avoid, while our own nerves and palate, stimulated to an ever
deepening subtlety, as our choice narrows itself down, tells us what
passionately and spontaneously we must snatch up and enjoy.

It will be noted that in what we have tried to indicate as the only
possible starting-point for adventurous criticism, there has been a
constant assumption of a common ground between sensitive people; a
common sensual and psychic language, so to speak, to which appeals may
be made, and through which intelligent tokens may be exchanged. This
common ground is not necessarily--one is reluctant to introduce
metaphysical speculation--any hidden "law of beauty" or "principle of
spiritual harmony." It is, indeed, as far as we can ever know for
certain, only "objective" in the sense of being essentially human; in
the sense, that is, of being something that inevitably appeals to
what, below temperamental differences, remains permanent and
unchanging in us.

"Nature," as Leonardo says, "is the mistress of the higher
intelligences"; and Goethe, in his most oracular utterances, recalls
us to the same truth. What imagination does, and what the personal
vision of the individual artist does, is to deal successfully and
masterfully with this "given," this basic element. And this basic
element, this permanent common ground, this universal human
assumption, is just precisely what, in popular language, we call
"Nature"; that substratum of objective reality in the appearances of
things, which makes it possible for diversely constructed temperaments
to make their differences effective and intelligible.

There could be no recognizable differences, no conversation, in fact,
if, in the impossible hypothesis of the absence of any such common