me Significant Form to just that form which seems to signify
nothing. I adopted the term with hesitation, and I shall sacrifice it
without pain if something better can be found to take its place. All the
same, I did try to explain what I meant by it. I speak of Significant
Form in contradistinction to Insignificant Beauty--the beauty of gems
or of a butterfly's wing, the beauty that pleases, but does not seem to
provoke that peculiar thrill that we call an aesthetic emotion. I
suggested very cautiously that the explanation of this difference might
lie in the fact that the forms created by an artist express, or in some
way transmit, an emotion felt by their creator, whereas the forms of
nature, so far as most of us are concerned, do not seem to hand on
anything so definite. But about this part of my theory I was, and still
am, extremely diffident, and I mention it here only in the hope of
justifying what has seemed to many sensible people a silly name.

At the beginning of my book I was at some pains to explain why I held
that all systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience. I
said that my purpose was to discover some quality common and peculiar to
all works that moved me aesthetically, and I invited those whose
experience did not tally with mine--and whose experience does tally
exactly with that of any one else?--to discover some other quality
common and peculiar to all the objects that so moved them. I said that
in elaborating a theory of aesthetics an author must depend entirely on
his own experience, and in my book I depended entirely on mine. There
are people to whom a simple statement of this sort comes as a pressing
invitation to score cheaply:--So now we know what art is, it is
whatever you are pleased to honour with your approval. "But why should
Mr. Bell suppose that the forms that move him are the only ones proper
to move others?" says Mr. Davies.

"Again, it is as foolish for Mr. Bell, or any other individual, to
say, as he does say, that Frith's _Paddington Station_ is not a
work of art as it would be for me to say that rhubarb tart--which I
detest--is not food. If I were the only person in the world who ate
anything, then, I admit, I should be right in saying that it was
not food--for it would not be, because I should never eat it. And
if Mr. Bell were the only spectator of works of art on earth, he
would have a perfect right to say that _Paddington S