4 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
It denies, above all, that art is a physical fact: for example,
certain determined colours, or relations of colours; certain
definite forms of bodies; certain definite sounds, or
relations of sounds; certain phenomena of heat or of
electricity — in short, whatsoever be designated as
“physical.” The inclination towards this error of
physicising art is already present in ordinary thought, and
as children who touch the soap-bubble and would wish to
touch the rainbow, so the human spirit, admiring beautiful
things, hastens spontaneously to trace out the reasons for
them in external nature, and proves that it must think, or
believes that it should think, certain colours beautiful and
certain other colours ugly, certain forms beautiful and
certain other forms ugly. But this attempt has been carried
out intentionally and with method on several occasions in
the history of thought: from the “canons” which the Greek
theoreticians and artists fixed for the beauty of bodies,
through the speculations as to the geometrical and
numerical relations of figures and sounds, down to the
researches of the aestheticians of the nineteenth century
(Fechner, for example), and to the “communications”
presented in our day by the inexpert, at philosophical,
psychological and natural science congresses, concerning
the relations of physical phenomena with art. And if it be
asked why art cannot be a physical fact, we must reply, in
the first place, that physical facts do not possess reality,
and that art, to which so many devote their whole lives
and which fills all with a divine joy, is supremely real;
thus it cannot be a physical fact, which is something
unreal. This sounds at first paradoxical, for nothing seems
more solid and secure to the ordinary man than the
physical world; but we, in the seat of truth, must not
abstain from the good reason and substitute for it one less
good, solely because the first may have the appearance of
a lie; and besides, in order to surpass what of strange and
difficult may be contained in that truth, to become at
home with it, we may take into consideration the fact that
the demonstration of the unreality of the physical world
has not only been proved in an indisputable manner and is
admitted by all philosophers (who are not crass
materialists and are not involved in the strident
contradictions of materialism), but is professed by these
same physicists in the spontaneous philosophy which they
mingle with their physics, when they conceive physical
phenomena as products of principles that are beyond
experience, of atoms or of ether, or as the manifestation of
an Unknowable: besides, the matter itself of the
materialists is a supermaterial principle. Thus physical
facts reveal themselves, by their internal logic and by
common consent, not as reality, but as a construction of
our intellect for the purposes of science. Consequently,
the question whether art be a physical fact must rationally
assume this different signification: that is to say, whether
it be possible to construct art physically. And this is
certainly possible, for we indeed carry it out always,
when, turning from the sense of a poem and ceasing to
enjoy it, we set ourselves, for example, to count the words
of which the poem is composed and to divide them into
syllables and letters; or, disregarding the aesthetic effect
of a statue, we weigh and measure it: a most useful
performance for the packers of statues, as is the other for
the typographers who have to “compose” pages of poetry;
but most useless for the contemplator and student of art,
to whom it is neither useful nor licit to allow himself to be
“distracted” from his proper object. Thus art is not a
physical fact in this second sense either; which amounts
to saying that when we propose to ourselves to penetrate
its nature and mode of action, to construct it physically is
of no avail.
Another negation is implied in the definition of art as
intuition: if it be intuition, and intuition is equivalent to
theory in the original sense of contemplation, art cannot
be a utilitarian act; and since a utilitarian act aims always
at obtaining a pleasure and therefore at keeping off a pain,
art, considered in its own nature, has nothing to do with
the useful and with pleasure and pain, as such. It will be
admitted, indeed, without much difficulty, that a pleasure
as a pleasure, any sort of pleasure, is not of itself artistic;
the pleasure of a drink of water that slakes thirst, or a
walk in the open air that stretches our limbs and makes
our blood circulate more lightly, or the obtaining of a
longed-for post that settles us in practical life, and so on,
is not artistic. Finally, the difference between pleasure and
art leaps to the eyes in the relations that are developed
between ourselves and works of art, because the figure
represented may be dear to us and represent the most
delightful memories, and at the same time the picture may
be ugly; or, on the other hand, the picture may be
beautiful and the figure represented hateful to our hearts,
or the picture itself, which we approve as beautiful, may
also cause us rage and envy, because it is the work of our
enemy or rival, for whom it will procure advantage and
on whom it will confer new strength: our practical
interests, with their relative pleasures and pains, mingle
and sometimes become confused with art and disturb, but
are never identified with, our aesthetic interest. At the
most it will be affirmed, with a view to maintaining more
effectively the definition of art as the pleasurable, that it is
not the pleasurable in general, but a particular form of the
pleasurable. But such a restriction is no longer a defence,
it is indeed an abandonment of that thesis; for given that
art is a particular form of pleasure, its distinctive character
would be supplied, not by the pleasurable, but by what
distinguishes that pleasurable from other pleasurables,
and it would be desirable to turn the attention to that
distinctive element — more than pleasurable or different
from pleasurable. Nevertheless, the doctrine that defines
art as the pleasurable has a special denomination
(hedonistic aesthetic), and a long and complicated
development in the history of aesthetic doctrines: it
showed itself in the Graeco-Roman world, prevailed in
the eighteenth century, reflowered in the second half of
the nineteenth, and still enjoys much favour, being
especially well received by beginners in aesthetic, who