which his aesthetic imagination and no other is the peculiar soul.

Thus there grow up the distinct traditions, the whole distinctive worlds of imaginative thought and feeling, in which the great imaginative arts have their life and being.