Benedetto Croce

“ Not the idea, but the feeling, is what confers upon art the airy lightness of the symbol: an aspiration enclosed in the circle of a representation—that is art; and in it the aspiration alone stands for the representation, and the representation alone for the aspiration. Epic and lyric, or drama and lyric, are scholastic divisions of the indivisible: art is always lyrical—that is, epic and dramatic in feeling. What we admire in genuine works of art is the perfect imaginative form which a state of the soul assumes; and we call this life, unity, compactness and fulness of the work of art. ”

“ It is, however, evident that idealism or absolute morality is a necessary postulate of socialism. Is not the interest which prompts the formation of a concept of surplus-value a moral interest, or social if it is preferred? Can surplus value be spoken of in pure economics? Does not the labourer sell his labour-power for exactly what it is worth, given his position in existing society? And, without the moral postulate, how could we ever explain Marx's political activity, and that note of violent indignation and bitter satire which is felt in every page of Das Kapital? ”

“ The beautiful is the manifestation of the idea. Art is the ideal, a particular idea. Under the gaze of the artist the body becomes subtilized until it is nothing but the shadow of the soul, a beautiful veil. The world of poetry is peopled with phantasms; and the poet, eternal dreamer, with the eyes of one slightly intoxicated sees bodies float unsteadily around him and change their shapes. Nor do bodies merely become attenuated into forms and phantasms; these forms and phantasms themselves become free manifestations of every idea and every concept. ”

“ Love matter dominates in the Furioso, because it dominated in the heart of Ariosto, where it easily passed over into more noble feelings, into piety that goes beyond the tomb, into justice rendered to calumniated innocence, into kindness ill-recompensed, into admiration for the sacred tie of friendship. Hence, in marked contrast to the beautiful Doralice, so crudely sensual, that when her lover's body is still warm, she is capable of looking with desire upon his slayer, the valiant Ruggiero, Isabella deliberately decides upon putting herself to death that she may keep faith with her dead lover ”

“ Mysticism is not satisfied with this, feeling that no repose is ever accorded to the spirit which abandons itself to this orgy, this breathless adventure of infinitely various spectacles, and that the intimate meaning of them all escapes the æstheticist. It is true that there is no logical knowledge, that the concept is sterile, but the claim for unity is legitimate, and demands to be, and is, satisfied. But in what way is it satisfied? Art speaks, and its speech, however beautiful, does not content us; it paints, and its colours, however attractive, deceive us. ”

“ Unreality and nothingness are then the knavish trick of some wicked person who starts a calumny, which, being received and believed, injures an honest man? Unreality and nothing, the passion that drags the gambler into economic ruin and moral abjection? So the world is all good, all rose-coloured, all sweet; and crimes, cowardice, foolishness, and baseness are illusions, and there is no reason to lament; so the feeling of life should be expressed with a perpetual smile, like that upon the lips of the wounded warriors in the marbles of Aegina? ”

“ But history is never history of death, but history of life, and all know that the proper commemoration of the dead is the knowledge of what they did in life, of what they produced that is working in us, the history of their life and not of their death, which it behoves a gentle soul to veil, a soul barbarous and perverse to exhibit in its miserable nakedness and to contemplate with unhealthy persistence. ”

“ Time is divisible, eternity indivisible; disturbances of the mind wax and wane, its quiescence has no degrees; extended things are corruptible, unextended things permanent in their indivisibility; body can be divided, mind cannot; possibilities are at a single point, accidents are everywhere; science is one, while opinion produces differences; virtue is neither in one place nor another, vice walks up and down in every direction; the good is one, the bad is innumerable ”

“ He did not look upon art as pure beauty without a concept. He looked upon it as a beauty adherent and fixed about a concept. The work of genius contains two elements: imagination and intelligence. To these must be added taste, which combines the two. Art may even represent the ugly in nature, for artistic beauty "is not a beautiful thing but a beautiful representation of a thing." But this representation of the ugly has its limits in the arts (here Kant remembers Lessing and Winckelmann) , and an absolute limit in the disgusting and the repugnant, which kills the representation itself. ”

