Such in barest outline is Croce's theory of Art, and it is a question whether it is not itself open to attack by the same critical argument he employs against the Hedonists. The latter, as he truly points out, reduce all mental activities to one, i.e. feeling, and having effected this reduction, naturally do not see anything except pleasure or pain in any activity. They therefore find no substantial difference between the pleasure of art and (let us say) that of a good digestion. Croce, perceiving quite truly that form is of the essence of all works of art whatsoever, abstracts the formal element and reduces the aesthetic activity to this alone. He thus deliberately empties the artistic fact of all value-feelings and can therefore find, as we shall see, no difference in beauty between an epic and an epigram, so long as both are perfectly self-expressive. Although by this expedient he certainly supplies a definition of the Beautiful universally adequate to all works of art, at whatever period produced and in whatever land, he only does so by sacrificing what, to most men, alone makes Art worth while.

Two, more obvious, objections to his theory together with his reply to them may be briefly referred to before turning to his method of literary criticism. The first is this. Do not many poets compose their poems by means of the very process of writing them down? Did Milton, for example, have the whole of 'Paradise Lost' in his head before putting pen to paper? The mere idea is surely absurd. And this is the second objection-is it not equally ridiculous to assert that a poet never selects his subject, but that it comes to him? Is not such a supposition refuted by our proven knowledge of the fact that Milton did choose his subject, and that too with the greatest deliberation; and not only the subject of his poem, but the form also, when he decided to write, not, for example, a five-act drama, but a twelve-book epic?

Croce's reply to this objection, to take the latter point first, is simply that there is an ambiguity in the word 'subject' or perhaps in the word 'poet,' which is commonly applied to Milton in his capacity both as man and artist. If by subject you mean the description, general or even detailed, of what you intend your poem to be about, you can certainly choose that. But that is not the poem. If it were, we might all be Miltons, for

we can all draw up schemes for epics. The raw material of life out of which he hopes to make his poem, the dead mechanism out of which he is to create living form, is, Croce would agree, selected by the poet as man or is perhaps rather selected for him as a result of his own temperament or the suggestion of his friends or the historical moment in which he lives. But what a poet, as a man, wills to create, and what, as artist, he does create, are two quite distinct things, and have no necessary relation to one another. In this connexion Croce would probably quote a paradoxical saying of de Sanctis à propos of Dante.

'The poet,' says de Sanctis, 'sets to work endowed with the poetic theory, the forms, the ideas, and the preoccupations of his time; and the less of an artist he is, the more accurately does he reproduce the material of his selection. Look at Brunetto and Frezzi. Here everything is clear, logical, and harmonious; the reality is a mere figure. But, if the poet is an artist, the contradiction disappears; there results not the world of his intention but the world of art.'

This is equivalent to saying that you can never pass through his creation to the artist's character, save just in so far as that creation is inartistic, while it means, on the other hand, that the expression of personality, or of a 'state of soul' (the artist's soul and no one else's) is of the very essence of pure intuition. All art must be lyrical to be art at all. On the other hand, it does not know that it is lyrical. A poet can no more choose what the concrete thing called his poem is to be about, or what form it is to take, than a man, when going to sleep, can choose what shall be the material or shape of his dreams or, when dreaming, know that he is not awake. The dreams are his, but he is not responsible for them.

To the objection that the poet often creates his expressions not before, but by, writing them down, Croce replies that this, though an excusable, is a superficial view. For the poet-how can he?-never writes down an idea without having first seen it in imagination. The latter is the essential condition of the former. 'And, if he has not yet seen it, he will write the words, not to externalise his expression, which

does not yet exist, but as though to have a rallyingpoint for further reflexion and inward contemplation'— an expedient, he adds, comparable to the habit some artists cultivate of retiring into solitude when engaged in composition, or to any other eccentricity or peculiarity they may adopt for the like purpose. To this reply, however, it may reasonably be objected that Croce's is the superficial view, since it seems to imply that a logical priority must also involve a temporal.

If the end of Art is the production of Beauty, then the reproduction of it is, according to Croce, the sole end of Criticism. In judging a poem, the critic is using exactly the same imaginative powers of mind as the poet employed in creating it; only the circumstances are different. The poet produces; the critic reproduces. And the reproductive is, as it were, the inverse of the productive process. The poet begins with impressions, passes on to the inward expression of them, and then proceeds to translate the inward expression into the spoken or written word. The critic begins with the spoken or written word, and seeks to obtain a living impression of it, from which he proceeds to recover the inward expression, which thereby ceases to be the poet's and becomes his own.

