The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 43
and vocabularies, and with the foolish belief that man speaks
with the vocabulary and with grammar. Man speaks at every
instant like the poet, because, like the poet, he expresses his
impressions and his feelings in the form called conversational
or familiar, which is not separated by any abyss from the
other forms called prosaic, poetic-prosaic, narrative, epic,
dialogue, dramatic, lyric, melic, song, and so on. And if it do
not displease man in general to be considered poet and al-
ways poet (as he is by force of his humanity), it should not
displease the poet to be united with common humanity, be-
cause this union alone explains the power which poetry,
understood in the loftiest and in the narrowest sense, wields
over all human souls. Were poetry a language apart, a “lan-
guage of the gods,” men would not understand it; and if it
elevate them, it elevates them not above, but within them-
selves: true democracy and true aristocracy coincide in this
field also. Coincidence of art and language, which implies,
as is natural, coincidence of æsthetic and of philosophy of
language, definable the one by the other and therefore
identical,—this I ventured to place twelve years ago in the
title of a treatise of mine on Æsthetic, which has truly not
failed of its effect upon many linguists and philosophers of
Æsthetic in Italy and outside Italy, as is shewn by the copi-
ous “literature” which it has produced. This identification
will benefit studies on art and poetry by purifying them of
hedonistic, moralistic, and Conceptualistic residues, still to
be found in such quantity in literary and artistic criticism.
But the benefit which it will confer upon linguistic studies
will be far more inestimable, for it is urgent that they should
be disencumbered of physiological, psychological, and psy-
chophysiological methods, now the fashion, and be freed
from the ever returning theory of the conventional origin of

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