'■•t ':■ " 
 
 
THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Croce's Aesthetic 
 
 By 
 Bernard Bosanquet 
 
 Fellow of the Academy 
 
 I [I^rom the Proceedings of the British Academy; Vol. IX ^ 
 
 London 
 
 Published for the British Academy 
 
 By Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press 
 
 Amen Corner, E.G. 
 
 Price Tim Shillings net 
 
3H 
 
 
 CROCE'S AESTHETIC 
 
 By BERNARD BOSANQUET 
 
 FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY 
 
 Communicated December 10, 1919 
 
 Art and Beauty are one and the same thing, and that thing is an 
 experience of the human spirit. We might even say that it is the 
 simplest of all such experiences, and the earliest. Whenever a human 
 being concentrates his total feeling into an image which is at once 
 its essence and its utterance, the spirit of art is awakened. Beauty, 
 in other words, lives in the creative imagination, and there alone; 
 and art is nothing more and nothing less than the experience which 
 we call beauty. All else is irrelevant. True and false, real and 
 unreal, good and bad, have no place in the aesthetic world. Here 
 nothing counts but the perfection of the imaginative act in itself, 
 and by its own standard. And this is in principle all that we need 
 to know about the beautiful. It has no subdivisions within itself, 
 and its manifestations array themselves in no kind of series. Aesthetic 
 philosophy lies in explaining the rank of beauty among the experiences 
 of the spirit, and in defending the simplicity of the principle against 
 traditional but unjustified intrusions. 
 
 This is the meaning of Croce's doctrine that beauty is expression. 
 And that doctrine is sound. It does justice to the essential qualities 
 of the beautiful ; to its spirituality and its simplicity. Wherever, 
 it says, you find vision and utterance, there you have art and beauty. 
 They may be on a great scale or a small, but they have one 
 quality throughout. 
 
 It is a real service for a man to have thrown the whole weight of 
 his conviction into this principle, and through it to have asserted 
 aesthetic theory as a plain and human thing, disembarrassed of 
 traditional lumber, and addressed directly to the central interest 
 of all who care for beauty. This service it appears to us that Croce 
 has rendered, and it should not and will not be forgotten when the 
 exaggerations by which he has endeavoured to emphasize it have gone 
 the way they will go. 
 
 For here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, it is impossibly not to ask 
 
 IX H 
 
2 IPtlOCP^i^iilis^^^.'OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 wiiy;t]Vef f,}iii/j)<,tr Hfha Has ^jven us so much has also taken so much 
 away ; wh}', to set off his true and spirited outhne, he has thought 
 it necessary to erase the whole supporting system. 
 
 To understand this necessity, we must follow his argument step 
 by step. 
 
 The conceptions of Art and Beauty, which are for him coincident, 
 are developed in his system by two constantly recurring terms, which 
 are coincident both with the two former and with each other. These 
 are Intuition and Expression. 
 
 The term Intuition insists mainly on the simplicity of the artistic 
 experience, and on its priority in the scheme of the spiritual forms, 
 which two characteristics intimately involve one another. The term 
 Expression insists on the distinctive quality of the^ constructive 
 imagination by which ^-.rpressive activity is distinguished from the 
 passivity which marks the impression. 
 
 The two terms, being conjoined throughout as descriptive of the 
 same experience, convev the conception that man's primary attitude 
 to the world, before in the judgement of perception he discriminates 
 the real from the unreal, is that of an intuition which is at once and 
 inherently an imaginative expression.)^ He does not judge; he 
 pictures, focuses, apprehends ideally in an image the matter pre- 
 sented to his mind.7 Ideally, or imaginatively — for apprehension is 
 ■ideal or imaginative when it portrays and does not affirm. Tliis 
 intuition-expression, as he calls it, this primaiy self-conceiitration 
 of the mind in something which without any intellectual character 
 is none the less a determinate spiritual utterance — think, Croce 
 would say, of the simplest imaginable phrase of love or song — this 
 intuition-expression is the elementary type of art and beauty. Let 
 it swell to a five-act tragedy, and include all the sayings of Hamlet 
 and Polonius, yet the constituents take their characters from the 
 whole, and the primary intuition is a primary intuition-expression 
 still. The mind gathers up in it the state and the material which 
 it feels driven to portray as a whole, but it makes no judgement of 
 reality, and simply looks before it at the expression it has created. 
 Here is a passage which emphasizes in connexion the simplicity and 
 priority of the intuition. 
 
 ' I observe in myself — that, in presence of any sensation whatever, 
 if I do not abandon myself to the attractions and repulsions of instinct 
 and feeling, if I do not permit myself to be distracted by reflections 
 and reasonings, if I persist in the intuitive attitude, I am in that very 
 disposition by means of which I enjoy what is commonly called a 
 work of art. I live the sensation, but as a pure contemplative spirit. 
 
CROCKS AESTHETIC 3 
 
 In ordinary life, reflections and volitions follow like lightning on the 
 sensations, and then follow other sensations and reflections and voli- 
 tions. Bat however lightning quick that succession may be, it does 
 not abolish the first instant, which must be one of pure intuition. 
 That first instant, multiplying and expanding itself, forms the region 
 of the life of art. Without that first instant, without the little 
 spark, the great flame could not follow. Artists in the pre-eminent 
 sense are those who have the power of persisting longer than others 
 in the moment of pure sensation or intuition,^ and of inducing others 
 to persist in it. Artists (as has been imaginatively observed) pre- 
 serve the ingenuous and intent regard of the child ; remain remote 
 and undistracted by practical preoccupations.' ^ 
 
 This conception of the artistic intuition as something essentially 
 primitive and prior in nature to intelligence and practice, while 
 communicating a welcome emphasis to Croce's view of the simplicity 
 and universality of art, is yet, in the systematic exaggeration which 
 he imposes on it, the source of serious defects in his doctrine, which 
 we must now consider. 
 
