Belcaro; Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions

Belcaro; Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions is a collection of essays by Vernon Lee. The contents list names, among others, "The Child in the Vatican", "Orpheus and Eurydice" and "Chapelmaster Kreisler".

The author thanks the Editors of the Cornhill and of Fraser's Magazines, and of the Contemporary Review, for permission to republish such of these studies as have previously appeared in print. The piece headed "The Book and Its Title" is addressed to one of the writer's readers, the first and earliest, and says the collection of studies was wished to be more especially theirs. One essay says that sculpture was trying to give psychological amusement, and music was trying to play tragedies and paint landscapes and write religious meditations, so that art was incapacitating itself for its real work. Another essay asks how the playwright contrives to make us see a character who is brazen, calm, shy, fluttered, all these things together.