Art & Creativity Quote by George Henry Lewes

Lewes is quietly stripping language of its aura. No sacred “word,” no mystical essence: just symbols in motion, agreed upon by a community and made meaningful by use. That demystification matters because it collapses the usual hierarchy that puts rational prose on one side and “mere” aesthetic experience on the other. If language is symbolic, then art isn’t an irrational cousin of thought; it’s operating in the same basic medium, just with different stakes and intensities.

The intent is almost disciplinary: a philosopher of the mid-Victorian moment, Lewes is pushing against Romantic ideas of ineffable artistic truth and against the comforting notion that language transparently mirrors reality. The subtext is that meaning is mediated all the way down. We don’t touch the world directly; we handle it through sign-systems, conventions, metaphors, images, rhythms. That’s as true for a scientific description as it is for a painting or a novel.

Why it works is its double “only.” The word sounds reductive, even deflationary, but it’s doing the opposite: widening the frame. “Only symbols” doesn’t make language small; it makes art intellectually legible. In Lewes’s orbit (Victorian realism, early psychology, proto-semiotic thinking), this is an argument for taking aesthetic experience seriously as a form of cognition: art affects us because it rearranges the symbols that organize perception, emotion, and social life, not because it bypasses them.