ct connection between art and ourselves,
which was the one I had felt, as a child, before learning all the
wonderful fantastications of art philosophers. My own art philosophy is
therefore simply to try and enjoy in art what art really contains, to
obtain from art all that it can give, by refraining from asking it to
give what it cannot. To this end have tended all those most harum-scarum
notes, written during the last six years, which I have here collected
and tried to group according to the particular art, or the particular
portion of an art, to which they referred. Some are about painting,
some about music, some about poetry, some about art in general, some
inextricably combined and mixed up with other subjects. They have been
written at different times, hence with varying amount of experience and
information; occasionally they may even be contradictory in a trifle.
Thus, when I wrote the notes on musical expression incorporated in the
essay called after Hoffmann's Kapell-Meister Kreisler, I was not yet
acquainted with the discoveries of Mr. Herbert Spencer on the subject;
discoveries which have infinitely cleared my ideas, and which serve to
correct, in the adjoining essay called _Cherubino_, much that was vague,
and perhaps equivocal, in my earlier notes. Had I been constructing a
system, I should have recast all the old (or suppressed all the new);
but I am merely collecting notes, so I have let them stand as they were
written. My object is not to teach others, but to show them how far I
have taught myself, and how far they may teach themselves. I must always
return to my comparison of the copy books of the boy attending a course
of lectures: this is not all that I conceive can be said on the subject;
it is merely as much as I have been able to understand thereof; and the
more I have listened and questioned, the more what I have understood has
become connected within itself and seemed to indicate connections with
unstudied problems belonging to different orders of thought. Thus, after
having thought and written only about art; about what each art can and
cannot do, about the relations of the various arts amongst each other
and to their artists, I have gradually found myself thinking and writing
about what art as a whole can do and should do; about the relations
between all art and life taken as a whole: after the purely aesthetical
questions has come the question, no aesthetical question this time--what
value, in th