 ( Intuition in Croce's theory is the primitive form of knowledge , 
 he higher form of which is philosophy. To call it knowledge seems 
 strange to us, as it is in its proper nature free from conceptual 
 affirmation and so prior to the judgement of perception, and uncon- 
 cerned with discrimination between real and unreal. On the other 
 hand, it is inherent in Croce's whole theory that language, conceived 
 as an expressive flux of tone and gesture, belongs to this primitive 
 stage, and is in fact a thing identical with intuition. Its conceptual 
 and conventional side belongs to logic and the judgement, and by 
 dwelling on this we are led to misconceive the nature of speech, which 
 is in truth far nearer akin to poetry than to logic. 
 
 Art then, as prior and single, is independent. Art does not need 
 the concept nor philosophy, but philosophy and the concept depend 
 upon art, without which they would not possess the original flow of 
 language — the poetry natural to man — on which their structure of 
 universal meanings has to be erected. 
 
 These, then, art and philosophy, are the two theoretical phases 
 of the spirit. Above or beyond' these, in the sense of employing and 
 depending upon them, are the two practical phases, the economic, 
 that in which the particular person wills his particular end ; and the 
 
 * As a rule Croce ranks pure sensation with impressions as a condition 
 precedent of intuition or expression. 
 
 2 Prnhlptjti cli Kxfl^fira , p. 484. 
 
 u2 
 
4 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 ethical, in which the particular is expanded into the universal end 
 of man and dominated by it. The practical forms depend on the 
 theoretical, because will depends on knowledge ; the ethical on the 
 economic, because you must have a will before you can have a good 
 will. 
 
 These four forms constitute the complete cycle of reality, of the 
 spirit's phases, which are not united in any complete experience, but 
 are traversed by the human mind in spirals,^ so to speak, in which 
 every cycle recommences at the point of experience to which the race 
 has been raised by that previously completed. 
 
 Thus Croce by no means denies that art can absorb and include 
 the products of conceptual thinking. It precedes all other experience, 
 he would maintain, in a logical but not in a temporal sense. Never- 
 theless, the idea of temporal precedence is influential in furnishing 
 his theory with its primary type and ideal, as the passage which has 
 been cited suffices to show. And from this idea there arises a series 
 of conceptions, which, while they rhetorically reinforce his leading 
 contention, really undermine and empty its substance. These con- 
 ceptions draw out the consequences of reducing art and language to 
 a common measure, the depth of which is prescribed by the conviction 
 • which we have already observed in Croce, regarding the primitive 
 intuition. 
 
 The origin of this conviction, to which Croce continually recurs, 
 and which he holds with extreme intensity, we find apparently in 
 Vico's influence. In the spring of 1900 Croce communicated his htst 
 paper on Aesthetic theory to the Academia Pontiana at Naples, and 
 in April 1901 he published his first contribution to the history of 
 the subject under the title ' Giambattista Vico primo scopritore della 
 scienza estetica'', which twelve years later he developed into a complete 
 study of Vico's philosophy. What concerns us here is Vlco's funda- 
 mental attitude to poetry in its connexion with primitive language 
 and primitive imagination. He adopts, or re-discovers, what our 
 own Elackwell, an Aberdeen professor and late contemporary of 
 Vico, speaks of as the ' Ancient Opinion that Poetry was before 
 Prose '. But he intensifies it into a general theory of the origin of 
 language in Song ^ and of the vast and profound imagination belong- 
 ing to primitive men. ' The men of the world's childliood were by 
 
 ^ This phrase is not to my knowledg'e used by Croce. 
 
 ^ So Blackwell {Life of Homer , a. n. 1735), nvbav = (uiSew. Vico points out that 
 men wlio stammer can often sing- witliout impediment^ which reminds us of an 
 incident in one of Marryat's novels. 
 
CROCKS AESTHETIC 5 
 
 nature sublime poets.' ^ 'These two common errors of the gram- 
 marians, that prose-writers'" language is proper, and tliat of Poets 
 improper ; and that speech in prose came first, and verse afterwards.' ^ 
 Croce is thoroughly permeated with the ideas here suggested, the 
 former of which he insists on in his rejection of the rhetorical distinc- 
 tion between bare and ornate language, and expands, as we shall see, 
 into a general condemnation of doctrines which establish laws and 
 classes in art and literature. 
 
 Now we cannot venture to say that tliese suggestions of Vico 
 determined the whole form of Croce's philosophy of the spirit, the 
 theory, that is, of the successive grades of reality, related as we have 
 described. But obviously this doctrine harmonizes with Vico's 
 attitude, and is reinforced by it ; and we have now to consider the 
 consequences which this fundamental orientation of his philosophy 
 imposes upon Croce's aesthetic. 
 
