Some Critical Terms of Henry James

Extract

A Survey of Western art in relation to its audience would suggest to an empirical æsesthetician that a degree of structural raggedness usually accompanies, if it does not actually constitute, artistic superiority. The trouble comes not, as often presumed, from difficulty in defining form, but from difficulty in experiencing it. Just as one art-lover may have a finer sense of line than another, with perhaps a weaker sense of color, so we may safely conclude from ubiquitous evidence that the perception of artistic form is a similarly variable factor. Disputes continually arise between those who derive a strong aesthetic experience from organic form in art and those who simply do not know what the others are talking about, and mistake genre, or type, or mechanical division for form. Either group may nourish the fallacy that an artist preoccupied with form is indifferent to almost everything else.