kings out of aesthetic questions.
Yet, they have, taken altogether, a certain uniformity of tendency, a
certain logical shape: they look like a system. But if a logical shape
they have, it is not because they have been deliberately fitted into
each other, but because they have been homogeneously evolved; if a
system they appear, it is because the same individual mind, in its
attempt to solve a series of closely allied problems, must solve them
in a self-consistent way. Hence, while dreading beyond all things to
cramp my still growing, and therefore altering, ideas in the limits
of a system, I find that I have, nevertheless, evolved for myself a
series of answers to separate questions, which constitute a sort of
art-philosophy. An art-philosophy entirely unabstract, unsystematic,
essentially personal, because evolved unconsciously, under the pressure
of personal circumstances, and to serve the requirements of personal
tendencies. I have, of course, read a good deal about art, perhaps more
than other people; and I have consciously and unconsciously assimilated
a good deal of the books that I read; but I have never deliberately
accepted (except in the domain of art-history and evolution, of which I
have not treated in this book which deals only of art in its connection
with the individual artist and his public) a whole theory, and set
myself either to developing or correcting it: the ideas of others enter
largely into the answers to my self-questionings, but they do so because
they had become part and parcel of my own thought; and the questions and
their answers have always been asked by myself and answered by myself.
For, with respect to aesthetic training, I have been circumstanced
differently from most writers on the subject, nay, from most readers of
our generation. I was taught as little about art, I heard as little talk
about pictures, statues, or music, as any legendary calvinist child of
the 17th century; I jostled art of one kind or another as much as any
child well can: I was familiar with art, cared about it (to the extent
of requiring it) before well knowing that art existed: reversing the
training of these days of culture and eclecticism and philosophy,
according to which one usually knows all about art, all about its
history, ethics, philosophy, schools, epochs, moral value, poetic
meaning, and so forth, before one knows art itself, long before one
cares a jot for it. To me, art was neither a technical study, n