21 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
aspects, to the history of science and to the history of
literature, and why, among the many different kinds of
poetry enumerated by the rhetoricians, it would at the
least be capricious to refuse to number the “poetry of
prose,” which is sometimes far purer poetry than much
pretentious poetry of poetry. And it will be well that I
should mention again another problem of the same sort, to
which I have already alluded in passing: namely, the
connection between art and morality, which has been
denied to be immediate identification of the one with the
other, but which must now be reasserted, and to note that,
since the poet preserves the passion for his art when free
from every other passionateness, so he preserves in his art
the consciousness of duty (duty toward art), and every
poet, in the act of creation, is moral, because he
accomplishes a sacred function.
And finally, the order and logic of the various forms of
the spirit, making the one necessary for the other and
therefore all necessary, reveal the folly of negating the
one in the name of the other: the error of the philosopher
(Plato), or of the moralist (Savonarola or Proudhon), or of
the naturalist and practical man (there are so many of
these that I do not quote names!), who refute art and
poetry; and, on the other hand, the error of the artist who
rebels against thought, science, practice, and morality, as
did so many “romantics” in tragedy, and as do so many
“decadents” in comedy in our day. These are errors and
follies to which also we can afford indulgence in passing
(always keeping in view our plan of not leaving anyone
quite disconsolate), for it is evident that they have a
positive content of their own in their very negativity, as
rebellion against certain false concepts or certain false
manifestations of art and of science, of practice and of
morality (Plato, for example, combating the idea of poetry
as “wisdom”; Savonarola, the not austere and therefore
corrupt civilisation of the Italian Renaissance so soon to
be dissolved), etc. But it is madness to attempt to prove
that, were philosophy without art, it would exist for itself,
because it would be without what conditions its problems,
and air to breathe would be taken from it, in order to
make it prevail alone against art; and that practice is not
practice, when it is not set in motion and revived by
aspirations, and, as they say, by “ideals,” by “dear
imagining,” which is art; and, on the other hand, art
without morality, art that with the decadents usurps the
title of “pure beauty,” and before which is burnt incense,
as though it were a diabolic idol worshipped by a
company of devils, is decomposed as art, and becomes
caprice, luxury, and charlatanry owing to the lack of
morality in the life from which it springs and which
surrounds it; the artist no longer serves it, but itself
serving the private and futile interests of the artist as the
vilest of bondmaids.
Nevertheless, objection has been taken to the idea of the
circle in general, which affords so much aid in making
clear the connection of dependence and independence of
art and of the other spiritual forms, on the ground that it
thinks the work of the spirit a tiresome and melancholy
doing and undoing, a monotonous turning upon itself, not
worth the trouble. Certainly there is no metaphor but
leaves some side open to parody and caricature; but these,
when they have gladdened us for the moment, oblige us to
return seriously to the thought expressed in the metaphor.
And the thought is not that of a sterile repetition of going
and coming, but a continuous enrichment in the going of
the going and the coming of the coming. The last term,
which again becomes the first, is not the old first, but
presents itself with a multiplicity and precision of
concepts, with an experience of life lived, and even of
works contemplated, which was wanting to the old first
term; and it affords material for a more lofty, more
refined, more complex and more mature art. Thus, instead
of being a perpetually even revolution, the idea of the
circle is nothing but the true philosophical idea of
progress, of the perpetual growth of the spirit and of
reality in itself, where nothing is repeated, save the form
of the growth; unless it should be objected to a man
walking, that his walking is a standing still, because he
always moves his legs in the same time!
Another objection, or rather another movement of
rebellion against the same idea, is frequently to be
observed, though not clearly self-conscious: the
restlessness, existing in some or several, the endeavour to
break and to surpass the circularity that is a law of life,
and to attain to a region of repose from movement, so full
of anxiety; withdrawn henceforward from the ocean and
standing upon the shore, they would turn back and
contemplate the tossing billows. But I have already had
occasion to state of what this repose consists: an effectual
negation of reality, beneath the appearance of elevation
and sublimation; and it is certainly attained, but is called
death; the death of the individual, not of reality, which
does not die, and is not afflicted by its own motion, but
enjoys it. Others dream of a spiritual form, in which the
circle is dissolved, a form which should be Thought of
thought, unity of the Theoretical and of the Practical,
Love, God, or whatever other name it may bear; they fail
to perceive that this thought, this unity, this Love, this
God, already exists in and for the circle, and that they are
uselessly repeating a search already completed, or are
repeating metaphorically what has already been
discovered, in the myth of another world, which repeats
again the same drama of the real world,
I have hitherto outlined this drama, as it truly is, ideal and
extratemporal, employing such terms as first and second,
solely with a view to verbal convenience and in order to
indicate logical order: — ideal and extratemporal, because
there is not a moment and there is not an individual in
whom it is not all performed, as there is no particle of the
universe unbreathed upon by the spirit of God. But the
ideal, indivisible moments of the ideal drama can be seen
as if divided in empirical reality, as in a bodily symbol of