Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/78

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And this leads to the important question, what is meant by the ideal in art. The essential point is, as we saw when speaking of the idealisation of nature, that the ideal should not be a tendency which is negatively related to the fullest aesthetic expression. The ideal has often indicated a generalisation and abstraction, ultimately depending on the notion that to get at the root and law of things is to get at a generalised common element in which they resemble one another. But we saw that if it means anything in application to nature, it means the heightened expression of character and individuality which come of a faith in the life and divinity with which the external world is instinct and inspired.

This same conception of the ideal is the lesson of our doctrine of art. The ideal of every art must be revealed, I take it, in terms of the art itself; and it must be what underlies the whole series of efforts which the artist’s imagination has made and is making, to create, in his own medium, an embodied feeling in which he