our sensibilities have early been educated.
Even the most catholic of tastes becomes restricted in the
course of education. To Western ears, there is at first no
music at all in Chinese music, and Beethoven would appear to
the Chinese as barbarous as their compositions appear to us.

But while in a wide sense, conformity to the average determines
or limits our possible appreciation of the beautiful,
within these limits certain elements are intrinsically more
pleasing than others. Those elements of experience, in the
first place, more readily acquire aesthetic values, which in
themselves strikingly impress the senses. Thus tallness in a
man, because it is in the first place striking, becomes readily
incorporated into our standard of the beautiful. And all elements
in themselves beautiful, the human eye, the curve of
the arm, the wave of the hair, come to be emphasized. These
outstanding elements may themselves become conventionalized
and standardized, so that objects of art which conform
to them are insured thereby of a certain degree of recognition
as beautiful. Too close a conformity produces monotonous
formalities, cloying classicisms. Too wide a divergence
results in shock and unpleasantness. The history of all the arts,
however, is full of instances of how the taste of a people can be
educated to new forms. Ruskin had to educate the English
people to an appreciation of Turner. The poets of the Romantic
period were condemned by the critics brought up on
the rigid classic models. The so-called Romantic movements
in the arts are, at their best, departures from old forms, not
into formlessness, but into new, various, and more fruitful
forms. Romanticism at its worst dissolves into mere formlessness
and inarticulate ecstacies. Infinite variety of forms
the world of experience may be made to wear, but sensations,
emotions, and ideas must be given some form, if they are to
pass from a fruitless yearning after beauty into its positive
incarnation in objects of art.

All forms have their characteristic emotional effects, as have
all materials, even apart from the emotions or ideas they express.
The glitter of gold and the sparkle of diamonds, the
strength of marble, the sturdiness of oak--we hardly can
think of these materials without thinking of the associations
which go with them. Similarly the symmetry of the colonnades
of a temple, the multiplicity and variety of Gothic
architecture, even so simple a form as a circ