templation of shape. Bearing this example in
mind we cannot fail to understand that, just as the thought of
_locomotion_ is opposed to the thought of _movement of lines,_ so,
in more or less degree, the thought of the objects and actions
represented by a picture or statue, is likely to divert the mind from
the pictorial and plastic shapes which do the representing. And we
can also understand that the problem unconsciously dealt with by all
art (though by no means consciously by every artist) is to execute
the order of suggesting interesting facts about things in a manner
such as to satisfy at the same time the aesthetic demand for shapes
which shall be satisfactory to contemplate. Unless this demand for
sensorially, intellectually and empathically desirable shapes be
complied with a work of art may be interesting as a diagram, a
record or an illustration, but once the facts have been conveyed and
assimilated with the rest of our knowledge, there will remain a shape
which we shall never want to lay eyes upon. I cannot repeat too
often that the differentiating characteristic of art is that it gives its
works a value for contemplation independent of their value for
fact-transmission, their value as nerve-and-emotion-excitant and of their
value for immediate, for practical, utility. This aesthetic value,
depending upon the unchanging processes of perception and
empathy, asserts itself in answer to every act of contemplative
attention, and is as enduring and intrinsic as the other values are apt
to be momentary and relative. A Greek vase with its bottom
knocked out and with a scarce intelligible incident of obsolete
mythology portrayed upon it, has claims upon our feelings which the
most useful modern mechanism ceases to have even in the intervals
of its use, and which the newspaper, crammed full of the most
important tidings, loses as soon as we have taken in its contents.

CHAPTER XVII

THE CO-OPERATION OF THINGS AND SHAPES

DURING the Middle Ages and up to recent times the chief task of
painting has been, ostensibly, the telling and re-telling of the same
Scripture stories; and, incidentally, the telling them with the addition
of constantly new items of information about _things:_ their volume,
position, structure, locomotion, light and shade and interactions of
texture and atmosphere; to which items must be added others of
psychological or (pseudo)-historical kind, how it all came about, in
what surroundings and