The problem of literary criticism--The three phases: exposition,
valuation, history--Æsthetic judgment and history of art: the exigency
of a new Æsthetics--The place of Æsthetics in Croce's thought--Moral
and logical preoccupations--Croce and Spaventa.
At the end of the following year (1894), Croce interrupted again the
steady flow of his erudite production with the publication of a little
book, _La Critica Letteraria: questioni teoriche,_ which was the
outcome of a discussion he had had during the summer with a friend, a
professor of philosophy. As the net result of his first philosophical
effort had been the conquest of a clearer conception of art, it was
natural that he should proceed to investigate the relations between
history and the subject-matter of history in that field in which he
felt he had already been able to find some light. The general problem
of the nature of history, of which he had seen but one aspect, was set
aside for the moment, giving way to a close examination of the methods
of historical thought in the study of literature.
Only a few of the conclusions of this particular research were destined
to have any kind of permanency in Croce's theories; but it is useful
to recall them, not only as a step in the development of his thought,
but as representing a marked progress in that conception of literary
criticism which is still predominant wherever the influence of that
thought has not yet been felt. Croce submitted that conception to a
process similar to what a French critic calls a disassociation of
ideas, trying to establish which can be said to be the essential
operations of literary criticism, and the relations between these and
the various kinds of possible works on literary material. Given this
method, which is that of abstract classification, and having approached
his problem through criticism itself instead of starting from the other
end and deducing the concept of criticism from the concept of art
and literature, he was bound to reach a number of abstract concepts,
apparently irreducible to each other, and the fundamental unity of
which he could only later affirm through the general progress of his
theory of æsthetics.
Literary criticism, which until fifty or sixty years ago, stood only
for the judgment and valuation of literary works, to-day usually
includes, beside the æsthetic valuation, the study of the historical
development, the edition and comment of the text, the biography of
the author, the exposition of the work itself, the æsthetic theory
of literature, and so on; in fact, every kind of conceivable work
on literature. The danger of this extension of meaning lies in the
facility with which we are led to believe that many things, when called
with one name, are really one thing: we think of literary criticism as
of the synthesis of all the above-mentioned operations--a synthesis
which, as Croce observes, when it exists cannot be due to anybody but
the printer. Or, again, we may consider that one or another of those
operations is the true aim of literary criticism--and to that one we
subordinate all the others, as merely subservient to the particular
aim we have in sight. This is the origin of the various _schools_ of
criticism--æsthetic, historical, psychological--each of which believes
itself to be in possession of the only legitimate method. But if we
subordinate the history of a work to its æsthetic valuation, we deny
the independence and intrinsic importance of history; if we subordinate
the æsthetic valuation to the historical consideration, we make of
the former a useless accessory of the latter; if we subordinate the
biography of the author to the historical explanation of the work,
we destroy the importance of biography, which, though useful in a
certain sense to the explanation of the work, is in itself "nothing
but the history of the development of a moral personality."[1] In
fact, the unity of literary criticism lies not in its aim, but in
its subject-matter: what we mean by literary criticism is "a series
of particular operations having independent aims, without any other
connection than that of the material employed in each of them."[2]
Croce does not deny the possibility of using the results of one of
these operations for the purposes of another, but this does not change
the nature of either: "the spirit of man is not divided into small
compartments: all our experience helps us in whatever work we are
doing. To understand Petrarch's poetry, it is useful either to be or
to have been in love; but it doesn't follow that to make love and to
understand that poetry are one and the same thing."[3]
The study of the principles of literature does not belong to literary
criticism, but to Æsthetics; or, to use Vico's distinction, not to
Philology but to Philosophy. Textual criticism, and interpretative
comment, are preliminaries of literary criticism, which begins only
with the contemplation or æsthetic enjoyment of literature: that is,
with that operation of reading which is made possible through the
establishment of a correct text, and by the help, when needed, of a
convenient commentary. In literary criticism proper Croce distinguishes
three successive phases, or moments, answering respectively to the
questions: What have I read? What is the value of that which I have
read? Which is the genesis and fortune of this particular work? The
first is the exposition or description--which in itself is a work
of art of which another work of art is the subject; the second, the
valuation or æsthetic judgment; the third, the history of the work
under consideration. Outside these three moments or phases, Croce does
not admit of any other independent critical operation: the research
of the sources of a work is only part of the history of that work;
comparative criticism is an instrument of historical criticism;
philology in the strict sense of the word can in turn be used as a
help to each of the three main operations, but when it is exclusively
concerned with the general history of a language, it is no longer a
literary discipline; bibliography is a mere external element of the
history of the work; the study of the content is a literary study only
if it is pursued in relation with either the exposition, valuation
or history of the work, that is, when the work itself is viewed as
literature, and not as a document for the purposes of another science
or discipline; the biography of the author is an element of the genesis
of the work, and therefore of its history, but its main interest is
moral and not literary.
