25 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
conceived in its turn as a clash of atoms, or as abstractly
monadistic, composed of monads without communication
among themselves and harmonised only from without.
But that is not reality: reality is spiritual unity, and in
spiritual unity nothing is lost, everything is an eternal
possession. Not only the reproduction of art, but, in
general, the memory of any fact (which is indeed always
reproduction of intuitions), would be inconceivable
without the unity of the real; and if we had not been
ourselves Caesar and Pompey, — that is, that universal
which was once determined as Caesar and Pompey and is
now determined as ourselves, they living in us, — we
should be unable to form any idea of Caesar and Pompey.
And further, the doctrine that individuality is
irreproducible and the universal only reproducible is
certainly a doctrine of “sound” philosophy, but of sound
scholastic philosophy, which separated universal and
individual, making the latter an accident of the former
(dust swept away by time), and did not know that the true
universal is the universal individuated, and that the only
true effable is the so-called ineffable, the concrete and
individual. And finally, what does it matter if we have not
always read}’ the material for reproducing with full
exactitude all works of art or any work of art of the past?
Fully exact reproduction is, like every human work, an
ideal which is realised in infinity, and therefore is always
realised in such a manner as is permitted at any instant of
time by the conformation of reality. Is there a shade of
meaning in a poem, of which the full signification escapes
us? No one will wish to affirm that this shade, of which
we have so dim and unsatisfactory a vision, will not be
better determined in the future by means of research and
meditation and by the formation of favourable conditions
and sympathetic currents.
Therefore, inasmuch as taste is most sure of the
legitimacy of its discussions, by just as much are
historical research and interpretation indefatigable in
restoring and preserving and widening the knowledge of
the past, despite that relativists and sceptics, both in taste
and in history, utter their desperate cries from time to
time, but do not reduce anyone, not even themselves, as
we have seen, to the truly desperate condition of not
judging.
Closing here this long but indispensable parenthesis and
taking up the thread of the discourse, art, historical
exegesis, and taste, if they be conditions of criticism, are
not yet criticism. Indeed, nothing is obtained by means of
that triple presupposition, save the reproduction and
enjoyment of the image — expression; that is to say, we
return and place ourselves neither more nor less than in
the place of the artist-producer in the act of producing his
image. Nor can we escape from those conditions, as some
boast of doing, by proposing to ourselves to reproduce in
a new form the work of the poet and the artist by
providing its equivalent; hence they define the critic:
artifex additus artifici. Because that
reproduction in a new
garment would be a translation, or a variation, another
work of art, to some extent inspired by the first; and if it
were the same, it would be a reproduction pure and
simple, a material reproduction, with the same words, the
same colour, and the same tones — that is, useless. The
critic is not artifex additus artifici, but philosophus
additus artifici: his work is not achieved, save when the
image received is both preserved and surpassed; it
belongs to thought, which we have seen surpass and
illumine fancy with new light, make the intuition
preception, qualify reality, and therefore distinguish
reality from unreality. In this perception, this distinction,
which is always and altogether criticism or judgment, the
criticism of art, of which we are now especially treating,
originates with the question: whether and in what measure
the fact, which we have before us as a problem, is
intuition — that is to say,
is real as such; and whether and
in what measure, it is not such — that is to say, is unreal:
reality and unreality, which in art are called beauty and
ugliness, as in logic they are called truth and error, in
economy gain and loss, in ethic good and evil. Thus the
whole criticism of art can be reduced to this briefest
proposition, which further serves to differentiate its work
from that of art and taste (which, considered in
themselves, are logically mute), and from exegetical
erudition (which lacks logical synthesis, and is therefore
also logically mute): “There is a work of art !a,” with its
corresponding negative: “There is not a work of art !a.”
This seems to be absurd, but the definition of art as
intuition seemed to be neither more nor less than absurd,
and it has been since seen how many things it included in
itself, how many affirmations and how many negations:
so many that, although I have proceeded and proceed in a
condensed manner, I have not been able and shall not be
able to afford more than brief mention of them. That
proposition or judgment of the criticism of art, “The work
of art a is,” implies, above all, like every judgment, a
subject (the intuition of the work of art a), to achieve
which is needed the labour of exegesis and of imaginative
reproduction, together with the discernment of taste: we
have already seen how difficult and complicated this is,
and how many go astray in it, through lack of
imagination, or owing to slightness and superficiality of
culture. And it further implies, like every judgment, a
predicate, a category, and in this case the category of art,
which must be in the judgment conceived, and which
therefore becomes the concept of art. And we have also
seen, as regards the concept of art, to what difficulties and
complications it gives rise, and how it is a possession
always unstable, continually attacked and plotted against,
and continually to be defended against assaults and plots.
Criticism of art, therefore, develops and grows, declines
and reappears, with the development, the decadence and
the reappearance of the philosophy of art; and each can
compare what it was in the Middle Ages (when it may
almost be said that it was not) with what it became in the
first half of the nineteenth century with Herder, with