Portraits and Speculations. By Arthur Ransome. (Macmillan and Co. Is.
6d. net.)—Seven of the nine papers collected here are pieces of literary criticism dealing, among others, with Daudet, Nietzsche, and Pater. Mr. Ransome has the great merit of a pure prose style, and he often strikes out an illuminating comment. The first and last essays in the book are devoted to aesthetic speculation of an undistinguished kind. The first of them, " Art for Life's Sake," propounds a theory of the value of art not unlike Mr. Berenson's familiar view, that things are beautiful when they are " life-enhancing." In his last essay Mr. Ransome seeks to distinguish two sorts of speech, " kinetic " and "potential." He quotes the first verse of Blake's poem "The Tiger," and proceeds : " The kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed tiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and on either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the phosphorescence of another speech that we cannot so easily overbear. And who shall speak in fit terms of its potentiality ? " There may doubtless be an interesting field for further examina- tion of the obvious fact that words call up in the human mind more or less vague associations in addition to their precise connotation ; but it may be questioned whether Mr. Ransome's rather reckless use of two words of such indeterminate meaning as " kinetic " and "potential " is likely to be of much help in the inquiry. Half the difficulty in all philosophical problems is to discover the exact meaning of the words we are using ; and it is the commonest mistake of the loose thinker to believe that a mass of obscure and tangled ideas can be made clear and simple by being given a name.
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