itic to put the public in the way of enjoying
it.

2. _Second Thoughts_

It is becoming fashionable to take criticism seriously, or, more
exactly, serious critics are trying to make it so. How far they have
succeeded may be measured by the fact that we are no longer ashamed to
reprint our reviews: how far they are justified is another question. It
is one the answer to which must depend a good deal on our answer to that
old and irritating query--is beauty absolute? For, if the function of a
critic be merely to perform the office of a sign-post, pointing out
what he personally likes and stimulating for that as much enthusiasm as
possible, his task is clearly something less priestlike than it would
be if, beauty being absolute, it were his to win for absolute beauty
adequate appreciation.

I do not disbelieve in absolute beauty any more than I disbelieve
in absolute truth. On the contrary, I gladly suppose that the
proposition--this object must be either beautiful or not beautiful--is
absolutely true. Only, can we recognize it? Certainly, at moments we
believe that we can. We believe it when we are taken unawares and bowled
over by the purely aesthetic qualities of a work of art. The purely
aesthetic qualities, I say, because we can be thrown into that
extraordinarily lucid and unself-conscious transport wherein we are
aware only of a work of art and our reaction to it by aesthetic qualities
alone. Every now and then the beauty, the bald miracle, the "significant
form"--if I may venture the phrase--of a picture, a poem, or a piece of
music--of something, perhaps, with which we had long believed ourselves
familiar--springs from an unexpected quarter and lays us flat. We were
not on the look-out for that sort of thing, and we abandon ourselves
without one meretricious gesture of welcome. What we feel has nothing
to do with a pre-existent mood; we are transported into a world washed
clean of all past experience aesthetic or sentimental. When we have
picked ourselves up we begin to suppose that such a state of mind must
have been caused by something of which the significance was inherent and
the value absolute. "This," we say, "is absolute beauty." Perhaps it is.
Only, let us hesitate to give that rather alarming style to anything
that has moved us less rapturously or less spontaneously.

For, ninety-nine out of a hundred of our aesthetic experiences have been
carefully prepared. Art rarely catches us: we go half way to