Page:Criticism and Beauty.djvu/42

 ideas plays so important a part in the creation of taste, the feeling of beauty springs from psychological causes so complex and so subtle, that we need feel no surprise at its being occasioned in different people by different objects. In the pleasures of sense we never get very far from the innate physiological qualities in which men are most alike. In the pleasures of aesthetics we are very largely concerned with the qualities in which men most vary—education, experience, beliefs, traditions, customs. The strange thing is not that there should be so little agreement in critical judgements, as that there should be so much:—though, to be sure, the agreement is, as I have already pointed out, often more apparent than real. This, however, is no consolation to those who cannot willingly part with the belief that in Art there is a 'right' and a 'wrong', as well as a 'more pleasing' and a 'less pleasing'. A theory which makes every man a law unto himself, which shatters anything in the nature of an independent standard, which barely admits the theoretic possibility of arriving at some rough estimate of the aesthetic values actually realized in experience, is to them wellnigh intolerable. It seems to make our highest ideals the sport of individual caprice, to reduce the essence of beauty to individual feeling, and in so