rough comparison of one poet with another where both are engaged upon much the same problem of expression, which happens when each is concerned in giving form to a somewhat similar subject matter. But to the conclusions which result from such a procedure he denies any scientific value whatever, since, strictly speaking, not only is every poem that has ever been written unique, and therefore incomparable, but every line in every poem is unique too, nay, every word in every line, even if the same word be many times repeated within the compass of a single stanza. In short, there is no form of criticism, common though this particular form of it be, which Croce considers more pernicious in its results than that which either openly or by implication strives to establish an absolute standard of taste by setting up, let us say, Shakespeare as the ideal type of dramatist and then depreciating the merit of other poets or dramatists by comparison.

Croce objects, of course, no less vehemently to the maxim 'à chaque homme son goût.' There does indeed exist an absolute criterion of taste, but absolute in a different way from that of the intellect because established. by no process of reasoning. The criterion of taste is absolute with the intuitive absoluteness of the imagination, which cannot err, and recognises no degrees in Beauty. Thus an epigram and an epic, a savage's scrawl and the Sistine Madonna, a music-hall tune and a Beethoven Symphony, though each pair presents a difference as wide as the poles in the amount or complexity of their contents, yet all have form in common. They are all expressions; and the critic has to decide but one thing-are they coherent expressions, that is, truly and completely expressive of themselves? If his verdict be in the affirmative, he must pronounce them all beautiful and hence of equal artistic merit. The sole method by which the critic can apply this test is himself to try to see imaginatively exactly what the poet or artist has seen imaginatively-a task he can only hope to accomplish by first placing himself at the poet's point of view. Once he has reached it, and because the imagination is absolute, if the poet has seen clearly, so will the critic see clearly and pronounce the expression beautiful. If, on the other hand, the poet has not seen

clearly, the critic too will not see clearly, and will therefore find the expression more or less ugly, just as the poet himself found it.

In reaching the needful point of view lies one of the critic's difficulties; and it is to assist him in this connexion that Croce requires that he should possess historical culture, which will alone enable him to recover the conditions under which the poet produced his work. No man living has paid higher tribute than Croce to the philologist, the grammarian, the historian, the searcher in dusty archives-to all labourers, in short, however humble, who work in those fields of scientific research that abut upon, but are not to be confused with, the domain of artistic criticism proper. Such research is invaluable for the (frequently) indispensable information it provides, information which the critic should possess, though not necessarily himself have discovered, if he is to proceed fully equipped to his task.

But, even thus equipped, he will fail in that task if he does not possess æsthetic sensibility, without which he will not find beauty when beauty is there. He must train his taste and train it on the best literature. Croce himself, whose critical activities have been largely expended upon modern Italian poets, is well aware of the danger of thereby lowering his own standard of taste. 'For my part,' he says, 'I have sought to guard myself against it by constant re-reading of the classics, which I regard as a kind of spiritual exercise, a præparatio ad missam, for my office of critic.'

By training the taste, however, Croce really means keeping the imagination pure, so far as that can be done by merely trying. There is a moment in the process of criticism when the critic's mind must literally be 'of imagination all compact." It is in that moment that he will assuredly find beauty, if beauty is there to be found. But this moment, in spite of all the poet may do to assist him by even the most masterly technique, it is no easy matter for the critic to achieve. For the effort to see, and to see clearly, is again and again thwarted by the very constitution of the human mind, which is at the same time both one and complex. When poets and critics, or one good critic and another good critic, disagree (as of course they often do) about a particular

work, the divergence of opinion is more often attributable to this cause than to a difference in their respective points of view. Haste, vanity, theoretical prejudices, personal likes and dislikes, intervene and disturb the contemplative attitude. In other words, the mind insists upon thinking and willing when it ought to be all concentrated in seeing. This mental struggle, which the critic himself experiences when bent to his task, should predispose him to sympathise with the poet whose work he is judging. For it is the exact parallel of that which, taking place in the poet's mind, results in the production of his poem, that poem's failure or success depending upon its issue. If the critic be a true captain of his soul, the struggle always ends in the victory of imagination. The imagination is, so to speak, given its chance and catches that which it is seeking a living impression of the whole, without which no amount of subsequent reflexion will enable the critic to decide with assurance upon the causes of the beauty or relative ugliness of the expression; for he will not have made it his own.

