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way, and had little use for the critical training of the academies, or
the Daedalian training of the conscious artists.
These two volumes suggest the interest that a good biography of
Lewis could have; not the kind of critical biography which alternates
paraphrases of the novels with anecdote, but a careful study of the
figure of Lewis himself, querying his energy for its sources and noting
his relations to the world in which he lived. Behind these letters and
these prose pieces there is the shadow of such a figure; a Thersites,
driven by obscure irritations to turn a red glare on the scene around
him; an American in the kin of Henry George and Henry Ford and
Ezra Pound, the outraged heart in search of a gimmick which will re–
lieve the hidden distress. Such a study would count the costs of
his
surrenders to the American scene. Nor would it underestimate him, as
has been the fashion ; he was an Adam of American writing, a namer
of the animals in our wild zoo, and thus fulfilled a major function in
the imaginative life of the nation.
Thomas Riggs Jr.
AESTHETICS IN A NEW KEY
FEELING AND FORM. By
Susonne
K.
Longer. Scribner's.
$7.00.
Mrs. Langer's philosophical ambition is such that any final
judgment about her general theory must await her next book on the
nature of artistic abstraction.
Feeling and Form
can properly be called
the heart of her aesthetics. The very title, one of the several ways in
which her main theme can be couched, announces the relevance of
her subject to all modern discussion about the nature of art, while it
hopefully challenges "the inveterate tendency to paradox" which marks
the leading notions involved in this discussion. The book is a close
sequel to
Philosophy in a New Ke),.
It embodies the same conception
of mind and develops, in extraordinary detail, the theories of symbol–
ization and artistic significance which were presented in the earlier
volume. Though Mrs. Langer has not yet answered certain fundamental
objections which have been brought repeatedly against her earlier work,
she has, by a wonderful indirection, written one of the finest books on
the theory of art in American philosophy; a work dense with the closest
analysis of aesthetic questions, often polemical, always immediate to art
itself and not to some more general realm of events.
The long series of chapters grouped under the heading, "The Mak-
