These relations between intuitive or aesthetic knowledge and the other
fundamental or derivative forms of knowledge having been definitely
established, we are now in a position to reveal the errors of a series
of theories which have been, or are, presented, as theories of
Aesthetic.
[Sidenote] _Critique of verisimilitude and of naturalism._
From the confusion between the exigencies of art in general and the
particular exigencies of history has arisen the theory (which has lost
ground to-day, but used to dominate in the past) of _verisimilitude_ as
the object of art. As is generally the case with erroneous propositions,
the intention of those who employed and employ the concept of
verisimilitude has no doubt often been much more reasonable than the
definition given of the word. By verisimilitude used to be meant the
artistic _coherence_ of the representation, that is to say, its
completeness and effectiveness. If "verisimilar" be translated by
"coherent," a most exact meaning will often be found in the discussions,
examples, and judgments of the critics. An improbable personage, an
improbable ending to a comedy, are really badly-drawn personages,
badly-arranged endings, happenings without artistic motive. It has been
said with reason that even fairies and sprites must have verisimilitude,
that is to say, be really sprites and fairies, coherent artistic
intuitions. Sometimes the word "possible" has been used instead of
"verisimilar." As we have already remarked in passing, this word
possible is synonymous with that which is imaginable or may be known
intuitively. Everything which is really, that is to say, coherently,
imagined, is possible. But formerly, and especially by the
theoreticians, by verisimilar was understood historical credibility, or
that historical truth which is not demonstrable, but conjecturable, not
true, but verisimilar. It has been sought to impose a like character
upon art. Who does not recall the great part played in literary history
by the criticism of the verisimilar? For example, the fault found with
the _Jerusalem Delivered_, based upon the history of the Crusades, or of
the Homeric poems, upon that of the verisimilitude of the costume of the
emperors and kings?
At other times has been imposed upon art the duty of the aesthetic
reproduction of historical reality. This is another of the erroneous
significations assumed by the theory concerning _the imitation of
nature_. Verism and naturalism have since afforded the spectacle of a
confusion of the aesthetic fact with the processes of the natural
sciences, by aiming at some sort of _experimental_ drama or romance.
[Sidenote] _Critique of ideas in art, of theses in art, and of the
typical._
The confusions between the methods of art and those of the philosophical
sciences have been far more frequent. Thus it has often been held to be
within the competence of art to develop concepts, to unite the
intelligible with the sensible, to represent _ideas or universals_,
putting art in the place of science, that is, confusing the artistic
function in general with the particular case in which it becomes
aesthetico-logical.
The theory of art as supporting _theses_ can be reduced to the same
error, as can be the theory of art considered as individual
representation, exemplifying scientific laws. The example, in so far as
it is an example, stands for the thing exemplified, and is thus an
exposition of the universal, that is to say, a form of science, more or
less popular or vulgarized.
The same may be said of the aesthetic theory of the _typical_, when by
type is understood, as it frequently is, just the abstraction or the
concept, and it is affirmed that art should make _the species shine in
the individual_. If by typical be here understood the individual, here,
too, we have a merely verbal variation. To typify would signify, in this
case, to characterize; that is, to determine and to represent the
individual. Don Quixote is a type; but of whom is he a type, if not of
all Don Quixotes? A type, that is to say, of himself. Certainly he is
not a type of abstract concepts, such as the loss of the sense of
reality, or of the love of glory. An infinite number of personages can
be thought of under these concepts, who are not Don Quixote. In other
words, we find our own impressions fully determined and verified in the
expression of a poet (for example in a poetical personage). We call that
expression typical, which we might call simply aesthetic. Poetical or
artistic universals have been spoken of in like manner, in order to show
that the artistic product is altogether spiritual and ideal in itself.
