The Breviary o£ Aesthetic 87
through vivacity of language, or in order to chime with cur-
rent parlance; provided that we shew at the same time, or
hint, or let be understood, or at least do not exclude, the
positive content, both of that beautiful and of that ugly,
which will never be so radically condemned in its ugliness
as when it is fully justified and understood, because in this
case it will be removed in the most radical manner from the
sphere proper to art.
For this reason, criticism of art, when truly æsthetie or
historical, becomes at the same time amplified into a criti-
cism of life, since it is not possible to judge—that is, to char-
acterise—works of art without at the same time judging and
characterising the works of the whole life: as we observe
with the truly great critics, and above all with De Sanctis,
in his “History of Italian Literature” and in his “Critical Es-
says,” who is as profound a critic of art as of philosophy, mo-
rality, and politics; he is profound in the one because pro-
found in the other, and inversely: the strength of his pure
aesthetic consideration of art is the strength of his pure moral
consideration of morality. Because the forms of the spirit, of
which criticism avails itself as categories of judgment, al-
though ideally distinguishable in unity, are not materially
separable from one another and from unity, under penalty
of seeing them vanish before us. We cannot, therefore, speak
of a distinction of art from other criticism, save in an empiri-
cal manner, to indicate that the attention of the speaker or
writer is directed to one rather than to another part of his
indivisible argument. And the distinction is also empirical
(I have hitherto preserved this here, in order to proceed
with didactic clearness) betwen criticism and history of
art: a distinction which has been specially determined by
the fact that a polemical element prevails in the study of