Page:Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915).djvu/105

90 beauty — beauty which, although of the most distinguished quality, is universal in its appeal. I mean when a passage of feeling at high tension, simply and directly expressed, has the mixture of luck and merit which makes it strike on some great nerve of humanity, and thus conquer the suffrages of the world. Great artists, from Plato to Balzac, have laid stress on this possibility, and Balzac at least was not the man needlessly to admit anything in derogation of the pure prerogative of art. I have never found the man or woman to whom the Demeter of Knidos failed to appeal, and it surely cannot be set down as facile beauty in the depreciatory sense.

But, in general, one may say that the common mind — and all our minds are common at times — resents any great effort or concentration, and for the same reason resents the simple and severe forms which are often the only fitting embodiment of such a concentration — forms which promise, as Pater says, a great expressiveness, but only on condition of being received