[Sidenote] _Critique of the symbol and of the allegory._
Continuing to correct these errors, or to make clear equivoques, we will
note that the _symbol_ has sometimes been given as essence of art. Now,
if the symbol be given as inseparable from the artistic intuition, it is
the synonym of the intuition itself, which always has an ideal
character. There is no double-bottom to art, but one only; in art all is
symbolical, because all is ideal. But if the symbol be looked upon as
separable--if on the one side can be expressed the symbol, and on the
other the thing symbolized, we fall back again into the intellectualist
error: that pretended symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept,
it is an _allegory_, it is science, or art that apes science. But we
must be just toward the allegorical also. In some cases, it is
altogether harmless. Given the _Gerusalemme liberata_, the allegory was
imagined afterwards; given the _Adone_ of Marino, the poet of the
lascivious insinuated afterwards that it was written to show how
"immoderate indulgence ends in pain"; given a statue of a beautiful
woman, the sculptor can write on a card that the statue represents
_Clemency_ or _Goodness_. This allegory linked to a finished work _post
festum_ does not change the work of art. What is it, then? It is an
expression externally _added_ to another expression. A little page of
prose is added to the _Gerusalemme_, expressing another thought of the
poet; a verse or a strophe is added to the _Adone_, expressing what the
poet would like to make a part of his public swallow; while to the
statue nothing more than the single word is added: _Clemency_ or
_Goodness_.
[Sidenote] _Critique of the theory of artistic and literary classes._
But the greatest triumph of the intellectualist error lies in the theory
of artistic and literary classes, which still has vogue in literary
treatises, and disturbs the critics and the historians of art. Let us
observe its genesis.
The human mind can pass from the aesthetic to the logical, just because
the former is a first step, in respect to the latter. It can destroy the
expressions, that is, the thought of the individual with the thought of
the universal. It can reduce expressive facts to logical relations. We
have already shown that this operation in its turn becomes concrete in
an expression, but this does not mean that the first expressions have
not been destroyed. They have yielded their place to the new
aesthetico-logical expressions. When we are on the second step, we have
left the first.
He who enters a picture-gallery, or who reads a series of poems, may,
after he has looked and read, go further: he may seek out the relations
of the things there expressed. Thus those pictures and compositions,
each of which is an individual inexpressible by logic, are resolved into
universals and abstractions, such as _costumes, landscapes, portraits,
domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes,
deserts, tragic, comic, piteous, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic,
knightly, idyllic facts_, and the like. They are often also resolved
into merely quantitative categories, such as _little picture, picture,
statuette, group, madrigal, song, sonnet, garland of sonnets, poetry,
poem, story, romance_, and the like.
When we think the concept _domestic life_, or _knighthood_, or _idyll_,
or _cruelty_, or any other quantitative concept, the individual
expressive fact from which we started is abandoned. From aesthetes that
we were, we have been changed into logicians; from contemplators of
expression, into reasoners. Certainly no objection can be made to such a
process. In what other way could science be born, which, if aesthetic
expressions be assumed in it, yet has for function to go beyond them?
The logical or scientific form, as such, excludes the aesthetic form. He
who begins to think scientifically has already ceased to contemplate
aesthetically; although his thought will assume of necessity in its turn
an aesthetic form, as has already been said, and as it would be
superfluous to repeat.
The error begins when we try to deduce the expression from the concept,
and to find in the thing substituting the laws of the thing substituted;
when the difference between the second and the first step has not been
observed, and when, in consequence, we declare that we are standing on
the first step, when we are really standing on the second. This error is
known as _the theory of artistic and literary classes_.
What is the aesthetic form of domestic life, of knighthood, of the
idyll, of cruelty, and so forth? How should these contents be
_represented_? Such is the absurd problem implied in the theory of
artistic and literary classes. It is in this that consists all search
after laws or rules of styles. Domestic life, knighthood, idyll,
cruelty, and the like, are not impressions, but concepts. They are not
contents, but logico-aesthetic forms. You cannot express the form, for
it is already itself expression. And what are the words cruelty, idyll,
knighthood, domestic life, and so on, but the expression of those
concepts?
