the aesthetic element of representation, and from a variable element, the pleasing in its infinite forms, arising from all the various classes of values.

"In ordinary language there is sometimes a feeling of repugnance at calling an expression beautiful, which is not an expression of the sympathetic. Hence the continual contrast between the point of view of the æsthetician or of the art critic and that of the ordinary person, who cannot succeed in persuading himself that the image of pain and of turpitude can be beautiful, or at least, can be beautiful with as much right as the pleasing and the good" (Esthetic, tr. Douglas Ainslee, p. 137). "The doctrine of the sympathetic has introduced and rendered familiar in systems of æsthetic a series of concepts," such as "tragic, comic, sublime, pathetic, moving, sad, ridiculous, melancholy, tragi-comic, humoristic, majestic, dignified, serious, grave, imposing, noble, decorous, graceful, attractive, piquant, coquettish, idyllic, elegiac, cheerful, violent, ingenuous, cruel, base, horrible, disgusting, dreadful, nauseating; the list can be increased at will" (p. 142). But these concepts, Croce says, and the psychologists would agree with him, are merely "classes, which can be bent in the most various ways and multiplied at pleasure, to which it is sought to reduce the infinite complications and shadings of the values and disvalues of life." They cannot be defined. They belong not to aesthetic but to psychology.

Now Mr. Balfour is in perfect accord with Croce in his belief that these concepts are not measurable objectively, that what is attractive to one person may be repellent to another. But he has nowhere shown that he recognizes the distinction between the aesthetic of the sympathetic and the beautiful of expression alone. His view is almost identical with that of æsthetic hedonism which "looks upon the aesthetic as a simple fact of feeling, and confounds the pleasurable of expression with the pleasurable of all sorts." Of course pleasure arising from a variable element is not measurable by any fixed standard, but the pleasurable of expression is. And the measure to be used is suggested by Balfour himself. It is knowledge. Balfour admits that technique is measurable objectively by the critic's knowl

edge of the difficulties to be overcome. Similarly adequacy of expression, which is only another name for beauty, is measured by the critic's knowledge of what the artist is trying to express. If, in Croce's words, we ask before a work of art "if it be expressive and what it expresses, whether it speak or stammer, or be silent altogether" (p. 61), we are applying an objective test just as certainly as a judge who, with the evidence before him, asks whether the parties concerned have fulfilled or violated a contract. We may reach different conclusions, just as judges may, and do, but as Balfour himself concedes, in speaking of technique, "the scale is not the less objective because it may often be uncertain in application” (p. 17). |

To illustrate the difference between the pleasurable of expression and the pleasurable of the sympathetic I had thought of selecting a realistic passage from Crabbe's Village, such a passage as that portraying the hideous misery of the village poor house. No normal person could derive any pleasure from contemplating the appalling heartlessness, degradation, and squalor depicted: though critics innumerable have admired Crabbe's power of expression. But the contemplation of such misery might arouse pity, and as pity is classed as a sympathetic emotion, I fear the passage would not serve my purpose. Let me present, instead, an image which has nothing about it with which we can sympathize. What could be more gruesome than Spenser's description of the foul monster in the den of Errour?--

Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide,

But th' other half did woman's shape retaine,
Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.

Of her there bred

A thousand young ones, which she dayly fed,

Sucking upon her poisonous dugs, each one

Of sundry shapes, yet all ill-favorèd:

Soon as that uncouth light upon them shone,

Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone.

No one has ever seen such a monster, and yet it is easily visualized. No one can have any pleasant associations aroused by the details enumerated, and yet the perfection of the expression of the ugly is in itself beautiful.

Or take the picture by Teniers, of sots quarreling over their dice, which Ruskin denounces as base, because "it is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing." In this picture the surroundings are unattractive, the characters are repellent, their occupation low. Our sympathies are not touched. Yet it does produce pleasure of the purely æsthetic kind, pleasure resulting from the observer's recognition of the truthfulness of the artist's transcription of his feelings about the facts before him. Ruskin, who condemns the picture on moral grounds, admits that "nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it." His words are not the result of sympathetic admiration, but of knowledge. Not knowledge that comes through any one definite channel, but knowledge that many people may have in common just the same; knowledge of life and knowledge of the significance of details; the sort of knowledge that enables us to say confidently that a character in a book is true to life, though we never actually knew any personality like it in real life. To be sure, as Woodberry says, it is not a "facile task to re-create the work as it was in the mind of the artist. It is not so simple as observing a sunset; it is not merely to open your eyes and see; you must first create the eye to see with" (Two Phases of Criticism, p. 14). But if the critic with the seeing eye points out the significance of the details in revealing the artist's meaning, then those persons whose souls have developed enough through experience and contemplation will recognize the truth in the representation. In every generation the beauties of the artistic creations of the past have been apparent to men of trained insight. They may have given slightly different interpretations to the artist's meaning, reading their own personalities into it to a certain extent, but still the nucleus of truth, the fundamental similarity between expression and idea, has been there, else there had been no common point from which they could diverge. Year after year, also, readers who have failed to appreciate these works, come to appreciate them. It is not as though the world were divided into those absolutely incapable of appreciation and those capable. On the contrary, the incapable are constantly merging into the capable. The works which they enjoyed in their immaturity pass to the

