Page:Criticism and Beauty.djvu/29

 quality of aesthetic emotion rises, as we approach the level where the sentiment of beauty becomes intense, and the passion of admiration incommunicable, there is not—and, I believe, cannot be—any real unanimity of personal valuation. On these high peaks men never wander in crowds: they whose paths lie close together on the slopes below, perforce divide into diminishing companies, as each moves upwards towards his chosen ideals of excellence.

If any man doubt that the agreement among experts is in some degree artificial, and in some degree imaginary, let him turn for a moment from the critics who have created our literary and artistic tradition to the men of genius who have created Literature and Art. No one will deny that they were men of 'trained sensibility': no one will maintain that they were agreed. So little, indeed, have they been agreed, that the law of change prevailing through certain important periods of artistic history seems to be based on their disagreement. Successive epochs, which show little difference in other elements of culture, yet often differ vehemently in their aesthetic judgements. Action is followed by reaction. A school, at one moment dominant, gradually decays, and is succeeded by another of sharply contrasted characteristics. The art-producing fields get wearied, as it were, of a crop too