-
556 / Philosophies of Art and Beautythe impressions which the
mind gathers from practical life, i.e,t -,'|from its impulses, its
desires, and its sensory awareness. The in- '"*tuitions, then,
which make up the artist's consciousness are theproduct of feeling
on the one hand and images on the other.These are brought together
and fused in the unity of lyrical ex-pression. The artistic
integrity of lyrical expression is due to thepervasiveness of
feeling in it: because of feeling, an image can be-come an
intuition. With this achievement art becomes a symbolof
feeling.
"What gives coherence and unity to the intuition is feeling:the
intuition is really such because it represents a feeling, andcan
only appear from and upon that. Not the idea, but the feel-ing, is
what confers upon art the airy lightness of the symbol:an
aspiration enclosed in the circle of a representationthat isart:
and in it the aspiration alone stands for the representation,and
the representation alone for the aspiration." Croce's posi-tion
clearly contains the doctrine which has been developed bySusanne
Langer: art is a symbol of feeling.
The essay included here is the article on "Aesthetics" fromthe
fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whichis Croce's
most concise presentation of his position. For afuller discussion,
the reader is referred to The Breviary of Aes-thetics.
AESTHETICS
FROM Encyclopaedia Britannica(Fourteenth Edition)
If we examine a poern in order to determine what it is that mate
Ijfeel it to be a poem, we at once find two constant and necessary
*"aments: a complex of images, and a feeling that animates them,us,
for instance, recall a passage learnt at school: Virgil's
III(Aeneid, iii, 294, sqq.), in which Aeneas describes how on
hearthat in the country to whose shores he had come the Trojan
Hekwas reigning, with Andromache, now his wife, he was overcome \t
and a great desire to see this surviving son of Priam
to hear of his strange adventures. Andromache, whom he m
CROCK 1557outside the walls of the city, by the waters of a
river renamedSimois, celebrating funeral rites before a cenotaph of
green turf andtwo altars to Hector and Astyanax; her astonishment
on seeing him,her hesitation, the halting words in which she
questions him, uncer-tain whether he is a man or a ghost; Aeneas's
no less agitated repliesand interrogations, and the pain and
confusion with which she recallsthe pasthow she lived through
scenes of blood and shame, how shewas assigned by lot as slave and
concubine to Pyrrhus, abandoned byhim and united to Helenus,
another of his slaves, how Pyrrhus fell bythe hand of Orestes and
Helenus became a free man and a king;the entry of Aeneas and his
men into the city, and their receptionby the son of Priam in this
little Troy, this mimic Pergamon with itsnew Xanthus, and its
Scaean Gate whose threshold Aeneas greetswith a kissall these
details, and others here omitted, are images ofpersons, things,
attitudes, gestures, sayings, joy and sorrow; mereimages, not
history or historical criticism, for which they are neithergiven
nor taken. But through them all there runs a feeling, a
feelingwhich is our own no less than the poet's, a human feeling of
bitter *memories, of shuddering horror, of melancholy, of
homesickness, oftenderness, of a kind of childish pietas that could
prompt this vainrevival of things perished, these playthings
fashioned by a religiousdevotion, the parva Trow, the Pergama
simulata magnis, the aren-tem Xanthi cognomine rivum: something
inexpressible in logicalterms, which only poetry can express in
full. Moreover, these two ele-ments may appear as two in a first
abstract analysis, but they cannotbe regarded as two distinct
threads, however intertwined; for, ineffect, the feeling is
altogether converted into images, into this com-plex of images, and
is thus a feeling that is contemplated and there-lore resolved and
transcended. Hence poetry must be called neitherfeeling, nor image,
nor yet the sum of the two, but "contempla-tion of feeling" or
"lyrical intuition" or (which is the same thing)"pure
intuition"pure, that is, of all historical and critical referenceto
the reality or unreality of the images of which it is woven, and
ap-prehending the pure throb of life in its ideality. Doubtless,
otherthings may be found in poetry besides these two elements or
mo-ments and the synthesis of the two; but these other things are
eitherpresent as extraneous elements in a compound (reflections,
exhorta-tions, polemics, allegories, etc.), or else they are just
these image-feelings themselves taken in abstraction from their
context as somuch material, restored to the condition in which it
was before theact of poetic creation. In the former case, they are
non-poetic ele-
-
558 / Philosophies of Art and Beautyments merely interpolated
into or attached to the poem; in the latthey are divested of
poetry, rendered unpoetical by a reader eitunpoetical or not at the
moment poetical, who has dispelledpoetry, either because he cannot
live in its ideal realm, or for the ltimate ends of historical
enquiry or other practical purposes winvolve the degradationor
rather, the conversionof the poem ira document or an
instrument.
