“But the worst of that theory is,” I said, “that one lays down canons of taste, which are very neat and pretty; and then there comes some new writer of genius, knocks all the old canons into fragments, and establishes a new law.  Canons of art seem to me sometimes nothing more than classifications of the way that genius works.  I find it very hard to believe that there is a pattern, so to speak, for the snuffers and the candlesticks, revealed to Moses in the mount.  It was Moses’ idea of a pair of snuffers, when all is said.”

“I entirely agree,” said Musgrave; “the only ultimate basis of all criticism is, ’I like it because I like it’—­and the connoisseurs of any age are merely the people who have the faculty of agreeing, I won’t say with the majority, but with the majority of competent critics.”

“No, no,” said Herries, raising his mournful eyes to Musgrave’s face, “don’t talk like that!  You take my faith away from me.  Surely there must be some central canon of morality in art, just as there is in ethics.  For instance, in ethics, is it conceivable that cruelty might become right, if only enough people thought it was right?  Is there no absolute principle at all?  In art, what about the great pictures and the great poems, which have approved themselves to the best minds in generation after generation?  Their rightness and their beauty are only attested by critics, they are surely not created by them?  My view is that there is an absolute law of beauty, and that we grow nearer to it by slow degrees.  Sometimes, as with the Greeks, people got very near to it indeed.  Is it conceivable, for instance, that men could ever come to regard the Venus of Milo as ugly?”

“Why yes,” said Musgrave, laughing, “I suppose that if humanity developed on different lines, and a new type of beauty became desirable, we might come to look upon the Venus of Milo as a barbarous and savage kind of object, a dreadful parody of what we had become, like a female chimpanzee.  To a male chimpanzee, the wrinkled brow, the long upper lip, the deeply indented lines from nose to mouth, of a female chimpanzee in the prime of adolescence, is, I suppose, almost intolerably dazzling and adorable—­beauty can only be a relative thing, when all is said.”

“We are drifting away from our point,” I said.  “The question really is whether, as art expands, the principles become fewer or more numerous.  My own belief is that the principles do become fewer, but the varieties of expression more numerous.  Keats tried to sum it up by saying, ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’; but it is not a successful maxim, because, as a peevish philosopher said, ’Why in that case have two words for the same thing?’”

“But it is true, in a sense, for all that,” said Herries.  “What we have learnt is that the subject is of very little importance in art—­it is the expression that matters.  Genre pictures, plots of novels, incidents of plays—­they are all rather elementary things.  Flaubert looked forward to a time in art when there should be no subjects at all, when art should aspire to the condition of music, and express the intangible.”