 It is a fundamental principle with him, embodied in the attitude 
 which we have seen that he shares with Vico, that languao-e i^ 
 identical with expression in the whole pregnancy of the term, that 
 is, with intuition, art, and beauty. This reduction of art and 
 language to a common measure depends on the idea of a phase of 
 lin£2:uistic utterance in which logical meanina; and assertion have 
 not yet appeared ; in which parts of speech are not distinguished, 
 and words are not discriminated as signs for objects, each to each, 
 but tlie dramatic flow of tone and gesture springs from the total 
 state of mind like a song or an imaginative vision. That there is 
 much truth in a view which insists upon such an aspect of language 
 need not be questioned. It is 'familiar ground to us to-day that the 
 sentence and not the w^ord is the linguistic unit. 
 
 But to enable ourselves to say all that Croce says, not merely ' all 
 language is expression ' but ' all expression is language ', it is obvious 
 that we must not only insist upon this aspect of speech but must 
 exclude every other. If language is to be intuition and expression 
 in a sense level w^ith that in which these terms apply to all the 
 utterances of art and embodiments of beauty, then logical affirmation 
 and conceptual or conventional meaning must necessarily be banished 
 from it. And this, we see at once, is the point in which Croce's 
 scheme of degrees and Vico's equation of poetry and primitive speech 
 converge and agree. 
 
 We may put it thus. We are quite accustomed to say that all 
 art and beauty are expression and ' speak a language '. We are then 
 
 * VicOj Scien!::a Niiova : Degnitd (axiom); xxxvii, cf. Ixii. * Op. cit. ii. 
 
 d\d9i^H 
 
6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 adopting a phraseology which has for us a strong and unmistakable 
 significance derived from our familiarity with the definite and con- 
 ventional usage by which the spoken or written sentence ' means "* to 
 us something definite, other than itself. When we say that the 
 music or the picture speaks a language to us we allude to this familiar 
 quality with a modification distinctly understood. It speaks to us, 
 we say, but we cannot put in words what it tells us. What it tells 
 us cannot be told except by the music or the picture itself. It is 
 not something outside them and separate. Even of a poem, which 
 is in explicit words, we say the same. And we say it because tlie 
 words of the poem have undergone a transformation, and no longer 
 are mere words. They have been made part of a new whole, and 
 have acquired a quality peculiar to them. 
 
 But the general truth we are urging is this. When we say that 
 the music or the picture speaks to us, but we cannot put in words 
 what it says, we are referring to the significance of language, not in 
 any partial value, but in its completeness. We employ the full 
 conception of definite meaning, modified by a reservation which we 
 believe ourselves clearly to understand, to help in explaining what 
 it is that we experience in the intuition which we call art or beautv. 
 Something, something of supreme value, we are sure, is communicated 
 to us, though what it is w^e can only indicate by retraversing the 
 actual communication, which differs in this respect from 'language"", 
 that is, from the articulate discourse of ordinary life. 
 
 Now when language is despoiled of its full capacity for significance, 
 in order to equate it, to level it, with expression in general, the 
 manoeuvre is self-destructive. Language has become a gesture or 
 a tune, and to compare a tune or a gesture to language is now to 
 compare a thing to itself. If expression, beauty, and language are 
 taken in principle as prior to thought and explicit meaning, then 
 the problem of beauty is treated as if it were solved, when in truth . 
 it has not yet been raised. Beauty is not a datum but a transforma- 
 tion ; not a gift at birth, but the achievement of an adult. 
 
 We can see, however, the advantage which to Croce's masterful 
 and, I had almost said, unscrupulous genius appeared to be off^ered 
 by \'ico"'s attitude. Singleness was the gain ; the absolute annihilar 
 tion of everything that could in the slightest degree appear to 
 dictate from without to the self- creating expression which is beauty. 
 To be rid of alien aims ; of instructiveness, moral or intellectual ; of 
 pleasureableness ; of rank, dignity, and appropriateness in -the 
 subjects selected for artistic expression ; to banish technical rules 
 and the laws of stereotyped kinds ; to shake off even the dictatorship 
 
CROCKS AESTHETIC 7 
 
 of well-authenticated physical beauty considered as located in actual 
 works of art or of nature — we can imagine the lelicf which came to 
 so uncompromising a spirit from the idea that all this was to go, and 
 that\nothing was to matter any more but the intuition of a mind 
 that in a coherent imagination had found and satisfied itself,\ It is 
 evident to an English reader that there must have been a struggle 
 with traditions of rhetorical and literary criticism with which we 
 are less familiar, and which imparted a zest and keenness to the work 
 of repudiation. And this together with Croce's proneness to sweep- 
 ing and unmodified conclusions goes far to account for the exaggera- 
 tions and distortions, as they seem to us, into which his systematic 
 doctrine impelled him. 
 
 Singleness, we said, was the lure. Not even content, we add to 
 our former statements, was to dictate to expression. You cannot lay 
 it down that this theme must be treated thus, and that other in that 
 other way. For apart from the expression the content does not 
 exist. You cannot take the content as a burden or a trust, to which 
 in some way justice has to be done or appropriate treatment meted 
 out by a method and form to be contrived. Content and form are 
 created pari passu ; the intuition or expression is the two in one. 
 And this true doctrine I hope is not unfamiliar to us ; our great 
 English students of fine art and poetry have shown I believe no 
 disposition to ignore it. 
 