Even the most refined of these distinctions, those that have the most
philosophic appearance, do not resist criticism; as, for instance, when
works of art are divided into the subjective and the objective styles,
into lyric and epic, into works of feeling and works of design. It is
impossible to separate in aesthetic analysis, the subjective from the
objective side, the lyric from the epic, the image of feeling from that
of things.
[Sidenote] _Errors derived from this theory appearing in judgments
on art._
From the theory of the artistic and literary classes derive those
erroneous modes of judgment and of criticism, thanks to which, instead
of asking before a work of art if it be expressive, and what it
expresses, whether it speak or stammer, or be silent altogether, it is
asked if it be obedient to the _laws_ of the epic poem, or to those of
tragedy, to those of historical portraiture, or to those of landscape
painting. Artists, however, while making a verbal pretence of agreeing,
or yielding a feigned obedience to them, have really always disregarded
these _laws of styles_. Every true work of art has violated some
established class and upset the ideas of the critics, who have thus been
obliged to enlarge the number of classes, until finally even this
enlargement has proved too narrow, owing to the appearance of new works
of art, which are naturally followed by new scandals, new upsettings,
and-new enlargements.
From the same theory come the prejudices, owing to which at one time
(and is it really passed?) people used to lament that Italy had no
tragedy (until a poet arose who gave to Italy that wreath which was the
only thing wanting to her glorious hair), nor France the epic poem
(until the _Henriade_, which slaked the thirsty throats of the critics).
Eulogies accorded to the inventors of new styles are connected with
these prejudices, so much so, that in the seventeenth century the
invention of the _mock-heroic_ poem seemed an important event, and the
honour of it was disputed, as though it were the discovery of America.
But the works adorned with this name (the _Secchia rapita_ and the
_Scherno degli Dei_) were still-born, because their authors (a slight
draw-back) had nothing new or original to say. Mediocrities racked their
brains to invent, artificially, new styles. The _piscatorial_ eclogue
was added to the _pastoral_, and then, finally, the _military_ eclogue.
The _Aminta_ was bathed and became the _Alceo_. Finally, there have been
historians of art and literature, so much fascinated with these ideas of
classes, that they claimed to write the history, not of single and
effective literary and artistic works, but of their classes, those empty
phantoms. They have claimed to portray, not the evolution of the
_artistic spirit_, but the _evolution of classes_.
The philosophical condemnation of artistic and literary classes is found
in the formulation and demonstration of what artistic activity has ever
sought and good taste ever recognized. What is to be done if good taste
and the real fact, put into formulas, sometimes assume the air of
paradoxes?
[Sidenote] _Empirical sense of the divisions of classes._
Now if we talk of tragedies, comedies, dramas, romances, pictures of
everyday life, battle-pieces, landscapes, seascapes, poems, versicles,
lyrics, and the like, if it be only with a view to be understood, and to
draw attention in general and approximatively to certain groups of
works, to which, for one reason or another, it is desired to draw
attention, in that case, no scientific error has been committed. We
employ _vocables and phrases_; we do not establish _laws and
definitions_. The mistake arises when the weight of a scientific
definition is given to a word, when we ingenuously let ourselves be
caught in the meshes of that phraseology. Pray permit me a comparison.
It is necessary to arrange the books in a library in one way or another.
This used generally to be done by means of a rough classification by
subjects (among which the categories of miscellaneous and eccentric were
not wanting); they are now generally arranged by sizes or by publishers.
Who can deny the necessity and the utility of these groupings? But what
should we say if some one began seriously to seek out the literary laws
of miscellanies and of eccentricities from the Aldine or Bodonian
collection, from size A or size B, that is to say, from these altogether
arbitrary groupings whose sole object has been their practical use?
Well, whoever should undertake an enterprise such as this, would be
doing neither more nor less than those who seek out the aesthetic laws
of literary and artistic classes.
V