Page:Criticism and Beauty.djvu/23

. The trained critic, be it in the art of riding or in contrapuntal conventions, may, by the application of purely impersonal tests, make a tolerably fair comparison. Familiar with the difficulties which have to be met, he can judge of the success with which they have been surmounted. Basing his estimate, not on feeling but on knowledge, he can measure aesthetic qualities by a scale which is not the less 'objective' because it may often be uncertain in its application.

Here, then, are aesthetic qualities (I have taken artistic workmanship as an example) which have a known reality apart from aesthetic feeling, and which can be independently measured. Of these it is possible, in a certain loose sense, to say that the man who admires them is right, and the man who does not admire them is wrong: that the one sees excellence when it is there, while the other does not. But when we pass from qualities like these, through doubtful and marginal cases, to the qualities we call 'sublime', 'beautiful', 'pathetic', 'humorous', 'melodious', and so forth, our position is quite different. What kind of existence are they known to possess apart from feeling? How are they to be measured except by the emotions they produce? Are they indeed anything but those very emotions illegitimately 'objectified', and assumed to be