so deeply
stirred again, we remain persuaded that no objects save those we then
discovered can have a true sublimity. These high-water marks of aesthetic
life may easily be reached under tutelage. It may be some eloquent
appreciations read in a book, or some preference expressed by a gifted
friend, that may have revealed unsuspected beauties in art or nature;
and then, since our own perception was vicarious and obviously inferior
in volume to that which our mentor possessed, we shall take his
judgments for our criterion, since they were the source and exemplar of
all our own. Thus the volume and intensity of some appreciations,
especially when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes them
authoritative over our subsequent judgments. On those warm moments hang
all our cold systematic opinions; and while the latter fill our days and
shape our careers it is only the former that are crucial and alive.

A race which loves beauty holds the same place in history that a season
of love or enthusiasm holds in an individual life. Such a race has a
pre-eminent right to pronounce upon beauty and to bequeath its judgments
to duller peoples. We may accordingly listen with reverence to a Greek
judgment on that subject, expecting that what might seem to us wrong
about it is the expression of knowledge and passion beyond our range; it
will suffice that we learn to live in the world of beauty, instead of
merely studying its relics, for us to understand, for instance, that
imitation is a fundamental principle in art, and that any rational
judgment on the beautiful must be a moral and political judgment,
enveloping chance aesthetic feelings and determining their value. What
most German philosophers, on the contrary, have written about art and
beauty has a minimal importance: it treats artificial problems in a
grammatical spirit, seldom giving any proof of experience or
imagination. What painters say about painting and poets about poetry is
better than lay opinion; it may reveal, of course, some petty jealousy
or some partial incapacity, because a special gift often carries with it
complementary defects in apprehension; yet what is positive in such
judgments is founded on knowledge and avoids the romancing into which
litterateurs and sentimentalists will gladly wander. The specific values
of art are technical values, more permanent and definite than the
adventitious analogies on which a stray observer usually bases his
views. Only a technica