When this book was first published it contained a large amount of
material which is now taken out of it; additions have been made, besides
many corrections and changes; and the whole form of the book has been
remodelled. It is now more what it ought to have been from the first;
what I saw, from the moment of its publication, that it ought to have
been: a book of theory. The rather formal announcement of my intentions
which I made in my preface is reprinted here, because, at all events,
the programme was carried out.
This book, I said then, is intended to form part of a series, on which I
have been engaged for many years. I am gradually working my way towards
the concrete expression of a theory, or system of æsthetics, of all the
arts.
In my book on "The Symbolist Movement in Literature" I made a first
attempt to deal in this way with literature; other volumes, now in
preparation, are to follow. The present volume deals mainly with the
stage, and, secondarily, with music; it is to be followed by a volume
called "Studies in Seven Arts," in which music will be dealt with in
greater detail, side by side with painting, sculpture, architecture,
handicraft, dancing, and the various arts of the stage. And, as life too
is a form of art, and the visible world the chief storehouse of beauty,
I try to indulge my curiosity by the study of places and of people. A
book on "Cities" is now in the press, and a book of "imaginary
portraits" is to follow, under the title of "Spiritual Adventures." Side
by side with these studies in the arts I have my own art, that of verse,
which is, after all, my chief concern.
In all my critical and theoretical writing I wish to be as little
abstract as possible, and to study first principles, not so much as they
exist in the brain of the theorist, but as they may be discovered, alive
and in effective action, in every achieved form of art. I do not
understand the limitation by which so many writers on æsthetics choose
to confine themselves to the study of artistic principles as they are
seen in this or that separate form of art. Each art has its own laws,
its own capacities, its own limits; these it is the business of the
critic jealously to distinguish. Yet in the study of art as art, it
should be his endeavour to master the universal science of beauty.
1903, 1907.