Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

B >> Benedetto Croce >> Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

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Expression in the naturalistic sense simply lacks expression in the
spiritual sense, that is to say, the characteristic itself of activity
and of spirituality, and therefore the bipartition into poles of beauty
and of ugliness. It is nothing more than a relation between cause and
effect, fixed by the abstract intellect. The complete process of
aesthetic production can be symbolized in four steps, which are: _a_,
impressions; _b_, expression or spiritual aesthetic synthesis; _c_,
hedonistic accompaniment, or pleasure of the beautiful (aesthetic
pleasure); _d_, translation of the aesthetic fact into physical
phenomena (sounds, tones, movements, combinations of lines and colours,
etc.). Anyone can see that the capital point, the only one that is
properly speaking aesthetic and truly real, is in that _b_, which is
lacking to the mere manifestation or naturalistic construction,
metaphorically also called expression.

The expressive process is exhausted when those four steps have been
taken. It begins again with new impressions, a new aesthetic synthesis,
and relative accompaniments.

[Sidenote] _Intuitions and memory._

Expressions or representations follow and expel one another. Certainly,
this passing away, this disassociation, is not perishing, it is not
total elimination: nothing of what is born dies with that complete death
which would be identical with never having been born. Though all things
pass away, yet none can die. The representations which we have
forgotten, also persist in some way in our spirit, for without them we
could not explain acquired habits and capacities. Thus, the strength of
life lies in this apparent forgetting: one forgets what has been
absorbed and what life has superseded.

But many other things, many other representations, are still efficacious
elements in the actual processes of our spirit; and it is incumbent on
us not to forget them, or to be capable of recalling them when necessity
demands them. The will is always vigilant in this work of preservation,
for it aims at preserving (so to say) the greater and more fundamental
part of all our riches. Certainly its vigilance is not always
sufficient. Memory, we know, leaves or betrays us in various ways. For
this very reason, the vigilant will excogitates expedients, which help
memory in its weakness, and are its _aids_.

[Sidenote] _The production of aids to memory._

We have already explained how these aids are possible. Expressions or
representations are, at the same time, practical facts, which are also
called physical facts, in so far as to the physical belongs the task of
classifying them and reducing them to types. Now it is clear, that if we
can succeed in making those facts in some way permanent, it will always
be possible (other conditions remaining equal) to reproduce in us, by
perceiving it, the already produced expression or intuition.

If that in which the practical concomitant acts, or (to use physical
terms) the movements have been isolated and made in some sort permanent,
be called the object or physical stimulus, and if it be designated by
the letter _e_; then the process of reproduction will take place in the
following order: _e_, the physical stimulus; _d-b_, perceptions of
physical facts (sounds, tones, mimic, combinations of lines and colours,
etc.), which form together the aesthetic synthesis, already produced;
_c_, the hedonistic accompaniment, which is also reproduced.

And what are those combinations of words which are called poetry, prose,
poems, novels, romances, tragedies or comedies, but _physical stimulants
of reproduction_ (the _e_ stage); what are those combinations of sound
which are called operas, symphonies, sonatas; and what those of lines
and of colours, which are called pictures, statues, architecture? The
spiritual energy of memory, with the assistance of those physical facts
above mentioned, makes possible the preservation and the reproduction of
the intuitions produced, often so laboriously, by ourselves and by
others. If the physiological organism, and with it memory, become
weakened; if the monuments of art be destroyed; then all the aesthetic
wealth, the fruit of the labours of many generations, becomes lessened
and rapidly disappears.

[Sidenote] _The physically beautiful._

Monuments of art, which are the stimulants of aesthetic reproduction,
are called _beautiful things or the physically beautiful_. This
combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, because the beautiful
is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the
activity of man, to spiritual energy. But henceforth it is clear through
what wanderings and what abbreviations, physical things and facts, which
are simply aids to the reproduction of the beautiful, end by being
called, elliptically, beautiful things and physically beautiful. And now
that we have made the existence of this ellipse clear, we shall
ourselves make use of it without hesitation.

