The Signification and Principles of Art a Critical Essay for
General Readers. By C. H. Waterhouse. (J. S. Virtue and CO— This book purports to be written for general readers, but it is a real puzzle what class of minds it would appeal to,—scarcely to the artistic. Indeed, who would care to have proved to him "that subjectivity does not exist apart from its correlative objectivity, that the tendency to objectivise, to externalise, to project our feelings and refer them to the various objects around us, is indeed inherent in the very nature of our being ;" or that " nature means in fact a state of unbalanced conditions ;" or, again, "our life participates in this unrest, for the microcosm or world within, is as a reflection of the macrocosm or great world without," &a. P Mr. Waterhouse's style is impregnated with Germanisms, and he leads us wandering through mazes of misty words and thoughts. We are told "it is not easy to differentiate an industrial from a fine art ;" that the organ of sight takes the lead of the organs of tactile sensation in its knowledge-giving functions; we have the "basal conceptions of form-manifesting ;" and, again, music appeals far more to the seneorium than to the organ of cognition ; that music, has but a slight intellectual or ideational character—and so on, page after page. We are so overwhelmed with art literature nowadays, that we could wish that Mr. Waterhouse had laid to heart the last sentence in his book,—" For Art is the happy child of Nature, content to play in the Here and the Now, without asking whence or whither,"—and then he might have spared himself, and us, this long dissertation on the "signification and principles of Art."
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