Experience, Already Reduced To A Group Of

Product Of A Myriad Various Minds And Contending Tongues, Compact Of Obscure And Minute Association, A Language Has Its Own Abundant And Often Recondite Laws, In The Habitual And Summary Recognition Of Which Scholarship Consists.

Many Attempts Have Been Made By Writers On Art And Poetry To Define Beauty In The Abstract, To Express It In The Most General Terms, To Find Some Universal Formula For It.

What We Have To Do Is To Be Forever Curiously Testing New Opinions And Courting New Impressions.

We Need Some Imaginative Stimulus, Some Not Impossible Ideal Such As May Shape Vague Hope, And Transform It Into Effective Desire, To Carry Us Year After Year, Without Disgust, Through The Routine-work Which Is So Large A Part Of Life.

Such Discussions Help Us Very Little To Enjoy What Has Been Well Done In Art Or Poetry, To Discriminate Between What Is More And What Is Less Excellent In Them, Or To Use Words Like Beauty, Excellence, Art, Poetry, With A More Precise Meaning Than They Would Otherwise Have.