Unluckily, history and personal experience—­those two black beasts of a priori idealists—­here await us.  If beauty be absolute, the past was sometimes insensitive, or we are:  for the past failed to recognize the beauty of much that seems to us supremely beautiful, and sincerely admired much that to us seems trash.  And we, ourselves, did we never despise what to-day we adore?  Murillo and Salvator Rosa and forgers of works by both enjoyed for years the passionate admiration of the cognoscenti In Dr. Johnson’s time “no composition in our language had been oftener perused than Pomfret’s Choice.”  If ever there was a man who should have been incapable of going wrong about poetry that man was Thomas Gray.  How shall we explain his enthusiasm for Macpherson’s fraud?  And if there be another of whom the bowling over might be taken as conclusive evidence in the court of literary appeal that other is surely Coleridge.  Hark to him:  “My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place....  And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author.”  That author was the Reverend Mr. Bowles.

I was saying that any work of art that has given the authentic thrill to a man of real sensibility must have an absolute and inherent value:  and, of course, we all are really sensitive.  Only, it is sometimes difficult to be sure that our thrill was the real coup de foudre and not the mere gratification of a personal appetite.  Let us admit so much:  let us admit that we do sometimes mistake what happens to suit us for what is absolutely and universally good; which once admitted, it will be easy to concede further that no one can hope to recognize all manifestations of beauty.  History is adamant against any other conclusion.  No one can quite escape his age, his civilization, and his peculiar disposition; from which it seems to follow that not even the unanimous censure of generations can utterly discredit anything.  The admission comes in the nick of time:  history was on the point of calling attention to the attitude of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Gothic, Romanesque, and Byzantine art.

The fact is, most of our enthusiasms and antipathies are the bastard offspring of a pure aesthetic sense and a permanent disposition or a transitory mood.  The best of us start with a temperament and a point of view, the worst with a cut-and-dried theory of life; and for the artist who can flatter and intensify these we have a singular kindness, while to him who appears indifferent or hostile it is hard to be even just.  What is more, those who are most sensitive to art are apt to be most sensitive to these wretched, irrelevant implications.  They pry so deeply into a work that they cannot help sometimes spying on the