The Breviary of Aesthetic 79
anyone, not even themselves, as we have seen, to the effec-
tual desperation of not judging.
Closing here this long but indispensable parenthesis and
taking up the thread of the discourse, art, historical exegesis,
and taste, if they be conditions of criticism, are not yet criti-
cism. Indeed, nothing is obtained by means of that triple
presupposition, save the reproduction and enjoyment of the
image—expression; that is to say, we return and place our-
selves neither more nor less than in the place of the artist-
producer in the act of producing his image. Nor can we es-
cape from those conditions, as some boast of doing, by pro-
posing to ourselves to reproduce in a new form the work of
the poet and the artist by providing its equivalent; hence
they define the critic: artifex additus artifici. Because that re-
production in a new garment would be a translation, or a
variation, another work of art, to some extent inspired by the
first; and if it were the same, it would be a reproduction
pure and simple, a material reproduction, with the same
words, the same colours, and the same tones—that is, useless.
The critic is not artifex additus artifici, but philosophas ad-
ditus artifici: his work is not achieved, save when the image
received is both preserved and surpassed; it belongs to
thought, which we have seen surpass and illumine fancy
with new light, make the intuition perception, qualify reality,
and therefore distinguish reality from unreality. In this per-
ception, this distinction, which is always and altogether criti-
cism or judgment, the criticism of art, of which we are now
especially treating, originates with the question: whether
and in what measure the fact, which we have before us as a
problem, is intuition—that is to say, is real as such; and
whether and in what measure, it is not such—that is to say,
is unreal: reality and unreality, which in art are called beauty