Mind & Art, by Guy Sircello (1972), Princeton University Press, New Jersey

Chapter Two: The Mind in Art

The Canonical Position implies that the range of phenomena which the Expression Theory could reasonably seek to accommodate is no more extensive than the range of cases in which anthropomorphic predicates are applicable to works of art. I the present chapter I shall argue that that assumption is wrong. In particular I shall show that there are what I shall call “subjective factors” in works of art, which, like artistic acts, are not discernable independently of the work but which, unlike many acts, are not describable in terms predicated of the work. …It is the major task of this chapter to clarify the nature of these subjective factors.

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The supposition that Devembez [in Greek Painting by Pierre Devambez] means that certain paintings either love nature or take delight in nature is patently ridiculous. The terms “love of nature” and “delight in nature” clearly operate differently in discourse about art from simple anthropomorphic predicates like “sad” and “gay” applied to art works.

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(5) It [a carved figure] is at once the expression and the habitation of a spirit. And again, by means which seem to escape from our comprehension, the miracle of an intense inner life is achieved. The vivid gesture of the hands holding the bowl, the head bowed forward with infinitely patient resignation, and the strange melancholy of the almost unseeing eyes: everything here – even the most surprising distortions – hangs together and co-operates in the realization of the idea. And what intense subtle understanding of form, what delicate unemphatic sensibility there is in the way the eyebrows are just indicated the curve of the brow.

            This spirit head has the complex, elusive, indefinable quality of the human spirit coloured….by the sense of suffering and resignation…

Roger Fry, Last Lectures (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p.79.

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One feature which a sense of suffering and resignation, a sense of power and mass, a feeling for goodness, and an awareness of manners have in common is that they all must be described in terms of their “objects”. For it is precisely in terms of what an “awareness”, a “sense” or a “feeling” is of or for that it is distinguishable from other “awarenesses”, “senses”, and “feelings” of this sort. Now it is possible to designate these forms of sensitivity in an adjectival way and to apply the adjective phrase to persons. A person might thus be sensitive to the suffering and resignation of others; he might be sensitive to the goodness of other people; he might be especially sensitive to what is powerful and massive; he might be aware of the manners of his time in an especially lively way. But it is surely nonsense to characterize sculptures, buildings, or novels in these sorts of ways. Forms of sensitivity, therefore, figure in art criticism in a way different from anthropomorphic “qualities”.    

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Here [In Lionel Trilling’s critical essay on Dickens’ Little Dorrit] the “subjective factor” is what Trilling calls the “imagination” of the novel. The entire passage is, in effect, a description of that “imagination”, but it is not a description translatable into an anthropomorphic description, however lengthy, of the novel itself.

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