Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/180

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164
FOUR AND TWENTY MINDS

ter of a boarding-school which all good little Italians should attend.

In other countries the revelation according to Croce has aroused no such wonder. The Æsthetics has been translated into four or five languages; but we may safely affirm that France, England, and Germany have marveled rather at our admiration than at the value of Croce’s theories. Not a single philosopher has accepted them, and not one has discussed them at length save the illustrious Cohen, who slashes them through several pages of his last treatise on æsthetics.

Texas appears to be the only foreign land that rivals central and southern Italy in their incautious and prostrate devotion. Croce was invited some time ago to deliver at the Rice Institute, in Houston, four lectures which should at last reveal the true nature of art to an anxious nation. He was unable, for personal reasons, to undertake the long voyage to the Gulf of Mexico, but he sent over the four lectures that had been requested; and now, lest a grateful fatherland should suffer from their loss, he has printed them in the original Italian. In this Breviary, he writes, “I have not only condensed the more important concepts of my earlier volumes on the same subject, but have set them forth in better organization and with greater clearness than in my Æsthetics.” And he is so