4 Expression
Feelings about subject matters in life: Wordsworth, Tolstoy,
and Collingwood
Against the idea that works of art present a subject matter and the idea that
works of art embody pleasing formal arrangements, it can seem important to
emphasize that works of art are products of human action–madethings, not
just either imitations or forms. Without this emphasis artworks can seem
either too much like gratuitous reproductions of reality (like mirrors or
reflections in ponds) or too much like objects of idle pleasure and amusement
(like pretty decorations). When we instead focus on works of art as things that
human beings make, then these misemphases can be corrected. Though they
do present a subject matter and please through arrangement, works of art are
also made in order somehow to communicate something–an attitude, a point
of view, or a feeling about a subject matter–that lies in some sense“in”the
maker. Audiences typically approach a work with an interest not only in what
it asserts but also in what it more broadly communicates, that is, with an
interest in which attitudes and emotions toward its subject matter on the part
of its maker it makes manifest. It is natural therefore to think that artworks
areexpressiveobjects and that it is distinctive ofartisticrepresentations and
formal arrangements–in contrast with scientific treatises and decorations–
that they have as a central function theexpressionof attitudes and emotions
toward their subject matters. Only by attending to art as expression can we
properly engage with its distinctive kind of significance: the communication
of emotion and attitude, above and beyond simple assertion.
In the 1800 preface to the second edition ofLyrical Ballads, Wordsworth
eloquently sketches an expression theory of poetry as a way of establishing
its importance in human life, in contrast with decadent and idle entertain-
ment. His principal purpose in his poems, he tells us,
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