Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, Benedetto Croce [read e books online free TXT] 📗

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 aestheticological 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

ANALOGOUS ERRORS IN HISTORIC AND LOGIC

The better to confirm these criticisms, it will be opportune to cast a rapid glance over analogous and opposite errors, born of ignorance as to the true nature of art, and of its relation to history and to science.

These errors have injured alike the theory of history and of science, of Historic (or Historiology) and of Logic.

[Sidenote] Critique of the philosophy of history.

Historical intellectualism has been the cause of the many researches which have been made, especially during the last two centuries, researches which continue to-day, for a philosophy of history, for an ideal history, for a sociology, for a historical psychology, or however may be otherwise entitled or described a science whose object is to extract from history, universal laws and concepts. Of what kind must be these laws, these universals? Historical laws and historical concepts? In that case, an elementary criticism of knowledge suffices to make clear the absurdity of the attempt. When such expressions as a historical law, a historical concept are not simply metaphors colloquially employed, they are true contradictions in terms: the adjective is as unsuitable to the substantive as in the expressions qualitative quantity or pluralistic monism. History means concretion and individuality, law and concept mean abstraction and universality.

If, on the other hand, the attempt to draw from history historical laws and concepts be abandoned, and it be merely desired to draw from it laws and concepts, the attempt is certainly not frivolous; but the science thus obtained will be, not a philosophy of history, but rather, according to the case, either philosophy in its various specifications of Ethic, Logic, etc., or empirical science in its infinite divisions and subdivisions. Thus are sought out either those philosophical concepts which are, as has already been observed, at the bottom of every historical construction and separate perception from intuition, historical intuition from pure intuition, history from art; or already formed historical intuitions are collected and reduced to types and classes, which is exactly the method of