Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne?  Only one answer seems possible—­significant form.  In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions.  These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call “Significant Form”; and “Significant Form” is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

At this point it may be objected that I am making aesthetics a purely subjective business, since my only data are personal experiences of a particular emotion.  It will be said that the objects that provoke this emotion vary with each individual, and that therefore a system of aesthetics can have no objective validity.  It must be replied that any system of aesthetics which pretends to be based on some objective truth is so palpably ridiculous as not to be worth discussing.  We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.  The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with each individual.  Aesthetic judgments are, as the saying goes, matters of taste; and about tastes, as everyone is proud to admit, there is no disputing.  A good critic may be able to make me see in a picture that had left me cold things that I had overlooked, till at last, receiving the aesthetic emotion, I recognise it as a work of art.  To be continually pointing out those parts, the sum, or rather the combination, of which unite to produce significant form, is the function of criticism.  But it is useless for a critic to tell me that something is a work of art; he must make me feel it for myself.  This he can do only by making me see; he must get at my emotions through my eyes.  Unless he can make me see something that moves me, he cannot force my emotions.  I have no right to consider anything a work of art to which I cannot react emotionally; and I have no right to look for the essential quality in anything that I have not felt to be a work of art.  The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience.  All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience—­that is to say, they must be subjective.

Yet, though all aesthetic theories must be based on aesthetic judgments, and ultimately all aesthetic judgments must be matters of personal taste, it would be rash to assert that no theory of aesthetics can have general validity.  For, though A, B, C, D are the works that move me, and A, D, E, F the works that move you, it may well be that x is the only quality believed by either of us to be common to all the works in his list.  We may all agree about aesthetics, and yet differ about particular works of art.  We may differ as to the presence or absence of the quality x.  My immediate object will be to show that significant form is the only quality common and peculiar to all the works of visual art that move me; and I will ask those whose aesthetic experience does not tally with mine to see whether this quality is not also, in their judgment, common to all works that move them, and whether they can discover any other quality of which the same can be said.