But there is a danger in lingering too long in the intellectual
regions; the other regions of the human spirit may be called the
aesthetic and the mystical regions. To take the aesthetic region
next, the duty of the philosopher is to realize at the outset that
the perception of beauty is essentially an individual thing, and
that the canons of what are called good taste are of all things the
most shifting. In this region the danger of dogmatism is very
great, because the more that a man indulges the rapturous
perception of the beauty that appeals to himself, the more likely
he is to believe that there is no beauty outside of his own
perceptions. The duty of a man who wishes to avoid egotism in this
region is to try and recognize faithful conception and firm
execution everywhere; to realize that half, and more than half, of
the beauty of everything is the beauty of age, remoteness, and
association. There is no temptation so strong for the aesthetic
nature, as to deride and contemn the beauty of the art that we have
just outgrown. To take a simple case. The Early Victorian
upholsterers derided the stiffness and austerity of Queen Anne
furniture, and the public genuinely admired the florid and rococo
forms of Early Victorian art. A generation passed, and Early
Victorian art was relentlessly derided, while the Queen Anne was
reinstalled. Now there are signs of a growing tolerance among
connoisseurs of the Early Victorian taste again. The truth is that
there is no absolute beauty in either; that the thing to aim at is
progress and development in art, and that probably the most
dangerous and decadent sign of all is the reverting to the beauty
of a previous age rather than striking out a new line of our own.
The aim then of the man who would avoid aesthetic egotism should be,
not to lay down canons of what is or what is not good art, but to