ARTISTIC QUALITIES.What has been said of "poetry" applies tothe
other "arts" commonly enumerated; painting, sculpture, arclecture,
music. Whenever the artistic quality of any product ofmind is
discussed, the dilemma must be faced, that either it islyrical
intuition, or it is something else, something just as respectalbut
not art. If painting (as some theorists have maintained) wthe
imitation or reproduction of a given object, it would be, notbut
something mechanical and practical; if the task of the painter
(sother theorists have held) were to combine lines and lights
arcolours with ingenious novelty of invention and effect, he
wouldnot an artist, but an inventor; if music consisted in similar
combirtions of notes, the paradox of Leibniz and Father Kircher
would contrue, and a man could write music without being a
musician; ortematively we should have to fear (as Proudhon did for
poetry arJohn Stuart Mill for music) that the possible
combinationswords or notes would one day be exhausted, and poetry
or mtwould disappear. As in poetry, so in these other arts, it is
notoricthat foreign elements sometimes intrude themselves; foreign
eithea parte objecti or a parte subjecti, foreign either in fact or
frompoint of view of an inartistic spectator or listener. Thus the
criticsthese arts advise the artist to exclude, or at least not to
rely upwhat they call the "literary" elements in painting,
sculpture andsic, just as the critic of poetry advises the writer
to look for "poetand not be led astray by mere literature. The
reader who understarpoetry goes straight to this poetic heart and
feels its beat uponown; where this beat is silent, he denies that
poetry is present, whatever and however many other things may take
its place, united tfithe work, and however valuable they may be for
skill and wisdomjfnobility of intellect, quickness of wit and
pleasantness of effect,reader who does not understand poetry loses
his way in pursuitthese other things. He is wrong not because he
admires them, bbecause he thinks he is admiring poetry.
C R O C EOTHER FORMS OF ACTIVITY AS DISTINCT FROM ART.By
defining art 3Slyrical or pure intuition we have implicitly
distinguished it from allother forms of mental production. If such
distinctions are made ex-plicit, we obtain the following
negations:
i. Art is not philosophy, because philosophy is the logical
think-ing of the universal categories of being, and art is the
unreflectiveintuition of being. Hence, while philosophy transcends
the image anduses it for its own purposes, art lives in it as in a
kingdom. It is saidthat art cannot behave in an irrational manner
and cannot ignorelogic; and certainly it is neither irrational nor
illogical; but its ownrationality, its own logic, is a quite
different thing from the dalecticallogic of the concept, and it was
in order to indicate this peculiar andunique character that the
name "logic of sense" or "aesthetic" wasinvented. The not uncommon
assertion that art has a logical char-acter, involves either an
equivocation between conceptual logic and,aesthetic logic, or a
symbolic expression of the latter in terms of theformer.
2. Art is not history, because history implies the critical
distinc-"tion between reality and unreality; the reality of the
passing momentand the reality of a fancied world: the reality of
fact and the reality ofdesire. For art, these distinctions are as
yet unmade; it lives, as wehave said, upon pure images. The
historical existence of Helenus, An-dromache and Aeneas makes no
difference to the poetical quality ofVirgil's poem. Here, too, an
objection has been raised: namely thatart is not wholly indifferent
to historical criteria, because it obeysthe laws of
"verisimilitude"; but, here again, "verisimilitude" is onlya rather
clumsy metaphor for the mutual coherence of images, whichwithout
this internal coherence would fail to produce their effect
asimages, like Horace's delphinus in silvis and aper in
fluctibus.
