act of the spokes of a wheel-pattern. And, along with
the empathic suggestion of the mechanical forces experienced in
ourselves, will come the empathic suggestion of spiritual
characteristics: the lines will have aims, intentions, desires, moods;
their various little dramas of endeavour, victory, defeat or
peacemaking, will, according to their dominant empathic suggestion,
be lighthearted or languid, serious or futile, gentle or brutal;
inexorable, forgiving, hopeful, despairing, plaintive or proud, vulgar
or dignified; in fact patterns of visible lines will possess all the chief
dynamic modes which determine the expressiveness of music. But
on the other hand there will remain innumerable emphatic
combinations whose poignant significance escapes verbal
classification because, as must be clearly understood, Empathy deals
not directly with mood and emotion, but with dynamic conditions
which enter into moods and emotions and take their names from
them. Be this as it may, and definable or not in terms of human
feeling, these various and variously combined (into coordinate
scenes and acts) dramas enacted by lines and curves and angles, take
place not in the marble or pigment embodying those contemplated
shapes, but solely in ourselves, in what we call our memory,
imagination and feeling. Ours are the energy, the effort, the victory
or the peace and cooperation; and all the manifold modes of
swiftness or gravity, arduousness or ease, with which their every
minutest dynamic detail is fraught. And since we are their only real
actors, these empathic dramas of lines are bound to affect us, either
as corroborating or as thwarting our vital needs and habits; either as
making our felt life easier or more difficult, that is to say as bringing
us peace and joy, or depression and exasperation.

Quite apart therefore from the convenience or not of the adjustments
requisite for their ocular measurement, and apart even from the
facility or difficulty of comparing and coordinating these
measurements, certain shapes and elements of shape are made
welcome to us, and other ones made unwelcome, by the sole
working of Empathy, which identifies the modes of being and
moving of lines with our own. For this reason meetings of lines
which affect us as neither victory nor honourable submission nor
willing cooperation are felt to be ineffectual and foolish. Lines also
(like those of insufficiently tapered Doric columns) which do not
_rise with enou