Chapter II

Such is the theory of art as pure intuition, in its fundamental conception. This theory, then, takes its origin from the criticism of the loftiest of all the other doctrines of Aesthetic, from the criticism of mystical or romantic Aesthetic, and contains in itself the criticism and the truth of all the other Aesthetics. It is not here possible to allow ourselves to illustrate its other aspects, such as would be those of the identity, which it lays down, between intuition and expression, between art and language. Suffice it to say, as regards the former, that he alone who divides the unity of the spirit into soul and body can have faith in a pure act of the soul, and therefore in an intuition, which should exist as an intuition, and yet be without its body, expression. Expression is the actuality of intuition, as action is of will; and in the same way as will not exercised in action is not will, so an intuition unexpressed is not an intuition. As regards the second point, I will mention in passing that, in order to recognize the identity of art and language, it is needful to study language, not in its abstraction and in grammatical detail, but in its immediate reality, and in all its manifestations, spoken and sung, phonic and graphic. And we should not take at hazard any proposition, and declare it to be aesthetic; because, if all propositions have an aesthetic side (precisely because intuition is the elementary form of knowledge and is, as it were, the garment of the superior and more complex forms), all are not _purely_ aesthetic, but some are philosophical, historical, scientific, or mathematical; some, in fact, of these are more than aesthetic or logical; they are aestheticological. Aristotle, in his time, distinguished between semantic and apophantic propositions, and noted, that if all propositions be _semantic_, not all are _apophantic_. Language is art, not in so far as it is apophantic, but in so far as it is, generically, semantic. It is necessary to note in it the side by which it is expressive, and nothing but expressive. It is also well to observe (though this may seem superfluous) that it is not necessary to reduce the theory of pure intuition, as has been sometimes done, to a historical fact or to a psychological concept. Because we recognize in poetry, as it were, the ingenuousness, the freshness, the barbarity of the spirit, it is not therefore necessary to limit poetry to youth and to barbarian peoples. Though we recognize language as the first act of taking possession of the world achieved by man, we must not imagine that language is born _ex nihilo_, once only in the course of the ages, and that later generations merely adopt the ancient instrument, applying it to a new order of things while lamenting its slight adaptability to the usage of civilized times. Art, poetry, intuition, and immediate expression are the moment of barbarity and of ingenuousness, which perpetually recur in the life of the spirit; they are youth, that is, not chronological, but ideal. There exist very prosaic barbarians and very prosaic youths, as there exist poetical spirits of the utmost refinement and civilization. The mythology of those proud, gigantic Patagonians, of whom our Vico was wont to discourse, or of those _bons Hurons_, who were lately a theme of conversation, must be looked upon as for ever superseded.

But there arises an apparently very serious objection to the Aesthetic of pure intuition, giving occasion to doubt whether this doctrine, if it represent progress in respect to the doctrines which have preceded it, yet is also a complete and definite doctrine as regards the fundamental concept of art. Should it be submitted to a dialectic, by means of which it must be surpassed and dissolved into a more lofty point of view? The doctrine of pure intuition makes the value of art to consist of its power of intuition; in such a manner that just in so far as pure and concrete intuitions are achieved will art and beauty be achieved. But if attention be paid to judgments of people of good taste and of critics, and to what we all say when we are warmly discussing works of art and manifesting our praise or blame of them, it would seem that what we seek in art is something quite different, or at least something more than simple force and intuitive and expressive purity. What pleases and what is sought in art, what makes beat the heart and enraptures the admiration, is life, movement, emotion, warmth, the feeling of the artist. This alone affords the supreme criterion for distinguishing true from false works of art, those with insight from the failures. Where there are emotion and feeling, much is forgiven; where they are wanting, nothing can make up for them. Not only are the most profound thoughts and the most exquisite culture incapable of saving a work of art which is looked upon as _cold_, but richness of imagery, ability and certainty in the reproduction of the real, in description, characterization and composition, and all other knowledge, only serve to arouse the regret that so great a price has been paid and such labours endured, in vain. We do not ask of an artist instruction as to real facts and thoughts, nor that he should astonish us with the richness of his imagination, but that he should have a _personality_, in contact with which the soul of the hearer or spectator may be heated. A personality of any sort is asked for in this case; its moral significance is excluded: let it be sad or glad, enthusiastic or distrustful, sentimental or sarcastic, benignant or malign, but it must be a soul. Art criticism would seem to consist altogether in determining if there be a personality in the work of art, and of what sort. A work that is a failure is an incoherent work; that is to say, a work in which no single personality appears, but a number of disaggregated and jostling personalities, that is, really, none. There is no further correct significance than this in the researches that are made as to the verisimilitude, the truth, the logic, the necessity, of a work of art.

