14 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
and never charged with anything else, or “ornate.”
Certainly a problem was lurking beneath this falsest of
distinctions, the necessity of making a distinction; and the
problem (as can be deduced from certain passages in
Aristotle, and from the psychology and gnoseology of the
Stoics, and as we see it more clearly, intensified in the
discussions of the Italian rhetoricians of the seventeenth
century) was concerned with the relations between
thought and imagination, philosophy and poetry, logic
and aesthetic (“dialectic” and “rhetoric,” or, as was still
said at the time, the “open” and the closed “fist” ).
“Naked” expression referred to thought and to
philosophy, “ornate” expression to imagination and to
poetry. 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.
But the greatest injury caused by the rhetorical doctrine of
“ornate” expression to the theoretical systematisation of
the forms of the human spirit, concerns the treatment of
language, because, granted that we admit naked and
simply grammatical expressions, and expressions that are
ornate or rhetorical, language becomes of necessity
adjusted to naked expressions and consigned to grammar,
and, as a further consequence (since grammar finds no
place in rhetoric and aesthetic), to logic, where the
subordinate office of a semeiotic or ars significandi is
assigned to it. Indeed, the logicistic conception of
language is closely connected and proceeds pari passu
with the rhetorical doctrine of expression; they appeared
together in Hellenic antiquity, and they still exist together,
though opposed, in our time. Rebellions against the
logicism in the doctrine of language have been rare, and
have had as little efficacy as those against rhetoric; and
only in the romantic period (traversed by Vico a century
before) has a lively consciousness been formed by certain
thinkers, or in certain select circles, as to the fantastic or
metaphoric nature of language, and its closer connection
with poetry than with logic. Yet since a more or less
inartistic idea of art persisted even among the best
(conceptualism, moralism, hedonism, etc.), there existed a
very powerful repugnance to the identification of
language and poetry. This identification appears to us to
be, on the contrary, as unavoidable as it is easy, having
established the concept of art as intuition and of intuition
as expression, and therefore implicitly its identity with
language: always assuming that language be conceived in
its full extension, without arbitrary restrictions to so-
called articulate language and without arbitrary exclusion
of tonic, mimetic, and graphic; and in all its intension —
that is, taken in its reality, which is the act of speaking
itself, without falsifying it with the abstractions of
grammars and vocabularies, and without the foolish belief
that man speaks with the vocabulary and with grammar.
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. 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 if it elevate them, it elevates
them not above, but within themselves: true democracy
and true aristocracy coincide in this field also.
Coincidence of art and language, which implies, as is
natural, coincidence of aesthetic and of philosophy of
language, definable the one by the other and therefore
identical, — this I ventured to place twelve years ago in
the title of a treatise of mine on Esthetic, which has truly
not failed of its effect upon many linguists and
philosophers of Æsthetic in Italy and outside Italy, as is
shown by the copious “literature” which it has produced.
This identification will benefit studies on art and poetry
by purifying them of hedonistic, moralistic, and
conceptualistic residues, still to be found in such quantity
in literary and artistic criticism. But the benefit which will
accrue to linguistic studies will be far more inestimable,
for it is urgent that they should be disencumbered of
physiological, psychological, and psychophysiological
methods, now the fashion, and be freed from the ever
returning theory of the conventional origin of language,
which has the inevitable correlative of the mystical theory
as its inevitable reaction. 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; and when it persists in explaining
language by signs, it is obliged to have recourse to God,
as giver of the first signs — that is, to presuppose language
in another way, by consigning it to the unknowable.
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. This
erroneous doctrine is embodied in two systematic series,
one of which is known as the theory of literary and