[Sidenote] _Content and form: another meaning._

The intervention of the physically beautiful serves to explain another
meaning of the words _content and form_, as employed by aestheticians.
Some call "content" the internal fact or expression (which is for us
already form), and they call "form" the marble, the colours, the rhythm,
the sounds (for us form no longer); thus they look upon the physical
fact as the form, which may or may not be joined to the content. This
serves to explain another aspect of what is called aesthetic ugliness.
He who has nothing definite to express may try to hide his internal
emptiness with a flood of words, with sounding verse, with deafening
polyphony, with painting that dazzles the eye, or by collocating great
architectonic masses, which arrest and disturb, although, at bottom,
they convey nothing. Ugliness, then, is the arbitrary, the
charlatanesque; and, in reality, if the practical will do not intervene
in the theoretic function, there may be absence of beauty, but never
effective presence of the ugly.

[Sidenote] _Natural and artificial beauty._

Physical beauty is wont to be divided into _natural_ and _artificial_
beauty. Thus we reach one of the facts, which has given great labour to
thinkers: _the beautiful in nature_. These words often designate simply
facts of practical pleasure. He alludes to nothing aesthetic who calls a
landscape beautiful where the eye rests upon verdure, where bodily
motion is easy, and where the warm sun-ray envelops and caresses the
limbs. But it is nevertheless indubitable, that on other occasions the
adjective "beautiful," applied to objects and scenes existing in nature,
has a completely aesthetic signification.

It has been observed, that in order to enjoy natural objects
aesthetically, we should withdraw them from their external and
historical reality, and separate their simple appearance or origin from
existence; that if we contemplate a landscape with our head between our
legs, in such a way as to remove ourselves from our wonted relations
with it, the landscape appears as an ideal spectacle; that nature is
beautiful only for him who contemplates her _with the eye of the
artist_; that zoologists and botanists do not recognize beautiful
animals and flowers; that natural beauty is _discovered_ (and examples
of discovery are the points of view, pointed out by men of taste and
imagination, and to which more or less aesthetic travellers and
excursionists afterwards have recourse in pilgrimage, whence a more or
less collective _suggestion_); that, _without the aid of the
imagination_, no part of nature is beautiful, and that with such aid the
same natural object or fact is now expressive, according to the
disposition of the soul, now insignificant, now expressive of one
definite thing, now of another, sad or glad, sublime or ridiculous,
sweet or laughable; finally, that _natural beauty_, which an artist
would not _to some extent correct, does not exist_.

All these observations are most just, and confirm the fact that natural
beauty is simply a _stimulus_ to aesthetic reproduction, which
presupposes previous production. Without preceding aesthetic intuitions
of the imagination, nature cannot arouse any at all. As regards natural
beauty, man is like the mythical Narcissus at the fountain. They show
further that since this stimulus is accidental, it is, for the most
part, imperfect or equivocal. Leopardi said that natural beauty is
"rare, scattered, and fugitive." Every one refers the natural fact to
the expression which is in his mind. One artist is, as it were, carried
away by a laughing landscape, another by a rag-shop, another by the
pretty face of a young girl, another by the squalid countenance of an
old ruffian. Perhaps the first will say that the rag-shop and the ugly
face of the old ruffian are _disgusting_; the second, that the laughing
landscape and the face of the young girl are _insipid_. They may dispute
for ever; but they will never agree, save when they have supplied
themselves with a sufficient dose of aesthetic knowledge, which will
enable them to recognize that they are both right. _Artificial_ beauty,
created by man, is a much more ductile and efficacious aid to
reproduction.

[Sidenote] _Mixed beauty._

In addition to these two classes, aestheticians also sometimes talk in
their treatises of a _mixed_ beauty. Of what is it a mixture? Just of
natural and artificial. Whoso fixes and externalizes, operates with
natural materials, which he does not create, but combines and
transforms. In this sense, every artificial product is a mixture of
nature and artifice; and there would be no occasion to speak of a mixed
beauty, as of a special category. But it happens that, in certain cases,
combinations already given in nature can be used a great deal more than
in others; as, for instance, when we design a beautiful garden and
include in our design groups of trees or ponds which are already there.
On other occasions externalization is limited by the impossibility of
producing certain effects artificially. Thus we may mix the colouring
matters, but we cannot create a powerful voice or a personage and an
appearance appropriate to this or that personage of a drama. We must
therefore seek for them among things already existing, and make use of
them when we find them. When, therefore, we adopt a great number of
combinations already existing in nature, such as we should not be able
to produce artificially if they did not exist, the result is called
_mixed_ beauty.

