Page:Criticism and Beauty.djvu/25

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
CRITICISM AND BEAUTY
19

of judgement have 'objective' value, and are as applicable to new cases as to old. The aesthetic critics of whom I am speaking make no such claim. They do not pretend to catalogue the external attributes by which the objective presence of the higher kinds of beauty can be securely established, which are never present when it is absent, or absent when it is present. They are always reduced in the last resort to ask, 'Does this work of art convey aesthetic pleasure?'—a test which, on the face of it, is subjective, not objective.

So also with regard to colour. There are of course persons of abnormal vision to whom the flower of a geranium appears to possess very much the same hue as its leaves. But this throws no doubt on what ordinary men mean either by the sensation of red, or by a red object. The physical quality which constitutes redness is perfectly well known, and when its presence in some external body is otherwise established, it may be confidently foretold that it will produce the sensation of red in persons normally constituted. But subject to what has been said above, we know nothing of the objective side of beauty. When we say that a tune is melodious, or an image sublime, or a scene pathetic, the adjectives may seem to be predicated of these objects, in precisely the same