Aesthetics

Excerpt from Æsthetics

As there is no such thing as abstract art, l'art en soi, because absolute beauty is a chimera,l so neither is there any definitive and final system of Esthetics. All the various formulas by which at various times it has been im prisoned - idealism, naturalism, realism, and such like, are nothing but different ways of looking at art, which is not entirely contained in any one of them. Each of them may recommend itself to certain individual or national tempera ments but it is absurd to force them upon natures to which they are repugnant. It is quite as ridiculous to condemn Flemish or Dutch art in the name of Greek sculpture, as to go through the reverse process, and to refuse all praise to Phidias because he is not Rembrandt. Courbet, too, is legitimate. We may be allowed to prefer one to the other, according to our natural attraction and affinities; but zesthetics has no more right to exclude either the one or the other, than we have to import passion and partiality into a question of science.

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