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Rh he resolves mental activity into two departments, the theoretical and the practical, or knowledge and action. These departments are in turn divided; the first into the aesthetic, or intuitive and individual, as distinct from the logical, or conceptual and universal; the second into the economic, or individually useful, as contrasted with the ethical, or universally good. Finally he establishes the interrelation of the theoretical and the practical, and gives precedence to the former.

Art, then, is intuitive knowledge, or knowledge obtained through the imagination; and intuition is no more and no less than expression. Beauty is successful expression; ugliness unsuccessful, or more exactly, failure to express. The genius does not exist: the difference between the artist and the layman is purely quantitative (if this were not so, art would be a closed circle drawn round the chosen few); "certain men have a greater aptitude, a more frequent inclination fully to express certain complex states of the soul—these are ordinarily known as artists." Croce has anticipated the crimes committed against art by the ignorant worshippers of his expressionistic gospel: he has rightly asserted the lyrical character of all art, but has consistently advocated a higher standard of critical judgement. Furthermore, he has applied his theory with brilliant results, The Poetry of Dante being by odds the finest interpretation of the Italian poet yet published, a book in which the personality of Dante shines out splendidly from the smoky mazes of dead allegory. Nevertheless, his creed has done immense mischief among modern painters. For a number of years we have had to face an appalling crop of abortions—meaningless abstractions, random idiocies of spectrum colour and riots of symbolical nonsense. And behind them a maniac with a brush in his hand, shouting, "This is art! This is expression!"

What Croce has failed to make clear is the fundamental brain-work necessary to the composition of a work of art. His analysis of the intuitive activity into the impression, the transforming imagination, and the expression is, in itself, incontrovertible, but for some reason or other—possibly because of his distaste for psychology—he has left the second process undeveloped. The concrete art-object is a long and cumulative growth; it is not the extrinsication of an original idea already executed in the brain; nor is it constructed from a sequence of images stored away in perfect form and demanding only colour and canvas for objective realization. A powerful gov-