82 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
philosophy, Tasso more serious because his philosophy is
more serious, Leopardi contradictory in his pessimism.
There is that criticism usually called psychological, which
separates content from form, and instead of attending to
works of art, attends to the psychology of the artists as men;
and there is the other form, which separates form from con-
tent and is pleased with abstract forms because, according
to cases and to individual sympathies, they recall antiquity
or the Middle Ages; and there is yet another, which finds
beauty where it finds rhetorical ornaments; and finally there
is that which, having fixed the laws of the kinds and of the
arts, receives or rejects works of art according as they ap-
proach or retreat from the models which they have formed.
I have not enumerated them all, nor had I the intention of
so doing, nor do I wish to expound the criticism of criticism,
which could be nothing but a repetition of the already traced
criticism and dialectic of Æsthetic; and already here and
there will have been observed the beginnings of inevitable
repetition. It would be more profitable to summarise (if
even a rapid summary did not demand too much space) the
history of criticism, to place the historical names in the ideal
positions that I have indicated, and to shew how criticism of
models raged above all during the Itahan and French clas-
sical periods, Conceptualistic criticism in German philosophy
of the nineteenth century, that of moralistic description at
the period of religious reform or of the Italian national re-
vival, psychology in France with Sainte-Beuve and many
others; how the hedonistic form had its widest diffusion
among people in society, among boudoir and journalistic
critics; that of classifications, in schools, where the duty of
criticism is believed to have been successfully fulfilled when
the so-called origin of metres and literary and artistic kinds
and their representatives has been investigated.