rubbish heap; the works which possess the qualities of durable Great art is that to which men grow

art they come to enjoy.

up but which they do not outgrow.

Although personally I do not believe that the quality of perfect expression is sufficient alone to put a work of art in the highest class, I do believe that every work of art prized by æstheticians possesses this quality, that it is the common basis for their agreement, no matter how much they may vary in total emotional response, and that without this element no work of art meets with the approval of a man of trained taste. The pure æsthetician would not rank works of art by the sympathetic pleasure they produce in him, as Balfour would, nor by their moral worth, as would Brownell, but by the nearness of their approach to pérfection of expression. And all perfect expressions, whether sonnets, odes, or epics, he would place in the same class.

It is Croce's dictum, not that art is expression, but that all expression is art, that Spingarn has seized upon with such eagerness (J. E. Spingarn, Creative Criticism, Henry Holt and Company). With a total disregard for reasoning and with an astonishing confidence in the power of mere assertion, he seeks to sweep aside the distinctions created by generations of thinkers. "We have done with all the old rules," he exclaims. "We have done with the genres, or literary kinds. . . . . We have done with the comic, the tragic, the sublime, and an army of vague abstractions of their kind. . . . . We have done with the theory of style, with metaphor, simile, and all the paraphernalia of Graeco-Roman rhetoric. . We have done with all moral judgment of literature. . . . . We have done with the confusion. between the drama and the theatre. technique as separate from art. . . race, the time, the environment of a poet's work as an element in Criticism. . . . . Finally we have done with the old rupture between genius and taste. When Criticism first propounded as its real concern the oft-repeated question: "What has the poet tried to express and how has he expressed it?' Criticism prescribed for itself the only possible method. How can the critic answer this question without becoming at one with the creator? The identity of genius and taste is the final achieve

We have done with We have done with the

ment of modern thought on the subject of art" (J. E. Spingarn, Creative Criticism, p. 24 ff.).

Mr. Spingarn is a bit hasty in reporting the success of the new criticism. He numbers the fatalities in the ranks he is attacking by the number of bombs he explodes, without troubling himself to examine actual results. Could we share his confidence we should now be speaking of conservative criticism in the past tense. In truth, however, many of those elements of art with which the older criticism has concerned itself persist in asserting themselves in spite of Mr. Spingarn's denial of their existence. We have hitherto confined ourselves to the pleasuregiving qualities of art in order to show that even if we evaluated art by its beauty alone there was some ground for belief in an objective standard. But such restraint did not spring from lack of belief in intellectual values. It is the plain intention of the new criticism, however, in identifying art and expression, to set aside as unimportant all intellectual and moral elements. Accept the principle "All expression is art," says Mr. Spingarn, and we have no further use for moral judgments. They are all so much old lumber.

Now this statement appears to have a shade of truth in it if, in accepting the principle, we attach to the word expression the same meaning that Croce attaches to it. But Mr. Spingarn, I cannot help feeling, is somewhat disingenuous in not explaining to his readers that he uses the term in a philosophical, not in its popular sense. What does the average reader understand by the term "expression" when applied to a work of art? Professor Woodberry has answered the question for us: "It is the process of externalizing what was in the artist's mind, in some object. of sense which shall convey it to others." That is, when we speak of an expression, we mean the painted picture, the moulded form, the written poem; in brief, the observable result of the artist's activity. But this is not what Croce means when he says that all expression is art. Croce means by expression the spiritual activity, the æsthetic vision of the artist, the synthesis of sensations and impressions existing in the artist's mind but not yet externalized. Space does not here permit of an attempt to unravel the intricacies of Croce's theory, but in so much as