Adverting to Mr. Jay Hambidge’s rectangles of beauty I had occasion to
cite Croce and his distinction between the æsthetic fact of expression
and the practical fact of externalization, to which distinction, I
said, Dr. Bosanquet had objected that it ignored the influence upon the
artist of his medium. Dr. Bosanquet has courteously sent me a copy of
a communication, “Croce’s Æsthetic,” which he has made to the British
Academy, and which deals not only with this point, but with his general
objections to the Crocean philosophy of art. It is not all objection,
far from it; much of it is highly laudatory, and all of it is manifestly
written in a spirit of candour and simple desire to arrive at the truth.
But I have neither the space nor the competence to review the whole
pamphlet, and I will confine myself to the particular point with which
I began. While suggesting, however, some criticisms of Dr. Bosanquet’s
contentions, I admit the suspicion that I may resemble one of those
disputants who, as Renan once said, at the bottom of their minds are a
little of the opinion of the other side. That, indeed, was why I said
that many of us would be glad to hear further on the point from Croce
himself. But with Dr. Bosanquet’s pamphlet before me I cannot afford to
“wait and see.” I must say, with all diffidence, what I can.
Dr. Bosanquet describes the Crocean view quite fairly. “The ‘work of
art,’ then, picture, statue, musical performance, printed or spoken
poem, is called so only by a metaphor. It belongs to the practical
(economic) and not to the æsthetic phase of the spirit, and consists
merely of expedients adopted by the artist as a practical man, to
ensure preservation and a permanent possibility of reproduction for
his imaginative intuition. The art and beauty lie primarily in his
imagination, and secondarily in the imagination of those to whom his
own may communicate its experience. The picture and the music are by
themselves neither art nor beauty nor intuition-expression.”
But when Dr. Bosanquet goes on to make his inferences, I suggest that
he infers too much. “Thus,” he says, “all embodiment in special kinds
of physical objects by help of special media and special processes is
wholly foreign to the nature of art and beauty.... There is nothing to be
learned from the practical means by help of which intuitions of beauty
receive permanence and communicability.” “Wholly foreign” and “nothing
to be learned” are, I think, too strong. Though the practical means are
distinct from art, they are part of the artist’s experience. The artist
is not working _in vacuo_. He is a certain man, with a certain nature
and experience, at a certain moment of time. His joy, say, in handling
and modelling clay (I take this example from an old lecture of Dr.
Bosanquet’s) will be one of the factors in his experience. In that sense
it will not be “wholly foreign” to his art, and he will have “learned”
something from it. It is not itself the art-impulse, the expressive
activity, but it is, what Croce calls it, a _point d’appui_ for a new one.
For let us hear what Croce himself says on this point (“Estetica,” Ch.
XIII.). “To the explanation of physical beauty as a mere aid for the
reproduction of internal beauty, or expression, it might be objected,
that the artist creates his expressions in the act of painting or
carving, writing or composing; and that therefore physical beauty,
instead of following, sometimes precedes æsthetic beauty. This would be
a very superficial way of understanding the procedure of the artist,
who, in reality, makes no stroke of the brush without having first seen
it in his imagination; and, if he has not yet seen it, will make it, not
to externalize his expression (which at that moment does not exist),
but as it were on trial and to have a mere _point d’appui_ for further
meditation and internal concentration. The physical _point d’appui_ is
not physical beauty, instrument of reproduction, but a means that might
be called _pedagogic_, like retiring to solitude or the many other
expedients, often queer enough, adopted by artists and men of science
and varying according to their various idiosyncrasies.” Can we not
put it more generally and say that the artist’s historic situation is
changing at every moment and his experience with his medium is part of
that situation (just as is the date of his birth, his country, or the
state of his digestion), or in other words, one of the influences that
make him what he is and not some one else? But to admit that, it seems
to me, is not at all to deny the independence of his spiritual activity
in expression any more than the freedom of the will is denied by the
admission that will must always be exercised in a definite historical
situation.
What Dr. Bosanquet cannot abide is Croce’s great principle that in
æsthetic philosophy there are no arts but only art. He says this “offers
to destroy our medium of intercourse through the body and through natural
objects.” Why “destroy”? Surely it is not a case of destruction but of
removal; removal from the philosophy of art to that of practice. Croce is
not quite so foolish as to offer to destroy things indestructible; he is
only trying to put them in their place.
“The truth is, surely, that different inclinations of the spirit have
affinities with different qualities and actions of body—meaning by body
that which a sane philosophy accepts as concretely and completely actual
in the world of sense-perception. The imagination of the particular
artist is
like the dyer’s hand,
Subdued to what it works in,
and its intuition and expression assume a special type in accordance
with the medium it delights in, and necessarily develop certain
capacities and acknowledge, however tacitly, certain limitations.” Who
denies anything so obvious? Certainly not Croce. What he denies, I
take it, is that these considerations, however valuable in their right
place, are proper to a philosophy of art. They are classifications and
generalizations, he would say, and philosophy deals not with _generalia_
but with universals. To say that art is one is not to say that Raphael
and Mozart are one. There are no duplicates in human life and no two
artists have the same activity of intuition-expression. You may classify
them in all sorts of ways; those who express themselves in paint, those
who express themselves in sounds, and so forth; or sub-classify them
into landscapists, portraitists, etc., etc.; or sub-sub-classify them
into “school” of Constable, “school” of Reynolds, etc., etc. But you are
only getting further and further away from anything like a philosophy of
art, and will have achieved at best a manual or history of technique.
In a philosophic theory Dr. Bosanquet’s “affinities of the spirit” are
a will-o’-the-wisp. Thereupon he says, crushingly, “if you insist on
neglecting these affinities of the spirit, your theory remains abstract,
and has no illuminating power.” Well, Croce’s theory is certainly “up
there,” it inhabits the cold air of pure ideas; it will not be of the
least practical use at the Academy Schools or the Royal College of
Music; but when a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet finds no illumination
in a theory which unifies the arts, gives a comprehensible definition of
beauty and, incidentally, constructs, to say the least of it, a plausible
“cycle of reality,” I can but respectfully wonder.