The Breviary o£ Aesthetic 41
either it is not or is not yet expression. On the other hand,
an ornate expression, if it be expressive in every part, can-
not be called ornate, but as naked as the other, and as ap-
propriate as the other; if it contain inexpressive, additional,
extrinsic elements, it is not beautiful, but ugly, it is not or is
not yet expression; to be so, it must purify itself of external
elements (as the other must be enriched with the elements
that are wanting).
Expression and beauty are not two concepts, but a single
concept, which it is permissible to designate with either sy-
nonymous vocable: artistic fancy is always corporeal, but it is
not obese, being always clad with itself and never charged
with anything else, or “ornate.” Certainly a problem was
lurking beneath this falsest of distinctions, the necessity of
making a distinction; and the problem (as can be deduced
from certain passages in Aristotle, and from the psychology
and gnoseology of the Stoics, and as we see it, intensified in
the discussions of the Italian rhetoricians of the seventeenth
century) was concerned with the relations between thought
and fancy, philosophy and poetry, logic and æsthetie (dia-
lectic and rhetoric, or, as was still said at the time, the “open”
and the closed “fist”). “Naked” expression referred to
thought and to philosophy, “ornate” expression to fancy and
to poetry. But it is not less true that this problem as to the
distinction between the two forms of the theoretical spirit
could not be solved in the field of one of them, intuition or
expression, where nothing will ever be found but fancy,
poetry, æsthetie; and the undue introduction of logic will
only project there a deceitful shadow, which will darken and
hamper intelligence, depriving it of the view of art in its ful-
ness and purity, without giving it that of Iogicity and of
thought.