Excerpt from The Meaning of Art, Its Nature, Role, and Value

My dear Friend, - You embarrass me greatly by asking me to write a preface for your new book. The subject is one that I find highly interesting as long as it is a question merely of reading about it, or of discussing it; but one that appals me when it becomes a question of coming to a conclusion and actually writing it down. My incompetence is, naturally, the first reason for this; but the "fluidity" of such concepts as beauty, aesthetic emotion, art, creation, ideal, impression, nature, style, life, expression, originality, and harmony, also makes these studies, in my opinion, as delicate as they are enchanting. Whether it will ever be possible to reduce these fleeting things to the laws of positive science, I do not know; but until then it is certainly allowable to approach them with one's whole nature - judgment, taste, feeling, intuition and reason, spirit of finesse and spirit of deduction.

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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Meaning of Art, Its Nature, Role, and Value (Classic Reprint) (Paul Gaultier)