An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.^60

This latter expression“individualizes,”^61 as Collingwood puts it. It is specific
to a certain quality of life as brought under conceptual attention, and it is
distinctively expression proper or artistic expression. (It bears adding that the
emotion expressed in art is, for Collingwood, invariably its author’s. The
expression of this emotion can happen, however, by way of expressing an
author’s attitude toward a character’s quite distinct emotion. For example,
Hamletexpresses Shakespeare’s emotions–including interest–at increasing
uncertainties in modern life, the breakdown of moralities of honor, the
growth of individualism, the dangers and importance of conscience, and so
forth, and it does so by way of Shakespeare’s interest in Hamlet’s melancholy
and other moods. But Hamlet’s melancholy is not necessarily Shakespeare’s.
Likewise, T. S. Eliot both identifies with Prufrock’s emotion and its expres-
sion, but also achieves a certain situating distance on it, with its own expres-
sive tenor.)
Arousal of emotion is a matter of effecting or setting up causally an
emotion in an audience, quite standardly the province of propaganda, adver-
tising, or some other form of craft. It is a matter of providing a stimulus that
will work, according to disinterested knowledge of more or less prevailing
causal patterns of response.^62
Expression proper or artistic expression is quite different from betrayal,
description, and arousal. In genuine expression, one begins

conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is.

All [the incipient expresser] is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement,

which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While

in this state, all he can say about his emotion is:“I feel...I don’t know

what I feel.”From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself

by doing something we call expressing himself. This is an activity which

has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by

(^60) T. S. Eliot,“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”inThe Norton Anthology of English
Literature, 3rd edn, ed. M. H. Abrams et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), vol. II,
pp. 2164–67 at p. 2167, lines 120–25.
(^61) Collingood,Principles of Art, p. 112.
(^62) Seeibid., pp. 110–11.
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