"
"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.
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