The name is absent

50 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

is without doubt a merit) paradoxical, or at variance with
vulgar opinions : but will they not be in want of some comple-
ment? There must be some mode of arranging, subordinating,
connecting, understanding, and dominating the dance of the
intuitions, if we do not wish to bewilder our wits with them.

And there is indeed such a mode, for when we denied
theoretic value to abstract classifications we did not intend
to deny it to that genetic and concrete classification which is
not, indeed, a “classification” and is called History. In history
each work of art takes the place that belongs to it—that and
no other: the ballade of Guido Cavalcanti and the sonnet of
Cecco Angioleri, which seem to be the sigh or the laughter
of an instant; the “Commedia” of Dante, which seems to re-
sume in itself a millennium of the human spirit; the “Mac-
cheronee” of Merlin Cocaio at the close of the Middle Ages,
with their noisy laughter; the elegant Cinquecento transla-
tion of the Æneid by Annibal Caro; the dry prose of Sarpi;
and the Jesuitic-polemical prose of Danielo Bartofi: without
the necessity of judging that to be not original which is origi-
nal, because it lives; that to be small which is neither great
nor small, because it escapes measure : or we can say great and
small, if we will, but metaphorically, with the intention of
manifesting certain admirations and of noting certain rela-
tions of importance (quite other than arithmetic or geomet-
rical). And in history, which is ever becoming richer and
more definite, not in pyramids of empirical concepts, which
become more and more empty the higher they rise and the
more subtle they become, is to be found the link of all works
of art and of all intuitions, because in history they appear
organically connected among themselves, as successive and
necessary stages of the development of the spirit, each one a
note of the eternal poem which harmonises all single poems
in itself.

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