Abstract

It would therefore be reasonable to undertake a description and appreciation of this book precisely in its character as a dialectical dictionary or magazine of aesthetic issues and arguments. One could conduct a guided tour, stopping to admire the fullness of information, or fertility of invention, and the nicely graded series of the ideas collected in this locus or that, or in some area where one happened to be well enough informed, noting the omissions. One might even raise a theoretical question about this whole aspect of the work, starting with the author's bald assertion: "What I have written is, simply and literally, a guide to aesthetics—a guide to the structure and problems of the subject, not to its literature." His "approach," he says, "is systematic, not historical." He "mentions names," but he says he is "not concerned much with who first said what," and his references are not always to the "earliest or best exponents of the views they illustrate". Much of the literature he says he has not read and does not mean to read. One who has himself not read all of the aesthetic literature can hardly object to this very strenuously.