Beyond the system--The universality of art--The discipline of
art--Poetry, prose and oratory--Classicism and impressionism--
Practical personality and poetical personality--The monographic
method in criticism--The reform of æsthetic history--Criticism as
philosophy--Sensibility and intelligence.
The identification of history and philosophy, in the form in which
we have expounded it in the preceding chapter, is the turning point
of Croce's thought; the system which in the first three volumes of
the _Filosofia dello Spirito_ had still a somewhat static and rigid
appearance, is really set to movement, animated as if by a new and
intenser life, since its implicit dynamism is made explicit in the
fourth and concluding volume. To Croce himself, the whole of his work
appears no longer as a system, but as "a series of systematizations,"
and his _Filosofia dello Spirito_, as a series of "volumes on the
problems slowly gathering in his mind since the years of his youth."
No wonder, therefore, that his later work should contain "thoughts
that break the bars of the so-called system, and give, to a close
scrutiny, new systems or new 'systematizations,' since always the whole
moves with every one of our steps." No wonder that he should feel that
he will continue to philosophize even if one day he shall abandon
"philosophy," "as this is what the unity of philosophy and history
implies: that we philosophize whenever we think, and of whatever object
and in whatever form we may think."[1] And in fact, in these last few
years, Croce has given many a severe shock to the faithful worshippers
of his system, sometimes by extending his tolerance, or even his
approval, to types of speculation apparently remote from his own, but
in which he recognises, under a radically different aspect, some of
the living impulses, and spiritual interests by which his own thought
is moved; and sometimes by developing new theories, through which
intellectual positions criticised by him at an earlier stage of his
work were reëstablished as having a new meaning and value, once they
were approached from a new and higher standpoint, partly reached by
means of that same critical process which had previously revealed them
as errors. Croce's conception of the function of error in the history
of human thought, while making him violently intolerant of actual
negative error, leads him to search painstakingly for that element of
truth which is the reality of every error; and in this respect too, his
philosophical career is as it were roughly divided into two periods,
one of critical dissolution, and the other of critical reconstruction,
respectively corresponding to the building up of the system, and to the
successive liberation from the shackles of the system itself. Croce's
name will certainly be remembered in the future, if on no other
account, as that of the only philosopher who never became the slave
of his dead thought. His coherence is never of the letter, but of the
spirit.
This last phase of Croce's thought offers greater difficulties to the
expositor than the preceding ones, partly because it is still in the
making, and therefore lacks the necessary perspective, and partly
because it is embodied not only in purely philosophical essays, but in
every page of Croce's historical and critical writings; so that very
often it would be impossible to give a clear account of it without
ample and minute reference to the underlying historical material.
The whole of Croce's thought could indeed be restated through an
exposition of Croce's historical views, and it would be an alluring
task to extract from his writings a kind of outline of the history
of mankind, considered especially in its æsthetic and philosophical
cal manifestations, and indirectly also in its moral and economic
activities; but it would take us much beyond the limits which we have
set to our labour. We shall therefore confine ourselves to examining,
in this chapter, the latest developments of Croce's æsthetics,
especially in relation with the history of art and poetry; and, in the
following and concluding one, to considering his theory of truth or of
the function of thought, in relation to other types of contemporary
thought.