3. Art is not natural science, because natural science is
historicalfact classified and so made abstract; nor is it
mathematical science,because mathematics performs operations with
abstractions and doesnot contemplate. The analogy sometimes drawn
between mathemati-cal and poetical creation is based on merely
external and genericresemblances; and the alleged necessity of a
mathematical or geomet-rical basis for the arts is only another
metaphor, a symbolic expres-sion of the constructive, cohesive and
unifying force of the poeticmind building itself a body of
images.
4. Art is not the play of fancy, because the play of fancy
passesfrom image to image, in search of variety, rest or diversion,
seeking to
-
560 / Philosophies of Art and Beautyamuse itself with the
likenesses of things that give pleasure or have \l and pathetic
interest; whereas in art the fancy is so dotnated by the single
problem of converting chaotic feeling into clintuition, that we
recognize the propriety of ceasing to call it fanfland calling it
imagination, poetic imagination or creative imagfotion. Fancy as
such is as far removed from poetry as are the wot:of Mrs. Radcliffe
or Dumas p&re.
5. Art is not feeling in its immediacy.Andromache, on
sectsAeneas, becomes omens, diriguit visu in medio, labitur,
longptempore fatur, and when she speaks longos cietbat incassum
ftetus; 1the poet does not lose his wits or grow stiff as he gazes;
he does nctotter or weep or cry; he expresses himself in harmonious
vehaving made these various perturbations the object of whichsings.
Feelings in their immediacy are "expressed" for if theynot, if they
were not also sensible and bodily facts ("psycho-physicphenomena,"
as the positivists used to call them) they would notconcrete
things, and so they would be nothing at all. Andromachepressed
herself in the way described above. But "expression" insense, even
when accompanied by consciousness, is a mere metaptfrom "mental" or
"aesthetic expression" which alone really exprthat is, gives to
feeling a theoretical form and converts it into wor
-
562 / Philosophies of Art and Beautysake, and close their hearts
to the troubles of life and the caresthought, are found to be
wholly unproductive, or at most rise toimitation of others or to an
impressionism devoid of concentratHence the basis of all poetry is
human personality, and, since burpersonality finds its completion
in morality, the basis of all poetry'the moral consciousness. Of
course this does not mean that themust be a profound thinker or an
acute critic; nor that he mustpattern of virtue or a hero; but he
must have a share in the worldthought and action which will enable
him, either in his ownor by sympathy with others, to live the whole
drama of human liftiHe may sin, lose the purity of his heart, and
expose himself, aspractical agent, to blame; but he must have a
keen sense of purand impurity, righteousness and sin, good and
evil. He may notendowed with great practical courage; he may even
betray signstimidity and cowardice; but he must feel the dignity of
courMany artistic inspirations are due, not to what the artist, as
a man,;in practice, but to what he is not, and feels that he ought
to bemiring and enjoying the qualities he lacks when he sees them
in otheiaMany, perhaps the finest, pages of heroic and warlike
poetry are "men who never had the nerve or the skill to handle a
weapon. Onother hand, we are not maintaining that the possession of
apersonality is enough to make a poet or an artist. To be a virdoes
not make a man even an orator, unless he is also dicendi perThe
sine qua non of poetry is poetry, that form of theoretical sjthesis
which we have defined above; the spark of poetical genius witout
which all the rest is mere fuel, not burning because no fire ishand
to light it. But the figure of the pure poet, the pure
artist,votary of pure Beauty, aloof from contact with humanity, is
nofigure but a caricature.
That poetry not only presupposes the other forms of human
mentactivity but is presupposed by them, is proved by the fact that
wout the poetic imagaination which gives contemplative form
toworkings of feeling, intuitive expression to obscure impressions,
an!thus becomes representations and words, whether spoken or
sungpainted or otherwise uttered, logical thought could not arise.