It is easy to see that, however fruitful as a reaction to the
prevailing confusion, this abstract partition was still very
artificial; but it was impossible for Croce to go beyond it, with
the help of the mechanical and unhistoric logic which was his only
instrument at that time. He still divided a fact from its genesis,
and the fact and genesis from the judgment, and therefore it was
impossible for him to see that the internal history of a work _is_ its
true exposition or characterization, and that such characterization
is one with the valuation. In regard to the valuation itself, he
considered it to be purely subjective and relative, as he was unable
to accept either Kant's theory of the objectivity of taste, because of
its intellectualism, or the psychologists' childish delusion of the
possibility of drawing a normal or standard taste from the average
of the æsthetic likings and judgments of different communities and
different ages; and on the other hand he was still very far from
discovering that identity of the æsthetic judgment with the æsthetic
activity, which was to be the foundation of his later doctrine.
The discussion that follows, on the relations between the æsthetic
judgment and the history of a work of art, obviously suffers from the
impossibility of drawing useful consequences from a distinction of
purely abstract concepts; from the fact that that which was Croce's
only real discovery at the time, his conception of art, had not yet
been thought out by him in the fulness of its relations with the other
activities of the human spirit. As regards history, this little book is
a step forward because it is a valid criticism of a confused and naïve
state of mind, in which these abstract concepts could help to introduce
some sort of order and method; but, on the whole, though it clarifies
the terms of the general problem, it does not bring it appreciably
nearer to a solution.
Croce was, however, more or less consciously aware of this deficiency.
In a long _excursus_ on De Sanctis, whose work he upheld as a model
of perfect literary criticism, he insisted on the importance of a
sound theory of art, such as De Sanctis undoubtedly possessed, as an
essential part of the mental equipment of a literary critic; and the
chief reproach that he addressed to his contemporaries in the field of
literary studies in Italy, was that of neglecting those theoretical
problems to which very little attention had been paid in our country
after the work of Vico. He pointed to the great development of æsthetic
studies in Germany during the nineteenth century, and affirmed the
necessity of "dismissing every spirit of impatience and false pride,
and of submitting oneself to the hard labour of extracting the essence
of the abundant literature created by the philosophic activity of
the Germans around those problems."[4] His final words contained at
the same time an appeal and a programme of work: "There is a good
deal to be expected from a work especially directed towards these
two points: to banish a series of concepts which have introduced
themselves in æsthetics, and which are entirely foreign to it, and
with their presence maintain an invincible confusion; and to free the
concept of art and of the Beautiful from the limits within which it has
been circumscribed by linguistic habits, acknowledging the intimate
connection between the so-called æsthetic and artistic facts and other
facts of the life of the spirit."[5] That his attitude towards the
later German æsthetics was, from the very beginning, a critical one, is
clearly shown by what immediately follows: "Working in this direction,
I believe that we shall find ourselves, with a new consciousness and
with a wealth of observations gathered in the course of a century,
to the point from which modern Æsthetics started, to the school of
Leibnitz and Wolff, and to Baumgarten's conception,"[6]--that is, to
Baumgarten's _Meditations_ of 1735, which the word _Æsthetica_ appears
for the first time as the name of an independent philosophical cal
discipline, contrasted to Logic in the same sense in which the Greeks
used to contrast _aisthēta_ to _noēta,_ the facts of sensuous knowledge
to the facts of mental knowledge. Which means that Croce believed the
science of Æsthetics to be still in its infancy, and to require a great
creative effort which was well worth making, both for the sake of the
general philosophical problems involved, and for the effects that a
deeper view of those problems could not but have on the practical work
of the literary critic and of the historian.
