Once more, Croce succumbs to the fascination of the hotchpotch, but he does not ask himself, for instance, what are the probabilities that a perception or a definition may be, if not true, at least acceptable—and this despite the fact that, starting with the Aesthetic, he reserved this very concern for history, which, as knowledge of individual facts, neither unreal nor fantastic, must nevertheless resort to conjectures, suppositions, probabilities (p. 32).
- Prepared to compromise on the hotchpotch as far as conceptual knowledge goes, the Croce of the Aesthetic seems determined not to give ground as far as intuition is concerned. Intuition is always without a conceptual component; at most it may employ concepts as the subject of artistic expression—but in that case “They were, indeed, once concepts, but have now become simply components of intuitions” (p. 2).
This explains why the Croce of the Aesthetic declares war on prescriptive rules: no doubt out of the need to distance himself from the preceding tradition, but in the end throwing out the baby with the bath water. In combating the rules, whether they are rhetorical rules, the classification of literature into genres, or the phenomenology of “styles,” Croce forgets that, in the hotchpotch of conjecture, we make ample use of formulas such as “military bearing” or “sickly complexion,” without these formulas exhausting or reducing the perception we may have of an individual in his or her irreducible peculiarity. If I say: “Yesterday I met the minister’s new assistant, I was expecting some kind of seminarist, but he looks more like a tennis player,” it does not imply pigeonholing a new experience in terms of a stereotype; on the contrary, it means using clichés to underline its novelty.
In the same way, classifying something as a historical novel or a metaphor defines in the first case the expectations we bring to the work (expectations that may in fact be unexpectedly thwarted), and in the second the umpteenth but completely original variation on a rhetorical schema that has assumed a wide variety of forms over the centuries. While it is undeniable that “every true work of art has violated an established genre” (p. 41), the very fact that Croce realizes it merely highlights the role played by his awareness of the genre and his expectations and suspicions of it in generating his surprise and his positive judgment of taste. Much of Ariosto’s irony and his humor would be lost if, in his Orlando Furioso, he had not been playing fast and loose with the genre of the chivalric epic.
“The amount of damage wreaked by these [rhetorical] distinctions” (p. 77) is something that we all know, and maybe in 1902 there was some point in combating the facile rhetoric taught in Episcopal seminaries. But how much harm Croce did by broadcasting his scorn for rhetoric (with a rhetorical ability and a gift for polemical oversimplification that entranced his readers) has not perhaps been sufficiently realized. See, for instance, the argument against the definition of metaphor as “a word used in place of the literally correct one” (p. 77). The definition is certainly inadequate, but Croce is not in the least concerned with the problem—which still exercises not ignoble minds—of defining what really happens, not merely to language but to our cognitive structures themselves, when we use a trope. He simply comments: “And why give oneself the trouble of substituting a different word in place of the literally correct one and of taking the longer and worse way when the shorter and better is known to us?
Perhaps because, as it is commonly said, the literal word, in certain cases, is not as expressive as the supposed nonliteral or metaphorical word? But if this is the case, the metaphor just is in this event the ‘literal’ word; and that which is usually called ‘literal,’ if it were used in this case, would be less expressive and therefore wholly improper” (p. 77). “Similar observations of elementary common sense,” however, are precisely that, elementary, and, instead of addressing the question, repeat it back as the answer. We are all aware that, when Dante says “conobbi il tremolar della marina” (“I recognized the trembling of the sea”), he is using a most felicitous expression, but the problem is to explain what made both Dante’s text and the entire patrimony of the language take a quantum leap, when the new expression is adjudged “perfectly proper” and takes the place of another whose meaning, however, is not cancelled. To address problems like these is the least we can expect of an aesthetics that claims at the same time to be a general linguistics.
It should be said in Croce’s defense that all his polemical exaggerations are always tempered with a great deal of common sense. Thus, having condemned the notion of literary genres, he is prepared to admit their practical utility. While such “groupings” retain their usefulness as criteria for classifying books in a library, they are also useful for selecting certain books and reading them with a certain attitude of mind—the attitude that will allow Croce to define as “tragic” in Torquato Tasso “the vital impulse and joie de vivre that at times find their issue in suffering and death and are thereby redeemed.” What’s more, the genres thrown out the door come back in again through the window when Croce finds himself having to explain how an architectural work, whose practical intentions no one can deny, can produce an aesthetic effect: all the artist has to do is to make “the destination of the object that is to serve a practical end enter as material for his aesthetic intuition and external expression. He has no need to add anything to the object in order to make it an instrument for aesthetics impressions: it will be such if perfectly adapted to its purposes” (p. 113). Excellently put: but why not apply the principle to someone proposing to produce a chivalric epic, a seascape, or a madrigal?
As for rhetoric, Croce is the first to see in its classifications a way of identifying a “family likeness” (a fine pre-Wittgensteinian expression)—resemblances, in other words, which reveal spiritual relationships between artists. It is by considering these procedural similarities that we can confer a minimum of legitimacy on translations, “not insofar as they are reproductions (which it would be useless to attempt) of the original expressions, but insofar as they are productions of expressions which resemble their originals more or less closely” (p. 81).
- More embarrassing is the discourse Croce broaches in chapter 6 of the Aesthetic, devoted to the difference between theoretical activity and practical activity, in which the incredible proposition is announced whereby the intuition-expression of art is entirely contained in its inner elaboration, while its technical and material exteriorization, in marble, on canvas, in emitted vocal sounds, is totally accessory and inessential, having as its only end the “conservation and reproduction” of the original inner illumination (p. 108). Just a minute! Isn’t this the same author who a hundred pages earlier had declared “One often hears people claim to have in their heads many important thoughts but not to be able to express them.
But the truth is that if they truly had them, they would have coined them in so many ringing words” (p. 9)? Of course, Croce can tell us that putting those thoughts into concrete words is no more than an empirical necessity, a stenographic device, so to speak, for the record, to let him or another judge know that the thoughts really were there. But what are we to say of the famous tenor who one night, after having a perfect internal intuition of a magnificent high C, is hooted off the stage by the gallery merely because he had tried to externalize it, just for the record, only to have his vocal cords fail him? Who knows his craft but has a trembling hand, as Dante put it (Paradiso, XIII, 78). The fact is that what Croce says does not correspond to what we know from the practice of other artists, who have made sketch after sketch trying to come up with the definitive image, or who have struggled with a set square and a pair of compasses to produce a perfect vanishing point.
On this point, however, Croce’s convictions are unfortunately adamant and seem to spring from an extremely limited familiarity with the arts, not only in the sense of his never having practiced one, but also in the sense that he never had much interest in what artists actually did. Croce condemns as superficial the observation that “the artist creates his expressions in the act of painting and sketching, writing and composing,” because artists “in fact, do not make strokes of the brush without first having seen [the work] by means of the imagination” (p. 114). But if the word “reality” has any meaning in Croce’s system, actual artists in fact never tire of recounting how the consistency of the material stimulated their imaginations, and it is only when reciting their rough drafts aloud that some poets find the clue that leads them to change the rhythm and come up with the right word. Croce, however, states, in La poesia, that poets abhor the empirical externalization of their inner intuitions to the point that are reluctant to recite their poems out loud. Which is statistically inaccurate as far as the poets I know are concerned.
In his Breviario d’estetica Croce demonstrates the inessential nature of the technical aspects of art, citing the cases of very great painters who have used colors that faded over time;
