Essays and Lectures

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimat...

Art should have no sentiment about it but its beauty, no technique except what you cannot observe. One should be able to say of a picture not that it is ‘well painted,’ but that...

This is that _consolation des arts_ which is the key-note of Gautier’s poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed—as indeed what in our century is not?—by Goethe. You rememb...

The art systems of the past have been devised by philosophers who looked upon human beings as obstructions. They have tried to educate boys’ minds before they had any. How much...

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For to the poet all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal...

Now, as regards his theory of the necessity of the historian’s being contemporary with the events he describes, so far as the historian is a mere narrator the remark is undoubte...

It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the intensified individualism, the passionate...

Arguing from his knowledge of human nature, Herodotus rejects the presence of Helen within the walls of Troy. Had she been there, he says, Priam and his kinsmen would never have...

Now, it is to be borne in mind that while his rejection of miracles as violation of inviolable laws is entirely _a priori_—for discussion of such a matter is, of course, impossi...

Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper conceptions of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer thought of God as of one with fair limbs and tre...

On the whole, however—for I have quoted these two instances only to show the unscientific character of early philology—we may say that this important instrument in recreating th...

PAGE THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM 1 THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART 109 HOUSE DECORATION 157 ART AND THE HANDICRAFTMAN 173 LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS 197 LONDON MODELS 213 POEMS...

And God said to the Man, ‘Evil hath been thy life, and with evil didst thou requite good, and with wrongdoing kindness. The hands that fed thee thou didst wound, and the breasts...