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 rightly I should feel differently? If there be a meaning, what is it?

In dealing with this fundamental question we must, I think, distinguish. There are kinds of aesthetic excellence to which, in a certain sense, we can apply an 'objective' test; though they are neither the highest kinds of excellence nor the most important from the point of view of theory, I might cite as examples technical skill, workmanship, the mastery over material and instruments, and kindred matters. These are more or less capable of impersonal measurement; and I cannot doubt either that the pleasure they give to the sympathetic observer is very great, or that it belongs to the same genus, if not the same species, as aesthetic feeling in its more familiar and higher meaning.

Some may think it dishonouring to beauty thus to class it with technical skill. Others, forgetful that Fine Art is the distant cousin of sport, may think it dishonouring to the technical skill required of the poet, the painter, or the musician, to compare it with that required of the cricketer or the billiard-player. There is no doubt an all-important difference between them. In the case of games, the pleasures which the sympathetic observation of great skill produces in a competent spectator are