With
such diversity of material, the absolute standard, absurd enough in
any case, became altogether impossible to maintain. It was replaced
by the conception of a common instinct for beauty, modified in each
nation by the special circumstances of its temperament and history.
But even this does not cover the whole extent of the revolution in
critical ideas. Side by side with a more tolerant--and, it may be
added, a keener--judgment of artistic form, came a clearer sense of
the inseparable connection between form and matter, and the
impossibility of comprehending the form, if it be taken apart from the
matter, of a work of art. This, too, was in part the natural effect
of the historical method, one result of which was to establish a closer
correspondence between the thought of a nation and its art than had
hitherto been suspected. But it was in part also a consequence of the
intellectual and spiritual revolution of which Rousseau was the herald
and which, during fifty years, found in German philosophy at once its
strongest inspiration and its most articulate expression.
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