In the appreciation of the more objective types of art, the personality
expressed is not, of course, the actual personality; but rather the
self extended and expanded through the imagination. The things which
I seem to see and enjoy in the landscape picture I may have never
really seen; I may have never really moved through the open plain
there, as I seem to move, toward the mountain in the distance. The
acts described in the novel or portrayed on the stage I do not really
perform; the opinions uttered by the persons I do not hold. And yet,
in order to appreciate the picture, it must be _as if_ I really
saw the mountain and moved towards it; in order to appreciate the novel
or the play, I must make the acts and opinions mine. And this I can
do; for, as it is a commonplace to note, each one of us has within him
capacities of action and emotion and thought unrealized--the actual
self is only one of many that might have been--hundreds of possible
lives slumber in our souls. And no matter which of these lives we have
chosen for our own, or have had forced upon us by our fate, we always
retain a secret longing for all the others that have gone unfulfilled,
and an understanding born of longing. Some of these we imagine
distinctly--those that we consciously rejected or that a turn of chance
might have made ours; but most of them we ourselves have not the power
even to dream. Yet these too beckon us from behind, and the artist
provides us with their dream. Through art we secure an imaginative
realization of interests and latent tendencies to act and think and
feel which, because they are contradictory among themselves or at
variance with the conditions of our existence, cannot find free play
within our experience. That same sort of imaginative enlarged expression
of self that we get vicariously by participating in the life of our
friends we get also from art.[Footnote: Compare Santayana: _The Sense
of Beauty_, p. 186.]