For the notion that the subject does not matter in a picture is one which should be utterly and severely condemned. It arose at a time when art was diseased, when artists themselves had ceased from having anything of importance to say, when the subjects chosen had no meaning, and when technique was bad. And it must be regarded more in the light of a war-cry coming from a counter-movement, aiming at an improved technique and rebelling against an abuse of literature in the graphic arts, than in the light of sound doctrine, taking its foundation in normal and healthy conditions. The intrinsic beauty of the content or substance of a picture or sculpture may therefore be the subject of legitimate inquiry, and in determining what it consists of, we raise the whole question of content beauty. Volumes, stacks of volumes, have been written on this question. The most complicated and incomprehensible answers have been given to it, and not one can be called satisfactory; for all of them would be absolute. When, however, we find a modern writer defining the beautiful as "that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium,"[55] we feel, or at least _I_ feel, that something must be wrong. It is definitions such as these which compel one to seek for something more definite and more lucid in the matter of explanation, and if, in finding the latter, one may seem a little too prosaic and _terre-à-terre_, it is only because the transcendental and metaphysical nature of the kind of definition we have just quoted makes anything which is in the slightest degree clearer, appear earthly and material beside it. It is obvious that, if we could only arrive at a subject-beauty which was absolute, practically all the difficulties of our task would vanish. For having established the fact that the purpose of the graphic arts is to determine the values beautiful and ugly, it would only remain for us to urge all artists to advocate that absolute subject-beauty with all the eloquence of line and colour that our concept of Art-form would allow, and all the problems of Art would be solved. But we can postulate no such absolute in subject-beauty. "Absolute beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth."[56] The term "beautiful," like the term "good," is only a means to an end. It is simply the arbitrary self-affirmation of a certain type of man in his struggle to prevail.[57] He says "Yea" to his type, and calls it beautiful. He cannot extend his power and overcome other types unless with complete confidence and assurance he says "Yea" to his own type.