Note † — Chapter XXXIII · Truth and Revelation Theories

All the difficulty begins when this has been written, and what has been said is of no assistance towards its elucidation. Nor is Pater, for all his praise of clarity and accuracy, of much better quality. “Truth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And, further, all beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within”†. It would perhaps be difficult, outside Croce,* to find a more unmistakable confusion between value and communicative efficacy. But the Essay is a veritable museum of critical blunders.