we may like or love them,
though we can assign no ground for our preference.

If the analogy were pursued it might lead to something like a solution
of the difficulty. For all fine art is beautiful expression; it is
self-expression; it is the expression of something which the artist
perceives. If it strikes an answering chord in us we are satisfied;
and that fact of response means a community of perception, of aesthetic
knowledge, between the artist and the recipient, something perhaps
which is dragged from the depths of our duller natures but which burst
forth in expression from the artist with his quicker and more apt
perception. But let it be noted that there could be no such response
or sympathy conveyed from one to another by a symbol unless there were
some real bond, some existent principle possessed in common. Art is
communicative, but not surely a communication of nothing. It
communicates something which is not the less real because it is
intangible and mysterious. If it inexplicably affords us--as it
does--an experience which some persons describe as transcendent, then
that quality in it, which we call the "sublime" or the "beautiful,"
has at least to this extent a definite reality, that it affords us
unique experiences. It is this question which I shall examine in the
following chapter.

Some men have not been so made that they can respond to the beauty
which is summoned by art, just as some men, born blind, are not
touched by the light of the sun. But it is of no moment to say that
tastes differ. Men may differ about their friends, but they do not
differ about friendship. They may have different codes of honour, but
a sense of honour is the same thing for a savage as it is for a
bishop. And so not all things are called beautiful by the same men,
but beauty is the same for all.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Preface to _Round the Corner_. (Martin Secker.)

II

LITERATURE A FINE ART

There are many people of my acquaintance who think it almost indecent
to talk of literature as a fine art. They have the same distaste for
the word "art" as others have for the name of God. It has indeed been
misused in certain aesthetic circles and discussed almost unctuously,
so that it is often associated with long hair and cant, and seems
nonsensical if not disreputable to plain and honest men. I remember an
Oxford don, chiefly noted for his cricket and his knowledge of Homer,
and in later life for his dyspepsia, abusin