at a loss when called upon to tell what art is or to explain why he
calls one thing "beautiful" and another "ugly." Even the artist and
the connoisseur, skilled to produce or accurate in judgment, are often
wanting in clear and consistent ideas about their own works or
appreciations. Here, as elsewhere, we meet the contrast between feeling
and doing, on the one hand, and knowing, on the other. Just as practical
men are frequently unable to describe or justify their most successful
methods or undertakings, just as many people who astonish us with their
fineness and freedom in the art of living are strangely wanting in
clear thoughts about themselves and the life which they lead so
admirably, so in the world of beauty, the men who do and appreciate
are not always the ones who understand.

Very often, moreover, the artist and the art lover justify their
inability to understand beauty on the ground that beauty is too subtle
a thing for thought. How, they say, can one hope to distill into clear
and stable ideas such a vaporous and fleeting matter as Aesthetic
feeling? Such men are not only unable to think about beauty, but
skeptical as to the possibility of doing so,--contented mystics, deeply
feeling, but dumb.

However, there have always been artists and connoisseurs who have
striven to reflect upon their appreciations and acts, unhappy until
they have understood and justified what they were doing; and one meets
with numerous art-loving people whose intellectual curiosity is rather
quickened than put to sleep by just that element of elusiveness in
beauty upon which the mystics dwell. Long acquaintance with any class
of objects leads naturally to the formation of some definition or
general idea of them, and the repeated performance of the same type
of act impels to the search for a principle that can be communicated