Benedetto Croce

“ And since the criticism of art has shown itself to us to be inseparable from other criticism, so the history of art can be separated from the complete history of human civilisation only with a view to giving it literary prominence and where it certainly follows its own law, which is art, but receives its historical impulse from the complete history, which belongs to the spirit as a whole, never to one form of the spirit torn from the others. ”

“ I ask myself if the critics have established the greatness of Dante, of Shakespeare, or of Michelangelo, or rather their legions of readers; if, among the legions who have acclaimed and do acclaim these great men, there are or have been men of letters and professional critics, their acclamation does not differ in this case from that of others, even of youth and of the people, who are all equally ready to open their hearts to the beautiful, which speaks to all, save sometimes, when it is silent, on discovering the surly countenance of a critic-judge. ”

“ In this perception, this distinction, which is always and altogether criticism or judgment, the criticism of art, of which we are now especially treating, originates with the question: whether and in what measure the fact, which we have before us as a problem, is intuition—that is to say, is real as such; and whether and in what measure, it is not such—that is to say, is unreal: reality and unreality, which in art are called beauty and ugliness, as in logic they are called truth and error, in economy gain and loss, in ethic good and evil. ”

“ What is the use of the pronouncement of criticism, when it has already been given by genius and by taste? Genius and taste are legion, they are the people, they are general and secular consensus of opinion. So true is this, that the pronouncements of criticism are always given too late ”

“ But for the honour of criticism we must add that those capricious critics are not so much critics as artists: artists who have failed and who aspire to a certain form of art, which they are unable to attain, either because their aspiration was contradictory, or because their power was not sufficient and failed them ”

“ For this reason, criticism of art, when truly aesthetic or historical, becomes at the same time amplified into a criticism of life, since it is not possible to judge—that is, to characterise—works of art, without at the same time judging and characterising the works of the whole life: as we observe with the truly great critics, and above all with De Sanctis, in his “History of Italian Literature” and in his “Critical Essays,” where he is as profound a critic of art as of philosophy, morality and politics ”

“ But if criticism of art be historical criticism, it follows that it will not be possible to limit the duty of discerning the beautiful and the ugly to simple approval and rejection in the immediate consciousness of the artist when he produces, or of the man of taste when he contemplates ”

“ Misunderstanding, because criticism seems to be, wishes to be and is something different: it does not wish to invade art, nor to rediscover the beauty of the beautiful, or the ugliness of the ugly, nor to make itself small before art, but rather to make itself great before art which is great and, in a certain sense, above it. ”

“ CRITICISM AND THE HISTORY OF ART.
ARTISTIC and literary criticism is often looked upon by artists as a morose and tyrannical pedagogue who gives capricious orders, imposes prohibitions, and grants permissions, thus aiding or injuring their works by wilfully deciding upon their fate. And so the artists either show themselves submissive, humble, flattering, adulatory, toward it, while hating it in their hearts ”

“ Without the moment of art (and, as we have seen, that criticism which affirms itself to be productive or an aid to production, or as repressing certain forms of production to the advantage of certain other forms, is, in a certain sense, art against art) , the material on which to exercise itself would be wanting to criticism. Without taste (judicial criticism) the experience of art would be wanting to the critic, that of art creating itself within his spirit, severed from non-art and enjoyed in opposition to it. ”

“ And since the artist, at the moment of producing, is a very severe judge of himself from whom nothing escapes,—not even that which escapes others,—others also discern, immediately and very clearly, in the spontaneity of contemplation, where the artist has been an artist and where he has been a man, a poor man; in what works, or in what parts of works, lyrical enthusiasm and creative fancy reign supreme, and where they have become chilled and have given way to other things, which pretend to be art, and therefore (considered from the aspect of this pretence) are called “ugly.” ”

“ And owing to this dependence of criticism upon the concept of art, as many forms of false criticism are to be distinguished as there are false philosophies of art; and, limiting ourselves to the principal forms of which we have already discoursed, there is a kind of criticism which, instead of reproducing and characterising art, breaks in pieces and classifies it; there is another, moralistic, which treats works of art like actions in respect of ends which the artist proposes or should have proposed to himself ”

“ Therefore, inasmuch as taste is most sure of the legitimacy of its discussions, by just as much are historical research and interpretation indefatigable in restoring and preserving and widening the knowledge of the past, despite that relativists and sceptics, both in taste and in history, utter their desperate cries from time to time, but do not reduce anyone, not even themselves, as we have seen, to the truly desperate condition of not judging. ”

“ But I fear that the blame of uselessness will not be removed from criticism, even with this other definition, although perhaps its motive may to some extent be changed. Is there really need of criticism in order to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly? The production itself of art is never anything but this distinguishing, because the artist arrives at purity of expression precisely by eliminating the ugly which threatens to invade it ”