[Sidenote] _Writings._

We must distinguish from artificial beauty those instruments of
reproduction called _writings_, such as alphabets, musical notes,
hieroglyphics, and all pseudo-languages, from the language of flowers
and flags, to the language of patches (so much the vogue in the society
of the eighteenth century). Writings are not physical facts which arouse
directly impressions answering to aesthetic expressions; they are simple
_indications_ of what must be done in order to produce such physical
facts. A series of graphic signs serves to remind us of the movements
which we must execute with our vocal apparatus in order to emit certain
definite sounds. If, through practice, we become able to hear the words
without opening our mouths and (what is much more difficult) to hear the
sounds by running the eye down the page of the music, all this does not
alter anything of the nature of the writings, which are altogether
different from direct physical beauty. No one calls the book which
contains the _Divine Comedy_, or the portfolio which contains _Don
Giovanni_, beautiful in the same sense as the block of marble which
contains Michael Angelo's _Moses_, or the piece of coloured wood which
contains the _Transfiguration_ are metaphorically called beautiful. Both
serve for the reproduction of the beautiful, but the former by a far
longer and far more indirect route than the latter.

[Sidenote] _The beautiful as free and not free._

Another division of the beautiful, which is still found in treatises, is
that into _free and not free_. By beauties that are not free, are
understood those objects which have to serve a double purpose,
extra-aesthetic and aesthetic (stimulants of intuitions); and since it
appears that the first purpose limits and impedes the second, the
beautiful object resulting therefrom has been considered as a beauty
that is not free.

Architectural works are especially cited; and precisely for this reason,
has architecture often been excluded from the number of the so-called
fine arts. A temple must be above all things adapted to the use of a
cult; a house must contain all the rooms requisite for commodity of
living, and they must be arranged with a view to this commodity; a
fortress must be a construction capable of resisting the attacks of
certain armies and the blows of certain instruments of war. It is
therefore held that the architect's field is limited: he may be able to
_embellish_ to some extent the temple, the house, the fortress; but his
hands are bound by the _object_ of these buildings, and he can only
manifest that part of his vision of beauty in their construction which
does not impair their extrinsic, but fundamental, objects.

Other examples are taken from what is called art applied to industry.
Plates, glasses, knives, guns, and combs can be made beautiful; but it
is held that their beauty must not so far exceed as to prevent our
eating from the plate, drinking from the glass, cutting with the knife,
firing off the gun, or combing one's hair with the comb. The same is
said of the art of printing: a book should be beautiful, but not to the
extent of its being difficult or impossible to read it.

[Sidenote] _Critique of the beautiful that is not free._

In respect to all this, we must observe, in the first place, that the
external purpose, precisely because it is such, does not of necessity
limit or trammel the other purpose of being a stimulus to aesthetic
reproduction. Nothing, therefore, can be more erroneous than the thesis
that architecture, for example, is by its nature not free and imperfect,
since it must also fulfil other practical objects. Beautiful
architectural works, however, themselves undertake to deny this by their
simple presence.

In the second place, not only are the two objects not necessarily in
opposition; but, we must add, the artist always has the means of
preventing this contradiction from taking place. In what way? By taking,
as the material of his intuition and aesthetic externalization,
precisely the _destination_ of the object, which serves a practical end.
He will not need to add anything to the object, in order to make it the
instrument of aesthetic intuitions: it will be so, if perfectly adapted
to its practical purpose. Rustic dwellings and palaces, churches and
barracks, swords and ploughs, are beautiful, not in so far as they are
embellished and adorned, but in so far as they express the purpose for
which they were made. A garment is only beautiful because it is quite
suitable to a given person in given conditions. The sword bound to the
side of the warrior Rinaldo by the amorous Armida was not beautiful: "so
adorned that it seemed a useless ornament, not the warlike instrument of
a warrior." It was beautiful, if you will, in the eyes and imagination
of the sorceress, who loved her lover in this effeminate way. The
aesthetic fact can always accompany the practical fact, because
expression is truth.

