ABSTRACT
Strachey's aesthetic imagination was fundamentally literary, occupied with biography and history. The Classical doctrine held as one of its most important tenets that the objects with which art concerned itself ought always to be beautiful in themselves. This Pastoral theory is typical of the Classical view of art. It is not sufficient to represent beautifully an ugly shepherdess; the shepherdess herself must be a thing of beauty. The 18th century outcry against Shakespeare's 'irregularities' was to a great extent based upon this kind of feeling. His defence – the impressionist defence – simply amounts to the statement that the best works of art do not differ in kind from a beautiful carpet or wall-paper – that they are decorative and nothing more. Surely one can make beautiful decorative patterns without the knowledge of the laws of Helmholtz – patterns whose particular beauty might be that they involved false lights, lights that no one had ever seen.