We have followed the evolution, or rather the deepening, of Croce's
concept of art as pure intuition, into lyrical intuition, through
which the movement and life which might seem to have been denied to
the products of the æsthetic activity considered as a mere form of
knowledge, were recognised as intrinsically belonging to them by reason
of the very nature of that cognitive activity, and of its relations
with the practical sphere of the spirit, the states of mind, which can
be abstracted as the matter or content of the æsthetic form. Another
difficulty, however, still persisted in Croce's theory, due to the
sharp distinction between the æsthetic and the logical activity, which
reserved to the first the field of individual, to the second that of
universal knowledge--constituting a double-grade relation, in which the
æsthetic was implied by the logic activity, but not vice-versa. The
corresponding distinction of the two forms of the practical spirit,
the economic and the ethic, evolved by Croce at a maturer stage of his
speculation, establishes not only a double-grade relation, but also
a reciprocal implication. Croce's essay on _Il carattere di totalità
della espressione artistica_ (1917) is an attempt at interpreting his
first distinction in the light of the second, thereby recognising the
universal or cosmic character of art. That universality which becomes
explicit in the logical judgment is implicit in the intuition, already
identified with the category of feeling, with the concrete states of
mind, on which it imposes its form: "Since, what is a feeling or a
state of mind? is it something that can be detached from the universe
and developed by itself? have the part and the whole, the individual
and the cosmos, the finite and the infinite, any reality, one outside
the other? One may be inclined to grant that every severance and
isolation of the two terms of the relation could not be anything
but the work of abstraction, for which only there is an abstract
individuality and an abstract finite, an abstract unity and an abstract
infinite. But the pure intuition, or artistic representation, abhors
abstraction; or rather it does not even abhor it, since it knows it
not, because of its naïve or auroral cognitive character. In it, the
individual lives by the life of the whole, and the whole is in the life
of the individual; and every true artistic representation is itself and
the universe, the universe in that individual form, and that individual
form as the universe. In every accent of a poet, in every creature of
his phantasy, there is the whole of human destiny, all the hopes, the
illusions, the sorrows and the joys, all human greatness and all human
misery, the entire drama of reality, which perpetually becomes and
grows upon itself, suffering and rejoicing."[2]
This recognition of the implicit universality of the æsthetic
expression does not abolish, as it might seem to a superficial
observer, the distinction between æsthetic and logical knowledge; it
rather makes it clearer and truer. An imperfect recognition may lead
to an intellectualistic or mystic theory of art; and intellectualism
and mysticism in æsthetics remain for Croce as typical forms of error,
whether they are directed towards a confusion between intuition and
judgment, or towards a symbolical or allegorical interpretation of
art, or towards a semi-religious theory of art as the revelation of
the _Deus absconditus_. But the truth that those errors tried to
express in their imperfect formulas, is finally understood by him to
be that character of universality which belongs to every aspect and
to every fragment of the living reality. Feeling itself, or a state
of mind, partakes in its actuality of that universal character, but
when expressed in art, it retains its universality only by losing its
practical nature, and subjecting itself entirely to the form which
expresses it. Thus the æsthetic activity, because bent on realizing
its own universality, which is the perfection of its form, imposes on
the artist a morality and a discipline which cannot be identified with
practical morality, with the discipline of life. The sincerity of the'
artist is of another order than that of the practical man, though (we
can never repeat it too often) æsthetic virtues being incommensurable
with moral values, his work as an artist does not exempt him from his
duties as a man.
This further determination of the concept of expression is used by
Croce to clarify a distinction which had already been adumbrated
in the Estetica; the distinction between poetic, intellectual, and
practical expression, between the word in which the pure intuition
embodies itself, the word which is a sign or symbol of thought, and
the word which is an instrument for the awakening of the emotions, a
preparation for action. Thus the old categories of poetry, prose, and
oratory reappear, but no longer as criteria of material classification,
no longer to be identified with classes or genres of expression. They
become synonyms, respectively, of the æsthetic, the logical, and the
practical activity; to be used as instruments of literary and artistic
criticism, if the critic is willing to renounce all external helps and
material standards, and to penetrate into the "individuality of the
act, where only it is given to him to discern the different spiritual
dispositions, and what is poetry from what is not poetry. Under the
semblance of prose, in a comedy or in a novel, we may find a true and
deeply felt lyric; as under that of verse, in a tragedy or in a poem,
nothing but reflection and oratory."[3] It is easy to perceive how this
distinction will also react on Croce's theory of language as intuition
and expression, not by altering its initial position, but by offering
new means for the empirical analysis of the facts of language, the
nature of which is obviously determined by the kind of impulse which
man obeys in the individual act of expression. By the employment of
such a method, the history of language as æsthetic expression can be
qualified and illumined through the consideration of the moments in
which language ceases to be a pure act of æsthetic creation, and is
subordinated, as a symbol or instrument, to the purposes of the logical
and practical mind.
Similarly, in the history of poetry or of art, the consideration of
the logical and practical moments in the expression will help to
define and isolate that which is purely æsthetic expression, that is,
poetry and art. Croce's expressionistic theory, when thus understood,
differs both from other expressionistic theories and from the narrow
interpretations of Croce's own theory that have been given by some of
his followers and by all his adversaries. It does not, in fact, attempt
to give an æsthetic justification of art as the mere passive reception
of the transient mood; it has no sympathy for that impressionism which
transforms the artist into a reed shaken by all winds of circumstance,
legitimizing every intrusion of the practical personality in the
æsthetic production. It reduces this modern æsthetics of the immediate
feeling to an expression, not of the true spirit of what art and poetry
is being produced to-day, but of that disease, or passivity, of the
times, the first solemn document of which can be traced in Rousseau's
_Confessions_. Against it, Croce appeals to the example and the word
of a Goethe or a Leopardi, who diagnosed the disease in its inception,
and contrasted the classical naturalness and simplicity of the ancients
with the affectation and tumidity of the moderns. But the classicism
which Croce invokes is not a formal and literal ideal, limited to
certain models or standards: it is that complete idealization, which
the immediate practical data, in all times and climates, will undergo
at the hands of the true poet and artist, whether he calls himself a
romanticist or a classicist, an idealist or a realist.