It cannot, however, be denied that aesthetic contemplation sometimes
hinders practical use. For instance, it is a quite common experience to
find certain new things so well adapted to their purpose, and yet so
beautiful, that people occasionally feel scruples in maltreating them by
using after contemplating them, which amounts to consuming them. It was
for this reason that King Frederick William of Prussia evinced
repugnance to ordering his magnificent grenadiers, so well suited for
war, to endure the strain of battle; but his less aesthetic son,
Frederick the Great, obtained from them excellent services.

[Sidenote] _The stimulants of production._

It might be objected to the explanation of the physically beautiful as a
simple adjunct for the reproduction of the internally beautiful, that is
to say, of expressions, that the artist creates his expressions by
painting or by sculpturing, by writing or by composing, and that
therefore the physically beautiful, instead of following, sometimes
precedes the aesthetically beautiful. This would be a somewhat
superficial mode of understanding the procedure of the artist, who never
makes a stroke with his brush without having previously seen it with his
imagination; and if he has not yet seen it, he will make the stroke, not
in order to externalize his expression (which does not yet exist), but
as though to have a rallying point for ulterior meditation and for
internal concentration. The physical point on which he leans is not the
physically beautiful, instrument of reproduction, but what may be called
a pedagogic means, similar to retiring into solitude, or to the many
other expedients, frequently very strange, adopted by artists and
philosophers, who vary in these according to their various
idiosyncrasies. The old aesthetician Baumgarten advised poets to ride on
horseback, as a means of inspiration, to drink wine in moderation, and
(provided they were chaste) to look at beautiful women.

XIV

MISTAKES ARISING FROM THE CONFUSION BETWEEN PHYSIC AND AESTHETIC

It is necessary to mention a series of scientific mistakes which have
arisen from the failure to understand the purely external relation
between the aesthetic fact or artistic vision, and the physical fact or
instrument, which serves as an aid to reproduce it. We must here
indicate the proper criticism, which derives from what has already been
said.

[Sidenote] _Critique of aesthetic associationism_

That form of associationism which identifies the aesthetic fact with the
_association of two_ images finds a place among these errors. By what
path has it been possible to arrive at such a mistake, against which our
aesthetic consciousness, which is a consciousness of perfect unity,
never of duality, rebels? Just because the physical and the aesthetic
facts have been considered separately, as two distinct images, which
enter the spirit, the one drawn forth from the other, the one first and
the other afterwards. A picture is divided into the image of the
_picture_ and the image of the _meaning_ of the picture; a poem, into
the image of the words and the image of the _meaning_ of the words. But
this dualism of images is non-existent: the physical fact does not enter
the spirit as an image, but causes the reproduction of the image (the
only image, which is the aesthetic fact), in so far as it blindly
stimulates the psychic organism and produces an impression answering to
the aesthetic expression already produced.

The efforts of the associationists (the usurpers of to-day in the field
of Aesthetic) to emerge from the difficulty, and to reaffirm in some way
the unity which has been destroyed by their principle of associationism,
are highly instructive. Some maintain that the image called back again
is unconscious; others, leaving unconsciousness alone, hold that, on the
contrary, it is vague, vaporous, confused, thus reducing the _force_ of
the aesthetic fact to the _weakness_ of bad memory. But the dilemma is
inexorable: either keep association and give up unity, or keep unity and
give up association. No third way out of the difficulty exists.