It is true that many protests have been made by artists, critics, and philosophers by profession, against the characteristic of _personality_. It has been maintained that the bad artist leaves traces of his personality in the work of art, whereas the great artist cancels them all. It has been further maintained that the artist should portray the reality of life, and that he should not disturb it with the opinions, judgments, and personal feelings of the author, and that the artist should give the tears of things and not his own tears. Hence _impersonality_, not personality, has been proclaimed to be the characteristic of art, that is to say, the very opposite. However, it will not be difficult to show that what is really meant by this opposing formula is the same as in the first case. The theory of impersonality really coincides with that of personality in every point. The opposition of the artists, critics, and philosophers above mentioned, was directed against the invasion by the empirical and volitional personality of the artist of the spontaneous and ideal personality which constitutes the subject of the work of art. For instance, artists who do not succeed in representing the force of piety or of love of country, add to their colourless imaginings declamation or theatrical effects, thinking thus to arouse such feelings. In like manner certain orators and actors introduce into a work of art an emotion extraneous to the work of art itself. Within these limits, the opposition of the upholders of the theory of impersonality was most reasonable. On the other hand, there has also been exhibited an altogether irrational opposition to personality in the work of art. Such is the lack of comprehension and intolerance evinced by certain souls for others differently constituted (of calm for agitated souls, for example).

Here we find at bottom the claim of one sort of personality to deny that of another. Finally, it has been possible to demonstrate from among the examples given of impersonal art, in the romances and dramas called naturalistic, that in so far and to the extent that these are complete artistic works, they possess personality. This holds good even when this personality lies in a wandering or perplexity of thought regarding the value to be given to life, or in blind faith in the natural sciences and in modern sociology.

Where every trace of personality was really absent, and its place taken by the pedantic quest for human documents, the description of certain social classes and the generic or individual process of certain maladies, there the work of art was absent. A work of science of more or less superficiality, and without the necessary proofs and control, filled its place. There is no upholder of impersonality but experiences a feeling of fatigue for a work of the utmost exactitude in the reproduction of reality in its empirical sequence, or of industrious and apathetic combination of images. He asks himself why such a work was executed, and recommends the author to adopt some other profession, since that of artist was not intended for him.

Thus it is without doubt that if pure intuition (and pure expression, which is the same thing) are indispensable in the work of art, the personality of the artist is equally indispensable. If (to quote the celebrated words in our own way) the _classic_ moment of perfect representation or expression be necessary for the work of art, the _romantic_ moment of feeling is not less necessary. Poetry, or art in general, cannot be exclusively _ingenuous_ or _sentimental_; it must be both ingenuous and sentimental. And if the first or representative moment be termed _epic_, and the second, which is sentimental, passionate, and personal, be termed _lyric_, then poetry and art must be at once epic and lyric, or, if it please you better, _dramatic_. We use these words here, not at all in their empirical and intellectualist sense, as employed to designate special classes of works of art, exclusive of other classes; but in that of elements or moments, which must of necessity be found united in every work of art, how diverse soever it may be in other respects.

Now this irrefutable conclusion seems to constitute exactly that above-mentioned apparently serious objection to the doctrine which defines art as pure intuition. But if the essence of art be merely theoretic--and it is _intuibility_--can it, on the other hand, be practical, that is to say, feeling, personality, and _passionality_? Or, if it be practical, how can it be theoretic? It will be answered that feeling is the _content_, intuibility the _form_; but form and content do not in philosophy constitute a duality, like water and its recipient; in philosophy content is form, and form is content. Here, on the other hand, form and content appear to be different from one another; the content is of one quality, the form of another. Thus art appears to be the sum of two qualities, or, as Herbart used to say in his time, of _two values_. Accordingly we have an altogether unmaintainable Aesthetic, as is clear from recent largely vulgarized doctrines of Aesthetic as operating with the concept of the _infused personality_. Here we find, on the one hand, things intuible lying dead and soulless; on the other, the artist's feeling and personality. The artist is then supposed to put himself into things, by an act of magic, to make them live and palpitate, love and adore. But if we start with the _distinction_, we can never again reach _unity_: the distinction requires an intellectual act, and what the intellect has divided intellect or reason alone, not art or imagination, can reunite and synthetize. Thus the Aesthetic of infusion or transfusion--when it does not fall into the antiquated hedonistic doctrines of agreeable illusion, of games, and generally of what affords a pleasurable emotion; or of moral doctrines, where art is a symbol and an allegory of the good and the true;--is yet not able, despite its airs of modernity and its psychology, to escape the fate of the doctrine which makes of art a semi-imaginative conception of the world, like religion. The process that it describes is mythological, not aesthetic; it is a making of gods or of idols. "To make one's gods is an unhappy art," said an old Italian poet; but if it be not unhappy, certainly it is not poetic and not aesthetic. The artist does not make the gods, because he has other things to do. Another reason is that, to tell the truth, he is so ingenuous and so absorbed in the image that attracts him, that he cannot perform that act of abstraction and conception, wherein the image must be surpassed and made the allegory of a universal, though it be of the crudest description.