Closely related with this line of thought is Croce's distinction of
the practical from the poetical personality of the artist, and of
biography from æsthetic criticism, as we find it in the essay of
_Alcune massime critiche_, and in the first chapter of his study on
Shakespeare (1919). The knowledge of the facts of an artist's life is
undoubtedly required for the purposes of biographical or practical
history; but their relation with the æsthetic personality of the artist
is not, as it is generally assumed, a relation of cause and effect.
They may have an indirect utility for the definition of the æsthetic
personality, and especially for the recognition of that which in the
works of art themselves is still purely practical, not yet stamped
with the seal of the æsthetic activity. But in the apprehension of
art, the critic must prescind from the biographical elements, because
"the artist himself has prescinded from them in the act of creation of
his work of art, which is a work of art inasmuch as it is the opposite
of the practical life, and is accomplished by the artist raising
himself above the practical plane, abandoning the greatest part of
his practical feelings, and transfiguring those even that he seems
to preserve, because putting them into new relations. The artist, as
we say, 'transcends time,' that is, the 'practical time,' and enters
the 'ideal time,' where actions do not follow actions, but the eternal
lives in the present. And he who pretends to explain the ideal time by
the practical time, the imaginative creation by the practical action,
art by biography, unwittingly denies art itself, and reduces it to
a practical business, of the same kind as eating and making love,
producing goods or fighting for a political cause."[4]
This concept of the æsthetic personality, which we find clearly
defined in Croce's most recent essays, was the guiding principle
of all his literary criticism, since the time when he started his
series of studies on modern Italian literature. He had inherited
it from De Sanctis, whose work, in so far as it is æsthetic and
not moral or political history, can be regarded as a collection of
powerful characterizations of æsthetic personalities. But, in his
first attempts in literary criticism, Croce employed it tentatively
in what then appeared to him only as the preparatory stage of his
work; beyond the individual characterizations, and once these had
been sufficiently determined, he still thought of the possibility of
a general literary history, in which these should find their place as
parts of a more complex organism of critical thought. But when he had
completed his task, in a series of remarkable essays, some of which
will have fixed for a long time to come the physiognomy of the most
notable Italian writers of the last half-century, he perceived that
he had practically exhausted the æsthetic problems which the work of
those writers presented to his mind: a general literary history of
the period could have been nothing but a new arrangement of the same
ideas and valuations contained in the individual essays. Thus the
monographic method .which he had originally adopted for convenience'
sake, justified itself in the practice of his work, or rather proved
to be the only legitimate method of literary and general artistic
history. All the vague abstractions with which modern nationalistic or
sociological histories of art and poetry are crammed, reveal themselves
ultimately as either generalizations of individual characteristics, or
concepts borrowed from the economic and moral history of a nation or
people, more or less irrelevant to the purposes of æsthetic criticism.
