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Updated: June 27, 2025
'Private Views. This passage, which I found in a contemporary chronicle, is so quaint and so instinct with the spirit of its time that I am fain to quote it: 'There were quaint, beautiful, extraordinary costumes walking about ultra-aesthetics, artistic-aesthetics, aesthetics that made up their minds to be daring, and suddenly gave way in some important point put a frivolous bonnet on the top of a grave and flowing garment that Albert Durer might have designed for a mantle.
He will have left the firm land of aesthetics to travel in an unstable element; in criticism one catches at any straw. There is no harm in that, provided the critic never forgets that, whatever ingenious theories he may put forward, they can be nothing more than attempts to explain the one central fact that some forms move us aesthetically and others do not.
A judgment is not trivial, however, because it rests on human feelings; on the contrary, triviality consists in abstraction from human interests; only those judgments and opinions are truly insignificant which wander beyond the reach of verification, and have no function in the ordering and enriching of life. Both ethics and aesthetics have suffered much from the prejudice against the subjective.
That Comus lies, so to speak, midway between the drama and the masque, and partakes of the nature of either, is not, by any inherent law of literary aesthetics, a blemish; what in my view is a blemish, and that a serions one, is that the means employed are not calculated to the demands of the situation.
Wagner's theoretical edifice will not stand as it is; it is too loosely jointed; but the materials are valuable. That there will ever be a real science of aesthetics I do not believe; art would cease to be art if it lost its mystery. For the present at least we must be content to remain in darkness as to the precise conditions of musical expression, and eschew theory.
He who would elaborate a plausible theory of aesthetics must possess two qualities artistic sensibility and a turn for clear thinking. Without sensibility a man can have no aesthetic experience, and, obviously, theories not based on broad and deep aesthetic experience are worthless.
To clear up these concepts and to free them from false allied ideas is the task of aesthetics in its widest sense. This includes all concepts which are accompanied by a judgment of praise or blame; the most important among them are the ethical concepts.
So, if they write criticism and call it aesthetics, if they imagine that they are talking about Art when they are talking about particular works of art or even about the technique of painting, if, loving particular works they find tedious the consideration of art in general, perhaps they have chosen the better part.
He was found of aesthetics and anaesthetics, and his chief interests in life were beauty and his big bills. "What's the use of beauty, if a thing isn't useful?" Warble would ask, and Petticoat would reply, "What's the use of use, anyway? There's no use in having anything that isn't beautiful." And as the house was under Petticoat rule, Big Bill won out.
Beauty and aesthetics supplied that for him. But a good lawgiver is not satisfied with discovering the bent of his people he turns it to account as an instrument for higher use; and hence he chose the stage, as giving nourishment to the soul, without straining it, and uniting the noblest education of the head and heart.
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