Through these first discussions, which at the time appeared to him
more as acts of personal liberation than as the beginning of a
philosophical career, Croce had really discovered his vocation. From
De Sanctis he had learnt that "art is neither the work of reflection
and logic, nor the product of craft, but a pure and spontaneous _forma
fantastica_":[7] through his own experience of dry erudition, and
through his meditations on the relations between history and criticism,
he had verified the validity and usefulness of De Sanctis' conception,
and had been made aware of the necessity of doing what De Sanctis had
not been either willing or capable of doing: "of creating a philosophy
where he had given nothing but critical essays and delineations of
literary history, and a new criticism, a new historiography, as a
consequence of the philosophic deepening and systematization of his
thought."[8]
But from Croce's published work at this time it would be easy to
gather the fallacious impression that his interest was an exclusively
literary one: that he proceeded to create a philosophy of literature
and art, and that only through the necessities of the system he was
led to the consideration of logical, economic and ethical facts.
If that were true, with the exception of his theory of æsthetics,
practically the whole of his philosophy would be opened to the
reproach that he levelled against the greatest part of the German
æsthetic theories of the nineteenth century: "of not being derived
from spontaneous and direct researches, but rather from the need of
filling a compartment in a philosophical system."[9] A good many among
Croce's critics have been the victims of such a misconception of the
actual genesis of his thought; and have discounted the importance of
any but his æsthetic theories, considering all the rest as a kind of
philosophical by-product, with the result that they have not been
able properly to understand even that part of his work in which they
were interested. The typical example is given by those moralistic
critics of his æsthetics, who would have been spared many mistakes and
inanities, if they had thought Croce's ethics and logic worth a little
consideration. They would then have realized that their criticisms had
been anticipated and criticized long before they had been uttered. But
perhaps it is asking too much of the average student of literature,
once he has made the effort to think about the problems of art, that
he should also try to turn the light of his reason on the obscure
promptings of his moral consciousness; a suggestion which in many cases
would be violently rejected as the height of immorality.
We shall soon see from which source Croce derived his interest in
economic problems and in the history of the practical activities of
man. Of the permanence of those moral preoccupations which had been
his constant companions since his adolescence, we find the traces in
his autobiographical notes. In De Sanctis, whose _History of Italian
Literature_ is as much a moral as an æsthetic history of the Italian
people, he had the model of "a sound and simple morality, austere
without exaggerations, and high without fanaticisms."[10] But the same
difficulties which prevented him from fully understanding De Sanctis'
æsthetic principles, and from using them as a vivifying element in his
literary work, made him also for a long time accept an inferior moral
conception, that of Herbart's realism, "in which the moral ideal was
energetically asserted, but as a thing of another world, as having
man under itself as brute matter, on which its stamp, more or less
marked, might or might not be impressed." That is, he saw the moral
ideal in relation to the actual life of man, in a position similar
to that which concepts and ideals had for him in relation to reality
as a whole: his moral abstractism and rigorism was the counterpart of
his logic. "But that rigorism and abstractism was the way that I had
necessarily to follow in order to understand the moral concreteness,
and to lift it to the plane of a philosophical theory." "And that
rigorism, which was at the same time a love for sharp distinctions,
while it saved me from associationism and positivism and evolutionism,
put me on my guard against, and hindered me from falling into the
errors of that now naturalistic, now mystic, Hegelianism, which through
a hasty and often mythological dialectic, obliterated or weakened the
distinctions which are the life of the dialectic process."[11] What
Croce lacked, in ethics as well as in æsthetics, was a new logic or
theory of knowledge, which would allow him to grasp the concept or
the ideal, that is the universal, in the concrete spiritual activity,
that is in the particular and individual. Meanwhile, his own dealing
with abstract concepts, with purely formal universals, was to be, in
relation to the further developments of his logic, what his early
literary work, of a purely erudite character, had been in relation
to his meditations on art and history: that personal experience, of
difficulties and errors, without which no truth can ever be reached.
