Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... enjoyable with the comic. "Three hours of laughter" is on American theatre-posters synonymous with an evening of enjoyment. Serious and comic being opposites, the serious becomes, to the naive intelligence, equivalent to the joyless. The truth, which the naive intelligence does not suspect, is that the pleasure a work of art can give is too intense and too voluminous not to be serious. Poe writes of "Days when mirth was a word unknown, so solemnly deep-toned was happiness."1 Delusion the second evidences, by its overestimate of the importance of knowledge, the American lack of it. "Omne ignotum pro magnifico." Compare the infectious awe which a book and he who can read it inspires among Ariosto's athletes with the scant reverence which modern literati pay printed matter.2 Not all inquiry is important for every one, and in particular historical inquiry into art, apart from the aid it may give in the enjoyment of art works, has no serious importance except for specialists. Intrinsically the history of art has no more claim upon the attention of the intelligent public than has the history of religion or of science, or of government, or of any other special element of civilization. By itself considered it is one of the least of human concerns. But the commerce of art works is one of the greatest. The knowledge of art history bears much the same relation of importance to the friendship of art itself that a knowledge of the Diophantine Analysis has to the ability to cipher correctly, or the perusal of Lecky has to keeping one's word to one's neighbor and one's hands off his property. 1 Colloquy of Monos and Una. * Orlando Furioto, iv, 17; also xv, 19: ." . . un libro, ondefacea Nascer, leggendo, I 'alia maraviglia." "A book out of which, in...