This theory of criticism follows logically from Croce's theory of art, and must stand or fall with it. For it is clear that, if you identify the artistic fact not, as is usually done, with the physical or outward work of art, as given in experience, but only with the abstracted mental form or expression, of which the external fact is to be treated as the mere symbol, then, when once you have re-created the expression, you, and you alone, are the author of it. The critic, therefore, who fully and completely appreciates Shakespeare's Hamlet' is in that moment of appreciation Shakespeare's poetical equal. In fact, Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' died with Shakespeare. 'Hamlet' that survives is always the critic's. To the would-be critic this is undoubtedly a very inspiring theory, if he finds himself able to grant the postulate upon which it is based-that the imagination of a great poet does not differ in quality from that of the ordinary man; in other words, that the difference between us and

The

Shakespeare is not that he has better eyes than we, but merely that he enjoys a more advantageous point of view, and can therefore see further. Croce, however, does not really assist us to any solution of the mystery of genius. Granted that we are all in an equal degree potential poets, how comes it that so few of us stand upon the mountain-tops of vision? Yet on one vexed question Croce is perfectly clear. The poet is not necessarily the best critic of poetry. Poetry can be made to yield up all its secrets to those incapable of writing a line of it themselves.

We have now to consider how Croce applies his theory in practice; and a description of his method of criticism will best be given in his own words.

'It is a method,' he writes ('La Critica,' July 1907), 'based on the notion of Art as pure imagination or pure expression. It therefore excludes from Art no content or state of mind whatsoever, provided it be rendered concrete in a perfect expression. Beyond this conception of Art the criticism I am describing relies on no other theoretical presupposition at all. Hence it rejects as arbitrary the so-called rules of the literary and artistic classes and all other kinds of particular artistic laws. In order to judge a work of art, it knows of no other way except to interrogate the work itself directly and experience a living impression of it; for this end and this alone, it admits, nay requires researches into the circumstances of the production of the work of art concerned -learned researches possessing interpretative value, which must assist in transporting us, so to speak, into the mental condition of the author at the time he produced his artistic synthesis. This living impression once obtained, the further labour only consists in determining what, in the object under examination, is the pure product of art, and what in it appears to be not truly artistic-for instance, violence committed by the author against his vision for reasons of extraneous preoccupation; obscurities and emptiness which he allows to subsist through laziness; excrescences he introduces for effect; signs of academic prejudices, etc., etc. The result is the exposition or critical estimate, which simply states (and in stating' has thereby judged) wie es eigentlich geschehen, 'how it really happened,' according to Leopold v. Ranke's brilliantly simple definition of history. Hence the history of art and the criticism of art, in my view,

coincide. Every essay in the criticism of art is an attempt to write a page in the history of art (understanding the term 'history,' as it must be understood, in its full and complete sense); it determines by analysing and characterising reflectively, what the effective production of art consists in, according to temporal succession.'

It is easy to perceive how criticism is simplified by Croce by being thus emptied of almost all that it is commonly supposed to include. For, in the first place, it is not required of the critic that he should analyse the meaning of the poem with a view to passing judgment on the truth or falsity of the ideas it contains. At least half, if not a larger proportion, of so-called 'literary criticism, in this country at any rate, is thus deprived of any right to the title. It may be criticism of great value but-call it scientific or philosophical or what you will— it is not literary; that is, it is not criticism of literature as an art.

Secondly, the critic is absolved from the necessity of referring the particular work he is judging to the verdict of any code of abstract artistic rules. This follows from Croce's repudiation of literary classes. The critic may employ such labels as 'poetry' or 'prose, 'classical' or 'romantic,' etc., if he chooses, for the purpose of more easily handling his material as a practical man. But he is not concerned with them as a critic. You may, for instance, decide to call a poem a lyric or say that it is written in blank verse, but you will still have left it critically intact. When one considers what scores of books have been written discussing such problems as whether certain plays of Shakespeare are rightly to be called comedies or tragedies, or whether, to take another example, Walt Whitman wrote poetry or prose, one realises once again how enormously reduced in bulk becomes the extant corpus of what, upon Crocean principles, alone merits the name of genuine literary criticism.

Lastly, the critic may omit all qualitative comparison between one author's work and another's due to an attempt to establish a scale of merit by reference to the value of their contents. This comparative type of judgment is perhaps the commonest among all the forms of so-called literary criticism. Croce does not object to the Vol. 235.-No. 467.

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