y Pre-Raphaelite
pictures, in which every detail is painted with minute perfection. It
was all there, no doubt, and it was all exactly like that; but that is
not how the human eye apprehends a scene. The human mind takes a central
point, and groups the accessories round it. In art, I think everything
depends upon centralisation. Two lovers part, and the birds' faint chirp
from the leafless tree, the smouldering rim of the sunset over misty
fields, are true and symbolical parts of the scene; but if you deal in
botany and ornithology and meteorology at such a moment, you cloud and
dim the central point--you digress when you ought only to emphasise."

"Oh yes," said Herries with a sigh, "that is all right enough--it all
depends upon proportion; and the worst of all these discussions on
points of art is that each person has to find his own standard--one
can't accept other people's standards. To me Bouvard et Pecuchet is
a piece of almost flawless art--it is there--it lives and breathes. I
don't like it all, of course, but I don't doubt that it happened so.
There must be an absolute rightness behind all supreme writing. Art must
have laws as real and immutable and elaborate as those of science and
metaphysics and religion--that is the central article of my creed."

"But the worst of that theory is," I said, "that one lays down canons
of taste, which are very neat and pretty; and then there comes some
new writer of genius, knocks all the old canons into fragments, and
establishes a new law. Canons of art seem to me sometimes nothing more
than classifications of the way that genius works. I find it very hard
to believe that there is a pattern, so to speak, for the snuffers and
the candlesticks, revealed to Moses in the mount. It was Moses' idea of
a pair of snuffers, when all is said."

"I entirely agree," said Musgrave; "the only ultimate basis of all
criticism is, 'I like it because I like it'--and the connoisseurs of any
age are merely the people who have the faculty of agreeing, I won't say
with the majority, but with the majority of competent critics."

"No, no," said Herries, raising his mournful eyes to Musgrave's face,
"don't talk like that! You take my faith away from me. Surely there must
be some central canon of morality in art, just as there is in ethics.
For instance, in ethics, is it conceivable that cruelty might become
right, if only enough people thought it was right? Is there no absolute
principle at all?