16 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
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. 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.
Nevertheless, if the pure artist and the pure critic, and also
the pure philosopher, are not occupied with
generalia,
with classes or kinds, these retain their utility on other
grounds; and this utility is the true side of those erroneous
theories, which I will not leave without mention. 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. These classes will always be formed, as is
natural, either by means of the abstract image or the
abstract expression, and therefore as classes of states of
the soul (literary and artistic kinds) and classes of means
of expression (arts). Nor does it avail to object here that
the various kinds and arts are arbitrarily distinguished,
and that the general dichotomy is itself arbitrary; since it
is admitted without difficulty that the procedure is
certainly arbitrary, but the arbitrariness becomes
innocuous and useful from the very fact that every
pretension of being a philosophical principle and criterion
for the judgment of art is removed from it. Those kinds
and classes render easy the knowledge of art and
education in art, offering to the first, as it were, an index
of the most important works of art, to the second a
collection of most important information suggested by the
practice of art. Everything depends upon not confounding
indications with reality, hypothetic warnings or
imperatives with categoric imperatives: a confusion easy
to fall into, but which should and can be resisted. Books
of literary instruction, rhetoric, grammar (with their
divisions into parts of speech and their morphological and
syntactical laws), of the art of musical composition, of the
poetical art, of painting, and so on, consist chiefly of
indexes and precepts. Tendencies toward a definite
expression of art are manifested in them, either only in a
secondary manner — and in this case it is art that is still
abstract, art in elaboration (the poetic arts of classicism or
romanticism, purist or popular grammars, etc.), — and in
the third place they exhibit attempts and tendencies
toward the philosophical comprehension of their
argument, and then give rise to the divisions into kinds
and into arts, an error which I have criticised and which,
by its contradictions, opens the way to the true doctrine of
the individuality of art.
Certainly this doctrine produces at first sight a sort of
bewilderment: individual, original, untranslatable,
unclassifiable intuitions seem to escape the rule of
thought, which could not dominate them without placing
them in relation with one another; and this appears to be
precisely forbidden by the doctrine that has been
developed, which has the air of being rather anarchic or
anarchoid than liberal and liberistic.
A little piece of poetry is aesthetically equal to a poem; a
tiny little picture or a sketch, to an altar picture or an
affresco; a letter is a work of art, no less than a romance;
even a fine translation is as original as an original work!
These propositions may be irrefutable, because logically
deduced from verified premises; they may be true,
although (and this is, without doubt, a merit) paradoxical,
or at variance with vulgar opinions: but will they not be in
want of some complement? There must be some mode of
arranging, subordinating, connecting, understanding, and
dominating the dance of the intuitions, if we do not wish
to lose our wits with them.
And there is indeed such a mode, for, when we denied
theoretic value to abstract classifications, we did not
intend to deny it to that genetic and concrete classification
which is not, indeed, a “classification” and is called
History. 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; the
Comedy of Dante, which seems to resume in itself a
millennium of the human spirit; the “Maccheronee” of
Merlin Cocaio with their scornful laughter at the Middle
Ages in their twilight; the elegant Cinquecento translation
of the Æneid by Annibal Caro; the crisp prose of Sarpi;
and the Jesuiticpolemical prose of Danielo Bartoli:
without the necessity of judging that to be not original
which is original, because it lives; that to be small which
is neither great nor small, because it escapes measure: or
we can say great and small, if we will, but metaphorically,
with the intention of manifesting certain admirations and
of noting certain relations of importance (quite other than
arithmetical or geometrical). 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.
3. The Place of Art in the Spirit and in Human
Society
The dispute as to the dependence or independence of art
was at its hottest in the romantic period, when the motto
of “art for art’s sake” was coined, and, as its apparent