The Breviary of Aesthetic 65
And finally, the order and logic of the various forms of
the spirit, making the one necessary for the other and there-
fore all necessary, reveal the folly of negating the one in the
name of the other: the error of the philosopher (Plato), or
of the moralist (Savonarola or Proudhon), or of the natural-
ist and practical man (there are so many of these that I do
not quote names!), who refute art and poetry; and, on the
other hand, the error of the artist who rebels against thought,
science, practice, and morality, as did so many “romantics”
in tragedy, and as do so many “decadents” in comedy in our
day. These are errors and follies to which also we can afford
a caress in passing (always keeping in view our plan of not
leaving anyone quite disconsolate), for it is evident that they
have a positive content of their own in their very negativity,
as rebellion against certain false concepts or certain false
manifestations of art and of science, of practice and of mo-
rality (Plato, for example, combating the idea of poetry as
“wisdom”; Savonarola, the not austere and therefore corrupt
civilisation of the Italian Renaissance so soon to be dis-
solved), etc. But it is madness to attempt to prove that were
philosophy without art, it would exist for itself, because it
would be without what conditions its problems, and air to
breathe would be taken from it, in order to make it prevail
alone against art; and that practice is not practice, when it
is not set in motion and revived by aspirations, and, as they
say, by “ideals,” by “dear imagining,” which is art; and, on
the other hand, that art without morality, art that usurps
with the decadents the title of “pure beauty,” and before
which is burnt incense, as though it were a diabolic idol wor-
shipped by a company of devils, owing to the lack of morali-
ty in the life from which it springs and which surrounds it, is
decomposed as art, and become caprice, luxury, and charla-