To me Bouvard et
Pecuchet is a piece of almost flawless art--it is there--it lives
and breathes. I don't like it all, of course, but I don't doubt
that it happened so. There must be an absolute rightness behind all
supreme writing. Art must have laws as real and immutable and
elaborate as those of science and metaphysics and religion--that is
the central article of my creed."
"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.
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