The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 25
affections, of love and hate, of anguish and jubilation, of des-
peration and elevation; and is willingly satisfied and pleased
with vaporous and indeterminate images, broken and allu-
sive in style, with vague suggestions, with approximate
phrases, with powerful and troubled sketches: while classi-
cism loves the peaceful soul, the wise design, figures studied
in their characteristics and precise in outline, pondération,
equilibrium, clarity; and resolutely tends toward represen-
tation, as the other tends toward feeling. And whoever puts
himself at one or the other point of view finds crowds of
reasons for maintaining it and for confuting the opposite
point of view; because (say the romantics), What is the
use of an art, rich in beautiful images, which, nevertheless,
does not speak to the heart? And if it do speak to the
heart, what is the use if the images be not beautiful? And
the others will say, Wlrat is the use of the shock of the pas-
sions, if the spirit do not rest upon a beautiful image?
And if the image be beautiful, if our taste be satisfied,
what matters the absence of those emotions which can all
of them be obtained outside art, and which life does not
fail to provide, sometimes in greater quantity than we de-
sire?—But when we begin to feel weary of the fruitless
defence of both partial views; above all, when we turn
away from the ordinary works of art produced by the ro-
mantic and classical schools, from works convulsed witlι
passion or coldly decorous, and fix them on the works,
not of the disciples, but of the masters, not of the medio-
cre, but of the supreme, we see the contest disappear in
the distance and find ourselves unable to call the great por-
tions of these works, romantic or classic or representative,
because they are both classic and romantic, feelings and
representations, a vigorous feeling which has become all

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