Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/420

352 erning intelligence; the ability to select and reject; to determine the congruity of material; to accept or modify the image which, upon representation, turns out to be harmonious or inadequate; the feeling for unity and the recognition of it when achieved—these are the constituents of the process of transformation, and the qualities which distinguish the true artist from the naïve rhapsodist who merely expresses himself. But Croce has made clearer than any other writer the identity of form and content. The abolition of this time-honoured dualism will, alone, assure him of immortality. The chief characteristic of art is that it has no ideas separable from its form, and in this respect it is unlike philosophy where thought may adopt any one of a number of forms and still preserve its essential meaning. In art the material drawn from the vast reservoir of experience retains its meaning only in the form given it: change one detail and a different meaning instantly appears.

In his definition of the concept, I am not sure that Croce has surmounted Berkeley's old contention that "we have no idea of substance distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities." But it is one of the blessings of philosophy that it is never absolute; and it is one of the liberties of philosophy that its concepts, whether impregnable or not, provide us with instruments for probing into the meaning of art and life. And when Croce places art among the lower grades of the theoretic spirit, that is, inferior to logic, I am not hurt. Lower it may be, but certainly not less important. In his latest writings he has at last connected art, by means of its lyric aspect, with the universal. "In every accent of a poet, in every creature of his fantasy, there is the whole of human destiny, all the hopes, the illusions, the sorrows and the joys, all human greatness and all human misery, the entire drama of reality, which perpetually becomes and grows upon itself, suffering and rejoicing." Philosophy, parasitic on art, dies in its unattainable desire for eternal truth. The beauty of art is complete and unchangeable. Art lives through the perfection of its forms. Therein lie its glory and its immortality.