[Sidenote] _Critique of aesthetic physic._

From the failure to analyze so-called natural beauty thoroughly, and to
recognize that it is simply an incident of aesthetic reproduction, and
from having, on the contrary, looked upon it as given in nature, is
derived all that portion of treatises upon Aesthetic which is entitled
_The Beautiful in Nature or Aesthetic Physic_; sometimes even
subdivided, save the mark! into Aesthetic Mineralogy, Botany, and
Zoology. We do not wish to deny that such treatises contain many just
remarks, and are sometimes themselves works of art, in so far as they
represent beautifully the imaginings and fantasies, that is the
impressions, of their authors. But we must state that it is
scientifically false to ask oneself if the dog be beautiful, and the
ornithorhynchus ugly; if the lily be beautiful, and the artichoke ugly.
Indeed, the error is here double. On one hand, aesthetic Physic falls
back into the equivoke of the theory of artistic and literary classes,
by attempting to determine aesthetically the abstractions of our
intellect; on the other, fails to recognize, as we said, the true
formation of so-called natural beauty; for which the question as to
whether some given individual animal, flower, or man be beautiful or
ugly, is altogether excluded. What is not produced by the aesthetic
spirit, or cannot be referred to it, is neither beautiful nor ugly. The
aesthetic process arises from the ideal relations in which natural
objects are arranged.

[Sidenote] _Critique of the theory of the beauty of the human body._

The double error can be exemplified by the question, upon which whole
volumes have been written, as to the _Beauty of the human body_. Here it
is necessary, above all things, to urge those who discuss this subject
from the abstract toward the concrete, by asking: "What do you mean by
the human body, that of the male, of the female, or of the androgyne?"
Let us assume that they reply by dividing the inquiry into two distinct
inquiries, as to the virile and feminine beauty (there really are
writers who seriously discuss whether man or woman is the more
beautiful); and let us continue: "Masculine or feminine beauty; but of
what race of men--the white, the yellow, or the black, and whatever
others there may be, according to the division of races?" Let us assume
that they limit themselves to the white race, and let us continue: "What
sub-species of the white race?" And when we have restricted them
gradually to one section of the white world, that is to say, to the
Italian, Tuscan, Siennese, or Porta Camollia section, we will continue:
"Very good; but at what age of the human body, and in what condition and
state of development--that of the new-born babe, of the child, of the
boy, of the adolescent, of the man of middle age, and so on? and is the
man at rest or at work, or is he occupied as is Paul Potter's cow, or
the Ganymede of Rembrandt?"

Having thus arrived, by successive reductions, at the individual
_omnimode determinatum_, or, better, at the man pointed out with the
finger, it will be easy to expose the other error, by recalling what has
been said about the natural fact, which is now beautiful, now ugly,
according to the point of view, according to what is passing in the mind
of the artist. Finally, if the Gulf of Naples have its detractors, and
if there be artists who declare it inexpressive, preferring the "gloomy
firs," the "clouds and perpetual north winds," of the northern seas; let
it be believed, if possible, that such relativity does not exist for the
human body, source of the most various suggestions!

[Sidenote] _Critique of the beauty of geometric figures._

The question of the _beauty of geometrical figures_ is connected with
aesthetic Physic. But if by geometrical figures be understood the
concepts of geometry, the concept of the triangle, the square, the cone,
these are neither beautiful nor ugly: they are concepts. If, on the
other hand, by such figures be understood bodies which possess definite
geometrical forms, these will be ugly or beautiful, like every natural
fact, according to the ideal connexions in which they are placed. Some
hold that those geometrical figures are beautiful which point upwards,
since they give the suggestion of firmness and of force. It is not
denied that such may be the case. But neither must it be denied that
those also which give the impression of instability and of being crushed
down may possess their beauty, where they represent just the ill-formed
and the crushed; and that in these last cases the firmness of the
straight line and the lightness of the cone or of the equilateral
triangle would, on the contrary, seem elements of ugliness.

Certainly, such questions as to the beauty of nature and the beauty of
geometry, like the others analogous of the historically beautiful and of
human beauty, seem less absurd in the Aesthetic of the sympathetic,
which means, at bottom, by the words "aesthetic beauty" the
representation of what is pleasing. But the pretension to determine
scientifically what are the sympathetic contents, and what are the
irremediably antipathetic, is none the less erroneous, even in the
sphere of that doctrine and after the laying down of those premises. One
can only answer such questions by repeating with an infinitely long
postscript the _Sunt quos_ of the first ode of the first book of Horace,
and the _Havvi chi_ of Leopardi's letter to Carlo Pepoli. To each man
his beautiful ( = sympathetic), as to each man his fair one. Philography
is not a science.

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