The Breviary of Aesthetic 61
son, all are real, in the unity of the spirit, in the eternal going
and coming, which is their eternal constancy and reality.
Those who see in art the concept, history, mathematics, the
type, morality, pleasure, and everything else, are right, be-
cause these and all other things are contained within it, ow-
ing to tire unity of the spirit; indeed, the presence in it of
them all, and the energetic unilaterality alike of art as of any
other particular form, tending to reduce all activities to one,
explains the passage from one form to another, the complet-
ing of one form in the other, and it explains development.
But those same people are wrong (owing to the distinction,
which is the inseparable moment of unity) in the way that
they find them all equally abstract or equally confused. Be-
cause concept, type, number, measure, morality, utility,
pleasure and. pain are in art as art, either antecedent or con-
sequent; and therefore are there presupposed (sunk and for-
gotten there, to adopt a favourite expression of De Sanctis)
or as presentiments. Without that presumption, without that
presentiment, art would not be art; but it would not be art
either (and all the other forms of the spirit would be dis-
turbed by it), if it were desired to impose those values upon
art as art, which is and never can be other than pure intui-
tion. The artist will always be morally blameless and philo-
sophically uncensurable, even though his art should indicate
a low morality and philosophy: in so far as he is an artist, he
does not act and does not reason, but poetises, paints, sings
and, in short, expresses himself: were we to adopt a different
criterion, we should return to the condemnation of Homeric
poetry, in the manner of the Italian critics of the Seicento
and the French critics of the time of the fourteenth Louis,
who turned up their noses at what they termed “the man-
ners” of those inebriated, vociferating, violent, cruel and ill-
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