of feeling we know not what is converted into“the same emotion...accom-
panied by a new feeling of alleviation or easement.”^74 The feeling of allevi-
ation or easement that attaches to the same emotion thus transfigured is due
to the achieved sense that it is natural and apt to feel just this emotion, in full
and coherent attention to the subject matter presented. This explains, among
other things, why Walton is right to say that we do not always find the
experience of being sad to be painful. Sometimes in feeling sad we have an
achieved sense also that it is apt to feel just this sadness toward just these
subject matters, and that achieved sense has its own satisfactions.
We do feel infinitely graded mixtures of pity, fear, remorse, exhilaration,
delight, awe, calm, and many other emotions toward the phenomena of life–
including toward such things as experiences of space, landscape, and gestural
action, not only toward the kinds of subject matters that are presented in
plots in narrative art. Artists express these emotions, thus transfiguring and
easing them in a kind of clarification of their specific aptness to their specific
subject matters, in acts of full attention to the subject matter, which acts are
themselves achieved in the working of the materials of a medium of art. In
following that working of materials, we participate in the artist’s attention,
emotion, and expression. How and why we respond with feeling needs no
more explanation than this.(^74) Ibid., p. 117.
224 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art