5 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
are, above all, struck by the fact that art causes pleasure.
The life of this doctrine has consisted of proposing in turn
one or another class of pleasures, or several classes
together (the pleasure of the superior senses, the pleasure
of play, of consciousness of our own strength, of
criticism, etc., etc.), or of adding to it elements differing
from the pleasurable, the useful, for example (when
understood as distinct from the pleasurable), the
satisfaction of cognoscitive and moral wants, and the like.
And its progress has been caused just by this restlessness,
and by its allowing foreign elements to ferment in its
bosom, which it introduces through the necessity of
somehow bringing itself into agreement with the reality of
art, thus attaining to its dissolution as hedonistic doctrine
and to the promotion of a new doctrine, or at least to
drawing attention to its necessity. And since every error
has its element of truth (and that of the physical doctrine
has been seen to be the possibility of the physical
“construction” of art as of any other fact), the hedonistic
doctrine has its eternal element of truth in the placing in
relief the hedonistic accompaniment, or pleasure,
common to the aesthetic activity as to every form of
spiritual activity, which it has not at all been intended to
deny in absolutely denying the identification of art with
the pleasurable, and in distinguishing it from the
pleasurable by defining it as intuition.
A third negation, effected by means of the theory of art as
intuition, is that of art as a moral act; that is to say, that
form of practical act which, although necessarily uniting
with the useful and with pleasure and pain, is not
immediately utilitarian and hedonistic, and moves in a
superior spiritual sphere. But the intuition, in so far as it is
a theoretic act, is opposed to the practical of any sort. And
in truth, art, as has been remarked from the earliest times,
does not arise as an act of the will; good will, which
constitutes the honest man, does not constitute the artist.
And since it is not the result of an act of will, so it escapes
all moral discrimination, not because a privilege of
exemption is accorded to it, but simply because moral
discrimination cannot be applied to art. An artistic image
portrays an act morally praiseworthy or blameworthy; but
this image, as image, is neither morally praiseworthy nor
blameworthy. Not only is there no penal code that can
condemn an image to prison or to death, but no moral
judgment, uttered by a rational person, can make of it its
object: we might just as well judge the square moral or
the triangle immoral as the Francesca of Dante immoral
or the Cordelia of Shakespeare moral, for these have a
purely artistic function, they are like musical notes in the
souls of Dante and of Shakespeare. Further, the moralistic
theory of art is also represented in the history of aesthetic
doctrines, though much discredited in the common
opinion of our times, not only on account of its intrinsic
demerit, but also, in some measure, owing to the moral
demerit of certain tendencies of our times, which render
possible that refutation of it on psychological grounds,
which should be made — and which we here make —
solely for logical reasons. The end attributed to art, of
directing the good and inspiring horror of evil, of
correcting and ameliorating customs, is a derivation of the
moralistic doctrine; and so is the demand addressed to
artists to collaborate in the education of the lower classes,
in the strengthening of the national or bellicose spirit of a
people, in the diffusion of the ideals of a modest and
laborious life; and so on. These are all things that art
cannot do, any more than geometry, which, however, does
not lose anything of its importance on account of its
inability to do this; and one does not. see why art should
do so either. That it cannot do these things was partially
perceived by the moralistic aestheticians also, for they
very readily effected a transaction with it, permitting it to
provide pleasures that were not moral, provided they were
not openly dishonest, or recommending it to employ to a
good end that empire over souls which it possessed
through its hedonistic power to gild the pill, to sprinkle
sweetness upon the rim of the glass containing the bitter
draught — in short, to play the courtesan (since it could
not get rid of its old and inborn habits) in the service of
holy church or of morality: meretrix ecclesiae. On other
occasions they have sought to avail themselves of it for
purposes of instruction, since not only virtue but also
science is a difficult thing, and art could remove this
difficulty and render pleasant and attractive the entrance
into the ocean of science — indeed, lead them through it as
through a garden of Armida, gaily and voluptuously,
without their being conscious of the lofty protection they
had obtained, or of the crisis of renovation which they
were preparing for themselves. We cannot now refrain
from a smile when we talk of these theories, but should
not forget that they were once a serious matter,
corresponding to a serious effort to understand the nature
of art and to elevate the conception of it; and that among
those who believed in it (to limit ourselves to Italian
literature) were Dante and Tasso, Parini and Alfieri,
Manzoni and Mazzini. And the moralistic doctrine of art
was and is and will be perpetually beneficial by its very
contradictions; it was and will be an effort, however
unhappy, to separate art from the merely pleasing, with
which it is sometimes confused, and to assign to it a more
worthy post: and it also has its true side, because, if art be
beyond morality, the artist is neither this side of it nor
that, but under its empire, in so far as he is a man who
cannot withdraw himself from the duties of man, and
must look upon art itself — art, which is not and never will
be moral — as a mission to be exercised, a priestly office.
Again (and this is the last and perhaps the most important
of all the general negations that it suits me to recall in
relation to this matter), with the definition of art as
intuition, we deny that it has the character of conceptual
knowledge. Conceptual knowledge,
in its true form, which
is the philosophical, is always realistic, aiming at
establishing reality against unreality, or at reducing
unreality by including it in reality as a subordinate
moment of reality itself. But intuition means, precisely,