From the Tree to the Labyrinth (96 page)

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).

4. 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).

5. 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; but in so doing he confuses artistic technique with the science of materials. In the
Aesthetic
there is an interesting page describing the efforts of a poet who tries out different words and phrases in search of “an expression for an impression he feels, or of which he has a presentiment” (p. 132); but only a few pages earlier he had said that artists whose expression is still unformed apply an experimental brushstroke “not to externalize their expressions (which do not then exist), but as if to try out and to have a simple point of support” or as a “heuristic device” (p. 114). What Croce calls a “point of support” is like the hotchpotch of our everyday perception: it’s all we have. But what common sense recognizes as everything, for philosophy becomes nothing, with the minor inconvenience that everything that’s left becomes impalpable.

I believe it can be pacifically agreed that in these pages Croce affirms the exact contrary of the truth, if the truth is what common sense concedes in the light of a thousand recorded experiences. I am not sufficiently familiar with the entirety of his works to know whether Croce ever commented on the sonnet in which Michelangelo reminds us that: “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto / c’un marmo solo in sé non conconscriva / col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva / la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto” [“The best of artists does not have any concept / that a single [block of] marble does not encompass / with its excess, and only to that [concept] arrives / the hand that obeys the intellect”]. If he read it, he forgot it, on purpose. Because what Michelangelo is telling us here is that the artist finds his intuition-expression in a dialogue with his materials, with their vein, their bias, the possibilities they offer. Indeed Michelangelo goes still further, for the sake of hyperbole: the statue is already present in the marble, and all the artist has to do is to remove the excess that conceals it.

And here we have Croce, as it were, contradicting Michelangelo, speaking of the “piece of marble
that embodies
the statue of Moses and of the piece of coloured wood
embodying
the Transfiguration” (p. 112, my emphasis). The citation leaves no room for doubt: what we consider works of art (over whose deterioration, restoration, counterfeiting ,or theft we agonize) are merely the
containers
of the only, unique, true (and at this point unattainable) works that existed in the completely inward intuitions of their authors. Elsewhere, speaking of how the judgment of taste retraces the genesis of the original intuition, Croce will refer to these physical embodiments as mere “signs,” instruments practically didactic in nature that facilitate the process of reconstruction. Not realizing that, for a philosopher reluctant to acknowledge the social existence of systems of signs, with their own laws and definable unities, who sees instead every expressive act as a
unicum
in which the language is, as it were, reborn as though for the first time, a sign ought not be something negligible, and the relationship between sign and intuition should be understood to be less accidental and external.

Croce tells us that that block of marble and that wooden panel are said to be beautiful only as a metaphor. Then it occurs to him that we really are using a metaphor when we say the score that contains Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
is beautiful, and he recognizes that the first metaphor is more immediate than the second. But, for an author who has refused to define metaphor, the solution leaves something to be desired. What does this difference in immediateness between metaphors conceal? And what is the status of the
Don Giovanni
contained in the score? Is it something that exists in the realm of sound (and therefore physically externalized and externalizable) or is it the original intuition that Mozart could even have refused to perform? And why does it continue to be performed today, rather than simply evoked by reading the score, as Croce believes dramatic works should be read, instead of seeing them externalized on the stage?

It seems clear that what Croce is articulating (encouraged by his lack of interest in everything that goes by the name of “nature,” and dominated by his humanistic education with its verbo-centric model, whereby beauty is inevitably defined with reference to verbal poetry) is a complex paralogism whose phases it will be useful to follow.

(i) First of all he is aware that there exist
volatile
expressions (in the sense in which
verba volant
[“words fly away”] and do not congeal in mid-air as Rabelais put it) and
permanent
expressions, such as statues or drawings. The difference is so evident that humankind has developed means by which to make the first permanent, from writing to magnetic tapes—authentic physical vehicles for the recording of previous expressions in the realm of sound.