Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 11

by Giovanni Papini

XI

CROCE^[1]

There are still in Italy a number of more or less youthful men of letters, many secondary professors in secondary schools, and a few journalists with a smattering of philosophy, who really attribute great importance to Benedetto Croce and his Æsthetics. That book, published ten years ago, has reached its fourth edition, and is considered, by those to whom I have referred, as the unbreakable table of artistic law, as the most refined and exquisite essence of European thought, as the eternal gospel of all criticism. In their eyes Croce is the one licensed guide of the present generation, the perpetual dictator of our culture, the high and mighty master of a boarding-school which all good little Italians should attend.

In other countries the revelation according to Croce has aroused no such wonder. The Æsthetics has been translated into four or five languages; but we may safely affirm that France, England, and Germany have marveled rather at our admiration than at the value of Croce’s theories. Not a single philosopher has accepted them, and not one has discussed them at length save the illustrious Cohen, who slashes them through several pages of his last treatise on æsthetics.

Texas appears to be the only foreign land that rivals central and southern Italy in their incautious and prostrate devotion. Croce was invited some time ago to deliver at the Rice Institute, in Houston, four lectures which should at last reveal the true nature of art to an anxious nation. He was unable, for personal reasons, to undertake the long voyage to the Gulf of Mexico, but he sent over the four lectures that had been requested; and now, lest a grateful fatherland should suffer from their loss, he has printed them in the original Italian. In this Breviary, he writes, “I have not only condensed the more important concepts of my earlier volumes on the same subject, but have set them forth in better organization and with greater clearness than in my Æsthetics.” And he is so well pleased with the little book that he hopes to introduce it into the schools “as collateral reading for literary and philosophic studies.” That is a serious menace; and it behooves us to stop for a moment to consider the real value of the æsthetic system of Croce, which seems likely, through newspapers and schools, to lead the mass of our young compatriots astray for twenty years to come.

The Breviary examines in turn the nature of art, prejudices relating to art, the place of art in the spirit and in human society, and, finally, criticism and the history of art. All the points of the system are indeed set forth with greater brevity, if not with greater clearness, than hitherto. Every difficulty is dispelled in a twinkling, and with the most elegant ease. Problems are solved with that smile of superiority which seems to say: “There; do you mean to admit that you hadn’t realized a truth as simple as this?”

Here again we find not only the familiar ideas, but the familiar mental method of Croce, which consists chiefly in multiplying distinctions just in order to deny them, in scattering equality signs right and left, in that pleasant little game in which you announce that a thing is white and black at the same time, and that it is white precisely because it is black, and black precisely because it is white. The summit of truth, for example, is so situated that the conqueror “reaches the sighed-for eminence, repulsing his adversary, and yet in his company.”^[2] Every particular concept “is independent on one side and dependent on another, or both independent and dependent.”^[3] The spirit which possesses intuition “finds in that virtue, together with its satisfaction, its dissatisfaction.”^[4] Foscolo, after the writing of a certain famous ode, is “a poet who has utterly achieved his task, and is therefore no longer a poet.”^[5] The paths of error are the same as the paths of truth;^[6] nay, more, pure error does not exist, for if it did exist, it would be truth.^[7] The concept and other things which are not art “are in art as art, either antecedent or consequent.”^[8] The activities of the spirit are at the same time all real and all unreal.^[9]

You simply cannot count the identifications: philosophy is religion,^[10] history,^[11] poetry;^[12] language is art;^[13] art is intuition, intuition is expression, expression is imagination, imagination is fancy, fancy is lyrism, lyrism is intuition, expression is beauty, etcetera, etcetera. Croce’s logic tends inevitably and infinitely toward fusions (not to say confusions). One does not see what is to prevent his reducing the entire system, by means of such identities, to one single word, to that Absolute which he regards as the synthesis of syntheses, the Spirit, the Real, and so forth. If you disregard critical trivialities and didactic accessories, the entire æsthetic system of Croce amounts merely to a hunt for pseudonyms of the word art, and may indeed be stated briefly and accurately in this formula: art = intuition = expression = feeling = imagination = fancy = lyrism = beauty. And you must be very careful not to take these words with the shadings and distinctions which they have in ordinary or scientific language. Not a bit of it. Every word is merely a different series of syllables signifying absolutely and completely the same thing; every term in the list may be superposed logically and exactly on any other term. What is not perceived by intuition is not art; what is not expressed is not even perceived by intuition; an unsuccessful expression is not even an expression, and every successful expression—that is to say, every expression that is an expression—is beautiful. That is all. You cannot get from Croce any further information as to the nature of art. He offers nothing save a string of identities which in the last analysis mean that art is art and is nothing else—a discovery which, I believe, had been made some time before the glorious eighteenth of February of the year 1900.

