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. 1904 edition. Excerpt: .found lifelongsolace mingled with disquiet. Scholars and saints, painters and ploughmen, lovers and skeptics, emperors and peasants, and poets and kings; and what had they all to say about their reading? No comment? Did they find the work amusing, or was it squalid, or only dull? Think of the poetry of Emerson and Wordsworth; what is it but a critical interpretation of nature? Think of the work of Fielding or Thackeray or Hawthorne; what was it but a running commentary on humanity? There is one sense in which all the arts are one--in that they are all but differing forms of expression, differing methods in which the spirit of humanity finds a voice and embodies its thought about the universe, and in that sense, surely, all art is an appendix to nature, a criticism on experience.

Fiction and painting, for example, seem clearly to have had.their origin as simple pastimes, yet how significant a body of commentary they contain. I suppose the art of painting arose in the idlest hour, from a very superfluity of leisure and fancy, the chance discovery of some dreamy bygone summer afternoon; yet every line or shade tells tales of the vanished painters sentiment as he looked out at the world about him. And modern fiction; there is a fine art which would seem to have had its beginning in nothing more serious than the telling of tales over a winter fire. Yet now, in all its varied complexity, so philosophical, so intentional, how evidently critical it has become. We must not forget, either, to make ample allowance for that conception of art which claims for it a province quite apart from the actual world. According to this view, it is the business of art to create for our enjoyment a fictitious universe, within our own, yet dissevered from it--an.