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. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION I. THE LIMITS OF NATURALISM The theories about art and literature that we have been reviewing in this book seem in the retrospect a sort of oscillation between extremes: we have seen the impressionistic extreme follow the extreme of formalism, the pseudo-Platonists succeed the pseudoAristotelians; we have seen the neo - classicists confuse the arts objectively (usually in terms of painting), and the romanticists confuse them subjectively (frequently in terms of music). "It is the privilege of the ancients," says Lessing, "never in any matter to do too much or too little." Man is fond of looking on himself as a lover of the truth; but in tracing historically a subject like the present we are often tempted to pronounce him rather a lover of half-truths. Of course most men cannot be said to love in any effective sense even half-truths, but are hungry above all for illusions. Nor do the illusions need to be very complicated, -- the simplest illusions of sense usually suffice. A little vanity and a little sensuality, says a disdainful French moralist, is about all that enters into the make-up of the average man. Even so there is something to be said for the point of view of the average man. He often derives more satisfaction from his frank surrender to the illusions of life, -- to what Erasmus would have called his folly, --than the philosopher from his painful gropings for the truth. "In Folly's cup still laughs the bubble Joy." If the philosopher does win a glimpse of something beyond the almost impenetrable veil of illusion, he is liable to take for the truth what is at best only a half-truth, and so grows one-sided and fanatical. The half-truth often gets itself formulated and imposed tyrannically upon the world, and...
