the explorer creates his Niagara; but he does not know in advance that it will be Niagara—at least, he cannot know what Niagara.
But after all, in practical life many purposes are combined in a single act without conscious contradiction. In at least one art, architecture, we recognize that utilitarian and aesthetic purposes may be and indeed must be combined harmoniously.[1] May not something similar be true of literature? Certainly we often call that literature, and I think rightly, which has for its main purpose the communication of something, because with the communication is joined the sense of creating beauty. If the aesthetic end is secondary in this case, it seems at least probable that the secondary end would be utterly defeated if we tried to separate it from the primary one of communication. On the other hand, our adventurer in words who begins with mere creative impulse—as some writers apparently do—does not discover Niagara.
University of Illinois
- ↑ More clearly than any other writer on aesthetics with whom I am acquainted, M. Guyau has shown the impossibility of separating the useful and the beautiful. See especially the second chapter of Les Problemes de l'Esthétique Contemporaine. As a rule for both art and poetry he gives the following (p. 81): "L'émotion produite par l'artiste sera d'autant plus vive que, au lieu de faire simplement appel à des images visuelles ou auditives indifférentes, il tâchera de réveiller en nous, d'une part les sensations les plus profondes de l'être, d'autre part les sentiments les plus moraux et les idées les plus élevées de l'esprit."
