ur in modern times. It is a reaction against
the view which became established in the course of the last century.
It was the habit of the eighteenth century to judge poetry by its form
alone; the nineteenth judged it by the spirit which inspired it, by
that which, as De Quincey puts it, was "incarnated" in a work of art.
William Blake literally believed that there was a real world of the
imagination which was opened up to the artist in his visions, and that
was why he said: "Learn to see _through_, not _with_, the eye."
Coleridge, too, asserted the primacy of Reason and imagination; and
for Wordsworth poetry was "Reason in her most exalted form," just as
for Keats "Beauty is truth, truth Beauty." Even so logical and prosaic
a thinker as John Stuart Mill recognised that supremacy of the artist
to which he himself could not attain; the artist, as he said in a
letter to Carlyle, perceives truth immediately, by intuition, and it
was his own humble function to translate the truths discerned by the
artist into logic. "Is not the distinction between mysticism, the
mysticism which is of truth, and mere dreamery, or the institution of
imaginations for realities, exactly this, that mysticism may be
translated into logic?" Logic, for Mill, was only the hand-servant of
that art which is concerned, not with "imaginations" only, but with
realities. And it was in the same spirit that Matthew Arnold laid down
his decisive verdict that literature is a criticism of life, that it
may be subjected to a "universal" estimate, and that the standard is
"the best that has been said and thought in the world."

But in recent years there has been a revolt against the idea of
standards or authority in art. Art has always been conceived as
something which affords pleasure; but now it is conceived as that
which affords pleasure to anyone. The democracy, now that it has
become literate, claims the right of private judgment, equality for
its members even in matters of art. And in a sense it is right.
Nothing should be or can be acclaimed as beautiful unless it appears
beautiful to the spectator. There is no criterion of beauty outside
the perception of beauty. For each man, that only is beautiful which
affords him the experience of beauty; and whatever does afford him
that experience has given him the aesthetic pleasure which is the true
pleasure of art. But there are many pleasurable thrills which have
nothing to do with beauty or with art. That is wh