Logicthought is not language, but it never exists without language,
anduses the language which poetry has created; by means of
concepts,discerns and dominates the representations of poetry, and
it cotnot dominate them unless they, its future subjects, had first
anistence of their own. Further, without the discerning and
criticizia|activity of thought, action would be impossible; and if
action, the
f C R O C E / 503
good action, the moral consciousness, duty. Every man,much he
may seem to be all logical thinker, critic, scientist, rdjiiSit
| absorbed in practical interests or devoted to duty, cherishes
afc f^v| bottom of his heart his own private store of imagination
and paeftcyiI even Faust's pedantic famulus, Wagner, confessed that
he often had| his "grillenhafte Stunden." Had this element been
altogether denied: him, he would not have been a man, and therefore
not even a think-
ing or acting being. This extreme case is an absurdity; but in
propor-tion as this private store is scanty, we find a certain
superficially andaridity in thought, and a certain coldness in
action.
THE SCIENCE OF ART, OR AESTHETICS, AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL
CHAR-ACTER.The concept of art expounded above is in a sense the
ordi-nary concept, which appears with greater or less clarity in
all statementsabout art, and is constantly appealed to, explicitly
or implicitly, as,the fixed point round which all discussions on
the subject gravitate:and this, not only nowadays, but at all
times, as could be shown bythe collection and interpretation of
things said by writers, poets, art-'ists, laymen and even the
common people. But it is desirable to dis-pel the illusion that
this concept exists as an innate idea, and to re-place this by the
truth, that it operates as an a. priori concept. Now ana. priori
concept does not exist by itself, but only in the
individualproducts which it generates. Just as the a priori reality
called Art, Poe-try or Beauty does not exist in a transcendent
region where it can beperceived and admired in itself, but only in
the innumerable worksof poetry, of art and of beauty which it has
formed and continues toform, so the logical a priori concept of art
exists nowhere but in theparticular judgments which it has formed
and continues to form,the refutations which it has effected and
continues to effect, the demon-strations it makes, the theories it
constructs, the problems and groupsof problems, which it solves and
has solved. The definitions and dis-tinctions and negations and
relations expounded above have each itsown history, and have been
progressively worked out in the course ofcenturies, and in them we
now possess the fruits of this complex andunremitting toil.
Aesthetic, or the science of art, has not thereforethe task
(attributed to it by certain scholastic conceptions) of defin-ing
art once for all and deducing from this conception its various
doc-trines, so as to cover the whole field of aesthetic science; it
is onlythe perpetual systematization, always renewed and always
growing, ofthe problems arising from time to time out of reflection
upon art, andis identical with the solutions of the difficulties
and the criticisms of
-
564 / Philosophies of Art and Beautythe errors which act as
stimulus and material to the unceasingress of thought. This being
so, no exposition of aesthetic (especiaa summary exposition such as
can alone be given here) can claimdeal exhaustively with the
innumerable problems which have arisen ?'may arise in the course of
the history of aesthetics; it can only irtion and discuss the
chief, and among these, by preference, thewhich still make
themselves felt and resist solution in ordinjeducated thought;
adding an implied "et cetera," so that the realmay pursue the
subject according to the criteria set before him, eitlby going
again over old discussions, or by entering into thoseto-day, which
change and multiply and assume new shapes almidaily. Another
warning must not be omitted: namely that aestheticthough a special
philosophical science, having as its principle a spcial and
distinct category of the mind, can never, just because
itphilosophical, be detached from the main body of philosophy; for
i(problems are concerned with the relations between art and the
othfmental forms, and therefore imply both difference and
identitAesthetics is really the whole of philosophy, but with
special erphasis on that side of it which concerns art. Many have
demandedimagined or desired a self-contained aesthetics, devoid of
any gene*philosophical implications, and consistent with more than
one,with any, philosophy; but the project is impossible of
execution 1cause self-contradictor}'. Even those who promise to
