In art, what about the great pictures and the great
poems, which have approved themselves to the best minds in generation
after generation? Their rightness and their beauty are only attested by
critics, they are surely not created by them? My view is that there
is an absolute law of beauty, and that we grow nearer to it by slow
degrees. Sometimes, as with the Greeks, people got very near to it
indeed. Is it conceivable, for instance, that men could ever come to
regard the Venus of Milo as ugly?"

"Why yes," said Musgrave, laughing, "I suppose that if humanity
developed on different lines, and a new type of beauty became desirable,
we might come to look upon the Venus of Milo as a barbarous and savage
kind of object, a dreadful parody of what we had become, like a female
chimpanzee. To a male chimpanzee, the wrinkled brow, the long upper lip,
the deeply indented lines from nose to mouth, of a female chimpanzee in
the prime of adolescence, is, I suppose, almost intolerably dazzling and
adorable--beauty can only be a relative thing, when all is said."

"We are drifting away from our point," I said. "The question really is
whether, as art expands, the principles become fewer or more numerous.
My own belief is that the principles do become fewer, but the varieties
of expression more numerous. Keats tried to sum it up by saying, 'Beauty
is Truth, Truth Beauty'; but it is not a successful maxim, because, as a
peevish philosopher said, 'Why in that case have two words for the same
thing?'"

"But it is true, in a sense, for all that," said Herries. "What we HAVE
learnt is that the subject is of very little importance in art--it is
the expression that matters. Genre pictures, plots of novels, incidents
of plays--they are all rather elementary things. Flaubert looked forward
to a time in art when there should be no subjects at all, when art
should aspire to the condition of music, and express the intangible."

"I confess," said Musgrave, laughing, "that that statement conveys
nothing to me. A painter, on that line, would depict nothing, but simply
produce a sort of harmony of colour. A picture would become simply
a texture of colour-vibrations. My own view is rather that it is a
question of accurate observation, followed by an extreme delicacy and
suggestiveness of expression. Some people would say that it was all a
question of reality; and that the point is that the writer shall suggest
a reality to his reader, even though the