Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter viii. they have all the same interpreter, and are all to be understood upon the same conditions. A stranger at Washington visits day after day the Corcoran Gallery, lingering before this and that masterpiece of genius, in earnest desire to read in each the artist's own thought and meaning. He frequents, too, some public reading-room, interested to study, through the daily issues of the press, the character and aims of the great diplomatists of Europe. And he also retreats now and then to some quiet alcove of an ample library, reaching after the actual ideas of some of the most original and helpful authors in English literature. In this man's successive efforts to read other men's meanings and intents, what or who shall decisively interpret for him? Gifted artists, world-ruling statesmen, authors that do not die, --who shall determine for him what, in their different modes of self-expression, they have actually said and intended to say? On these problems the man may think according to his power of thinking, and study as he has opportunity and means. He may also get the ideas and suggestions of experts in art, of practised observers of human lives and of the chess-games of rulers, and of professional students of language and of books. But being still in uncertainty, does he look around for some one who shall determine these questions for him? Government, society, the ages supply him with no such arbiter. Individual judgments vary; the ideas of the generations change. The ma