 And yet, when we speak of expression, it is plain that sheer 
 singleness, the singleness of priority and primitiveness, of the initial 
 moment of sensation as it was portrayed for us above, cannot be the 
 last word. Expression after ail is an empty name, unless there is 
 a something to be expressed, in an utterance which bears a definite 
 quality and character. We cannot here pursue at length a profound 
 misinterpretation of which Croce has been guilty, because he will not 
 admit that you may so much as say that art and beauty are the 
 sensuous reflex of the spirit that lives in the world-life. If you have 
 called it the reflex or semblance of anything, he seems to say, you 
 have made it the vehicle of an idea, and then, because such a vehicle 
 can be nothing but an inferior philosopliy, it must vanish and be 
 absorbed when knowledge comes to its own.^ But this is the very 
 madness of method. In all vision of beauty of course there is present 
 and concentrated a shape and revelation of life, and though to 
 dissolve it into sides of burden and utterance is to falsify it, yet to 
 study its coherence as a whole and the mode and self-congruence of 
 
 ' See Appendixj '^ Croce's view of •'the death of art" in Heg-el'. 
 
8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEJMY 
 
 its harmony is both inevitable and desirable. Art is in truth the 
 perpetual union of body and spirit, and to refuse to study the body 
 in which it clothes itself betrays a bias which indicates a one-sided 
 philosophy. Croce, in fact, denies the reality of the external world, 
 and we shall see how this denial, advocated with vehement conviction, 
 converges with the influences we have mentioned in his attitude 
 to art. 
 
 Now whether or no Croce's philosophical scheme was moulded 
 initially by the impulse of Vico, there can be no doubt that, to go 
 no further, the position which the latter assigns to art and intuition 
 and with them to language in its simplest form is exaggerated by 
 Croce into self-contradiction. The impulse to look to the primitive 
 for the type of perfection is natural and recurrent, and is not without 
 a certain rough justification. There are obvious obsessions of 
 advancing civilization from which all that is nearer to the primitive 
 seems relatively free, and it is a natural suggestion that by pursuing 
 a regressive inquiry we shall come upon a phase of experience which 
 shall be single, utterly expressive, and wholly free from alien pre- 
 occupation and from analytic thought. 
 
 Eut it cannot be so. The whole conception of antedating intuition 
 and language by comparison with tlie logical affirmation and the 
 concept or category is a nest of contradictions. Intuitions, we are 
 told, are things, concepts are universals or relations.^ Things ! We 
 can have intuitions of things, then, without concepts or categories, 
 without the de facto woiking in our minds — questions of reflective 
 recognition are here quite irrelevant — of the thoughts of identity, 
 distinction, substance, whole and part. It is a complete absurdity. 
 
 And so with language. We can have language, the poetry which 
 is primitive speech, without the agreement upon the reference of 
 signs — agreement with ourselves and with others — upon which the 
 definite interpretation of language depends. Signs cannot be 
 conventional in origin, because you nuist understand their reference, 
 before you can agree upon their significance. And so we are told 
 the belief in a conventional aspect of language drives you necessarily 
 back to an original gift of God. The solution of this problem by 
 the development of natural signs into conventional meanings, the 
 inevitable result of co-operation in practice, seems not to have 
 attracted Croce"'s attention. In fact, apart from an aspect of definite 
 analysis by which meanings are broken up and re-constituted out 
 of simpler meanings, the primary function of language, to communi- 
 
 I 
 
 ^ Estctica, p. 27. 
 
GROCERS AESTHETIC 9 
 
 cate to a mind what it does not know in terms of what it ah'eady 
 knows, could not possibly be achieved,^ The primitive mind, so far 
 from being purely contemplative and imaginative, is immersed in 
 practice ; and at every moment it must demand communication 
 through definite and separable elements of speech. ' Cross two rivers 
 and turn upstream by the third.' How could primitive life be 
 carried on without such communications as this ? And how could 
 such a sentence convey useful advice if the points at which error is 
 possible were not distinct and recognizable references ? The mood 
 of art is a victory and an advance, a divergence which contemplates 
 from a new and happier standpoint the determinate taskwork with 
 which life begins. It is an extraordinary contradiction to appeal, 
 as Croce does more than once, to the contrast, already remarked by 
 Aristotle, between the logical assertion or proposition and the 
 sentence which utters a wish or command. Croce takes this to mean 
 that the former alone had a significance according to agreement, 
 while the latter could be a type of the primitive poetry which he 
 thinks of as free from such meaning and prior to it. But both kinds 
 of sentence alike, though one of them is not assertory, have of course 
 ' conventional ' or logical significance, and it was to clench this point 
 that I used an imperative as my illustration. (^Language, in short, 
 is not language without its conceptual side ; and to equate language 
 with intuition, and treat intuition as prior to thinking, is to shatter 
 and overthrow the whole conception of a unity of the human mind. ': 
 The exaggeration which we have been criticizing is summed up in 
 Croce's favourite identification of Aesthetic Philosophy with the 
 general science of language. The problems of linguistic, so far as 
 they are philosophical, are the same, he continually urges, with the 
 problems of Aesthetic. Language is truncated by the rejection of 
 its logical aspect, and its name is reduced to an indication that some- 
 how, when the mind finds relief and completeness in an utterance, an 
 intuition, or an expression — we may hardly say, a communication — is 
 achieved. The problems of the acquisition of definite meaning, or 
 of the degree in which aflfirmation asserts reality, are set aside. All 
 problems, on the other hand, which concern the theory of art — for 
 example, we must suppose the question whether the human imagina- 
 tion reveals a progress in its creation of beauty — are swept into the 
 province of 'general linguistic". Many matters which we should 
 consider to be problems of aesthetic — the nature and relations, for 
 instance, of comedy and tragedy — are indeed excluded from the 
 
