owes his power of execution to that. He can make the beauty which he has
perceived because he has perceived it clearly; and this perceiving is
part of the making.

The defect of this theory is that it ends by denying that very
difference between the beauty of nature and the beauty of art which it
sets out to explain. If the artist makes the beauty of nature in
perceiving it, if it is produced by the action of his own mind upon the
chaos of reality, then it is the very same beauty that appears in his
art; and if, to us, the beauty of his art seems different from the
beauty of nature, as we perceive it, it is only because we have not
ourselves seen the beauty of nature as completely as he has, we have not
reduced chaos so thoroughly to order. It is a difference not of kind,
but of degree; for the artist himself there is no difference even of
degree. What he makes he sees, and what he sees he makes. All beauty is
artistic, and to speak of natural beauty is to make a false distinction.

Yet it is a distinction that we remain constantly aware of. In spite of
Signor Croce and all the subtlety and partial truth of his theory, we do
not believe that we make beauty when we see it, or that the artist makes
it when he sees it. Nor do we believe that that beauty which he makes is
of the same nature as that which he has perceived in reality. Rather he,
like us, values the beauty which he perceives in reality because he
knows that he has not made it. It is something, independent of himself,
to which his own mind makes answer: that answer is his art; it is the
passionate value expressed in it which gives beauty to his art. If he
knew that the beauty he perceives was a product of his own mind, he
could not value it so; if he held Signor Croce's theory, he would cease
to be an artist.