expound a natralistic, inductive, physical, physiological or
psychological aestheticin a word, a non-philosophical
aestheticswhen they pass fwrtjpromise to performance
surreptitiously introduce a general posirivi*tic, naturalistic or
even materialistic philosophy. And anyone wrthinks that the
philosophical ideas of positivism, naturalism armaterialism are
false and out of date, will find it an easy matter irefute the
aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic doctrines which mutually su|port them
and are supported by them, and will not regard theproblems as
problems still awaiting solution or worthy of discussioior, at
least, protracted discussion. For instance, the downfall
0*psychological associationism (or the substitution of mechanism
for /priori synthesis) implies the downfall not only of logical
associationism but of aesthetics also, with its association of
"content" are"form," or of two "representations," which (unlike
Campanella'itactus intrinsecus, effected cum magna suavitate) was a
contact"1extrinsecus whose terms were no sooner united than they
discecbant. The collapse of biological and evolutionary
explanationslogical and ethical values implies the same collapse in
the case
C R O C K 7565aesthetic value. The proved inability of empirical
methods to yieldknowledge of reality, which in fact they can only
classify and reduceto types, involves the impossibility of an
aesthetics arrived at by col-lecting aesthetic facts in classes and
discovering their laws by induc-tion.
{ INTUITION AND EXPRESSION.One of the first problems to
arise,when the work of art is defined as "lyrical image," concerns
the re-lation of "intuition" to "expression" and the manner of the
transi"tion from the one to the other. At bottom this is the same
problem| which arises in other parts of philosophy: the problem of
inner and6 outer, of mind and matter, of soul and body, and, in
ethics, of in-
tention and will, will and action, and so forth. Thus stated,
theproblem is insoluble; for once we have divided the inner from
the
if outer, body from mind, will from action, or intuition from
expres-I* sion, there is no way of passing from one to the other or
of reunitingI them, unless we appeal for their reunion to a third
term, variouslyg represented as God or the Unknowable. Dualism
leads necessarily*| cither to transcendence or to agnosticism. But
when a problem isH found to be insoluble in the terms in which it
is stated the only courseSI open is to criticize these terms
themselves, to inquire how they have
been arrived at, and whether their genesis was logically sound.
Inthis case, such inquiry leads to the conclusion that the terms
dependnot upon a philosophical principle, but upon an empirical and
natu-
j| ralistic classification, which has created two groups of
facts called in-I ternal and external respectively (as if internal
facts were not also
external, and as if an external fact could exist without being
also in-fernal), or souls and bodies, or images and expressions;
and everyone
E knows that it is hopeless to try to find a dialectical unity
between' terms that have been distinguished not philosophically or
formallyIr lit only empirically and materially. The soul is only a
soul in so far asm it is a body; the will is only a will in so far
as it moves arms and legs,U" fir is action; intuition is only
intuition in so far as it is, in that very
art, expression. An image that does not express, that is not
speech, |t)ng, drawing, painting, sculpture or architecturespeech
at least mur-uured to oneself, song at least echoing within one's
own breast, linemid colour seen in imagination and colouring with
its own tint thewhole soul and organismis an image that does not
exist. We may
I* nvscrt its existence, but we cannot support our assertion;
for thejf only thing we could adduce in support of it would be the
fact thatp the image was embodied or expressed. This profound
philosophical
-
566 / Philosophies of Art and Beautydoctrine, the identity of
intuition and expression is, moreoveprinciple of ordinary common
sense, which laughs at peopleclaim to have thoughts they cannot
express or to have imagine^great picture which they cannot paint,
Rem tene, verba sequentufmthere are no verba, there is no res. This
identity, which applies.every sphere of the mind, has in the sphere
of art a clearness andevidence lacking, perhaps, elsewhere. In the
creation of a work of;try, we are present, as it were, at the
mystery of the creation of thjworld; hence the value of the
contribution made by aestheticsphilosophy as a whole, or the
conception of the One that isAesthetics, by denying in the life of
art an abstract spiritualism a*the resulting dualism, prepares the
way and leads the mind tovidealism or absolute spiritualism.