 ^ Stout J Manual of Psychology, pp. 595 fF. 
 
 h3 
 
10 TROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 philosophy of art by the limitations which Croce imposes on it. But 
 enough remain, it would seem, to make it a serious paradox that 
 they should be assigned to the philosophy of language. The moment 
 we look at language in its full significance we see that to identify its 
 problems with those of the theory of art is an absurdity. 
 I Croce rejects, we said, the reality of the external \vorld.^J With 
 this rejection, the singleness of the intuition-expression is forcibly 
 intensified. In art, it is usually felt and held, there is in some sense 
 an inner and outer. True, beauty lies in imagination and not in 
 physical character, but yet the striving for expression seems to be 
 a striving to give outward reality to something from within. To any 
 such feeling of an inner and an outer in art or beauty Croce will not 
 yield a hair's breadth. The. -external world is not real at all; art is 
 the most real of things. How then can art become a part of the 
 external world, or be in any way concerned with physical processes 
 or media ? 
 
 The ' work of art ' then, picture, statue, musical performance, 
 printed or spoken poem, is called so only by a metaphor. It belongs 
 to the practical (economic) and not to the aesthetic phase of the 
 spirit, and consists merely in expedients adopted by the artist as 
 a practical man, to ensure preservation and a permanent possibility of 
 reproduction for his imaginative intuition. The art and beauty lie 
 primarily in his imagination and secondarily in the imagination of 
 those to whom his own may communicate its experience. The picture 
 or the music are by themselves neither art nor beauty nor intuition- 
 expression.^ 
 
 Thus all embodiment in special kinds of physical objects by help 
 of special media and special processes is wholly foreign to the nature 
 of art and beauty. Every expression is single and individual. There 
 is nothing to be learned from the practical means by help of which 
 intuitions of beauty receive permanence and communicability. The 
 whole of Lessing's line of inquiry is futile. Expression does not fall 
 into classes and types ; neither according to the media employed in 
 externalizing it, nor according to any other principle of division. 
 There are no limits of the arts.^ There are indeed no arts dis- 
 tinguishable in accordance with the philosophy of beauty. The 
 distinction, for example, of sound and colour is purely empirical. 
 The inner vision, the intuition which is expression, is the experience 
 
 ' See account of stages of expression and externalization. Estetica, p. 113, 
 ^ There is some laudatory criticism of writers \^■llose prose is like verse or like 
 painting in Scritti di .storiu kttcniria, x. 342. 
 
CHOCKS AESTHETIC 11 
 
 of beauty. Or better, there is no question of inner or outer. The 
 outer world is an abstract construction of physicists in order to 
 explain and deal practically with our experiences. You cannot 
 translate intuitions into tern)s of it. 
 
 We see how this philosophy reinforces Croce's devotedness to the 
 undivided expression. But the contention seems on the way to 
 become ridiculous. It has destroyed our meeting point with ourselves 
 and others in linguistic signiKcance, and now it offers to destroy our 
 medium of intercourse thz'ough the body and through natural objects. 
 True, an object not experienced cannot be the experience of beauty. 
 True, we hope and believe that all, which we call body, is in some 
 sense an incarnation of the spirit. Nevertheless, it is an incarnation, 
 and is not a mere state of mind. We experience natural objects as 
 full concrete existences, with real qualities of colour and sound and 
 splendour. Externality is a character of the world and a sign and 
 vehicle of spiritual achievement, and there can be no doubt tiiat the 
 creative imagination yearns towards externality, and externality in 
 some special medium. 
 
 Indeed, as we have seen, Croce's whole heart is set on insisting that 
 there is no jot or tittle of content in our imagination beyond what 
 has passed into expressive form, and that it is self-deception to 
 su{)pose that we possess a mental store of beauty which only a lack 
 of physical skill prevents us from translating into outwardness. » * If 
 you really had the thoughts, you would have coined them into as 
 many beautiful ringing words.' ^ ' You are confronted with the 
 reality of your imagination, when you are set to traverse the asses' 
 bridge of expression — s};eak, or, here is a pencil, draw, we shall say to 
 you." ^ Now on this side all is clear, and we claim no imagination 
 Avhich is not fused with expressive form. But has not Croce here 
 committed himself also on the other side ? Is not, in this latter 
 sentence, externalization at least the test, if not the essence, of ex- 
 pression ? Can the art-impulse, which is complete only in lines, 
 colours, words, and tones,^ be content before it has realized them in 
 determinate objects of sense .'* The external object, certainly, is not 
 imagination ; but can imagination complete itself without the external 
 object ? Croce tells us himself, ' When our music is really music, it 
 quavers in the throat and thrills along the fingers, as they run over 
 an ideal keyboard '."^ Is this yearning of soul and body for complete 
 determinateness in the world of sense-perception nothing but the 
 practical man's precaution that his expression may not be lost.-^ 
 
 » Edetku, p. 12. ^ lb., p. 14. Mb., p. 11. 
 
 * Brcviurio di E-bWlica, p. 5G. 
 
