SHORTER NOTICE
The Meaning of Beauty. By Eric Newton. (Longmans. I is.) AFTER perusing this discourse an amateur in aesthetics may well feel that he comes out " by the same door where in he went," but he should nevertheless have profited by the experience and be better able to analyse his reactions to a work of art. Reluctantly, one admits a suspicion that Mr. Newton has rather too much gift of the gab, and that his copious metaphors, of pearl necklaces, onions, telephones and so on, may induce more confusion than clarity of thought ' • but his background of knowledge is always impressive, and the knowledge is applied freshly and acutely in the discussion of such fundamental contrasts as, for instance, those between Linnet! and Van Gogh or James Ward and Picasso. The chapters on taste are particularly rewarding. It is the more disconcerting to find Mr. Newton's facility of language betraying him into superficial and misleading generalisations. Take the following sentences: . " Cezanne, for whom the dramatic or sentimental had so little appeal, can never be a popular artist though he is acknowledged to be a great one. Poussin, who paid careful but half-hearted lip-service to this outer level, will never persuade the average man that he was a ' human ' painter. For the average man is uncannily alert to the difference between lip-service and sincerity. There have been many artists of this kind, men who, like Velasquez, were temperamentally incapable of interesting themselves in the world of sentiment, or who,
- like Degas, cynically rejected it. To the average man such artists are uninteresting.. . '
The inescapable suggestion here seems to be that Velasquez is un- dramatic, not " human," insincere, and not interested in sentiment. But, whatever that uncannily alert " average man " may think, it is all nonsense to suggest that the creator of " Las Meninas " or " The Surrender of Breda " is undramatic or the painter of the dwarfs not " human." Again, Velasquez was the most. sincere and honest Court painter who ever lived, yet no one can look at his "Christ at the Column " and say he was not interested in sentiment (using that difficult word in its best sense). A passage like this suggests that Mr. Newton's judgements mast sometimes be received with considerable reservations.
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