EXPRESSION AND COMMUNICATION.Objections to the identity
oftuition and expression generally arise from psychological
illusicwhich lead us to believe that we possess at any given
moment?profusion of concrete and lively images, when in fact
wepossess signs and names for them; or else from faulty
analysiscases like that of the artist who is believed to express
mere fragmtof a world of images that exists in his mind in its
entirety, whereas 1really has in his mind only these fragments,
together withnotsupposed complete world, but at most an aspiration
or obscfworking towards it, towards a greater and richer image
whichtake shape or may not. But these objections also arise from
afusion between expression and communication, the latter
beingdistinct from the image and its expression. Communication
isfixation of the intuition-expression upon an object
metaphoriccalled material or physical; in reality, even here we are
conenot with material or physical things but with a mental
process,proof that the so-called physical object is unreal, and its
resoluti|into terms of mind, is primarily of interest for our
general philosical conceptions, and only indirectly for the
elucidation of aesthequestions; hence for brevity's sake we may let
the metaphor orbol stand and speak of matter or nature. It is clear
that thecomplete as soon as the poet has expressed it in words
whichrepeats to himself. When he comes to repeat them aloud,others
to hear, or looks for someone to leam them by heart and ^peat them
to others as in a schola. cantorum, or sets them dowwriting or in
printing, he has entered upon a new stage, notthetic but practical,
whose social and cultural importance need not,f
C R O C E 7567
course, be insisted upon. So with the painter; he paints on
hisor canvas, but he could not paint unless at every stage in his
WOll*from the original blur or sketch to the finishing touches, the
intuttwimage, the line and colour painted in his imagination,
preceded th
brush-stroke. Indeed, when the brush-stroke outruns the image,
it i* cancelled and replaced by the artist's correction of his own
work. The
exact line that divides expression from communication is
difficultto draw in the concrete case, for in the concrete case the
two proc-esses generally alternate rapidly and appear to mingle,
but it is clearin idea, and it must be firmly grasped. Through
overlooking it, orblurring it through insufficient attention, arise
the confusions be-tween art and technique. Technique is not an
intrinsic element of artbut has to do precisely with the concept of
communication. In gen-eral it is a cognition or complex of
cognitions disposed and directedto the furtherance of practical
action; and, in the case of art, of the
I practical action which makes objects and instruments for the
record-I ing and communicating of works of art; e.g., cognitions
concerningI the preparation of panels, canvases or walls to be
painted, pigments,i varnishes, ways of obtaining good pronunciation
and declamation
and so forth. Technical treatises are not aesthetic treatises,
nor yetparts or chapters of them. Provided, that is, that the ideas
are rigor-
I ously conceived and the words used accurately in relation to
them itt would not be worth while to pick a quarrel over the use of
the word
"technique" as a synonym for the artistic work itself, regarded
as"inner technique" or the formation of intuition-expressions. The
con-fusion between art and technique is especially beloved by
impotentar'ists, who hope to obtain from practical things and
practical devicesand inventions the help which their strength does
not enable them togive themselves.
ARTISTIC OBJECTS: THE THEORY OF THE SPECIAL ARTS, AND THE
BEAUTYOF NATURE.The work of communicating and conserving
artisticimages, with the help of technique, produces the material
ob-jects metaphorically called "artistic objects" or "works of
art": pic-tures, sculptures and buildings, and, in a more
complicated manner,literary and musical writings, and, in our own
times, gramophonesand records which make it possible to reproduce
voices and sounds.But neither these voices and sounds nor the
symbols of writing, sculp-ture and architecture, are works of art;
works of art exist only in theminds that create or recreate them.