 H 4 
 
 ^ 
 
12 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 Surely the simple fact is that the external world of sense-perception, 
 though we may call it a form of the spirit, is yet a peculiar and 
 distinctive form, with a function wliich nothing can replace ; and the 
 noblest part of this function is to be the medium to ourselves and to 
 others of the special discipline and determination with and by which 
 the artistic imagination is formed. We may consider the art of 
 music. Apart from the special discipline and experience which the 
 instrument aifords, the special world of purified sound in which the 
 musical imagination is exercised and educated could hardly have 
 existence for it at all. To reject the function of the body — our own 
 and nature's — is not to honour but to bereave the spirit. 
 
 The truth is, surely, that different inclinations of the spirit have 
 affinities with different qualities and actions of body— meaning by 
 body that which a sane philosophy accepts as concretely and com- 
 pletely actual in the world of sense-perception. The imagination 
 of the particular artist is , 
 
 like the dyer's hand 
 Subdued to what it works in, 
 
 and its intuition and expression assume a special type in accordance 
 with the medium it delights in, and necessarily develop certain 
 capacities, and acknowledge, however tacitly, certain limitations- 
 Croce has remarked indeed that painting, for example, is not solely 
 concerned with visual expression, but can raise softness, coolness, or 
 keenness to the level of beauty. But this is irrelevant. What has 
 beauty may concentrate in itself all the qualities of life ; but it is not 
 every quality of life that can form the vehicle of beauty ; nor can 
 everything that is capable of beauty present the spirit of life in the 
 same aspect and mood. 
 
 After all, then, it is necessary for philosophy to study the 
 specialities and limits of the arts ; for in considering them we are 
 considering the qualities and aspects of the human spirit ; nay more, 
 of the spirit which is in the world. If you know or can feel how the 
 beauty of bronze — that is, its expressive capacity — di-ffers from the 
 beauty of marble, you are on the way to understand the diverging 
 beauties of the arts ; and if you insist on neglecting these affinities of 
 the spirit, your theory remains abstract, and has no illuminating 
 power. 
 
 And one thing more you lose, almost the greatest thing of all. 
 Vou lose all sympathy with the spirit which is in nature. For you 
 have forbidden yourself to think of it as a real revelation of the 
 heart of things, though needing to be apprehended by man's appre- 
 ciative imagination. And you come to account for it as a reproduction, 
 
GROCERS AESTHETIC 13 
 
 by association with a physical stimulus, of some expression which you 
 have experienced before. You impose yourself on nature, and do not 
 submit your spirit to hers ; and so you condemn yourself to say that 
 ' she is stupid in comparison with art, and is dumb if man does not 
 make her speak \^ 
 
 If indeed the properties of what is 'outer' were separable and 
 distinct from what is ' inner ', the repudiation of the former would be 
 plausible. But Croce's passionate insistence on the inner deter- 
 minate expression recoils upon him, as we have amply seen, when he 
 comes to reject the necessity of outer determinateness. For it is 
 perfectly plain that the inner — the imaginative vision — depends upon 
 the outer, and that the human spirit, as is just and right, attains its 
 greatness and its clearness only by going to school to the spirit of the 
 universe in all its manifestations. In music we saw a decisive example 
 of this; and in visual art the 'innocence of the eye' may be indeed 
 a second childhood, but probably there never was a first corresponding 
 to it. Practical necessities have taught us to see things ' as they 
 are ', before we have had leisure and interest to see them as they 
 genuinely appear. Here again the ideal of singleness and priority 
 leads us astray. To love and to see the semblance is a victory and 
 not a beginning. The spirit of the universe may be revealed in the 
 spirit of man, but certainly not apart from man's intercourse with 
 his surroundings ; and his imagination, already fashioned by disci- 
 pline under the spirit that is in the outer world, feels itself incomplete 
 until in union with the most perfect bodily effort it has created an 
 example of complete self-determination in one of the vehicles which 
 that world supplies. We have merely to think of the effort of song 
 or of passionate speech to realize this creative outward pressure of 
 soul and body as a whole. We may set against each other no doubt 
 the saying of Leonardo, ' The more of bodily labour any art demands, 
 the less is it honourable ', and the words of Mr. Ruskin, ' All art is 
 athletic'. It is not difficult to interpret the balance of body and 
 mind — the fine adjustment and intense concentration — which taken 
 together they suggest. 
 
 The beauty of physical objects, we agree, is the experience which 
 they suggest to a human imagination. But where Croce argues at 
 length ^ that such beauty, because relative to variety of cases, is sub- 
 jective and unreal, we are confronted with the hoariest of fallacies. 
 If anything is certain in philosophy it is that an experience varying 
 relatively with the variation of conditions is an experience that 
 
 ^ Breviario, pp. GO-1. * Edetku, c. xiv. 
 
14 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BKITISH ACADEMY 
 
 indicates a reality. By such an argument, as we have seen, we shut 
 our souls against the world spirit, and refuse to submit to his 
 teaching. 
 
 Thus the ideal of pure singleness in expression and intuition has- 
 led us to the point that, because there is in beauty no content dis- 
 tinct from the expression, there is therefore in the whole expressed, 
 and in the total gamut of expressive forms, no life or spirit \vhose 
 character concentrates itself in their quality and shaping. We have 
 abandoned all regard for the respective affinities which fuse the 
 spirifs utterance Avith the se\eral splendours of sense-perception. 
 And we are now to see, further, how we lose all interest in the 
 ordered variations of the expressive quality itself — the subdivisions 
 of the beautiful and the transition which connects it with the ugly — 
 and the shapes and patterns of poetry which the various visions of 
 life have forged for themselves and are for ever forging anew. 
 
