Page:Criticism and Beauty.djvu/10

4 It had to be published immediately, so that correction was impossible. But in any case no mere correction could have remedied its defects. Fortune, which gave me no leisure for writing before the lecture was delivered, has given me a few weeks since. I have employed them in putting what I desired to say in a form in which I hope it will at least be possible to understand it.

Let me add that writers on the subject I have chosen have to use a most defective terminology. At every turn its poverty hampers them. The familiar word, often the only word, is too often the wrong word. There is, for instance, no expression which, according to everyday usage, describes the poet, the writer of literary prose, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect and, let me add, the historian. There is no term which describes their works. I have commonly used for these purposes the expressions 'Artist', 'Art': and it is thus that these words must be understood unless the context forbids it.

An inadequacy of language yet more embarrassing attaches to the whole group of terms which express aesthetic quality and aesthetic feeling. I have used, for instance, the word 'beauty' on the