The Breviary of Aesthetic
63
to it fugitively: the relation between fancy and logic, art and
science. This problem is substantially the same as that which
reappears as the search for the distinction between poetry
and prose; at any rate, since (and the discovery was soon
made, for it is already found in the “Poetic” of Aristotle) it
was recognised that the distinction cannot be drawn as be-
tween the metrical and the unmetrical, since there can be
poetry in prose (for example, romances and plays) and
prose in metre (for example, didascalic and philosophic
poems). We shall therefore conduct it with the more pro-
found criterion, which is that of image and perception, of
intuition and judgment, which has already been explained;
poetry will be the expression of the image, prose that of the
judgment or concept. But the two expressions, in so far as
expressions, are of the same nature, and both possess the
same aesthetic value; therefore, if the poet be the lyrist of his
feelings, the prosaist is also the lyrist of his feelings,—that is,
poet,—though it be of the feelings which arise in him from
or in his search for the concept. And there is no reason what-
ever for recognising the quality of poet to the composer of a
sonnet and of refusing it to him who has composed the
“Metaphysic,” the “Somma Teologia,” the “Scienza Nuova,”
the “Phenomenology of the Spirit,” or told the stoιy of the
Peloponnesian wars, of the politics of Augustus and Tiberius,
or the “universal history”: in all of those works there is as
much passion and as much lyrical and representative force
as in any sonnet or poem. For all the distinctions with which
it has been attempted to reserve the poetic quality for the
poet and to deny it to the prosaist, are like those stones, car-
ried with great effort to the top of a steep mountain, which
fall back again into the valley with ruinous results. Yet there
is a just apparent difference, but in order to determine it,