22 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
the ideal distinction. Not that they are really divided
(ideality is the true reality), but they appear to be so
empirically to him who observes with a view to
classification, for he possesses no other way of
determining the individuality of the facts in the types that
have attracted his attention, save that of enlarging and of
exaggerating ideal distinctions. Thus the artist, the
philosopher, the historian, the naturalist, the
mathematician, the man of business, the good man, seem
to live separated from one another; and the spheres of
artistic, philosophical, historical, naturalistic,
mathematical culture, and those of economic and ethic
and of the many institutions connected with them, seem to
be distinct from one another; and finally the life of
humanity seems to be divided into epochs in which one or
other or only some of the ideal forms are represented:
epochs of imagination, of religion, of speculation, of
natural sciences, of industrialism, of political passions, of
moral enthusiasms, of pleasure seeking, and so on; and
these epochs have their more or less perfect goings and
comings. But the eye of the historian discovers the
perpetual difference in the uniformity of individuals, of
classes, and of epochs; and the philosophical
consciousness, unity in difference; and the philosopher-
historian sees ideal progress and unity, as also historical
progress, in that difference.
But let us, too, speak as empiricists for a moment (since
empiricism exists, it must be of some use), and let us ask
ourselves to which of the types belongs our epoch, or that
from which we have just emerged; what is its prevailing
characteristic? To this there will be an immediate and
universal reply that it is and has been naturalistic in
culture, industrial in practice; and philosophical greatness
and artistic greatness will at the same time both be denied
to it. But since (and here empiricism is already in danger)
no epoch can live without philosophy and without art, our
epoch, too, has possessed both, so far as it was capable of
possessing them. And its philosophy and its art — the
latter mediately, the former immediately — find their
places in thought, as documents of what our epoch has
truly been in its complexity and interests; by interpreting
these, we shall be able to clear the ground upon which
must arise our duty.
Contemporary art, sensual, insatiable in its desire for
enjoyments, furrowed with confused attempts at an ill-
understood aristocracy, which reveals itself as a
voluptuous ideal or an ideal of arrogance and of cruelty,
sometimes sighing for a mysticism which is both egoistic
and voluptuous, without faith in God and without faith in
thought, incredulous and pessimistic, — and often most
powerful in its rendering of such states of the soul: this
art, — vainly condemned by moralists, — when understood
in its profound motives and in its genesis, asks for action,
which will certainly not be directed toward condemning,
repressing, or redirecting art, but toward directing life
more energetically toward a more healthy and more
profound morality, which will be mother of a nobler art,
and, I would also say, of a nobler philosophy. A
philosophy more noble than that of our epoch, incapable
of accounting not only for religion, for science, and for
itself, but for art itself, which has again become a
profound mystery, or rather a theme for horrible blunders
by positivists, neocritics, psychologists, and pragmatists,
who have hitherto almost alone represented contemporary
philosophy, and have relapsed (certainly to acquire new
strength and to mature new problems!) into the most
childish and the most crude conceptions about art.
4. Criticism and the History of Art
Artistic and literary criticism is often looked upon by
artists as a morose and tyrannical pedagogue who gives
capricious orders, imposes prohibitions, and grants
permissions, thus aiding or injuring their works by
wilfully deciding upon their fate. And so the artists either
show themselves submissive, humble, flattering,
adulatory, toward it, while hating it in their hearts; or,
when they do not obtain what they want, or their loftiness
of soul forbids that they should descend to those arts of
the courtier, they revolt against it, proclaiming its
uselessness with imprecations and mockery, comparing
(the remembrance is personal) the critic to an ass that
enters the potter’s shop and breaks in pieces with
quadrupedante ungulae sonitu the delicate products of his
art set out to dry in the sun. This time, to tell the truth, it is
the artists’ fault, for they do not know what criticism is,
expecting from it favours which it is not in a position to
grant, and injuries which it is not in a position to inflict:
since it is clear that, since no critic can make an artist of
one who is not an artist, so no critic can ever undo,
overthrow, or even slightly injure an artist who is really
an artist, owing to the metaphysical impossibility of such
an act: these things have never happened in the course of
history, they do not happen in our day, and we can be sure
that they will never happen in the future. But sometimes it
is the critics themselves, or the self-styled critics, who do
actually present themselves as pedagogues, as oracles, as
guides of art, as legislators, seers, and prophets; they
command artists to do this or that, they assign themes to
them and declare that certain subjects are poetical and
certain others not; they are discontented with the art at
present produced, and would prefer one similar to that
prevailing at this or that epoch of the past, or at another of
which they declare they catch a glimpse in the near or
remote future; they will reprove Tasso for not being
Ariosto, Leopardi for not being Metastasio, Manzoni for
not being Alfieri, D’Annunzio because he is not Berchet
or Fra Jacopone; and they describe the great artist of the
future, supplying him with ethic, philosophy, history,
language, metric, with architectonic and colouristic
processes, and with whatever it may seem to them that he
stands in need. And this time it is clear that the blame lies
with the critic; and the artists are right in behaving toward
such brutality in the way that we behave toward beasts,