“ And if disagreements as to judgments depend for one half, or less than half, upon lack of clearness as to what the artist has done, lack of sympathy and taste for another half, or more than half, this arises from the small degree of clearness of ideas upon art; whence it often happens that two individuals are substantially at one as to the value of a work of art, save that the one approves what the other blames, because each bases upon a different definition of art. ”

“ Because the forms of the spirit, of which criticism avails itself as categories of judgment, although ideally distinguishable in unity, are not materially separable from one another and from unity, under penalty of seeing them vanish before us. We cannot, therefore, speak of a distinction of art from other criticism, save in an empirical manner, and in order to indicate that the attention of the speaker or writer is directed to one rather than to another part of his indivisible argument. ”

“ Other artists should calmly reply to these artist-critics: “Continue doing in your art what you do so well, and let us do what we can do”; and to the artists who have failed and improvised themselves critics: “Do not claim that we should do what you have failed in doing, or what is work of the future, of which neither you nor we know anything.” ”

“ To object that works most artistically base have yet pleased some or many, and at any rate their author, is not valid, because their having pleased is not set in doubt (since nothing can be born in the soul without the consent of the soul, and consequently without corresponding pleasure) ; but we question that pleasure being aesthetic and having as its foundation a judgment of taste and beauty. ”

“ Closing here this long but indispensable parenthesis and taking up the thread of the discourse, art, historical exegesis, and taste, if they be conditions of criticism, are not yet criticism. Indeed, nothing is obtained by means of that triple presupposition, save the reproduction and enjoyment of the image—expression; that is to say, we return and place ourselves neither more nor less than in the place of the artist-producer in the act of producing his image. ”

“ Not only has the art that is most remote from us need of this assistance, but also that of the nearest past, called contemporary, which, although it treats of subjects and presents forms that seem to be obvious, yet is not always sufficiently obvious; and sometimes a considerable effort is required to prepare people to feel the beauty of a little poem or of some work of art, though born but yesterday. ”

“ And we have also seen, as regards the concept of art, to what difficulties and complications it gives rise, and how it is a possession always unstable, continually attacked and plotted against, and continually to be defended against assaults and plots. Criticism of art, therefore, develops and grows, declines and reappears, with the development, the decadence and the reappearance of the philosophy of art ”

“ But sometimes it is the critics themselves, or the self-styled critics, who do actually present themselves as pedagogues, as oracles, as guides of art, as legislators, seers, and prophets; they command artists to do this or that, they assign themes to them and declare that certain subjects are poetical and certain others not; they are discontented with the art at present produced, and would prefer one similar to that prevailing at this or that epoch of the past, or at another of which they declare they catch a glimpse in the near or remote future ”

“ And finally, what does it matter if we have not always read}’ the material for reproducing with full exactitude all works of art or any work of art of the past? Fully exact reproduction is, like every human work, an ideal which is realised in infinity, and therefore is always realised in such a manner as is permitted at any instant of time by the conformation of reality. Is there a shade of meaning in a poem, of which the full signification escapes us? ”

“ What Æsthetic, which implies thought and concept of art, can have to do with pure taste without concept, is difficult to say; and what history can have to do with disconnected erudition relative to art, which is not organisable as history, because without a concept of art and ignorant of what art is (whereas history demands always that we should know that of which we narrate the history) , is yet more difficult to establish ”

“ The critic is not artifex additus artifici, but philosophus additus artifici: his work is not achieved, save when the image received is both preserved and surpassed; it belongs to thought, which we have seen surpass and illumine fancy with new light, make the intuition preception, qualify reality, and therefore distinguish reality from unreality. ”

“ But that is not reality: reality is spiritual unity, and in spiritual unity nothing is lost, everything is an eternal possession. Not only the reproduction of art, but, in general, the memory of any fact (which is indeed always reproduction of intuitions) , would be inconceivable without the unity of the real ”

“ But go and ask of men such abstentions, sacrifices, heroisms, however extravagant in their ideas and fanatic in their extravagances! In particular, go and ask those who, for one reason or another, are occupied with art all their lives, not to talk of or to judge art! But the mute aesthetisticians talk of, judge, and argue about art, and the inconclusive historicists do the same ”

“ There is that criticism usually called psychological, which separates content from form, and instead of attending to works of art, attends to the psychology of the artists as men; and there is the other sort, which separates form from content and is pleased with abstract forms, because, according to cases and to individual sympathies, they recall antiquity or the Middle Ages ”

“ Criticism, conceived as a magistrate, kills the dead or blows air upon the face of the living, who is quite alive, in the belief that its breath is that of the God who brings life; that is, it performs a useless task, because this has previously been performed. ”

“ And passing from external scepticism to internal consideration, it should be said that the objection to the conceivability of the aesthetic reproduction is founded upon a reality conceived in its turn as a clash of atoms, or as abstractly monadistic, composed of monads without communication among themselves and harmonised only from without. ”