If you disregard critical trivialities and didactic accessories, the entire æsthetic system of Croce amounts merely to a hunt for pseudonyms of the word art, and may indeed be stated briefly and accurately in this formula: art = intuition = expression = feeling = imagination = fancy = lyrism = beauty. And you must be very careful not to take these words with the shadings and distinctions which they have in ordinary or scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word is merely a different series of syllables signifying absolutely and completely the same thing; every term in the list may be superposed logically and exactly on any other term. What is not perceived by intuition is not art; what is not expressed is not even perceived by intuition; an unsuccessful expression is not even an expression, and every successful expression—that is to say, every expression that is an expression—is beautiful. That is all. You cannot get from Croce any further information as to the nature of art. He offers nothing save a string of identities which in the last analysis mean that art is art and is nothing else—a discovery which, I believe, had been made some time before the glorious eighteenth of February of the year 1900.
The other remarks related to this central pronouncement have no real significance. He begins, for example, by maintaining that art is not
