ABSTRACT
This little book (of 60 or more pages of illustrations, and as many somewhat slenderly furnished with letterpress) is difficult to review in the sense of giving any idea of its contents. A rage for condensation and a distrust for the kind of clarity which expresses a general idea under a concrete, but too rigidly binding form have resulted in an orgy of abstract nouns which may mean anything or nothing, according to the equipment which the reader brings to his task. To some extent the authors seem to have contemplated such a result. They wish to suggest rather than to convince. ‘We will not attempt definitions,’ they say; ‘we honestly believe that we have said nothing which is not calculated to confirm the true painter in his personal predilections’: a danger rather easily avoided if they cast their suggestions in so vague a form that the reader, if he does not like them taken one way, can take them another. They not only refrain from definitions, but also shirk the occasion for giving instances, even when (as on p. 43) typical examples are really necessary to consolidate the reader’s apprehension of the contrasting categories previously described. It would have been well to recognize that the concrete instances of the reasoner, like the concrete images of the artist, are bound up in this compact form for purposes of transit from mind to mind.