 An over-strained emphasis on the distinction, in principle obsolete, 
 between what is philosophical and what is empirical, will aways bring 
 us into peril of nominalism and particularism. And so we find it 
 here. 'Sublime' (and comic, tragie, humoristic, &c.) 'is all that 
 which has been or shall be so named^ by those who have employed or 
 who shall employ these words.' ^ These distinctions, that is to say, 
 are not philosophical. They are only what we find essential to 
 apprehending the special and characteristic values in which beautiful 
 expression arrays itself. So again : ' He who speaks of tragedies, 
 comedies, dramas, romances, genre paintings, battle pieces, landscapes, 
 sea pieces, poems, idylls, lyrics, and so forth — certainly says nothing 
 scientifically erroneous, because he is employing names and phrases, 
 not establishing definitions.' (The 'laws' of kinds of literature, 
 considered as rigid imperative rules, are his great hete noire, which 
 shows, as I noted above, that he is partly incensed by the prevalence 
 of traditions which have become unfamiliar to us.) These distinctions 
 he goes on to compare with the arrangement of books in bookcases 
 according to their format or publisher's series — a useful arrangement, 
 but without literary significance ! We will say a word upon each of 
 these classifications. 
 
 First it is to be noted that the doctrine of sheer simplicity in 
 expression destroys what a philosopher might call the dialectic of 
 expressiveness ; that is to say, the tendency of distinctions of quality 
 to arise through the presence of something which is felt as entering 
 into, breaking through, or breaking down, the unity of the imagina- 
 tive utterance. 
 
 ^ Croce's italics. * Estetica, p. 106. 
 
CROCK'S AESTHETIC 15 
 
 Thus the difference between the merely beautiful and the sublime 
 is for Croce no question of aesthetic, but a verbal and fallacious 
 distinction, arising from what he classes under the heresy of aesthetic 
 hedonism, namely the restriction of beauty as such to the sympathetic 
 or what is immediately pleasing. The beautiful being for him coex- 
 tensive with expression, and equated with the aesthetically excellent? 
 admits of no subdivision into more facile and more difficult types, 
 such as beauty par excellence, the sublime, the terrible^ and the 
 grotesque. And this extension of the term beauty to the whole 
 province of the aesthetically excellent is in harmony, I believe, with 
 the best artistic feeling, and if this were all that he maintained, 
 Croce's position, as is often the case with him in the advocacy of very 
 general truths, would be exceedingly strong. But when he denies all 
 aesthetic value to the distinction, within the general region of beauty, 
 between the simply beautiful and the sublime, he is influenced by the 
 ideal which destroys for him the dialectic of expression. There can 
 be little question that in some intuitions of beauty there is a felt or 
 threatened interruption to the perfectness of the harmony, such as 
 itself to be expressive of a presence which no vehicle of manifestation 
 can altogether contain.^ We cannot here go further into the theory 
 of the sublime, but it is easy to see that it is a variation of the 
 beautiful dependent on a negative^ factor in the. expression demanded 
 in some experiences by the spirit of the whole. 
 
 An analogous dialectic connects the beautiful with the ugly, and 
 here it is interesting to note how an imperfect recognition of the 
 particular mode in which the one is negative towards the other 
 introduces confusion into Croce's account of both. 
 
 The question about ugliness which stares a student of aesthetic in 
 the face is whether or no it is an aesthetic quality — whether it is to 
 beauty as evil to good, or merely a vacancy and an absence. /Croce 's 
 primary position is laid down thus : ' It is idle to speak, as does the 
 doctrine which confines beauty to the sympathetic, of ugliness in art. 
 For us there is no ugliness but the anti-aesthetic or the inexpressive, 
 which can never form part of the^aesthetic fact, being on the other 
 hand its contrary and antithesis."' ^[ Now it is difficult for a contrary 
 and antithesis not to be something of an invader ; it is not quite the 
 same as a contradictory and privation.>> And so we are not surprised 
 to find that where you have the spiritual fact of expression you have 
 a bipartition between the poles of the beautiful and the ugly,^ which, 
 thus, I take it, is after all held to be an aesthetic quality. And we 
 
 ^ e.g. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, p. 58. 
 2 Edetku, p. 104. ' lb., i)p. 112-13. 
 
 lA 
 
16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 further find that ugliness implies the presence of some element of 
 beauty ; for if no such element were present the ugly would lose the 
 self-contradictory quality which is its essence, and falling outside 
 the aesthetic frontier (so I understand the passage) would cease to be 
 ugly.^ A clearer case of ugliness and one which seems to us best to 
 elucidate its natui-e as an aggressive contrary within aesthetic terri- 
 tory — ' aesthetic ugliness ' Croce himself calls it — is that in which the 
 would-be artist has ' nothing of his own to express, but attempts to 
 cover his inward emptiness with a flux of words, with sonorous verse, 
 with deafening polyphony, with dazzling colour — all without meaning. 
 The ugly is the arbitrary, the charlatanesque — it is due to the inter- 
 vention of the practical will in the theoretic function, and without 
 this you might have absence"^ of beauty, but you could never have 
 anything effective which should merit the name of the ugly.' ^ You 
 create, that is, a something which both is and is not aesthetic. One 
 other case will complete the account. 'There are uglinesses and 
 beastlinesses {tnrpitudini) in the world, and as long as this is so 
 they will impose themselves on the artist and the correlative ex- 
 pressions will arise. But these expressions a true critic, in opposition 
 to the vulgar, will recognize as beautiful.' ^ It is clear that in these 
 various cases of the ugly, as in the sublime, and, we shall further see, 
 in comedy and tragedy, we are dealing with a connexion between 
 expression and something to be expressed. The cases can only be 
 brought into intelligible order if we recognize the conception of 
 conflicts and collisions within the life which takes shape in art, giving 
 rise, in the expressions which it creates, to intuitions in which conflict 
 is explicit but wholly reconciled, or announces itself through a hinted 
 restraint or check in the artistic structure, or dominates with its 
 falsehood the entire utterance, fashioning it into an involuntary cari- 
 cature — a tawdry imitation — of something which truly expressed 
 would have been great or strong. Some such relations as these 
 obviously subsist between the tragic along with other types of 
 difficult beauty, the sublime, and the ugliness which disguised as an 
 aesthetic quality, or entangled with one, invades the aesthetic 
 province. 
 