He requires the further gift of acuteness in analysing the reasons of the poet's success or failure. For it is not enough to say 'this poem has succeeded' or 'it has failed'; he must know why, he must understand. To understand a poet critically, says Croce in one of his brilliant articles on Carducci, is

'to understand the dialectic of his mind, the practical and emotional forces no less than the contemplative and poetical forces which are struggling within him. To criticise him is to show how, as a result of the struggle between these forces, his poetry is at one time advanced, at another impeded. For the non-poetical elements of his mind sometimes nourish of their own accord the poetical elements, and sometimes consume and are nourished by them.'

Too often, he adds, instead of fixing attention upon this complex yet single process, particular aspects of it are gathered haphazard by the critic and then confusedly presented; the obstructions in the way of poetry or its crude material being substituted for the poetry itself, and, conversely, its very heart's blood described as that which impedes it and causes it to fail.

The final stage of criticism consists in the synthetic

process by which the critic puts together in his exposition or critical estimate his view of 'how it happened,' the result of his analysis of the poet's mental activity immanent in the poem or rather identical with the poem. The critic is here making a judgment of fact, and, if he commits his criticism to words, is writing History. For History, as conceived by Croce, is not a dead past, but a present reality. All poetry, however long ago its author lived, is contemporary poetry, for it is non-existent or at the best a mere unintelligible hieroglyph, until it is re-created in the reader's mind, who, as already pointed out, thereby makes it quite literally his own. It is of the essence of criticism, as of poetry, to be lyrical-in other words, an intimately personal or subjective expression. To aim at what is commonly called objectivity in criticism is, according to Croce, to aim at the impossible.

The reason is thus plain why Croce lays so much stress on the enormous importance to the critic of possessing historical learning. For without it he runs the risk of using the poem he is criticising as a means, not to re-creating or reproducing the original expression created by the poet, but to producing upon it a new one of his own. It is, however, difficult to see how, on Croce's theory-the theory that the physical work of art has no artistic reality-the critic, whatever his erudition as an historian, can be certain that he is not in any case doing this. Croce does indeed take this objection, which if admitted would be fatal to his whole argument, into consideration; but stoutly denies that changes in physical and psychological conditions are, as a matter of fact, insurmountable. He claims that we are constantly surmounting them; otherwise, he says, individual life, which is communion with our past selves and with our fellows, would be impossible. Nevertheless, he might well be challenged to point out any piece of actually existing criticism of a classic, even if based on the most exact historical knowledge, which in some degree is not, or could not be shown to be, what he compares to a palimpsest, a new expression imposed on the antique. It is, therefore, perhaps not without significance that Croce's own critical powers have been chiefly exercised upon quite modern poets. For obviously, if historical culture is a necessary condition of sound criticism

(because the more we know about the circumstances in which a poem was actually written the better able are we to adopt the poet's point of view), then we are forced to accept the paradox that the verdict of contemporary men of taste must in the nature of the case be always preferred to that of posterity, when the beauty of any 'historic' poem is the subject of dispute.

But to criticise Croce's method of criticism is to criticise his theory of art. The two are rigidly welded together and, as already said, must stand or fall together. Yet it is probably true to say that one's estimate of Croce as an æsthetician will closely depend upon whether one has first approached him from the side of his philosophy or from that of his literary criticism. For the former seems rather to have arisen out of the latter than vice versa; and he is such a born critic that the strength and efficacy of his critical method are far more apparent in the pages of 'La Critica,' where he is putting his principles into practice, than in the Estetica' where he formulates them philosophically.

His

As a theory, his Esthetic seems lean, not to say deliberately starved; but to see it applied, or at any rate applied by Croce himself, is to realise that lack of flesh need not necessarily imply absence of muscle. method, whatever its defects, is an unrivalled instrument for detecting pose and sentimentality, the two most heinous of artistic sins; he brings them unerringly to light, however ingeniously the poet may have managed to conceal their presence in his work. It matters not to Croce whether a poem is full of wisdom, its vowel sounds charged with music, its metre impeccable, its rhythms bewitching to the sense; it may possess all these qualities and yet be an ugly thing if it is not artistically sincere, that is, imaginatively pure. Did the poet really see a vision or did he only urge himself to see one because the occasion seemed to demand it? Was he content to wait upon his imagination, or did he suffer his imagination to become wholly or in part the slave of the material it should control? What was the true state of the poet's mind when he wrote his poem? How has that state of mind been developed in the various parts of the poem? Is the poem in harmony or out of harmony with it? Does the poem express it