Benedetto Croce

“ But it is not less true that this problem as to the distinction between the two forms of the theoretical spirit could not be solved in the field of one of them, intuition or expression, where nothing will ever be found but imagination, poetry, aesthetic; and the undue introduction of logic will only project there a deceitful shadow, which will darken and hamper intelligence, depriving it of the view of art in its fulness and purity, without giving it that of logicity and of thought. ”

“ Neither the artist who produces art, nor the spectator who contemplates it, has need of anything but the universal and the individual, or rather, the universal individualised: the universal artistic activity, which is all contracted and concentrated in the representation of a single state of the soul. ”

“ For the truth is really this: content and form must be clearly distinguished in art, but must not be separately qualified as artistic, precisely because their relation only is artistic—that is, their unity, understood not as an abstract, dead unity, but as concrete and living, which is that of the synthesis a priori; and art is a true aesthetic synthesis a priori of feeling and image in the intuition, as to which it may be repeated that feeling without image is blind, and image without feeling is void. Feeling and image do not exist for the artistic spirit outside the synthesis ”

“ What has here been distinguished cannot be unified, because it has been badly distinguished: how can something external and extraneous to the internal become united to the internal and express it? How can a sound or a colour express an image without sound and without colour? How can the bodiless express a body? How can the spontaneity of imagination and of reflection and even of technical action coincide in the same act? When the intuition has been distinguished from the expression, and the one has been made different from the other, no ingenuity of middle terms can reunite them ”

“ But what is impossible is to be a great poet who writes verses badly, a great painter who does not give tone to his colours, a great architect who does not harmonise his lines, a great composer who does not harmonise his notes ”

“ All this has no concern with the artist or the aesthetician: for art is no vain imagining, or tumultuous passionality, but the surpassing of this act by means of another act, or, if it be preferred, the substitution for this tumult of another tumult, that of the longing to create and to contemplate with the joy and the anguish of artistic creation. ”

“ And in history, which is becoming ever richer and more definite, not in pyramids of empirical concepts, which become more and more empty the higher they rise and the more subtle they become, is to be found the link of all works of art and of all intuitions, because in history they appear organically connected among themselves, as successive and necessary stages of the development of the spirit, each one a note of the eternal poem which harmonises all single poems in itself. ”

“ Absurdities resulting from the effort to determine rigorously what is indeterminable, owing to the contradictory nature of the attempt, are to be found even among great writers such as Lessing, who arrives at this extravagant conclusion, that painting represents “bodies”: bodies, not actions and souls, not the action and the soul of the painter! Absurdities are also to be found among the questions that logically arise from that illogic: thus, a definite field having been assigned to every kind and to every art, what kind and what art is superior? ”

“ And just as an image without expression is inconceivable, so an image which shall be also expression is conceivable, and indeed logically necessary; that is, provided that it be really an image. If we take from a poem its metre, its rhythm, and its words, poetical thought does not, as some opine, remain behind: there remains nothing. Poetry is born as those words, that rhythm, and that metre. ”

“ The kind or class is in this case one only, art itself or the intuition, whereas particular works of art are infinite: all are original, each one incapable of being translated into the other (since to translate, to translate with artistic skill, is to create a new work of art) , each one unsubdued by the intellect. No intermediate element interposes itself philosophically between the universal and the particular, no series of kinds or species, or generalia. ”

“ It is useless to refute an objection that certainly might be made (but rather with the sophistry of the advocate than with the acuteness of the scientist) , namely, that the aesthetic of the intuition also, since it describes the content of art as feeling or state of the soul, qualifies it outside the intuition, and seems to admit that a content, which is not feeling or a state of the soul, does not lend itself to artistic elaboration, and is not an aesthetic content. Feeling, or state of the soul is not a particular content, but the whole universe seen sub specie intuitionis ”

“ It is certainly useful to construct a net of generalia, not for the production of art, which is spontaneous, nor for the judgment of it, which is philosophical, but to collect and to some extent circumscribe the infinite single intuitions, for the use of the attention and of memory, in order to group together to some extent the innumerable particular works of art. ”

“ In history each work of art takes the place that belongs to it—that and no other: the ballade of Guido Cavalcanti and the sonnet of Cecco Angioleri, which seem to be the sigh or the laughter of an instant ”

“ And if it do not displease man in general to be considered a poet and always a poet (as he is by reason of his humanity) , it should not displease the poet to be united with common humanity, because this union alone explains the power which poetry, understood in the loftiest and in the narrowest sense, wields over all human souls. Were poetry a language apart, a “language of the gods,” men would not understand it ”

“ And since, on the other hand, individuality of intuition implies individuality of expression, and a picture is distinct from another picture, not less than from a poem, and picture and poem are not of value because of the sounds that beat the air and the colours refracted in the light, but because of what they can tell to the spirit, in so far as they enter into it, it is useless to have recourse to abstract means of expression, to construct the other series of kinds and classes: which amounts to saying that any theory of division of the arts is without foundation. ”

“ It is easy to distinguish internal and external, at least in words, especially when no minute enquiry is made as to the reasons and motives for the distinction, and when the distinction is just thrown down there without any service being demanded of it; so easy that by never thinking about it, the distinction may eventually come to seem indubitable to thought. But it becomes a different matter when, as must be done with every distinction, we pass from the act of distinguishing to that of establishing relation and unifying, because this time we run against most desperate obstacles. ”