To remove the appearance ofparadox from the truth that beautiful
objects, beautiful things, do not
-
568 / Philosophies of Art and Beautyexist, it may be opportune
to recall the analogous case of economicscience, which knows
perfectly well that in the sphere of economicsthere are no
naturally or physically useful things, but only demandand labour,
from which physical things acquire, metaphorically, thisepithet. A
student of economics who wished to deduce the economicvalue of
things from their physical qualities would be perpetrating agross
ignoratio elenchi.
Yet this same ignoratio elenchi has been, and still is,
committedin aesthetic, by the theory of special arts, and the
limits or peculiaraesthetic character of each. The divisions
between the arts aremerely technical or physical, according as the
artistic objects consistof physical sounds, notes, coloured
objects, carved or modelled ob-jects, or constructed objects having
no apparent correspondence withnatural bodies (poetry, music,
painting, sculpture, architecture, etc.).To ask what is the
artistic character of each of these arts, what it can,and cannot
do, what kinds of images can be expressed in sounds, wha,jin notes,
what in colours, what in lines, and so forth, is like asking!in
economics what things are entitled by their physical qualitieshave
a value and what are not, and what relative values they are
en-titled to have; whereas it is clear that physical qualities do
not entinto the question, and anything may be desired or
demandedvalued more than another, or more than anything else at
all, accoring to circumstances and needs. Even Lessing found
himself slippirdown the slope leading to this truth, and was forced
to such strarconclusions as that actions belonged to poetry and
bodies toture; even Richard Wagner attempted to find a place in the
list for icomprehensive art, namely Opera, including in itself by a
processaggregation the powers of all the arts. A reader with any
artistsense finds in a single solitary line from a poet at once
musical aipicturesque qualities, sculpturesque strength and
architectural stture; and the same with a picture, which is never a
mere thing ofeyes but an affair of the whole soul, and exists in
the soul not only icolour but as sound and speech. But when we try
to grasp thesesical or picturesque or other qualities, they elude
us and turn io$|each other, and melt into a unity, however we may
be accustomed 'distinguish them by different names; a practical
proof that art isand cannot be divided into arts. One, and
infinitely varied; notcording to the technical conceptions of the
several arts, but acccing to the infinite variety of artistic
personalities and their states
-
570 / Philosophies of Art and Beautydramas in another, poerns in
a third and romances in a fourth; an$ Jis convenient, in fact,
indispensable, to refer to works and groupsworks by these names in
speaking and writing of them. But heagain we must deny and
pronounce illegitimate the transitionthese classificatory concepts
to the poetic laws of composition ataesthetic criteria of judgment,
as when people try to decide that'tragedy must have a subject of a
certain kind, characters of akind, a plot of a certain kind and a
certain length; and, whenfronted by a work, instead of looking for
and appraising its owntry, ask whether it is a tragedy or a poem,
and whether it obeys"laws" of one or other "kind." The literary
criticism of the ;century owed its great progress largely to its
abandonment of theteria of kinds, in which the criticism of the
Renaissance and the Flclassicists had always been entangled, as may
be seen from thecussions arising out of the poems of Dante, Ariosto
and Tasso, Gfiini's Pastor fido, Corneille's Cid, and Lope de
Vega's conArtists have profited by this liberation less than
critics; for arwith artistic genius bursts the fetters of such
servitude, or even mathem the instruments of his power; and the
artist with little ofgenius turns his very freedom into a new
slavery.
It has been thought that the divisions of kinds could be
saved*!giving them a philosophical significance; or at any rate one
suchsion, that of lyric, epic and dramatic, regarded as the three
meof a process of objectification passing from the lyric, the
outpowof the ego, to the epic, in which the ego detaches its
feeling fromlself by narrating it, and thence to the drama, in
which it allowsfeeling to create of itself its own mouthpieces, the
dramatis peBut the lyric is not a pouring-forth; it is not a cry or
a lament;an objectification in which the ego sees itself on the
stage,itself, and dramatizes itself; and this lyrical spirit forms
theboth of epic and of drama, which are therefore distinguishedthe
lyric only by external signs. A work which is altogetherlike
Macbeth or Antony and Cleopatra, is substantially a lyrift*which
the various tones and successive verses are representedcharacters
and scenes.
