18 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
something else in so far as he is manartist; toward the
image on the first plane, but, since the first plane is
connected with the second and third planes, also toward
the second and third, although immediately toward the
first and mediately toward the second and third? And now
that he has reached the first plane, the second appears
immediately behind it, and becomes a direct aim from
indirect that it was before; and a new demand declares
itself, a new process begins. Not, be it well observed, that
the intuitive power gives place to another power, as
though taking its turn of pleasure or of service; but the
intuitive power itself — or rather, the spirit itself, which at
first seemed to be, and in a certain sense was, all
intuition — develops in itself the new process, which
comes forth from the vitals of the first. “One soul is not
kindled upon another” in us (I shall avail myself again on
this occasion of Dante’s words), but the one soul, which
first is all collected in one single “virtue,” and which
“seems to obey no longer any power,” satisfied in that
virtue alone (in the artistic image), finds in that virtue,
together with its satisfaction, its dissatisfaction: its
satisfaction, because it gives to the soul all that it can give
and is expected from it; its dissatisfaction, because,
having obtained all that, and having satiated the soul with
its ultimate sweetness, — ”what is asked and thanked
for,” — satisfaction is sought for the new need caused by
the first satisfaction, which was not able to arise without
that first satisfaction. And we all know also, from
continual experience, the new need which lurks behind
the formation of images. Ugo Foscolo has a love-affair
with the Countess Arese; he knows with what sort of love
and with what sort of woman he has to do, as can be
proved from the letters he wrote, which are to be read in
print. Nevertheless, during the moments that he loves her,
that woman is his universe, and he aspires to possess her
as the highest beatitude, and in the enthusiasm of his
admiration would render the mortal woman immortal,
would transfigure this earthly creature into a divine
creature for posterity, achieving for her a new miracle of
love. And indeed he already finds her rapt to the
empyrean, an object of worship and of prayers:
And thou, divine one, living in my hymns,
Shalt receive the vows of the Insubrian descendants.
The ode All amica risanata would not have taken shape in
the spirit of Foscolo unless this metamorphosis of love
had been desired and longed for with the greatest
seriousness (lovers and even philosophers, if they have
been in love, can witness that these absurdities are
seriously desired); and the images with which Foscolo
represents the fascination of his goddess-mistress, so rich
in perils, would not have presented themselves so vivid
and so spontaneous as we find them. But what was that
impetus of the soul which has now become a magnificent
lyrical representation? Was all of Foscolo, the soldier, the
patriot, the man of learning, moved with so many spiritual
needs, expressed in that aspiration? Did it act so
energetically within him as to be turned into action, and to
some extent to give direction to his practical life?
Foscolo, who at times had not been wanting of insight in
the course of his love, also from time to time became
himself again as regards his poetry and when the creative
tumult was appeased again acquired full clearness of
vision. He asks himself what he really did will, and what
the woman deserved. It may be that a slight suspicion of
scepticism had insinuated itself during the formation of
the image, if our ears be not deceived in seeming to detect
here and there in the ode some trace of elegant irony
toward the woman, and of the poet toward himself. This
would not have happened in the case of a more ingenuous
spirit, and the poetry would have flowed forth quite
ingenuously. Foscolo the poet, having achieved his task
and therefore being no longer poet (though ready to be
one again), now wishes to know his real condition. He no
longer forms the image, because he has formed it; he no
longer imagines, but perceives and narrates (“that
woman,” he will say later of the “divine one,” “had a
piece of brain where her heart should have been”); and the
lyrical image changes, for him and for us, into an
autobiographical extract, or perception.
With perception we have entered a new and very wide
spiritual field; and truly, words are not strong enough to
satirise those thinkers who, now as in the past, confound
image and perception, making of the image a perception
(a portrait or copy or imitation of nature, or history of the
individual and of the times, etc.), and, worse still, of the
perception a kind of image apprehensible by the “senses.”
But perception is neither more nor less than a complete
judgment, and as judgment implies an image and a
category or system of mental categories which must
dominate the image (reality, quality, etc.); and in respect
of the image, or a priori aesthetic synthesis of feeling and
imagination (intuition), is a new synthesis, of
representation and category, of subject and predicate, the
a priori logical synthesis, of which it would be fitting to
repeat all that has been said of the other, and, above all,
that in it content and form, representation and category,
subject and predicate, do not appear as two elements
united by a third, but the representation appears as
category, the category as representation, in indivisible
unity: the subject is subject only in the predicate, and the
predicate is predicate only in the subject. Nor is
perception a logical act among other logical acts, or the
most rudimentary and imperfect of them; for he who is
able to extract from it all the treasures it contains would
have no need to seek beyond it for other determinations of
logicality, because consciousness of what has really
happened, which in its chief literary forms takes the name
of history, and consciousness of the universal, which in its
chief forms takes the name of system or philosophy,
spring from perception, which is itself this synthetic
gemination: and philosophy and history constitute the
superior unity, which philosophers have discovered, by
means of nothing but the synthetic connection of the