Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/57

WHAT IS CRITICISM? correct. This declares to him that beauty is something absolute and objective—if not an entity, a thing, it at all events lies in expression—in the expression and charm of fitness. Only through a course of mental sophistry will he learn to accept the inverted theory of Véron (otherwise the most constructive of modern French critics), who maintains beauty's subjectivity, i. e., its non-existence except as an impression of the observer. Admit Véron's premise, that beauty is a chimera, and you must consider his treatise on "Æsthetics" unimpeachable. It is logical, masterly; but for one I do not think it sound doctrine, and the artistic nature is loath to believe, that "there is no disputing about tastes." I do not admit that Taste—and I use this hackneyed word in its full meaning—is purely the subjective standard of each individual, and that the taste of one is as good as that of another. Beauty everywhere is "a felt conformity to law"—of course to the law of its habitat; hence, again, the expression of the fitness of things, of the Right under the existing conditions. The personal "impressions" of one whose organization does not enable him to perceive that fitness, are no more to us than the visions of the half-blind who "see men as trees walking." And if from a material world or system all sentient observers were to be exiled, certain forms and combinations would still be beautiful in themselves, and would be found so by the first sane intelligence that should arrive to contemplate them.

Taste, therefore, is subjective, because man himself is a microcosm, having the operation of universal [43]