Chapter III: Criticism and History

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.]