forgiving, remorseful, exhilarated, and so on. The attitudes that can be
expressed toward a subject matter in the artistic working of materials are
as various as the attitudes that we can have toward the phenomena of human
life, and they are always present. When we follow the work as an instance or
product of human action, then we follow and participate in the emotional
attitudes that are expressed in it. In this way, as Palmer puts it, the work
“gets us to see something and not merely to know”^70 it descriptively or at
second hand; we“dwell in the experience”^71 of attending to the subject
matter that the work presents. If the work is less successful, then attention
to the subject matter is incoherent, halting, or interrupted. The unsuccessful
work will seem to us to be determined in its form not by coherent attention,
but by shifting personal needs that are not worked through, or by market
forces and a wish to pander to an audience or provoke a scene, or by
sentimentality, in which the emotion is prepackaged rather than worked
through in an act of attention.^72 If the work is successful, then we participate
in a coherent emotional attitude toward its subject matter, and that emo-
tional attitude is clarified in an act of full attention that is expressed in the
work. We sense and feel that it is apt to feel pity and terror (toward the
situation and prospects of a shared humanity) toward this developing action
in a plot, or we sense and feel that it is apt to feel admiration and exhilaration
at this interplay of intelligence and wit, or we sense and feel that it is apt to
feel a majestic elegiac calm at this landscape or developing musical phrase.
Collingwood describes a kind of lightening and easing of mind that occurs
in the successful act of artistic expression.^73 A helpless and oppressive sense
(^70) Ibid., p. 193.
(^71) Ibid., p. 203, taking this phrase from David Pole,Aesthetics, Form and Emotion, ed.
G. Roberts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 11.
(^72) Rick Anthony Furtak provides a nice account of sentimentality as a form of evasiveness
and a failure to engage with reality in“Poetics of Sentimentality,”Philosophy and Literature
26, 1 (April 2002), pp. 207–15. In commenting on this essay during a conference presen-
tation at the 2001 meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Minneapolis, Alex
Neill noted that it is possible to distinguish two different senses of“sentimentality”:
indulgence in tender feelings (with which there is nothingper sewrong); and indulgence
in evasive, inappropriate feelings (which is to be deplored). One might add that a
connection between these two senses is that often (though not always or necessarily)
tender feelingsareindulged in as a way of escaping from life and clear-sightedness into
mawkishness.
(^73) Collingwood,Principles of Art, pp. 109–10.
Art and emotion 223