The other remarks related to this central pronouncement have no real significance. He begins, for example, by maintaining that art is not a physical fact,^[14] but on the next page he proves that “physical facts do not possess reality.” All he has said, then, is that since art is a real fact it cannot belong to a class of unreal facts—that is, that art is a thing which does in truth exist. Quod non erat demonstrandum.

But we do not turn to a philosopher to learn that art is art, and that art is a portion of reality. So much we may infer for ourselves, with our own weak powers, even without recourse to Vico or to Baumgarten. From the philosopher we seek something more. We seek, for instance, some explanation of the phenomenon of art which shall be new and constructive even though it be incomplete. We seek primarily to ascertain whether or not there exists a sure and certain standard by which we may judge the beauty and the ugliness of works of art. But Croce gives us no help. There are just two types of explanation: the type that goes from the particular to the general, and the type that starts with the whole and proceeds to the component parts. In the first case we affirm that a given object belongs to a certain class of things having certain common characteristics; in the second we analyze the thing itself, and reveal its nature by reducing it to its elements. But in the æsthetics of Croce neither one of these two types of explanation is to be found. His procedure consists always and everywhere in the establishment of identities, that is to say, in proving the perfect equivalence, the exact interchangeableness of the concepts under discussion. Expression, fancy, imagination, are not elements or factors of art; they are art itself, in its entirety. Intuition and lyrism cannot be defined as individual members of the large class of the phenomena of the spirit, because they include the whole range of the phenomena of the spirit with which art is concerned. At the most they may be considered as proper to the human spirit, but since the human spirit belongs to the universal spirit, and the universal spirit is identical with the whole, and the whole is inexpressible because it cannot be distinguished from anything else (since no reality exists outside it), your final result is that intuition is an element of reality—that is to say, you know just as much about it as you knew before.

Croce’s strategy consists in taking secret advantage of the different meanings of the concepts which he employs—denying their diversity, but using them (without seeming to do so) in such a way as to give a certain coloring and a certain content to his system, which would otherwise be merely a game of words—whereas, to be just, not more than three-fourths of it, or at the most four-fifths, is merely a game of words.

Croce faces this dilemma: either he must contradict himself by assuming that there are differences between phenomena which he has called identical, or he must put ink on paper without intelligible results. Impelled by the desire to say something, Croce here and there loosens the links of his chain of homogeneity; for instance, after saying that art is feeling, he affirms that “what gives coherence and unity to the intuition is feeling: the intuition is really such because it represents a feeling, and can only appear from and upon that.”^[15] Now if feeling gives something to intuition; if intuition represents feeling and appears from feeling, then intuition and feeling are two different things; whereas Croce maintains elsewhere that intuition is art and that feeling is art,^[16] forgetting, at the appropriate moment, the very simple mathematical and logical axiom which teaches us that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

Nor is there any hope of reaching a concrete understanding through the idea that those phases of the spirit which are represented as identical may succeed each other in time. Croce denies resolutely that there is any such succession. Until intuition is expressed, it does not exist even as intuition. “Thought, musical fancy, pictorial image, did not indeed exist without expression, they did not exist at all previous to the formation of this expressive side of the spirit.”^[17]

To the two fundamental questions that men ask of æstheticians—“What is art?” and “What is beauty?”—Croce either does not deign to reply, or replies in antediluvian fashion, “Art is symbol, all symbol.”^[18] “An aspiration enclosed in the circle of a representaion—that is art; and in it the aspiration alone stands for the representation, and the representation alone for the aspiration.”^[19] “Art is a true æsthetic synthesis a priori of feeling and image in the intuition.”^[20] These definitions, to my mind, do nothing more than repeat, in more elegant terms, in more sophistical formulæ, the old truism that art consists in the expression of feeling.

With regard to beauty we are still more deeply in the dark. “An appropriate expression, if appropriate, is also beautiful, beauty being nothing but the determination of the image and therefore of the expression.”^[21] But we have learned that an expression which is not appropriate is not even an expression, and we remember that art is nothing other than expression: all art, then, is proper and determinate, in other words, beautiful. We are lost in another hopeless labyrinth of identities.

