The Genesis of Art-Form - An Essay in Comparative Aesthetics Showing the Identity of the Sources, Methods, and Effects of Composition in Music, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture #228221

Nor is the taste of any age, however it may stimulate ability or aspiration to produce, above the sway of fashions, good and bad, that, in proportion as they keep truth fettered, render excellence impossible. In order to attain this, the leader in art, as in religion, must break away from them, in fact from all the shackles of conventional traditionalism — one might almost say of historic criticism, broadly beneficial as this'has been in many a direction, — and, searching back of them, must find within himself and in the world about him, those first principles that underlie the nature of both thought and things.