This recent theory, then, is of no use. It leads back to the difficulties arising from the admission of two characteristics of art, _intuibility_ and _lyricism_, not unified. We must recognize, either that the duality must be destroyed and proved illusory, _or_ that we must proceed to a more ample conception of art, in which that of pure intuibility would remain merely secondary or particular. And to destroy and prove it illusory must consist in showing that here too form is content, and that pure intuition is _itself_ lyricism.

Now, the truth is precisely this: _pure intuition is essentially lyricism_. All the difficulties concerning this question arise from not having thoroughly understood that concept, from having failed to penetrate its true nature and to explore its multiple relations. When we consider the one attentively, we see the other bursting from its bosom, or better, the one and the other reveal themselves as one and the same, and we escape from the desperate trilemma, of either denying the lyrical and personal character of art, or of asserting that it is adjunctive, external and accidental, or of excogitating a new doctrine of Aesthetic, which we do not know where to find. In fact, as has already been remarked, what can pure intuition mean, but intuition pure of every abstraction, of every conceptual element, and, for this reason, neither science, history, nor philosophy? This means that the content of the pure intuition cannot be either an abstract concept, or a speculative concept or idea, or a conceptualized, that is historicized, representation. Nor can it be a so-called perception, which is a representation intellectually, and so historically, discriminated. But outside logic in its various forms and blendings, no other psychic content remains, save that which is called appetites, tendencies, feelings, and will. These things are all the same and constitute the practical form of the spirit, in its infinite gradations and in its dialectic (pleasure and pain). Pure intuition, then, since it does not produce concepts, must represent the will in its manifestations, that is to say, it can represent nothing but _states of the soul_. And states of the soul are passionality, feeling, personality, which are found in every art and determine its lyrical character. Where this is absent, art is absent, _precisely because pure intuition is absent_, and we have at the most, in exchange for it, _that reflex_, philosophical, historical, or scientific. In the last of these, passion is represented, not immediately, but mediately, or, to speak exactly, it is no longer represented, but thought. Thus the origin of language, that is, its true nature, has several times been placed in _interjection_. Thus, too, Aristotle, when he wished to give an example of those propositions which were not _apophantic_, but generically _semantic_ (we should say, not logical, but purely Aesthetic), and did not predicate the logically true and false, but nevertheless said something, gave as example invocation or prayer, _hae enchae_. He added that these propositions do not appertain to Logic, but to Rhetoric and Poetic. A landscape is a state of the soul; a great poem may all be contained in an exclamation of joy, of sorrow, of admiration, or of lament. The more objective is a work of art, by so much the more is it poetically suggestive.

If this deduction of lyricism from the intimate essence of pure intuition do not appear easily acceptable, the reason is to be sought in two very deep-rooted prejudices, of which it is useful to indicate here the genesis. The first concerns the nature of the _imagination_, and its likenesses to and differences from _fancy_. Imagination and fancy have been clearly distinguished thus by certain aestheticians (and among them, De Sanctis), as also in discussions relating to concrete art: they have held fancy, not imagination, to be the special faculty of the poet and the artist. Not only does a new and bizarre combination of images, which is vulgarly called _invention_, not constitute the artist, but _ne fait rien à l'affaire_, as Alceste remarked with reference to the length of time expended upon writing a sonnet. Great artists have often preferred to treat groups of images, which had already been many times used as material for works of art. The novelty of these new works has been solely that of art or form, that is to say, of the new _accent_ which they have known how to give to the old material, of the new way in which they have _felt_ and therefore _intuified_ it, thus creating _new images_ upon the old ones. These remarks are all obvious and universally recognized as true. But if mere imagination as such has been excluded from art, it has not therefore been excluded from the theoretic spirit. Hence the disinclination to admit that a pure intuition must of necessity express a state of the soul, whereas it may also consist, as they believe, of a pure image, without a content of feeling. If we form an arbitrary image of any sort, _stans pede in uno_, say of a bullock's head on a horse's body, would not this be an intuition, a pure intuition, certainly quite without any content of reflexion? Would one not attain to a work of art in this way, or at any rate to an artistic motive? Certainly not. For the image given as an instance, and every other image that may be produced by the imagination, not only is not a pure intuition, but it is not a _theoretic_ product of any sort. It is a product of _choice_, as was observed in the formula used by our opponents; and choice is external to the world of thought and contemplation. It may be said that imagination is a practical artifice or game, played upon that patrimony of images possessed by the soul; whereas the fancy, the translation of practical into theoretical values, of states of the soul into images, is the _creation_ of that patrimony itself.

