It has been objected to this suggestion that the context does not favour it. Perhaps; but there is often a good deal working in an author’s mind which the immediate context does not fully show. Footnote 55: On Impressionism, see Index. Footnote 56: And yet the “corruption” which dogs “the best” followed on this also. For it was on this dictum that false classicism based its doctrine that the poet ought not to count the streaks of the tulip—that he must conventionalise and be general. So, too, the all-important law that the end of art is pleasure appears solidly laid down.[57] True, it is not laid down so explicitly as it is in the _Metaphysics_ and the _Politics_, [Sidenote: _The end of art: the_ οἰκεία ἡδονή.] but it is assumed throughout, and such assumption practically more valuable than argument. We have left behind us the noble wrongheadedness of the Platonic depreciation of pleasure; we are even past the stage when it might seem necessary to plead humbly and with bated breath for its _locus standi_. Moreover, the doctrine of the _oikeia hedone_ not only by implication lays down the end of all art, but guards (in a fashion which should have been sovereign, though the haste and heedlessness of men have too often robbed it of its virtues) against one of the greatest dangers and mistakes of criticism in time to come. That what we have to demand of a work of literature is pleasure, and its own pleasure—how simple this seems, how much a matter of course! Alas! Aristotle himself is not entirely free from the charge of having sometimes overlooked it, while since his time the great majority of critical errors are traceable to this very overlooking. The obstinate ignoring or the captious depreciation of Latin literature by the later Greeks; the wooden “Arts of Poetry” of the Latins themselves; the scorn of Chaucer for “rim-ram-ruffing”; of the Renaissance for mediæval literature; of Du Bellay for Marot; of Harvey for the _Faerie Queene_; of Restoration criticism for the times before Mr Waller improved our numbers; of our Romantic critics for Dryden and Johnson; of Mr Matthew Arnold for French poetry,—all these things, and many others of the same class, come from the ignoring of the _oikeia hedone_, from the obstinate insistence that this thing shall be other than it is, that this poet shall be not himself but somebody else. Footnote 57: See for this point especially Professor Butcher’s chapter on this subject _op. cit._, pp. 197-213.