The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 71
tain subjects are poetical, and certain others not; they are
discontented with the art at present produced, and would
prefer one similar to that prevailing at this or that epoch of
the past, or at another of which they declare they catch a
glimpse in the near or remote future; they will reprove Tasso
for not being Ariosto, Leopardi for not being Metastasio,
Manzoni for not being Alfieri, D’Annunzio because he is not
Berchet or Fra Jacopone; and they describe the great artist
of the future, supplying him with ethic, philosophy, history,
language, metric, with architectonic and Colouristic proc-
esses, and with whatever it may seem to them that he stands
in need. And this time it is clear that the blame lies with the
critic; and the artists are right in behaving toward such bru-
tality in the way that we behave toward beasts, which we
try to tame, to illude and to delude, in order that they may
serve us; or we drive them away and send them to the
slaughter-house when they are no longer good for any ser-
ice. But for the honour of criticism we must add that those
capricious critics are not so much critics as artists : artists who
have failed and who aspire to a certain form of art, which
they are unable to attain, either because their aspiration was
contradictory, or because their power was not sufficient and
failed them; and thus, preserving in their soul the bitterness
of the unrealised ideal, they can speak of nothing else, la-
menting everywhere its absence, and everywhere invoking
its presence. And sometimes, too, they are artists who are
anything but failures,—indeed, most felicitous artists,—but,
owing to the very energy of their artistic individuality, in-
capable of emerging from themselves in order to understand
forms of art different from their own, and disposed to reject
them with violence; they are aided in this negation by the
odium figulinum, the jealousy of the artist for the artist,

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