Art and technique--Errors deriving from the common conception of
technique--The theories of the particular arts--The literary genres
--The rhetorical categories--The categories of language--Genius and
taste--The æsthetic judgment--The idolatry of standards--The æsthetic
standard: the true objectivity--Criticism and history.
The relation between the æsthetic activity and the practical moment of
the production of the physical objects of art may be regarded under the
aspect of the relation between art and technique. The only legitimate
meaning of the word technique is that of a body of naturalistic
knowledge in the service of the practical activity of the artist. In
this sense we can conceive of a great artist who is a poor technician,
as in the case of a painter who should use Colours subject to rapid
change and deterioration, a musician who should be a bad singer or
pianist, a poet who should not be able to recite his own poetry. But
in the common language of critics, we mean by technique something
quite different--in painting what we call drawing or composition, in
music, harmony or orchestration, in poetry, metre and construction.
Now it is quite clear that we cannot conceive of a great painter who
could not draw, a great musician unable to harmonize or to orchestrate,
a great poet whose lines are defective. What we here isolate as
the technical handling of an artistic subject is but the process of
æsthetic creation itself, the succession and progression of intuitions
in the artist's mind; using the naturalistic or psychological method,
we abstract certain moments of the creative process, and we attribute
a reality to such abstractions. We talk of the technique of a poem
or of a painting as being something that has been superadded to the
original intuition; we see the poet or the artist engaged in learning
the technique of his art; we see him correcting or modifying his
original expression according to certain technical standards. But what
we call the technique of a poem or of a painting is that particular
poem or painting in its concreteness; and no poet or artist can learn
a technique except by re-creating in his own spirit the work of the
great masters, his technical education being but one with his æsthetic
education; and finally, the process of correction or modification is
merely a stage of the expressive process itself: no poet can correct a
line in his poem, no painter change a line or a shade in his picture,
if the internal image has not first spontaneously undergone such
corrections and changes in his mind.
The consequences of the common conception of technique in criticism
are more dangerous, because more subtle and affecting a more intimate
knowledge of art, than those of any other æsthetic error. The talk
of the connoisseur and of the average musical or dramatic critic is
full of such fallacies as the technical errors of great painters, the
harmonic or orchestral wonders of poor music, the faulty construction
of a great play; fallacies which may sometimes have originated
from some real character of the æsthetic fact, but which are mere
contradictions in terms. And the literary critic will speak of the
_fine frenzy_ and the _quiet eye_, meaning by the one, the abstract
inspiration, and by the other the abstract production, and so miss the
true æsthetic moment which is neither the one nor the other, but the
synthesis of the two. Or he will oppose romanticism to classicism, in
a similar sense, without realizing that all art is at the same time
romantic and classic, truly inspired, and because truly inspired, able
to express itself.
Mere variations of the naturalistic or psychological conception of
technique, as an actual moment of the æsthetic creation, are a series
of theories which Croce has extensively criticised, and of which we can
give but a cursory account.
The theories of the particular arts and of their limits originate from
the manuals of practical precepts useful to architects, sculptors,
painters or musicians, and are founded on the assumed possibility of
finding a field of the æsthetic activity corresponding to the physical
means employed by each category of artists. But we have already seen
that in the æsthetic fact there is no distinction between means and
end: we can speak of the various arts in a purely empirical sense, as
an external classification of the objects of art, but not as classes of
æsthetic activity.
A similar kind of classification is the one which gives rise to
the literary genre, and to similar abstractions in the other arts:
legitimate instruments of work as long as we do not forget that there
does not exist anything like the idea of a tragedy or sonata apart from
all concrete tragedies or sonatas, and as long as we do not condemn
a new tragedy or a new sonata simply because it is not like the old
ones, that is, as long as we do not transform an abstract type into a
law. Every new æsthetic creation, far from being bound to obey external
laws, establishes new laws, or rather is its own law. It must, and
will, answer only for itself, and the only claim that we can put upon
it is that of internal coherence. Both the theories of the arts and the
theories of the genres, when we try to treat them as true and rigorous,
and not as mere practical expedients, manifest the absurdity of their
task through their incapacity to give precise and absolute definitions.
Every work of art expresses a state of mind, and every state of mind
is irreducibly individual and new: a complete classification would
therefore be only that in which every class has under itself a single
intuition.
