ABSTRACT
Through the first impression, the artistic shock, the work arouses in us a recognition; and as little by little the diffusion of its elements takes place, it completely fills our consciousness. Now at each of its stages, the perception of art is accompanied by an affective state which one commonly calls the emotion of art, or artistic feeling, which ravishes the soul as a feast would gratify the appetite; it is unique. The vocabulary of affective psychology is inexact and uncertain, for the phenomena which it studies take place in a sort of obscure clarity in consciousness. Pleasure and pain are accompaniments of psychological activities, but a state of more or less mystery surrounds both. They place us in the presence of a physical modification so much the more difficult of analysis as the functions of life which they accompany are the more 87elementary. The joys of health, the organic pleasure which the resurgence of nature in springtime brings to our devitalized bodies are as hard to understand as the fatigue and melancholy of physiological nature. On the other hand, intellectual and moral joys and sorrows, for which one reserves more especially the name of emotions in order to distinguish them from physical ones, more clearly reveal their causes, their content, and their effects. In the gamut of feelings or of higher emotions the artistic sentiment is one of those that can best, it seems, be brought out into the open; it is aided to some extent by the light with which the perception of art is surrounded. It receives this light by reflection. The emotion or sentiment of art—the two appellations are synonomous—lends itself, in effect, to a disintegration similar to that of the rays of the sun issuing from a prism. There I find these two factors: a transport of love directed toward the perceived work and a thrill of pleasure with which this transport is accompanied. Let us study each.
