theory of _mimesis_, and of which artists and critics have always had a kind of obscure presentiment, is now implicitly recognised by all who have an intimate contact with and a sincere feeling for art and poetry. The literary and artistic development of the end of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth century has been accompanied by such a wealth of critical thought, that a conscious understanding of the nature of art is now much more frequent than in former ages. The forces that were at work liberating logical and moral thought from the shackles of the past, reacted vigorously on æsthetic thought, and helped to make it more and more independent from both intellectualistic and moralistic errors. It would be possible to extract aphorisms and meditations from the writings of the greatest poets, artists, and musicians of the period, to show how common among them was and is the knowledge of the spiritual autonomy and of the intuitive character of art. But because the task of the artist is not that of elaborating a philosophy of art, and a good many critics and æstheticians, on the other hand, have very little experience of the actual æsthetic processes, we find that though the other doctrines are discredited, yet a number of prejudices which have their roots in them are still current,--the artists themselves rejecting them, as it were, by instinct and not by reasoning, and the critics and æstheticians clinging to them because they help them to gain a fictitious possession of that artistic reality which escapes them in its purity and actuality. An intellectualiste or moralistic critic can easily mask his lack of æsthetic taste, his fundamental ignorance of art, by talking at length and with great solemnity about unessentials. Artists and poets, on the other hand, are apt to react to these prejudices by falling into the errors of æstheticism, that is by attributing to their empirical selves the freedom that belongs to their function, and by denying in the name of art the autonomy and dignity of intellectual and moral values. In both cases, what is manifestly lacking is a proper understanding of the meaning of logical, or ideal distinctions, for which the artists, I suppose, ought to be more readily forgiven than the critics, though æstheticism may be as dangerous to art as moralism or intellectualism are to thought.