One thing assuredly Dr. Sellars has done for us. He has broken into the sedate circle of philosophy with this enfant terrible of our modern thought. He has, we must confess, dressed the child a little over sweetly and trained it to too melting a tone. But that matters little. The terrible child is in. May it now energize within the shocked circle of the elders!
College of the City of New YorkUniversity.
It is Pascal, as I recall, who defines metaphysics as "une poésie sophistiquée"; a countryman of Pascal, G. Bréton, writing on the Greek philosophical poets, says "la métaphysique est l'âme de toute poésie." In these contrasting characterizations we have set for us, not only a relation of the two forms of expression, but the problem of the nature of their community.
It is this problem which Professor Flaccus makes the text, as it were, of his group of essays entitled Artists and Thinkers. "A philosopher must have his problem," he says, " a trade weakness ... but one in which I must confess a share." And he proceeds to state his problem in giving the program of his book: "I have taken my material from the borderland of art and philosophy. I have chosen three artists—Rodin, Wagner, Maeterlinck—who have achieved greatness in such widely different arts as sculpture, music, and the drama; and three thinkers—Tolstoy, Hegel, and Nietzsche—who are quite unlike and fairly representative. All these men had much to say on art; they have discussed special points and formulated general theories. Many of these theories are fanciful, unsound, clumsy; these I have given as well as others which show remarkable insight. Incidentally I may have touched on the truth of a theory or weighed it historically, but the main interest has been elsewhere: in the problem of the interplay of art and philosophy; in tracing the Thinker in the Artist and the Artist in the Thinker."
Regretfully it must be stated that the expectations raised by Professor Flaccus's 'main interest' are disappointed in the sequel. The problem of tracing "the thinker in the artist and the artist in the thinker" is certainly a fascinating one, and should be rich in substance if carried through with that combination of judicious reserve and lively sympathy which marks your biographer of genius. For the problem is essentially a biographical one; it implies an intimate study of the human individual who may happen to be an artist or a thinker, with a view to showing his art or his thought as the necessary and central expression of his personality,—such a study, for example, as Plato gives us of the man Socrates. Professor Flaccus nowhere approaches his subjects from such a point of view; rather he gives us, in each case, a circumferential survey of the ideas (on the theme of art) with which his exemplars have publicly surrounded themselves,—so that his essays convey the general impression of studied interviews, too careful to be counted mere journalism, yet never penetrating to the artist behind the art or the thinker behind the thought.
