ic right and wrong, which were for ever being discussed within
me. This new myself, this heir to the task of putting into shape the
historical materials collected by an extinct individuality, is the
myself by whom has been written this present book: this present book
represents the thoughts, the problems, the doubts, the solutions, which
were haunting me while writing that first book from which this new one
so completely differs. To plan, to work for such a book as that first
one, seems to me now about the most incomprehensible of all things; to
care for one particular historical moment, to study the details of one
particular civilisation, to worry about finding out the exact when and
how of any definite event; above all, to feel (as I felt) any desire to
teach any specified thing to anybody; all this has become unintelligible
to my sympathies of to-day. And it is natural: natural in mental
growth that we are, to some extent, professorial and professorially
self-important and engrossed, before becoming restlessly and sceptically
studious: we may teach some things before we even know the desire of
learning others. Thus I, from my small magisterial chair or stool of
18th century-expounder, have descended and humbly gone to school as a
student of aesthetics.

To school, where, and with whom? A little to books, and this (excepting
a few psychological works not bearing directly upon my subject) with but
small profit; mainly to art itself, to pictures and statues and music
and poetry, to my own feelings and my own thoughts; studying, in
seemingly desultory fashion, in discussions with my friends and with
myself. This volume BELCARO is the first fruit of these attempts at
knowing: it is not the Sir-Oracle manual of a professor, with all in its
right place, understood or misunderstood, truth and error all neatly
systematised for the teaching of others; but rather the scholar's copy
book, the fragmentary and somewhat helter-skelter notes of what, in his
listenings and questionings, he has been able to understand, and which
he hands over to his fellow-pupils, who may have understood as much of
the lessons as himself, but have in all probability understood different
portions or in different ways. Such a collection of notes this volume
most unmetaphorically is: it is literally a selection of such pages out
of my commonplace books as seemed (though written at various moments)
to converge upon given points of aesthetical discussion; t