And the worst of it is that the concepts of appropriateness and determinateness are the most indeterminate of all possible concepts. Appropriate, if I mistake not, means adapted, and adapted brings us back to the idea of purpose. But what is the purpose of art? To move? There are works which move many people, and yet are not beautiful. To reveal? But there are some to whom a single epithet reveals the whole, and others to whom a whole series of descriptions will not convey the gift of vision. And what is the meaning of determinateness? Certainly not logical clearness, for there are poems which are great precisely because of their undefined suggestiveness; not completeness—else a notary’s inventory would be more beautiful than a swift poetic image. And if we turn to the standard set up by Croce in the Æsthetics itself—the standard of success and failure—we are no better off. The idea of success is indissolubly associated with the idea of a model (an object or an action) which the artist approaches more or less closely or not at all. But where and what are the models to which the critic may refer in judging the success, that is, the beauty, of a work of art? Surely not the ideal images that may arise in critics’ heads: for if they really had images superior to existing works they would at once express them—and then they would be no longer critics, but artists.

And yet a standard for the estimate of beauty in art is absolutely necessary if, as Croce admits, the service of the critic consists in “clearly stating whether a work be beautiful or ugly.”^[22]

In the presence of such thoughts and such a way of thinking, in the presence of a theory which wavers constantly between nonsense and mere common sense, between emptiness and banality, one is forced to ask why it is that Croce’s books have won such fame in Italy. One reason, at least, is this: among the things which Croce repeats so often there is one indubitable truth, namely, that Italians know little or nothing about philosophy. Croce’s advent occurred after twenty or thirty years of positivism had made our young men forget the strong and ancient language of metaphysics; the thirst for greater certainty remained; Croce came and conquered. The average Italian, weary of his positivists—Lombroso, Ardigò, Ferri, Sergi—threw himself upon the books of Croce in the belief that the philosophy dished out in them was the whole of philosophy and nothing but philosophy. Croce’s popularity was increased by the fact that he began his system with a treatment of art, thus winning all the men of letters of his land, who, since they are (or think themselves) capable of art, are persuaded that they are capable also of understanding the theory of art.

But just there lies a serious difficulty. The theorist should understand and feel, deeply and thoroughly, the phenomenon he is discussing: whereas Croce, as his too extensive excursions into literary criticism make evident, has not the slightest artistic sensitiveness nor the slightest taste beyond that which is merely scholastic and traditional. There are no works in which the sense of art is more completely lacking than in those of Croce. That is why he has brought himself to consider the theory of art as a closed circle of six or seven Siamese twins, so identical one with the other that no one of them gives any help in the understanding of another. And that is why he has had to cover the banality of his commonplaces with a sophistical counterpoint of arbitrary abstractions.

At a certain point in his book Croce expresses the belief that some of his theories, because of their novelty, will at first produce a sort of bewilderment. The illustrious theorist is right, but he need not worry. The reader’s bewilderment, when he comes really to understand the situation, is merely the bewilderment that comes with each new proof of the fact that enormous popularity may be won at any time by the utterance of the most bromidic of truisms, provided they be furbished up with a little coquetry and a little mystery.

1. Written à propos of Croce’s Breviario di estetica (“The Breviary of Æsthetic”), Bari, 1913.

   The lectures composing this treatise were written for the opening of the Rice Institute (October, 1912). They appear, in an English translation by Douglas Ainslie, in The Book of the Opening of The Rice Institute, Vol. II, pp. 430–517, and in The Rice Institute Pamphlet (December, 1915), pp. 223–310. In the present translation the passages of Croce’s Italian text quoted by Papini are replaced by the corresponding passages of Ainslie’s translation. The page references in the footnotes are to that translation as it appears in The Rice Institute Pamphlet.

2. P. 240.
3. P. 274.
4. P. 277.
5. P. 278.
6. P. 226.
7. P. 239.
8. P. 283.
9. Pp. 282–83.
10. P. 237.
11. P. 279.
12. P. 285.
13. P. 264.
14. P. 229.
15. P. 247.
16. P. 255.
17. P. 258.
18. P. 245.
19. P. 248.
20. P. 254.
21. P. 262.
22. P. 267.