AESTHETICS patriotic emotion or proletarian fervour Most importantly, art must be distinguished from craft or technical skill Art is not imitation or representation (mimesis), for that too is a craft Of course, a great work of art will also be a work of craft, but what makes it a work of art is not what makes it a work of craft If art were a craft, we could distinguish in it between end and means But if art has an end, it can only be the arousing of emotion; and this is not something that can be identified separately from the artistic activity, as a shoe can be identified separately from the act of cobbling Art should not be seen as the activity of arousing emotion, but as the activity of expressing emotion The true work of art is in fact the emotion in the artist himself Successful artists conclude their success in their own imagination; the externalization of their images in a public work of art is merely a matter of craft The inner work, the true work of art, consists in raising something preconscious, an inarticulate feeling, into an explicit and articulate state Following Croce, Collingwood accepted on this basis that imagination and expression were one and the same thing It is through language that the preconscious is transformed into the articulate; and in this sense all artistic expression, in whatever medium, is essentially linguistic If art is the expression of emotion, Collingwood argues, then the distinction between artist and audience disappears If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can understand him are those who are capable of experiencing that kind of fear themselves Hence, when someone reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet’s expression of his, the poet’s, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet’s words, which have thus become his own words As Coleridge put it, we know a man for a poet by the fact that he makes us poets (PA 118) Poet and reader share and express the same emotion: the difference is that the poet can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the reader needs the poet to show him how it is done By creating for ourselves (aided or unaided) an imaginary experience or activity, we express our emotions; and this is what we call art Croce and Collingwood differed from Tolstoy because they regarded art as something distinct from and independent of morality But all three writers 267