The Latin Sense of Art

...and one of the chief reasons for the difference is certainly the work of Benedetto Croce, now sixty years old and the recipient of honors from all parts of the world...

...But immense difficulties hamper one who would do no violence to his conscience of standards—to the old company of abiding nobilities, of arts which stand, in shadow or glaring light, among the mountains...

...The critical work of Croce would be outstanding if for no other reason than its unvarying resistance to barbarism...

...Hermann Bahr has resumed the significance of Croce in words of which the following are a few: "For most of us the fortunes of great art were identical with those of religious faith—-for art, the cultured Philistine assumed, was a private affair...

...And Dante would have been an exile, indeed, in the midst of those fleshly little atheists who for so long a time were the literati of Rome...

...Indeed, the energy to own this 'taste' can only be drawn from a firm communal consciousness of beauty—a consciousness now lost to a very great extent because the forms of culture have been uprooted so largely...

...Neither among the laymen nor the artists of our time did there exist a wholly stable, self-sufficient, sure and dependable 'taste,' which was not the slave of doubt and which could rise superior to changes of mood and accident...

...It is fatally easy to succumb to new things which come palpitating into the world's company, like lesser but effusive prima donnas flaunting all their charms...

...And because these words are true, those who are devoted to the civilization of Christendom join in the homage to Croce...

...Or pos-¦¦ sibly we should say, rather, that the Duce is not the most typical representative of the resurrection of mind and energy which, in our time, has given the lie so emphatically to all those minor aliens who professed to believe Rome a monument and Florence a stony shade...

...With stoical sublimity he has taken it for granted that form—the great pattern according to which the artist constructs his vision of reality—lives on, in spite of the artist's person and the psychology of "the age...

...But in myriad ways his courtesy, even his loyalty, to the great tradition are of signal importance...

...And though Croce is a relativist, he proves the same fact which is evident in all the higher spirits of our age: the fact that there lives on, below the surface, a secret and inherited residuum of truth which, though openly denied and shrouded in forgetfulness, is really the only source from which mankind still derives the strength to live...

...And strange to relate, the world has listened...

...It lost its contact with those substances by which it perennially, really lives...

...Now all this is changed...

...Personally he has stood apart from the Church, failing—as so many other moderns of importance have failed—to receive the gift of faith...

...These difficulties Croce did not shirk...

...What was at first a small audience widened into an international throng...

...We have all learned from Croce that the introduction to great poetry and art is not through subterranean corridors of knowledge, of interpretative information, but through the spontaneous outcry of the aesthetic faculty, God*given even as the intelligence, with laws of its own which the schools had studied with reverent care...

...Where, for instance, was deathless Italy in the debate which so continuously ended in favor of opportunism...

...Our time feeds on its memory and all our being and doing is valuable only in so far as it embodies and stimulates remembrance—remembrance of what productive art is, remembrance through which we arrive at an understanding of ourselves through a perception of what our ancestors meant, remembrance which is not merely acceptance but a motive for using once again the primal human energy which is preserved in the past...

...Very likely the Latin mind was temporarily in the mood of a foolish virgin and slept...