On the whole, Croce's position at that time was, as he himself defined
it many years later, a Platonic-Scholastic-Herbartian one; one that,
in the moral held, had at least the advantage of being "invulnerable
to the subtle menace of sensualism and decadentism,"[12] in the
European life and thought of the nineties, the acme of spiritual
distinction--an illusory reaction to and escape from the prevailing
positivism and determinism, of which in reality they were but thinly
disguised variations. Croce "never lost, even for an instant, the power
of discerning sensual refinement from spiritual finesse, erotic flights
from moral elevation, false heroism from sheer duty."[13] Here lies the
fundamental difference, "of spiritual race," between him and his most
illustrious contemporary, Gabriele d'Annunzio, with whom he has more
than once been coupled by superficial critics. The character of their
respective influence on the younger Italian generations, of D'Annunzio
between 1890 and 1900, and of Croce between 1900 and 1910, is more than
sufficient evidence on this point.
It is something of a surprise to find that he had learnt practically
nothing from his uncle Bertrando Spaventa, who had been the most
powerful representative of the Hegelian tradition in Italy. The central
problem of Spaventa's speculation had been that of the relations
between knowing and being, of transcendence and immanence; and although
it was only through a solution of this problem that Croce could hope
for progress in any of his particular philosophical researches, yet
he could take no interest in it when its discussion was earned on
independently of those problems of art, of moral life, of law and
history, towards which his attention was naturally drawn. Croce
himself explains this lack of interest as due to his "unconscious
immanentism": "as I met with no difficulty in conceiving the relation
between thinking and being; if I had any difficulty, it was rather in
conceiving a being severed from thought, or a thought severed from
being."[14] But in this case he is probably seeing himself in the
light of his later experience: that difficulty did exist, and is the
fundamental difficulty of his early speculation. Only, he could not
solve it by Spaventa's methods, which were those of a rigorous and
formal logician, of a philosopher with a theological background, but
only through the elaboration of the materials of his own particular
moral and intellectual experience. At a later stage, and when he had
already independently arrived at a position much more similar to
that of Spaventa, than he would ever have thought possible for him,
the influence, if not of Spaventa himself, at least of that attitude
towards philosophy which had been his, came back to him through his
friend Giovanni Gentile, whose mental temperament was much more akin
to that of the old Neapolitan thinker, than Croce's ever was. Croce's
idealism (or Hegelianism) was at this time limited to what he had
unconsciously absorbed through De Sanctis' conception of art; but his
theory of knowledge, not yet logically unfolded, was still oscillating
between intellectualism and naturalism. He was decidedly anti-Hegelian,
on the other hand, in his theory of history and in his general
conception of the world.
[Footnote 1: _Primi Saggi,_ pp. 79-80.]
[Footnote 2: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 80.]
[Footnote 3: _Primi Saggi_, p. 82.]
[Footnote 4: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 163.]
[Footnote 5: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 164.]
[Footnote 6: _Primi Saggi, ib._]
[Footnote 7: _Contributo,_ p. 54.]
[Footnote 8: _Contributo_, pp. 55-56.]
[Footnote 9: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 163.]
[Footnote 10: _Contributo,_ p. 58.]
[Footnote 11: _Contributo,_ p. 59-60.]
[Footnote 12: _Contributo,_ p. 60.]
[Footnote 13: _Contributo,_ p. 61.]
[Footnote 14: _Contributo,_ p. 63.]