or misread it. In Croce, poetry is a single creative act of the
mind: what is external is not any more a work of art. At most
the production of a work is due to the desire of the artist to
perpetuate and communicate to others his inner creative act. In
Valéry, writing is making, even manufacturing. The baker is
not similar to the bread he makes, the man who eats the bread
needs no knowledge of the baker. The monistic spiritualism of
Croce stands against Valéry's Cartesianism.

Similarly, our second pair, the Hungarian Marxist Georg
Lukács and the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, present a
striking contrast. Lukács conceives of literature as an index
and mirror of society and reality, sees it as deeply involved and
even determined by historical process and still wants it to influ-
ence the course of history. Ingarden, on the other hand, as a
follower of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology,
focuses all his attention on the work itself, which exists as a
construct with a peculiarly independent mode of being. He
contemplates it intently, analyzes it into layers, and studies its
effects on the reader without attention to its antecedents in the
author or presumed causes in society or history.

No doubt, another group of four critics could have been cho-
sen. But I have published papers on Russian formalism and on
the Czech group around the Prague Linguistic Circle who
called themselves structuralists as early as 1934. I have also
written on Walter Benjamin, the Marxist who remained, in
spite of his political commitment, a Jewish mystic; on Albert
Thibaudet, the French Bergsonian; and on Friedrich Gundolf
and Max Kommerell, the followers, faithful and unfaithful,
of Stefan George, the German poet who set himself up as a
prophet of an austere creed. I have published elaborate papers
on the three great Romance scholars: Ernst Robert Curtius,
Leo Spitzer, and Erich Auerbach. No lecturer likes to say
things he has said elsewhere and possibly better in print. Still,
eventually I hope to collect and synthesize all these intellectual
portraits in the sixth volume of my History of Modern Criti-
cism.

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