resent (or the emotion he is commissioned to elicit) as the
all-important _aim._ Thus he thinks of himself (and makes the critic
think of him) not as preventing the represented subject or expressed
emotion from withdrawing the beholder from the artistic shapes, but,
on the contrary, as employing these artistic shapes for the sole
purpose of that representation or emotional expression. And this
most explicable inversion of the real state of affairs ends by making
the beholder believe that what _he_ cares for in a masterpiece is not
the beauty of shape which only a masterpiece could have, but the
efficacy of bringing home a subject or expressing an emotion which
could be just as efficaciously represented or elicited by the vilest
daub or the wretchedest barrel organ! This inevitable, and I believe,
salutary illusion of the artist, is further in creased by the fact that
while the artist's ingenuity must be bent on avoiding irrelevance and
diminishing opportunities for ugliness, the actual beauty of the
shapes he is creating arises from the depths of his unreasoned,
traditional and organised consciousness, from activities which might
be called automatic if they were not accompanied by a critical
feeling that what is produced thus spontaneously and inevitably is
either turning out as it must and should, or, contrariwise, insists
upon turning out exactly as it _should not._ The particular system of
curves and angles, of directions and impacts of lines, the particular
"whole-and-part" scheme of, let us say, Michelangelo, is due to his
modes of aesthetic perceiving, feeling, living, added to those of all
the other artists whose peculiarities have been averaged in what we
call the school whence Michelangelo issued. He can no more depart
from these shapes than he can paint Rembrandt's Pilgrims of
Emmaus without Rembrandt's science of light and shade and
Rembrandt's oil-and-canvas technique. There is no alternative, hence
no choice, hence no feeling of a problem to resolve, in this question
of shapes to employ. But there are dozens of alternatives and of acts
of choice, there is a whole series of problems when Michelangelo
sets to employing these inevitable shapes to telling the Parting of the
Light from the Darkness, or the Creation of Adam on the Vault of
the Sixtine, and to surrounding the stories from Genesis with
Prophets and Sibyls and Ancestors of Christ. Is the ceiling to remain
a unity, or be broken up into irrelevant comp