The Breviary of Aesthetic 45
tises on the aesthetic of the tragic, the comic, the lyric, the
humorous, and aesthetics of painting, of music, or of poetry
(these last are still called by the old name of “poetics”); and,
what is worse (though but little attention is paid to these
æsthetieians who are impelled to write through solitary dil-
ettantism or academic profession), critics, in judging works
of art, have not altogether abandoned the habit of judging
them according to the genus or particular form of art to
which, according to the above æsthetieians, they should be-
long; and, instead of clearly stating whether a work be beau-
tiful or ugly, they proceed to reason their impressions, say-
ing that it well observes, or wrongly violates, the laws of the
drama, or of romance, or of painting, or of bas-relief. It is
also very common in all countries to treat artistic and liter-
ary history as history of kinds, and to present the artists as
cultivating this or that kind; and to divide the work of an
artist, which always has unity of development, whatever
form it take, whether lyric, romance or drama, into as many
compartments as there are kinds; so that Lodovico Ariosto,
for example, appears now among the cultivators of the Latin
poetry of the Renaissance, now among the authors of the
first Latin satires, now among those of the first comedies,
now among those who brought the poem of chivalry to per-
fection: as though Latin poetry, satire, comedy, and poem
were not always the same poet, Ariosto, in his experiments,
in his logic, and in the manifestations of his spiritual devel-
opment.
It is not to be denied that the theory of kinds and of the
arts has not had, and does not now possess, its own internal
dialectic and its autocriticism, or irony, according as we may
please to call it; and no one is ignorant that Uterary history
is full of these cases of an established style, against which an