Another form of the technical prejudice is the creation of rhetorical
categories, which are also abstract classes of expressions tending to
transform themselves into precepts. The main prejudice of rhetoric, in
literature as well as in all other arts, is that of the distinction
between the simple and the ornate, which is founded on a conception
of beauty not as the value of the expression, but as something that
can be added, so to speak, mechanically, to the expression. Because of
its preceptive character, rhetoric has done more harm in the history
of poetry and art, than any of the other classifications of the same
order; and though it is generally discredited among artists and critics
to-day, in its pure original form, yet rhetorical prejudices, both in
the creation and judgment of art, are still endowed with an obstinately
vigorous life.
These naturalistic classifications in art have their counterpart in the
study of language, in the creation of grammatical genres or categories
or parts of speech, and in the attempts to reduce the empirical
grammars to preceptive or normative grammars: that is, a practical
or pedagogic expedient, to a rhetoric or technique of language. But
the individuality and indivisibility of expression is in the nature
of language as well as of art, and language obeys not the abstract
precepts of grammarians, but the law of the æsthetic spirit which makes
us find a new expression for every new intuition. Even phonetic laws,
the modern scientific instruments of grammar, are mere descriptive
summaries of observed facts, of physical moments abstracted from their
spiritual reality, and therefore abstract or naturalistic laws, and
never actually represent the concrete, individually determined facts
of language.
A coherent theory of æsthetic (literary and artistic) criticism can
be deduced from the concept of art as intuition, and we have already
anticipated its main theses in the discussion of the concept itself. We
have seen that in the process of reproduction of an æsthetic process,
the actual moment in which the original image, through the medium of
what we have abstracted as the physical stimulus, reproduces itself in
a mind other than that of the creator (or, in what we might consider as
a particular case, in the mind of the creator himself at a time other
than that of the original creation), is a moment of æsthetic activity
identical with that of creation. Given an identity of circumstances,
that which takes place within my mind is the same æsthetic process
which took place originally in the mind of the artist. If we call
genius the creative, and taste the reproductive activity, the corollary
of these considerations is that of the identity of genius and taste:
in the act of contemplating and judging a work of art, our spirit
becomes one with the spirit of the artist. Though in practice this
identity may never be attained (because of variations in the material
conditions of the physical stimulus, or in the spiritual attitude of
the contemplator), yet if we deny it, and establish a difference in
kind between these two aspects of æsthetic activity, we find ourselves
inevitably led to exclude the possibility not of the æsthetic judgment
only, but of all forms of æsthetic communication. There is a sense
in which we can speak of the relativity of taste, and which accounts
for the actual variety of judgments, not in relation to art only, but
to all forms of human activity: every judgment is relative to our
knowledge, at a particular moment, of the actual conditions in which
the work of art was originally produced. But this is the intrinsic
relativity of all the particular determinations of reality, not a
relativity peculiar to æsthetic values, which are as real, though of a
different order, as those of logic or morality.
But the æsthetic judgment itself is not the mere intuitive reproduction
of the work of art, made possible by what we call historical criticism
in the narrow sense of the word, that is, by interpretation and
comment. These are the antecedent of the æsthetic judgment, which
consists in a logical proposition of the form: "A is art," or "A is not
art," "A is art in a b c, A is not art in d e f"; or again: "There is a
fact, A, which is a work of art," "There is a fact, A, which is falsely
believed to be a work of art." The æsthetic judgment, like all other
judgments, establishes a relation between a particular, concrete fact,
and a universal category, which is that of art. And, like all other
judgments, it is at the same time a judgment of value and an historical
judgment, which is the obvious consequence of Croce's identification of
value and fact. Æsthetic criticism therefore coincides with the history
of the æsthetic activity, with the history of poetry or art.
A frequent reaction to Croce's æsthetics, and to its implications
in the theory of criticism, especially among literary critics, is a
sense of irritation caused by the loss of the so-called standards of
judgment. It would be interesting to analyze these supposed standards,
which generally are not explicitly enunciated (probably because their
clear enunciation would manifest their true nature, and annul them
as standards of æsthetic judgment), but only more or less obscurely
referred to with a mixture of pride and reverence. They would then show
themselves to be the critical duplicates of the various æsthetic errors
which we have already discussed.
