12 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
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. 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; all the processes of
association, of habit, of mechanicising, of forgetting, of
instinctification, proposed by the psychologists and
laboriously developed by them, finally allow the the rift to
reappear: on this side the expression, on that the image.
And there does not seem to be any way of escape, save
that of taking refuge in the hypothesis of a mystery which,
according to poetical or mathematical tastes, will assume
the appearance of a mysterious marriage or of a
mysterious psychophysical parallelism. The first is a
parellelism incorrectly overcome; the second, a marriage
celebrated in distant ages or in the obscurity of the
unknowable.
But before having recourse to mystery (a refuge to which
there is always time to fly), we must enquire whether the
two elements have been correctly distinguished, and if an
intuition without expression be conceivable. Maybe the
thing is as little existing and as inconceivable as a soul
without a body, which has certainly been as much talked
of in philosophies as in religions, but to have talked about
it is not the same thing as to have experienced and
conceived it. 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. 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;
when a pictorial image is pictorially real, we are
impregnated with lymphs that are colours, and maybe, if
colouring matters were not at our disposition, we might
spontaneously colour surrounding objects by a sort of
irradiation, as is said of certain hysterics and of certain
saints, who caused stigmata to appear upon their hands
and feet by means of an act of imagination! Thought,
musical fancy, pictorial image, did not indeed exist
without expression, they did not exist at all, previous to
the formation of this expressive state of the spirit. To
believe in their pre-existence is simplicity, if it be simple
to have faith in those impotent poets, painters, or
musicians, who always have their heads full of poetic,
pictorial, and musical creations, and only fail to translate
them into external form, either because, as they say, they
are impatient of expression, or because technique is not
sufficiently advanced to afford sufficient means for their
expression: many centuries ago, it offered sufficient
means to Homer, Pheidias, and Apelles, but it does not
suffice for these, who, if we are to believe them, carry in
their mighty heads an art greater than those others!
Sometimes, too, this ingenuous faith is due to keeping a
bad account with ourselves and having imagined and
consequently expressed some few images, we fancy we
already possess in ourselves all the other images that go to
form part of the work, which we do not yet possess, as
well as the vital connection between them, which is not
yet formed and is therefore not expressed.
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. 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. Nor could expression be compared with the
epidermis of organisms, unless it be said (and perhaps this
may not be false even in physiology) that all the organism
in every cell and in every cell’s cell is also epidermis.
I should, however, be wanting in my methodological
convictions and in my intention of doing justice to errors
(and I have already done justice to the distinction of form
and content by demonstrating the truth at which they
aimed and failed to grasp), were I not to indicate what
truth may also be active at the base of this attempted
distinction of the indistinguishable, intuition and
expression. Imagination and technique are reasonably
distinguished, though not as elements of art; and they are
related and united between themselves, though not in the
field of art, but in the wider field of the spirit in its
totality. Technical or practical problems to be solved,
difficulties to be vanquished, are truly present to the artist,
and there is truly something which, without being really
physical, and being, like everything real, a spiritual act,
can be metaphoricised as physical in respect to the
intuition. What is this something? The artist, whom we