stronghold. Granted that beauty, as an abstract quality, is
timeless; granted that, in the judgment of a piece of literary
art, the standard of value is the canon of beauty, not the
type; yet the old order changeth. Primitive and civilized man,
the Hottentot and the Laplander, the Oriental and the Slav,
have desired differing beauties. May it, then, still be said
that although a given embodiment of beauty is to be judged
with reference to the idea of beauty alone, yet the concrete
ideal of beauty must wear the manacles of space and time,--
that the metamorphoses of taste preclude the notion of an
objective beauty? And if this is true, are we not thrown
back again on questions of genesis and development, and a
study of the evolution, not of particular types of art, but
of general aesthetic feeling; and, in consequence, upon a
form of criticism which is scientific in the sense of being
based on succession, and not on absolute value?

It is indeed true that the very possibility of a criticism
which shall judge of aesthetic excellence must stand or fall
with this other question of a beauty in itself, as an objective
foundation for criticism. If there is an absolute beauty, it
must be possible to work out a system of principles which shall
embody its laws,--an aesthetic, in other words; and on the basis
of that aesthetic to deliver a well-founded critical judgment.
Is there, then, a beauty in itself? And if so, in what does
it consist?

We can approach such an aesthetic canon in two ways: from the
standpoint of philosophy, which develops the idea of beauty as
a factor in the system of our absolute values, side by side