leisurely attitude characteristic of the aesthetic experience is
favorable to the recall of images; hence, just as in the aesthetic
perception of objects we put our feelings into them, so equally we
import into them the relevant images. The aesthetic reaction tends to
be total. Our demand for feeling in art also requires the image; for
feelings are more vividly attached to images than to abstract ideas.
It is a fact familiar in the experience of everybody that the strength
of the emotional tone of an object is a function of the clearness of
the image which we form of it on recall. We can preserve the feeling
tone of a past event or an absent object only if we can keep a vivid
image of it; as our image of it becomes vague, our interest in it
dissipates. Everywhere in our experience the image mediates between
feeling and idea. So in art. Images have no more an independent and
self-sufficient status in art than sensations have; like the latter
they are a means for the expression of feeling. In the painting of
sunlight, for example, the images of warmth carry joyousness and a
sense of ease; in the statue, the tactile images convey the emotional
response to the represented object. In literature the expressiveness
of images is perhaps even more impressive. Consider how longing is
aroused by the tactile, gustatory, and thermal images in the oft-quoted
lines of Keats:--

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth.

Examples might be multiplied indefinitely.

In literature alone of the arts, images from all departments of sense
can be aroused. Visual images play a greater role there than in painting
and sculpture, for the reason that, in the latter, visual sensations