“ THERE can be no doubt that the process of distinction of art, which I have summarily traced from the facts and the acts with which it has been and is confused, necessitates no small mental effort; but this effort is rewarded with the freedom which it affords in respect to the many fallacious distinctions that disfigure the field of Æsthetic. Although these do not present any difficulty, indeed, at first they seduce by their very facility and deceitful self-evidence, yet they prevent all profound understanding of what art truly is. ”

“ It is also very common in all countries to treat artistic and literary history as history of kinds, and to present the artists as cultivating this or that kind; and to divide the work of an artist, which always has unity of development, whatever form it take, whether lyric, romance or drama, into as many compartments as there are kinds ”

“ But the always imperfect adaptability, the fugitive nature, the mutability of “natural beauties” also justify the inferior place accorded to them, compared with beauties produced by art. Let us leave it to rhetoricians or the intoxicated to affirm that a beautiful tree, a beautiful river, a sublime mountain, or even a beautiful horse or a beautiful human figure, are superior to the chisel-stroke of Michelangelo or the verse of Dante; but let us say, with greater propriety, that “nature” is stupid compared with art, and that she is “mute,” if man does not make her speak. ”

“ We do not say that the words must necessarily be declaimed in a loud voice, the music performed, or the picture painted upon wood or canvas; but it is certain that when a thought is really thought, when it has attained to the maturity of thought, the words run through our whole organism, soliciting the muscles of our mouth and ringing internally in our ears; when music is truly music, it trills in the throat and shivers in the fingers that touch ideal notes ”

“ Art, understood as intuition, according to the concept that I have exposed, having denied the existence of a physical world outside of it, which it looks upon as simply a construction of our intellect, does not know what to do with a parallelism of the thinking substance and of substance extended in space, and has no need to promote impossible marriages, because its thinking substance—or, rather, its intuitive act—is perfect in itself, and is that same fact which the intellect afterwards constructs as extended. ”

“ An irony of the doctrine is also the impossibility, in which its theorists find themselves, of logically fixing the boundaries between the kinds and the arts: all the definitions that they have produced, when examined rather more closely, either evaporate in the general definition of art, or show themselves to be an arbitrary raising of particular works of art irreducible to rigorous logical terms to the rank of kinds and rules. ”

“ I shall conclude my account of the prejudices relating to art with that one of them which is most usual, because it is mingled with the daily life of criticism and of artistic historigraphy, the belief in the possibility of distinguishing several or many particular forms of art, each one determinable in its own particular concept and within its limits, and furnished with its proper laws. ”

“ What interests us in those aesthetics is just this dialectic, in which the theorists of the content become formalists against their will, and the formalists upholders of the theory of the content; thus each passes over to occupy the other’s place, but to be restless there and to return to their own, which gives rise to renewed restlessness. ”

“ Man speaks at every instant like the poet, because, like the poet, he expresses his impressions and his feelings in the form called conversational or familiar, which is not separated by any abyss from the other forms called prosaic, poetic-prosaic, narrative, epic, dialogue, dramatic, lyric, melic, singing, and so on. ”

“ In reality, we know nothing but expressed intuitions: a thought is not thought for us, unless it be possible to formulate it in words; a musical image exists for us, only when it becomes concrete in sounds; a pictorial image, only when it is coloured. ”

“ Many aestheticians still write treatises on the aesthetic of the tragic, the comic, the lyric, the humorous, and aesthetics of painting, of music, or of poetry (these last are still called by the old name of “poetics”) ; and, what is worse (though but little attention is paid to those aestheticians who are impelled to write for their own amusement or by academic profession) , critics, in judging works of art, have not altogether abandoned the habit of judging them according to the genus or particular form of art to which, according to them, they should belong ”

“ Expression and beauty are not two concepts, but a single concept, which it is permissible to designate with either synonymous word: artistic imagination is always corporeal, but it is not obese, being always clad with itself and never charged with anything else, or “ornate.” ”

“ They failed to perceive that their aesthetic content, thus made to enclose little by little the whole of reality, had no longer any character that distinguished it from other contents, since there is no content beyond reality; and that their fundamental theory was thus fundamentally negated. These tautologies resemble those of other formalistic theorists of the content who maintained the concept of an aesthetic content, but defined it as that “which interests man,” and made the interest relative to man in his different historical situations—that is, relative to the individual. ”

“ Here too it will no longer be necessary to construct absurd parallelisms, or to promote mysterious nuptials between sign and image: when language is no longer conceived as a sign, but as an image which is significant—that is, a sign in itself, and therefore coloured, sounding, singing, articulate. The significant image is the spontaneous work of the imagination, whereas the sign, wherewith man agrees with man, presupposes language ”

“ So distinct among themselves are the two forms of activity that it is possible to be a great artist with a bad technique, a poet who corrects the proofs of his verses badly, an architect who makes use of unsuitable material or does not attend to statics, a painter who uses colours that deteriorate rapidly: examples of these weaknesses are so frequent that it is not worth while citing any of them. ”

“ It may be said that fine taste and true critical sense of art have to defend themselves at every step against the perversions of judgment arising from these doctrines, in which philosophers become the crowd, and the crowd feels itself philosophical, because in agreement with those crowd-philosophers. ”

“ These are questions, distinctions, judgments, and definitions which arouse the revolt of the poetic and artistic sense, which loves each work for itself, for what it is, as a living creature, individual and incomparable, and knows that each work has its individual law. ”