“ The beauty which is used to clothe the good as well as the bad is not the ineffable, celestial Beauty, offspring of the alliance between the beautiful, the good and the perfect, which awakens more than mere pleasure, a veritable joy which ravishes and beatifies our soul. Such is the human face when, by filling the eye of the beholder with the pleasure of form arising from the variety, proportion and order of the features, it proceeds to arouse the imagination and intellect by its suggestion of interior perfection ”

“ Far from it: he has a throne and is bound to defend it, and therefore will punish the assassin. Yes, but when he has caused more blood to flow, he will find new and greater hatreds surrounding him, new and more dangerous plots. It is better, then, to die? But wherefore die? Why should he not enjoy revenge and triumph once again? This is the tumult of irresolution, which, while felt as a hard, a desperate torment, and although it seems to hold the will in suspense, in reality sets it in motion, insensibly guiding it to its end. ”

“ It certainly concerns intuition, but it is not intuition; it has art for subject-matter, but it is not art; it does not communicate a state of the soul, but communicates a thought, that is to say, an affirmation of universal character; therefore, it is a concept. And by this concept it is sought to deny the concept. It is as if one sought to leap over one's own shadow, when the leap itself throws the shadow, or, by clinging to one's own pigtail, to pull oneself into safety out of the river. ”

“ If there have not previously been a desire, an aspiration, a nostalgia, there cannot be poetry; if there have not been an impulse or a heroic deed, the epic cannot arise; if the sun do not illumine a landscape, or a soul invoke a ray of sunlight upon the countryside, the picture of a luminous landscape cannot exist. And if there be not a world of reality that generates a world of representations, Philosophy, which is the search for the universal, is not conceivable, nor History, the understanding of the individual. ”

“ And then the 'great epochs' must not be forgotten, the 'centuries' in which the arts nourished as the result of the work of wise men and monarchs, les quatre âges heureux of history. But between this sporadic good, weak or acting covertly, or appearing only for a time and then disappearing, and that of the new era, the quantitative and energetic difference is such that it is turned into a qualitative difference: a moment comes when men learn to think, to rectify their ideas, and past history seems like a tempestuous sea to one who has landed upon solid earth. ”

“ If the correspondence between labour and value is only realized in the simplified society of the first sphere, why insist on translating the phenomena of the second into terms of the first? Why give the name transformation of surplus value to what makes its appearance as the natural economic result of capital which must have (from its very nature as capital) a profit? Does Marx offer an explanation connecting ground and consequence, or does he not rather draw a parallel between two different phenomena, by which the diversities illuminating the origins of society are set in relief? ”

“ Real history is composed of actions, not of fancies and illusions: but actions are the work of individuals, not indeed in so far as they dream, but in the inspiration of genius, the divine madness of truth, the holy enthusiasm of the hero. Fate, Chance, Fortune, God—all these explanations have the same defect: they separate the individual from his product, and instead of eliminating the capricious element, the individual will in history, as they claim to do, they immensely reinforce and increase it. ”

“ But the distinction of art from philosophy (taken widely as including all thinking of the real) brings with it other distinctions, among which that of art from myth occupies the foremost place. For myth, to him who believes in it, presents itself as the revelation and knowledge of reality as opposed to unreality,—a reality that drives away other beliefs as illusory or false. It can become art only for him who no longer believes in it and avails himself of mythology as a metaphor, of the austere world of the gods as of a beautiful world, of God as of an image of sublimity. ”

“ The true work of art depends upon the degree of perfection with which the external in it agrees with the internal.
Schleiermacher rightly combats Schiller's view that art is in any sense a game. That, he says, is the view held by mere men of business, to whom business alone is serious. But artistic activity is universal, and a man completely deprived of it unthinkable, although the difference here between man and man, is gigantic, ranging from the simple desire to taste of art to the effective tasting of it, and from this, by infinite gradations, to productive genius. ”

