The Breviary of Aesthetic 81
pears, with the development, the decadence, and the reap-
pearance of the philosophy of art; and each can compare
what it was in the Middle Ages (when it may almost be said
that it was not) with what it became in the first half of the
nineteenth century with Herder, with Hegel, and with the
Romantics, in Italy with De Sanctis; and in a narrower field,
what it was with De Sanctis, and what it became in the fol-
lowing period of naturalism, in which the concept of art be-
came clouded and finally confused with physic and with
physiology, and even with pathology. And if disagreements
as to judgments depend for one half, or less than half, upon
lack of clearness as to what the artist has done, lack of sym-
pathy and taste for another half, or more than half, this
arises from the small clearness of ideas upon art; whence it
often happens that two individuals are substantially at one
as to the value of a work of art, save that the one approves
what the other blames, because each refers to a different
definition of art.
And owing to this dependence of criticism upon the con-
cept of art, as many forms of false criticism are to be distin-
guished as there are false philosophies of art; and, limiting
ourselves to the principal forms of which we have already
discoursed, there is a kind of criticism which, instead of re-
producing and characterising art, breaks in pieces and clas-
sifies it; there is another, moralistic, which treats works of
art like actions in respect of ends which the artist proposes
or should have proposed to himself; there is hedonistic criti-
cism, which presents art as having attained or failed to at-
tain to pleasure and amusement; there is also the intellectu-
aliste form, which measures progress according to the prog-
ress of philosophy, knows the philosophy but not the pas-
sion of Dante, judges Ariosto feeble because he has a feeble