If the standards of which the critics speak are, as is often the case,
moral or intellectual ideals, it is clear that Croce's æsthetics does
not question their validity, but only their application. There is a
large number of literary critics, who are such only in name, and whose
real interests are intellectual or moral, critics of thought and of
the ethical life, and not of art. They use works of art as documents
and undoubtedly works of art are, in the unity of the human spirit,
documents of intellectual and moral life; but their error begins when
they confuse the issues, and censure or praise the art of the past,
or try to influence the art of the future, with criteria which are no
longer intellectual or moral, but, because they have been transposed
outside their legitimate sphere, intellectualistic and moralistic.
All other so-called standards are derived from the abstract ideas of
literary genres and of rhetorical categories. It is easy to judge of
a new tragedy if you know what a tragedy ought to be, if you have a
catalogue of purely external characteristics which you may either find,
or not find, in the new work that comes before you. This is, of course,
the crudest form of rhetorical criticism; there is another which is
not less frequent, but more subtle. The critic builds up an ideal of
what art ought to be, not with abstract categories, and classifications
transformed into arbitrary æsthetic precepts or standards, but through
his predilection for one particular author, or for one particular
epoch, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, the Classics or the
Romantics: every work of art which is different either in spirit or in
form from those that have been chosen is condemned in proportion to its
variation from the ideal. This form of criticism is often also vitiated
by the intrusion of intellectualistic and moralistic errors, since an
ideal which is a mere particular determination of the past assumed as a
universal value is likely to be mere rhetoric of thought and morality
as well as of art.
The only legitimate standard in æsthetic criticism is the æsthetic
standard, that of beauty or expression, as against ugliness or
non-expression. Our critical judgment is the reaction of our æsthetic
personality in the presence of a work of art, as the moral judgment is
the reaction of our moral personality in the presence of an action. Our
knowledge of a work of art, of a concrete and individual intuition,
as our knowledge of an action, approaches more or less to the ideal
limit, according to the breadth of our experience and the depth of our
understanding; but there exist no external criteria on which we can
rest our judgment, no mechanical props which will support it. This
theory of criticism, far from justifying a capricious and arbitrary
subjectivism, requires from the critic a constant vigilance against
that which is narrowly personal, capricious, and arbitrary in himself;
a patient, unceasing effort in the labor of recapturing and recreating
the material and spiritual circumstances from which the work of art
originally sprang; and the quick sensitivity of the artist coupled with
the wide understanding of the historian and the philosopher.
When æsthetic criticism is raised to this plane on which it coincides
with the history of poetry, or of art, it transforms itself necessarily
into a general criticism of life. What to the æsthetic consciousness
appears as ugly or non-expressive, since in the world of history there
are no negative facts, will not, when historically considered, appear
as a negative value, but as a value of another order, as an intrusion
of the logical or of the practical spirit in the work of the poet or
of the artist. What in the Divine Comedy is not poetry is the outcome
of philosophical or moral preoccupations which have not become art,
have not fused themselves into a new, coherent intuition, and must be
apprehended not as art, but as philosophy and morality. The allegory
of the _Færie Queene_ is not art, but it is an expression of certain
aspects of the Protestant spirit in the England of Elizabeth. In a poet
like Byron, the presence of practical motives is felt all through his
poetical production; and the critic cannot limit his work to tracting
the gems, and to saying of all the rest: this is not poetry. He must
tell us what it is, and only by telling what it is, he criticises it
completely as poetry. It is impossible, in fact, to give to art its
place, without assigning its place to all the other activities of life.
The great æsthetic critic will also be a critic of philosophy, of
morality, of politics; but, as Croce says of De Sanctis, the strength
of his purely æsthetic consideration of art will also be the strength
of his purely moral consideration of morality, of his purely logical
consideration of philosophy, and so on. The forms or grades of the
spirit, which the critic employs as categories for his judgment, are
ideally distinct in the unity of the spirit, but cannot materially be
separated from each other or from that unity without losing all their
vitality. The distinction of æsthetic criticism from the other forms
of criticism, of the history of poetry and the arts from the other
kinds of history, is but an empirical one, pointing to the fact that
the attention of the critic or historian is turned towards one aspect
rather than another of the same indivisible reality.