86 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
the criticism of art as means or as end: since it is henceforth
clear that history adopted as a means is not history, precisely
because it is a means, but is exegetic material; and that
which enters it as end is certainly history, though it does not
enter it as a particular element, but as its constituent whole:
which precisely describes the word “end.”
But if criticism of art be historical criticism, it follows that
it will not be possible to limit the duty of discerning the
beautiful and the ugly to simple approval and refusal in the
immediate consciousness of the artist when he produces, or
of the man of taste when he contemplates; it must widen
and elevate itself to what is called explanation. And since in
tire world of history (which is, indeed, the only world) nega-
tive or privative facts do not exist, what seems to taste to be
ugly and repugnant, because not artistic, will be neither
ugly nor repugnant to historical consideration, because it
Icnows that what is not artistic yet is something else, and has
its right to existence as truly as it has existed. The virtuous
Cathohc allegory composed by Tasso for his “Gerusalemme”
is not artistic, nor the patriotic declamation of Niccolini and
Gueιτazzi, nor the subtleties and conceits which Petrarch in-
troduced into his poems; but Tasso’s allegory is one of the
manifestations of the work of the Catholic counter-reform
in the Latin countries; the declamations of Niccohni and of
Guerrazzi were violent attempts to rouse the souls of Italians
against tire priest and the stranger, representing adhesion to
the manner of that arousing; the subtleties and conceits of
Petrarch, the cult of traditional troubadour elegance, revived
and enriched in the new Italian civilisation; that is to say,
they are all practical facts, very significant historically and
worthy of respect. We can well continue to talk of the beau-
tiful and of the ugly, in the field of historical criticism,