rt-critics have often pointed out what may be called the thinness, the
lack of _staying power,_ of pictures deficient in the cubic element;
they ought also to have drawn attention to the fatiguing, the almost
hallucinatory excitement, resulting from uninterrupted attention to
two-dimensional pattern and architectural outlines, which were,
indeed, intended to be incidentally looked at in the course of taking
stock of the cubic qualities of furniture and buildings.

And since the limits of this volume have restricted me to painting as
a type of aesthetic contemplation, I must ask the Reader to accept on
my authority and if possible verify for himself, the fact that what I
have been saying applies, _mutatis mutandis,_ to the other arts. As
we have already noticed, something analogous to a third dimension
exists also in music; and even, as I have elsewhere shown,[*] in
literature. The harmonies accompanying a melody satisfy our
tendency to think of other notes and particularly of other allied
tonalities; while as to literature, the whole handling of words, indeed
the whole of logical thinking, is but a cubic working backwards and
forwards between _what_ and _how,_ a co-ordinating of items and
themes, keeping the mind enclosed in one scheme of ideas by
forestalling answers to the questions which would otherwise divert
the attention. And if the realisation of the third dimension has come
to be mistaken for the chief factor of aesthetic satisfaction, this error
is due not merely to the already noticed coincidence between cubic
imagination and artistic genius, but even more to the fact that cubic
imagination is the type of the various multiplying factors by which
the empathic, that is to say the essentially aesthetic, activity, can
increase its sphere of operations, its staying power and its intensity.

[*] _The Handling of Words,_ English Review, 1911-12.

CHAPTER XVIII

AESTHETIC RESPONSIVENESS

OUR examination has thus proceeded from aesthetic contemplation
to the work of Art, which seeks to secure and satisfy it while
furthering some of life's various other claims. We must now go back
to aesthetic contemplation and find out how the beholder meets
these efforts made to secure and satisfy his contemplative attention.
For the Reader will by this time have grasped that art can do nothing
without the collaboration of the beholder or listener; and that this
collaboration, so far from consisting in the passive "being impr