It may appear fantastic to assert that art is the only sphere where absolute values appear, and that the function of art in the Universe is to create absolute values, but it may be true. It is impossible to avoid the insistent demand of the human instinct for absolute values. This exists, an insatiable craving which will not rest content with the good but demands the better. And yet it is impossible to discover values that are absolute in themselves. The very notion is a meaningless abstraction. I do not even believe we can prove that Beethoven’s music is better music than Mozart’s or that Shakespeare’s poetry is better than Milton’s, or _vice versa_, unless we first of all limit the idea of music or poetry to something intellectually measurable. For example it would be difficult to convince all music-lovers that Bach’s counterpoint was better than Beethoven’s, or that Palestrina’s was better than Bach’s; for what is to determine “good” counterpoint? Very few musicians would accept any individual theorist’s rules--all rules being mere abstractions or generalizations from practice, and varying according to their historic date, so that even the academic theory of one age differs from that of another. Even in judging a fugue, one has ultimately to fall back upon expression, significance, or meaning, and who is to say--and on what universally acceptable principle is it to be said--that Bach’s “St. Anne” fugue is better than Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” Op. 133? There is exactly the same difficulty in poetry. In an excellent and well-known book on the English Sonnet a definition is given of perfect sonnet form which is intellectually satisfactory. But we find that most of the greatest English sonnets are not written in this form, while thousands of mediocre sonnets observe it correctly. The same is true of Bach’s Fugues. You cannot value them according to their correctness.[4] What then becomes of our “perfect” sonnet and our “perfect” fugue? Each is apparently an unreal abstraction--like all other attempts at creating absolute value. But are these “absolute” ideas necessarily valueless in themselves? I do not think so, for they correspond to and are the formalization or _death-shapes_ of desires ineradicably rooted in the human soul, those desires which create all values, and that profounder urge which is satisfied with none.