20 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
energetic unilaterality alike of art as of any other
particular form, tending to reduce all activities to one,
explains the passage from one form to another, the
completing of one form in the other, and it explains
development. But those same people are wrong (owing to
the distinction, which is the inseparable moment of unity)
in the way that they find them all abstractly equal or
confused. Because concept, type, number, measure,
morality, utility, pleasure and pain are in art as art, either
antecedent or consequent; and therefore are there
presupposed (sunk and forgotten there, to adopt a
favourite expression of De Sanctis) or as presentiments.
Without that presumption, without that presentiment, art
would not be art; but it would not be art either (and all the
other forms of the spirit would be disturbed by it), if it
were desired to impose those values upon art as art, which
is and never can be other than pure intuition. The artist
will always be morally blameless and philosophically
uncensurable, even though his art should indicate a low
morality and philosophy: in so far as he is an artist, he
does not act and does not reason, but poetises, paints,
sings and in short, expresses himself: were we to adopt a
different criterion, we should return to the condemnation
of Homeric poetry, in the manner of the Italian critics of
the Seicento and the French critics of the time of the
fourteenth Louis, who turned up their noses at what they
termed “the manners” of those inebriated, vociferating,
violent, cruel and ill-educated heroes. Criticism of the
philosophy underlying Dante’s poem is certainly possible,
but that criticism will enter the subterranean parts of the
art of Dante, as though by undermining, and will leave
intact the soil on the surface, which is the art; Nicholas
Macchiavelli will be able to destroy the Dantesque
political ideal, recommending neither an emperor nor an
international pope as hound of liberation, but a tyrant or a
national prince; but he will not have eradicated the lyrical
quality of Dante’s aspiration. In like manner, it may be
advisable not to show and not to permit to boys and
young men the reading of certain pictures, romances, and
plays; but this recommendation and act of forbidding will
be limited to the practical sphere and will affect, not the
works of art, but the books and canvases which serve as
instruments for the reproduction of the art, which, as
practical works, paid for in the market at a price
equivalent to so much corn or gold, can also themselves
be shut up in a cabinet or cupboard, and even be burnt in a
“pyre of vanities,” à la Savonarola. To confound the
various phases of development in an ill-understood
impulse for unity, to make morality dominate art, just
when art surpasses morality, or art dominate science, just
when science dominates or surpasses art, or has already
been itself dominated and surpassed by life: this is what
unity well understood, which is also rigorous distinction,
should prevent and reject.
And it should prevent and reject it also, because the
established order of the various stages of the circle makes
it possible to understand not only the independence and
the dependence of the various forms of the spirit, but also
their orderly preservation each in the other. It is well to
mention one of the problems which present themselves in
this place, or rather to return to it, for I have already
referred to it fugitively: the relation between imagination
and logic, art and science. This problem is substantially
the same as that which reappears as the search for the
distinction between poetry and prose; at any rate, since
(and the discovery was soon made, for it is already found
in the “Poetic” of Aristotle) it was recognised that the
distinction cannot be drawn as between the metrical and
the unmetrical, since there can be poetry in prose (for
example, romances and plays) and prose in metre (for
example, didactic and philosophic poems). We shall
therefore conduct it with the more profound criterion,
which is that of image and perception, of intuition and
judgment, which has already been explained; poetry will
be the expression of the image, prose that of the judgment
or concept. But the two expressions, in so far as
expressions, are of the same nature, and both possess the
same aesthetic value; therefore, if the poet be the lyrist of
his feelings, the prosaist is also the lyrist of his
feelings, — that is, poet, — though it be of the feelings
which arise in him from or in his search for the concept.
And there is no reason whatever for recognising the
quality of poet to the composer of a sonnet and of
refusing it to him who has composed the Metaphysic, the
Somma Teologia, the
Scienza Nuova, the
Phenomenology
of the Spirit, or told the story of the Peloponnesian wars,
of the politics of Augustus and Tiberius, or the “universal
history”: in all of those works there is as much passion
and as much lyrical and representative force as in any
sonnet or poem. For all the distinctions with which it has
been attempted to reserve the poetic quality for the poet
and to deny it to the prosaist, are like those stones, carried
with great effort to the top of a steep mountain, which fall
back again into the valley with ruinous results. Yet there
is a just apparent difference, but in order to determine it,
poetry and prose must not be separated in the manner of
naturalistic logic, like two co-ordinated concepts simply
opposed the one to the other: we must conceive them in
development as a passage from poetry to prose. And since
the poet, in this passage, not only presupposes a
passionate material, owing to the unity of the spirit, but
preserves the passionateness and elevates it to the
passionateness of a poet (passion for art), so the thinker or
prosaist not only preserves that passionateness and
elevates it to a passionateness for science, but also
preserves the intuitive force, owing to which his
judgments come forth expressed together with the
passionateness that surrounds them, and therefore they
retain their artistic as well as their scientific character. We
can always contemplate this artistic character,
presupposing its scientific character, or separating it
therefrom and from the criticism of science, in order to
enjoy the aesthetic form which it has assumed; and this is
also the reason why science belongs, though in different