AESTHETIC THEORY.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20920, 29 July 1933, Page 13

AESTHETIC THEORY.

A Critical History of Modern Aesthetics. By the Earl of Listowel. Allen and Unwin. (10s 6d net.) The author of this book defines aesthetics as the science and philosophy of man's aesthetic experience. There is a reason for the tautology of this definition so-called, for the study of our experience of beauty can, in the end, be expressed only in the terms of beauty itself. Much aesthetic theory has been a fruitless attempt to show that beauty is not beauty but something else. The Earl of Listowel has undertaken the task of continuing the history of aesthetics from the point where the work of Dr. Bosanquet ceased, for this purpose the first part of the book is historical, dealing with the subjective and objective theories in turn. Probably the best work in aesthetic theory has been done in this century, because we are in a better position to grasp the facts than were the great pioneers, who did not have the instructive failures of the past to teach them. The second part of the book is critical and constructive rather than historical, though the author here deals with the genetic explanation of art. The sublime, the tragic, the comic, the beautiful, and the ugly are explained in a few paragraphs containing, in a condensed form, a great mass of information. In the conclusion, the author attempts some metaphysical inferences. He tells us that the outstanding and characteristic features, of our experience of the beautiful are to be found in a disinterested and harmonious contemplation of the form and content of individual objects. The beautiful is a special attitude of the soul in face of things and exists only at the actual moment of creative activity. So that, though conditioned by the structure of the products of art and nature, it can be called subjective. Nevertheless, beauty illuminates "the imponderable mystery of existence" because it reconciles the bitterest antagonisms, for, in the experience of it, the boundary between organic and inorganic, between subject and obpect, tends to vanish away. Criticism would suggest that an experience with such a high function has a deeper foundation than material configuration and human subjectivity.