ty, and is pleased and interested in the
variations of it he observes in provincials; but the provincial is
always zealous to show that he has reason and ancient authority to
justify his oddities. So people who have no sensations, and do not
know why they judge, are always trying to show that they judge by
universal reason.

Thus the frailty and superficiality of our own judgments cannot
brook contradiction. We abhor another man's doubt when we
cannot tell him why we ourselves believe. Our ideal of other men
tends therefore to include the agreement of their judgments with
our own; and although we might acknowledge the fatuity of this
demand in regard to natures very different from the human, we
may be unreasonable enough to require that all races should admire
the same style of architecture, and all ages the same poets.

The great actual unity of human taste within the range of
conventional history helps the pretension. But in principle it is
untenable. Nothing has less to do with the real merit of a work of
imagination than the capacity of all men to appreciate it; the true
test is the degree and kind of satisfaction it can give to him who
appreciates it most. The symphony would lose nothing if half
mankind had always been deaf, as nine-tenths of them actually are
to the intricacies of its harmonies; but it would have lost much if
no Beethoven had existed. And more: incapacity to appreciate
certain types of beauty may be the condition _sine qua non_ for the
appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for
enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and
hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant.

The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are
philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they
indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of
them that has grown into a jealous passion. The architects that have
pieced out the imperfections of ancient buildings with their own
thoughts, like Charles V. when he raised his massive palace beside
the Alhambra, may be condemned from a certain point of view.
They marred much by their interference; but they showed a
splendid confidence in their own intuitions, a proud assertion of
their own taste, which is the greatest evidence of aesthetic sincerity.
On the contrary, our own gropings, eclecticism, and archaeology
are the symptoms of impotence. If we were less learned