“ Language is the act of speaking. "True and proper language consists in the very act of producing it by means of connected utterance; that is the only thing that must be thought of as the starting-point or the truth in any inquiry which aims at penetrating into the living essence of language. Division into words and rules is a lifeless artifice of scientific analysis." [6] Language is not a thing arising out of the need of external communication; on the contrary, it springs from the wholly internal thirst for knowledge and the struggle to reach an intuition of things." ”

“ Where art thou gone, O fame that followest emperors and singest their brave deeds in gentle verse, thou that honorest men after death and conferrest eternity upon those thou vauntest? This is the fault of the world. Thou art gone to sing of ancient loves and to tell of the battles of the giants, thanks to this world of ours that cares no longer for courage or for fame. Leave upon Parnassus that growth of green, since none knows now the upward path that leadeth thither, and sing here below with me this history of King Agramante, the mighty Saracen.... ”

“ Battles have been fought for legality, and rivers of blood have been shed for it; for legality are faced the troubles of litigation, and energetic action is displayed, which only superficial intellects can consider a waste of time and trouble; for no trouble is superfluous when we are protecting our own rights, and none is more sacred, since it also guards the offended majesty of the law, the rights of all. Those who declaim against laws can well do so with a light heart, for the law surrounds, protects, and preserves their life for them. ”

“ Indeed, he who produces an error has no power to twist or to denaturalize or stain the truth, which is his thought itself, the thought which acts in him and in all men; indeed, no sooner has he touched thought than he is touched by it: he thinks and does not err. He possesses only the practical power of passing from thought to deed; and his doing, in fact his thinking, is to open his mouth and emit sounds to which there corresponds no thought, or, what is the same thing, no thought which has value, precision, coherence and truth. It is to smear a canvas to which no intuition corresponds ”

“ History is living chronicle, chronicle is dead history; history is contemporary history, chronicle is past history; history is principally an act of thought, chronicle an act of will. Every history becomes chronicle when it is no longer thought, but only recorded in abstract words, which were once upon a time concrete and expressive. The history of philosophy even is chronicle, when written or read by those who do not understand philosophy: history would even be what we are now disposed to read as chronicle, as when, for instance, the monk of Monte Cassino notes: 1001. ”

“ Art does not allow itself to be troubled with the abstractions of the intellect, and therefore does not make mistakes; but it does not know that it does not make mistakes. If art, then (to return to what we said at the beginning) , be the first and most ingenuous form of knowledge, it cannot give complete satisfaction to man's need to know, and therefore cannot be the ultimate end of the theoretic spirit. Art is the dream of the life of knowledge. Its complement is waking, lyricism no longer, but the concept; no longer the dream, but the judgment. Thought could not be without fancy ”

“ Great thinkers are sometimes called great writers, while other equally great thinkers remain more or less fragmentary writers even if their fragments have the scientific value of harmonious, coherent, and perfect works.
We pardon thinkers and men of science their literary mediocrity. The fragments, the flashes, console us for the whole, because it is far easier to recover the well-arranged composition from the fragmentary work of genius, to liberate the flame latent in the spark, than to achieve the discovery of genius. But how can we pardon mediocre expression in pure artists? ”

“ For this reason is everywhere diffused the terror of the Unknown, which surrounds on every side and conceals a countenance that may be more terrible than terrible life itself, in the development of which human beings are involved—a countenance terrible for what it will reveal, and perhaps sublime and ecstatic, giving in its very terribleness, terror and rapture together. The mystery lies not only in the occasional appearance of spectres, demons, witches, in the poetry, but in the whole atmosphere of which they form only a part, assisting by their presence in a more direct determination. ”

“ But this does not suffice in philosophy. We may attain to ecstasy by the recitation of a poem or the execution of a piece of music, just as it is, without altering it anywhere. But it does not seem possible to possess a philosophic proposition, save when we have translated it, as we say, into our own language, when in reality, relying upon its results, we formulate new philosophic propositions and solve new problems that have presented themselves in our souls. For this reason no book ever completely satisfies us. Every book quenches one thirst, only to give us a new one. ”