usual: to some it has
seemed not only workable but true; that is miraculous almost.

In fifty or sixty thousand words, though one may develop a theory
adequately, one cannot pretend to develop it exhaustively. My book is a
simplification. I have tried to make a generalisation about the nature
of art that shall be at once true, coherent, and comprehensible. I have
sought a theory which should explain the whole of my aesthetic
experience and suggest a solution of every problem, but I have not
attempted to answer in detail all the questions that proposed
themselves, or to follow any one of them along its slenderest
ramifications. The science of aesthetics is a complex business and so is
the history of art; my hope has been to write about them something
simple and true. For instance, though I have indicated very clearly, and
even repetitiously, what I take to be essential in a work of art, I
have not discussed as fully as I might have done the relation of the
essential to the unessential. There is a great deal more to be said
about the mind of the artist and the nature of the artistic problem. It
remains for someone who is an artist, a psychologist, and an expert in
human limitations to tell us how far the unessential is a necessary
means to the essential--to tell us whether it is easy or difficult or
impossible for the artist to destroy every rung in the ladder by which
he has climbed to the stars.

My first chapter epitomises discussions and conversations and long
strands of cloudy speculation which, condensed to solid argument, would
still fill two or three stout volumes: some day, perhaps, I shall write
one of them if my critics are rash enough to provoke me. As for my third
chapter--a sketch of the history of fourteen hundred years--that it is a
simplification goes without saying. Here I have used a series of
historical generalisations to illustrate my theory; and here, again, I
believe in my theory, and am persuaded that anyone who will consider the
history of art in its light will find that history more intelligible
than of old. At the same time I willingly admit that in fact the
contrasts are less violent, the hills less precipitous, than they must
be made to appear in a chart of this sort. Doubtless it would be well if
this chapter also were expanded into half a dozen readable volumes, but
that it cannot be until the learned authorities have learnt to write or
some writer has learnt to be patient.

Those convers