Nothing is more symptomatic of the incipient twentieth century than the drawing together of currents of thought and action before remote or hostile.  The Parnassians were an exclusive sect, the symbolists an eccentric and often disreputable coterie; Claudel, D’Annunzio, Rudyard Kipling, speak home to throngs of everyday readers, are even national idols, and our Georgians contrive to be bought and read without the least surrender of what is most poetic in their poetry.  And the analogies between philosophic thinking and poetic creation become peculiarly striking.  Merely to name Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Benedetto Croce is to become vividly aware of these analogies and of the common bent from which they spring.  All three—­whether with brilliant rhetoric, or iron logic, or a blend of both—­use their thinking power to deride the theorizing intelligence in comparison with the creative intuition which culminates in poetry.  To define the scope and province of this intuition is the purport of Croce’s epoch-making Aesthetics, the basis and starting-point of his illumining work, in Critica, as a literary critic.  Bergson is the dominant figure in a line of French thinkers possessed with the conviction that life, a perpetual streaming forth of creative energy, cannot be caught in the mechanism of law, adapted to merely physical phenomena, which at best merely gives us generalizations and lets the all-important particulars—­the individual living thing—­slip through the meshes; whereas intuition—­the eye fixed on the object—­penetrates to the very heart of this individual living thing, and only drops out the skeleton framework of abstract laws.  Philosophy, in these thinkers, was deeply imbued with the analogies of artistic creation.  ‘Beauty,’ said Ravaisson, ’and especially beauty in the most divine and perfect form, contains the secret of the world.’[15] And Bergson’s Creative Evolution embodied a conception of life and of the world profoundly congenial to the artistic and poetic temper of his time.  For he restated, it has been well said, the two great surviving formulas of the nineteenth century, evolution and the will to live, in terms precisely suited to the temper of the age just dawning.  The will to live became a formula of hope and progress; evolution became a formula of vital impulse, of creative purpose, not of mechanical ’struggle for existence’.

The idea that aesthetic experience gives a profounder clue than logical thought to the inner meaning of things was as old as Plato.  It was one of the crowning thoughts of Kant; it deeply coloured the metaphysics of Schelling.  And Nietzsche developed it with brilliant audacity when in his Birth of Tragedy (1872) he contrasted scornfully with the laboured and ineffectual constructions of the theoretic man, even of Socrates the founder of philosophy, the radiant vision of the artist, the lucid clarity of Apollo.  ’His book gave the lie to a thousand years of orderly development’, wrote the great Hellenist Wilamowitz, Nietzsche’s old schoolfellow, indignant at his rejection of the labours of scholastic reason.  But it affirmed energetically the passion of his own time for immediate and first-hand experience.