Modern criticism of art will be found to have penetrated beyond the mere dogmatic assertion of intuited beauty and ugliness; it is replete with pointed psychological explanations of what has happened in the poet's or the would-be poet's mind. It will contend, for instance, that he had a moral doctrine to preach, which should have been put into the form of an essay, or that he had no real emotion and was simply straining after the memory of one, or that he had produced a garbled imitation of someone else's work and had contributed nothing original of his own. Judgments of this kind bristle with concepts and arguments, and they do indubitably involve a definition of art and an explanation of its process. A theoretical scaffolding has been erected round taste, or rather discovered implied in its structure. But it is equally definitely not the old scaffolding of rules and standards. The latter interfered, so to speak, with the actual building material, they endeavoured to inflate the contingent and the particular into universality. The new definitions are also in search of universality, and in this sense they are also trying to anticipate. But they do not anticipate the content or the material. As contrasted therefore with rules and standards they might be termed principles. The following are two illustrations, one of a judgment by a standard, the other of a judgment involving a principle.

"One of the poems on which much praise has been bestowed is Lycidas; of which the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain and the numbers unpleasing. What beauty there is we must therefore seek in the sentiments and images. It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief."-Samuel Johnson.

"Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining which of these best represents the tendency and native.

character of the poet's genius? Will he not decide that the one was so written because the poet would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or other of every composition write otherwise ?"-Coleridge on Wordsworth.

Samuel Johnson has all the time at the back of his mind ideal standards in respect of rhymes, diction, numbers, and subject-matter. But Coleridge traces the direction in which Wordsworth's imagination is really moving and points out where it gets inhibited by mistaken motives. He analyses the forces working in the poet's mind and explains how in certain cases they do not make for poetry.

Now it is fairly evident that while a critical and psychological judgment of this kind does not presuppose any fixed standard in point of content or technical method it does presuppose some previous experience of art. Otherwise whence the conception of the poetic imagination? It could not have been obtained merely from reflection on the faulty work in question, since ex hypothesi the work lacks this quality. It must therefore have been derived from a study of good poetry. Undoubtedly the critic and the aesthetic philosopher must possess a real acquaintance with art, and the more intense and extensive this acquaintance is the more likely are their critical principles to be profound and pertinent. But here again the same question arises as in the case of the standard. Does the experience of good poetry precede the principle or vice versa, or are the two inseparable and born together? And if the experience, the taste precedes the principle, what is the function and value of the latter? Can it subsequently affect the taste or the actual creation, and if it cannot, how can it be said that the discovery of principles is the outcome of the effort of taste itself to attain to its own truth?

Evidently this would be misleading, and it would be equally misleading to speak, as I have done, of the old systems of rules

as being the actual creations of taste in its striving for universality. For these systems would be purely intellectualist constructions imposed upon taste, which can attain to universality by its own methods and does not require the assistance of any theory whatsoever.

Now this view is, I believe, generally accepted to-day as the true one, and it is only recently and with considerable hesitation that I have come to doubt its essential correctness. It is attractively neat and clear cut, with its absolute distinction between the two different faculties, the imaginative and the theoretical, and its assignation to each faculty of a separate independent task. It has been maintained with great weight and lucidity by the famous Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, both in his original Estetica and in his more recent Breviario di Estetica. And he gives a practical application of it in his essay on Ariosto, where he writes: "However unanimous, simple, and unrestrainable be the æsthetic approbation accorded to the poem of Ariosto, the critical judgments delivered upon it are just as discordant, complicated and laboured, and indeed this is one of those cases where the difference of the two spiritual moments, intuitive or æsthetic, the apprehension or tasting of the work of art, and the intellective, the critical and historical judgment, stands out so clearly as to seem to be almost spatially divided, so that one can touch it with one's hand. It is one thing to read and sing the verses of a poet and another to understand him." This means that it is possible to appreciate and to create works of art without possessing any critical principles which are of their very nature explanations of a fait accompli. They neither create nor condition nor accompany taste, but follow upon it, for ever enshrouding it in a scaffolding of intellectual formulæ.

On the face of it, this view accords very well with that mass of general common-sense conclusions which we arrive at provisionally under pressure of practical exigencies and are rather too prone to designate as "facts of experience." When

the poet writes a poem he does not simultaneously construct a critical principle or an aesthetic system in a logical form, and when the critic reads the poem he first of all surrenders himself to it and afterwards develops his criticism. The theories of great artists are often negligible. There is little of real value in Leonardo da Vinci's essay on painting or in Hogarth's quaint theory of the line of beauty. Moreover, it is usually the second-rate artists who consciously put into practice aesthetic theories, and the majority of artists profess a fine contempt for all theory. The pathetic faith of the critic in the value and the importance of artists is not reciprocated by artists in respect of critics and criticism.

Of course, negatively, theories may be of the greatest value, that is to say in upsetting other theories. If artists are inclined to be influenced by wrong principles, and undoubtedly they are sometimes so inclined, the only way of putting them right is to convince them of the error in their theory. The modern world seethes with theories of art and it is difficult to see how any cultured nation can avoid producing them. It is not meant that they are needed in order to provide us with ready made judgments, but they are an inevitable part of any attempt at a systematization of values and an understanding of human society and history. If taste does not require æsthetic principles philosophical inquiry does; and the result reacts upon taste.

But a negative function also implies some positive function. It is scarcely possible to refute a theory without indicating, however vaguely, an alternative. A refutation of the theory behind modern vers libre would carry with it a defence and advocacy of metrical verse; an attack on the theory of cubism and of non-representative pictorial art would at the same time constitute an argument in favour of representational painting. Although the mere opinions that metrical verse and representational painting were proper art forms would not in themselves provide a means for the production either of a poem or a picture, they might serve to canalize the imagination and

encourage a certain kind of creation and taste. And although artists may profess a contempt for theory, scarcely any artist nowadays has not indulged in a certain amount of speculative thinking. Nor is there any reason why artists should eschew it as a source of contamination and a peril. The true principles, if they exist at all, must at any rate be latent and implicit in a work of art even if the artist is not himself aware of them, and with greater self knowledge would come greater precision and power of self criticism.

Thus while it may be true that taste can be completely divorced from theory and logically precedes it in time, this divorce is logical rather than actual; it is to-day inoperative and a thing of the past. Even if at the moment of imagining or tasting we are not theorizing, at the back of our consciousness and in fact encircling our taste there will be found some theory previously conceived and awaiting confirmation, modification or development.

But is it really true that taste or imagination can be isolated in this manner and is it logically prior to any theory or principle? Certainly it does not follow upon theory, but it might be contemporary and complementary instead of being a precedent condition. It will have been observed that on the basis of the distinction drawn between taste and theory there are two parallel series of continuous changes or developments taking place; one covering the changes of art and of taste, the other covering the changes of theory and criticism. Frequently two further distinctions are drawn between creative and recreative taste and between criticism and æsthetics, I agree however with Croce in discounting these subsidiary distinctions. For that, between the creative act and the recreative taste, although concerning quite a real difference, nevertheless lies within the same kind of activity. And if criticism is to be altogether separated from æsthetics it will become simply a literary expression of taste and will therefore go over into that category. There remain therefore just the two series of