The true unity in the consideration of the history of art cannot be
reached by the establishment of purely external and material relations
between work and work, between artist and artist, but only by making
one's critical estimate of the individual work or artist sufficiently
vast and sufficiently deep. "Contemporaries, related or opposed to the
individual poet, his more or less partial and remote forerunners, the
moral and intellectual life of his time, and that of the times which
preceded and prepared it, these and other things are all present (now
expressed, now unexpressed) in our spirit, when we reconstruct the
dialectic of a given artistic personality. Undoubtedly, in considering
a given personality we cannot, in the same act, consider another or
many others or all others, each for itself; and psychologists call this
lack of ubiquity the 'narrowness of the threshold of consciousness,'
while they ought to call it the highest energy of the human spirit,
which sinks itself in the object that in a given moment interests it,
and does not allow itself under any condition to be diverted from it,
because in the individual it finds all that interests it, and, in a
word, the Whole."[5]
This is the purport of the essay on _La Riforma della Storia artistica
e letteraria_ (1917), and this is the method deliberately followed by
Croce in his recent essays on Ariosto, Goethe, Shakespeare, Corneille
and Dante, which ought to be studied not only as characterizations of
the various poets, of the feeling or tonality which is peculiar to each
of them and constitutes their æsthetic personality, but also as sources
for the methodology of literary criticism. To his theory Croce brings
a two-fold corroboration, first, from the observation of the fact that
it coincides with a more and more widespread tendency in both literary
and artistic history towards the monographic form, the individual
essay, as the most effectual type of criticism; and second, from the
analogy with other forms of history. All history, and not æsthetic
history only, is essentially monographic; all history is the history
of a given event or of a given custom or of a given doctrine, and all
history reaches the universal only in and through the individual. The
only obstacles to a general acceptation of this view are, on one side,
a persistent inability to distinguish art from the practical and moral
life and from philosophy, and on the other, a lack of scientific sense,
through which science is regarded not as critical research, but as a
material gathering of facts. Prospectuses, handbooks, dictionaries
and encyclopedias are not the ideal of history: they are instruments
of which we shall always make use as practical helps for the critical
research; but what is living and real thought in them is but an echo of
the actual thinking of individual problems.
All æsthetic criticism, and therefore all æsthetic history, is this
thinking of logical problems, rooted in the concrete ground of the
works of art, which are in their turn solutions of æsthetic problems.
For this the dynamic conception of the human spirit imports that every
one of its acts is a creation, or a doing, in the particular form
in which the spirit realizes itself; art, a creation, in respect to
which all spiritual antecedents assume the aspect of a given æsthetic
problem; history or philosophy, a creation on the substance of reality
presenting itself as a logical problem; and the whole sphere of the
theoretical spirit, "a theoretical _doings_ which is the perpetual
antecedent and the perpetual consequent of the practical doing."[6]
The mere recreation of the æsthetic impression given by a work of art
is not yet criticism; the critic as a mere _artifex additus artifici_
is not yet a critic, but still an artist. Criticism, like all other
history, is not feeling or intuition, but intelligence and thought.
Every history of criticism will therefore ultimately coincide with the
history of æsthetic theories, with the philosophy of art. We thus reach
again, by a new path, the identification of history with philosophy; to
which, in this particular case, the most common objection is that what
is required in a critic is much more an exquisite æsthetic sensibility
than an elaborate concept of what art is as a category of the human
mind. But the objection rests on a misunderstanding of the proper
function of criticism. What sensibility can give is but the immediate
apprehension or taste of the work of art, critically dumb in itself;
on the other hand, it is impossible to conceive of a true intelligence
of art, "without the conjoined capacity to understand the individual
works of art, because philosophy does not develop in the abstract,
but is stimulated by the acts of life and imagination, rises for the
purpose of comprehending them, and understands them by understanding
itself."[7] The mere æsthetic sensibility makes but a new artist; what
makes the critic is his philosophy. Here also, however, as during the
whole course of our inquiry, we must not identify philosophy with the
official history of philosophical disciplines, which offers a large
number of theories of æsthetics only remotely related to the concrete
works of art, to the concrete processes of æsthetic creation, but with
the whole history of human thought, with the working out of particular
problems successively presented to the intelligence of man by the
actual developments of poetry and art. The æsthetic judgment, like
every other judgment, is a synthesis of the individual intuition, or
subject, and of the universal category, or predicate; and this is but
another way of stating the identity of æsthetic criticism, as of all
forms of history, with philosophy. The critic must be endowed with a
power to give new life, within his own mind, to the intuitions of the
artist, but this is for him but the soil in which his thought must
spread its roots; it is true that without that power, no criticism
is possible, but it is equally true that no philosophy of art can
grow on any but that same soil. The ultimate test of the validity of
æsthetic thought is in its capacity to expand our sphere of æsthetic
apprehension; and pure æsthetics is but the methodological moment of
æsthetic history or criticism.
[Footnote 1: _Contributo_, pp. 79-81.]
[Footnote 2: _Nuovi Saggi, di Estetica_, p. 126.]
[Footnote 3: _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 142. Also _Conversazioni Critiche_, I,
pp. 58-63.]
[Footnote 4: _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 231.]
[Footnote 5: _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 181.]
[Footnote 6: _L'arte come Creazione_ (1918), in _Nuovi Saggi_, p. 160.]
[Footnote 7: _La Critica Letteraria come Filosofia_ (1918), in _Nuovi
Saggi_, p. 217.]