In the old aesthetics, and even to-day in those whichthe type,
an important place is given to the so-called categorfet?beauty: the
sublime, the tragic, the comic, the graceful, the hutand so forth,
which German philosophers not only claimed tophilosophical
concepts, whereas they are really mere psycholand empirical
concepts, but developed by means of that dia
C R O C E 757.1which belongs only to pure or speculative
concepts, philosophicalcategories. Thus they arranged them in an
imaginary progress culmi-nating now in the Beautiful, now in the
Tragic, now in the Humorous.Taking these concepts at their face
value, we may observe their sub-stantial correspondence with the
concepts of the literary and artistickinds; and this is the source
from which, as excerpts from manuals ofliterature, they have found
their way into philosophy. As psychologicaland empirical concepts,
they do not belong to aesthetics; and as awhole, in their common
quality, they refer merely to the world offeelings, empirically
grouped and classified, which forms the perma-nent matter of
artistic intuition.
RHETORIC, GRAMMAR AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE.Every error hasin
it an element of truth, and arises from an arbitrary combination
ofthings which in themselves are legitimate. This principle may be
con-firmed by an examination of other erroneous doctrines which
havebeen prominent in the past and are still to a less degree
prominentto-day. It is perfectly legitimate, in teaching people to
write, to makeuse of distinctions like that between simple style,
ornate style andmetaphorical style and its forms, and to point out
that here the pupilought to express himself literally and there
metaphorically, or thathere the metaphor used is incoherent or
drawn out to excessivelength, and that here the figure of
"preterition," there "hypotyposis"or "irony," would have been
suitable. But when people lose sight ofthe merely practical and
didactic origin of these distinctions and con-struct a
philosophical theory of form as divisible into simple formand
ornate form, logical form and affective form, and so forth, theyare
introducing elements of rhetoric into aesthetics and vitiating
thetrue concept of expression. For expression is never logical, but
alwaysaffective, that is, lyrical and imaginative; and hence it is
never meta-phorical but always "proper"; it is never simple in the
sense of lackingelaboration, or ornate in the sense of being loaded
with extraneouselements; it is always adorned with itself, simplex
munditiis. Evenlogical thought or science, so far as it is
expressed, becomes feelingand imagination, which is why a
philosophical or historical or scientificbook can be not only true
but beautiful, and must always be judgednot only logically but also
aesthetically. Thus we sometimes saythat a book is a failure as
theory, or criticism, or historical truth, buta success as a work
of art, in view of the feeling animating it and ex-pressed in it.
As for the element of truth which is obscurely at work inthis
distinction between logical form and metaphorical form, dialec-
-
572 / Philosophies of Art and Beautytic and rhetoric, we may
detect in it the need of a science of a|thetics side by side with
that of logic; but it was a mistake to try 1distinguish the two
sciences within the sphere of expression whichlongs to one of them
alone.
Another element in education, namely the teaching of
languag^Hhas no less legitimately, ever since ancient times,
classifiedsions into periods, propositions and words, and words
into varicspecies, and each species according to the variations and
combii|jij|tions of roots and suffixes, syllables and letters; and
hence have ;alphabets, grammars and vocabularies, just as in
another way fortry has arisen a science of prosody, and for music
and the figuratffand architectural arts there have arisen musical
and pictorial grafmars and so forth. But here, too, the ancients
did not succeedavoiding an illegitimate transition ab intellectu ad
rem, from f|stractions to reality, from the empirical to the
philosophical, such;we have already observed elsewhere; and this
involved thinking!speech as an aggregation of words, and words as
aggregations of Sjlables or of roots and suffixes; whereas the
prius is speech itselfgcontinuum, resembling an organism, and words
and syllables and reare a posterius, an anatomical preparation, the
product of the ^stracting intellect, not the original or real fact.
If grammar, likerhetoric in the case above considered, is
transplanted into aesthfithe result is a distinction between
expression and the means of