From this we learn that an image, which is not the expression of a state of the soul, is not an image, since it is without any theoretical value; and therefore it cannot be an obstacle to the identification of lyricism and intuition. But the other prejudice is more difficult to eradicate, because it is bound up with the metaphysical problem itself, on the various solutions of which depend the various solutions of the aesthetic problem, and _vice versa_. If art be intuition, would it therefore be any intuition that one might have of a _physical_ object, appertaining to _external nature_? If I open my eyes and look at the first object that they fall upon, a chair or a table, a mountain or a river, shall I have performed by so doing an aesthetic act? If so, what becomes of the lyrical character, of which we have asserted the necessity? If not, what becomes of the intuitive character, of which we have affirmed the equal necessity and also its identity with the former? Without doubt, the perception of a physical object, as such, does not constitute an artistic fact; but precisely for the reason that it is not a pure intuition, but a judgment of perception, and implies the application of an abstract concept, which in this case is physical or belonging to external nature. And with this reflexion and perception, we find ourselves at once outside the domain of pure intuition. We could have a pure perception of a physical object in one way only; that is to say, if physical or external nature were a metaphysical reality, a truly real reality, and not, as it is, a construction or abstraction of the intellect. If such were the case, man would have an immediate intuition, in his first theoretical moment, both of himself and of external nature, of the spiritual and of the physical, in an equal degree. This represents the dualistic hypothesis. But just as dualism is incapable of providing a coherent system of philosophy, so is it incapable of providing a coherent Aesthetic. If we admit dualism, we must certainly abandon the doctrine of art as pure intuition; but we must at the same time abandon all philosophy. But art on its side tacitly protests against metaphysical dualism. It does so, because, being the most immediate form of knowledge, it is in contact with activity, not with passivity; with interiority, not exteriority; with spirit, not with matter, and never with a double order of reality. Those who affirm the existence of two forms of intuition--the one external or physical, the other subjective or aesthetic; the one cold and inanimate, the other warm and lively; the one imposed from without, the other coming from the inner soul--attain without doubt to the distinctions and oppositions of the vulgar (or dualistic) consciousness, but their Aesthetic is vulgar.

The lyrical essence of pure intuition, and of art, helps to make clear what we have already observed concerning the persistence of the intuition and of the fancy in the higher grades of the theoretical spirit, why philosophy, history, and science have always an artistic side, and why their expression is subject to aesthetic valuation. The man who ascends from art to thought does not by so doing abandon his volitional and practical base, and therefore he too finds himself in a particular _state of the soul_, the representation of which is intuitive and lyrical, and accompanies of necessity the development of his ideas. Hence the various styles of thinkers, solemn or jocose, troubled or gladsome, mysterious and involved, or level and expansive. But it would not be correct to divide intuition immediately into two classes, the one of _aesthetic_, the other of _intellectual_ or _logical_ intuitions, owing to the persistence of the artistic element in logical thought, because the relation of degrees is not the relation of classes, and copper is copper, whether it be found alone, or in combination as bronze.

Further, this close connection of feeling and intuition in pure intuition throws much light on the reasons which have so often caused art to be separated from the theoretic and confounded with the practical activity. The most celebrated of these confusions are those formulated about the relativity of tastes and of the impossibility of reproducing, tasting, and correctly judging the art of the past, and in general the art of others. A life lived, a feeling felt, a volition willed, are certainly impossible to reproduce, because nothing happens more than once, and my situation at the present moment is not that of any other being, nor is it mine of the moment before, nor will be of the moment to follow. But art remakes ideally, and ideally expresses my momentary situation. Its image, produced by art, becomes separated from time and space, and can be again made and again contemplated in its ideal-reality from every point of time and space. It belongs not to the _world_, but to the _superworld_; not to the flying moment, but to eternity. Thus life passes, but art endures.

Finally, we obtain from this relation between the intuition and the state of the soul the criterion of exact definition of the _sincerity_ required of artists, which is itself also an essential request. It is essential, precisely because it means that the artist must have a state of the soul to express, which really amounts to saying, that he must be an artist. His must be a state of the soul really experienced, not merely imagined, because imagination, as we know, is not a work of truth. But, on the other hand, the demand for sincerity does not go beyond asking for a state of the soul, and that the state of soul expressed in the work of art be a desire or an action. It is altogether indifferent to Aesthetic whether the artist have had only an aspiration, or have realized that aspiration in his empirical life. All that is quite indifferent in the sphere of art. Here we also find the confutation of that false conception of sincerity, which maintains that the artist, in his volitional or practical life, should be at one with his dream, or with his incubus. Whether or no he have been so, is a matter that interests his biographer, not his critic; it belongs to history, which separates and qualifies that which art does not discriminate, but represents.