lorious was its youth and early
manhood.

FOOTNOTES:

[16] To make the most of an article of this sort the reader ought,
obviously, to have illustrations by him. For these, in the original
even, I was obliged to refer to back numbers of the _Burlington
Magazine_, and now I must refer also to the plates that accompanied this
article when first it appeared.

[17] In the collections of M. Henraux and M. Claude Anet. Reproduced in
the _Burlington Magazine_, October 1912.

COUNTERCHECK QUARRELSOME

[Sidenote: _New Statesman Mar. 1914_]

I hasten to accept Mr. Randall Davies's offer of friendship,[18] though
I doubt whether much good can come of it if we are to go on arguing
about aesthetics. We are too far apart. What Mr. Davies feels for a
picture is something altogether different from what he feels for a
carpet, whereas the emotion I feel for a carpet is of exactly the same
kind as the emotion I feel for a picture, a statue, a cathedral, or a
pot. Also, my whole system of aesthetics is based on this psychological
fact, so that it would, perhaps, have been wiser in Mr. Davies to have
stated the difference between us and let it go at that.

If some one were to find fault with the _New Statesman_ on account of
the flimsiness and inadequacy of the arguments it adduces in favour of
private ownership of railways, the editor, being a polite man, would
reply, I suppose, that his critic had misunderstood the policy of the
paper: he would not feel that his arguments had received any very
damaging blow. In my first chapter I made it clear--my publishers
accused me of becoming repetitious about it--that what I wanted to
discover was a quality common and peculiar to all those objects I called
works of art; I explained that by "works of art" I meant objects that
provoked in me a peculiar emotion, called aesthetic; and I repeated over
and over again that amongst these objects were pictures, pots, textiles,
statues, buildings, etc. Mr. Davies's sharp eyes have enabled him to
perceive either that my hypothesis--that "significant form" is the
essential quality in a work of art--leads to the inclusion of Persian
carpets amongst works of art, or that the hypothesis that representation
is the essence of art excludes them: I am not sure which. Anyway, this
much is certain, either both pictures and carpets can be works of art or
they cannot. I set out from the hypothesis that pictures and carpets, or
rather some pictures and som