 And finally we may test the doctrine which expels from aesthetic 
 * philosophy the consideration of literary genera, by some reference to 
 the recent discussions of tragedy, comedy, and the distinction between 
 poetry and prose. 
 
 To begin with the latter. ' In fact,' Croce tells us, ' the two ex- 
 
 1 Estetieu, p. 93. * lb., p. 115. ' lb., p. 99. 
 
CROCKS AESTHETIC 17 
 
 pressions (poetry and prose) qua expressions, are of the same nature, 
 and they both have the same aesthetic value ; because, if the poet is 
 the lyrical singer (lirico) of his own feelings, the prose writer is no 
 less the lyrical singer (lirico) of his own, that is to say, a poet, 
 though it be with reference to feelings which arise in him from 
 the research and in the research of the idea (as opposed to the 
 intuition). There is no reason to concede the quality of poet to 
 the composer of a sonnet and to deny it to the composer of the 
 Mctaphysic, the Summa Theohgica, the Phenomenology of Mind,'' 
 or to Thucydides and Tacitus,^ &c. All this springs from the doctrine 
 we have noted throughout. Expression is individual and indivisible ; 
 there is nothing to observe of its correlation or adapted variation in 
 view of anything to be expressed. It would be an injustice to the 
 subject if we were here to reproduce imperfectly the study which one 
 of our finest critics devoted not long ago to the meaning of verse as 
 returning or repeating language, as opposed to the language of prose 
 which moves on Avithout any such return or repeat.^ ' The essence of 
 poetry is that it is patterned language.' It is the repeating and yet 
 continuous pattern in language which makes it technically poetry, and 
 its substantial and vital function is to make patterns out of life. 
 And with this mere reference we may leave the subject ; only pointing 
 out that here as everywhere to the philosophical critic the study of 
 expression in correlation with what is expressed is endlessly fruitful in 
 the revelation of organic and inherent variations, and a doctrine 
 which demands its rejection stands self-condemned. A word on the 
 ideas which emerge from' the consideration of Tragedy and Comedy 
 will lead us to a suggestive conclusion, bearing upon yet another 
 aspect of Croce's aesthetic conceptions. 
 
 Tragedy and comedy correspond to' a certain type of pattern which 
 art in their case finds in or weaves out of life. They work in a certain 
 medium, which is the stage, and their action is what can be acted. 
 They have in common a certain tension and concentration ; ' a problem, 
 we may say, is in each case set and solved.' These characters are 
 inherent and essential ; they spring from the relation of the art- 
 function to certain characters of life.^ Other modes of pattern-making 
 are possible ad infinitum, who can doubt it ? It is in contrast with 
 such another mode that in the study I am referring to these characters 
 are emphasized. But we repeat — relative variation is no proof of 
 arbitrariness ; to a philosophy that knows its business, it is the sure 
 indication of reality. 
 
 ^ Breviario, p. 93. * Mackail, Lectures on Poetry, pp. 12 ff. 
 
 ^ Miickailj op. vAi., p. 211. 
 
18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 About tragedy, where it differs from comedy, there is also much to 
 be said which has essential truth. \VJK're Aristotle and Hejjel have 
 given us of their best, and recent criticism has pursued the study on 
 the highest level, ^ it seems an impoverishment of life to argue that 
 in principle the distinction of these forms is valueless. 
 
 But there is an essential distinction between Comedy and Tragedy. 
 'When Dante (in speaking of the Divina Cornmed'ia) wrote Siihiectuvi 
 operis est homo, one can hardly doubt that he had in his mind, 
 consciously or sub-consciously, the famous line of the Terentian 
 comedy, the Homo sum, hiimani nihil a me aliemon puto of Chremes, 
 which is the complete and permanent motto of comedy itself.' 
 *Comedia\ the same writer quotes from John of Salisbury, 'est vita 
 hominis super terram,' and after further quotations he continues : 
 'The great truth upheld in, latent in, these fragmentary but illu- 
 minating sentences is that in the evolution of poetry, comedy tends 
 to displace tragedy, or tragedy to mei'ge in a higher and wider 
 Tragi-comedy. Only in that larger and wider scope can the ex- 
 pression of life be given, the pattern and interpretation of life be 
 found. All the more tense and exclusive forms of poetry gradually 
 translate themselves into a larger pattern and looser texture.''^ 
 
 And finally, we are to feel that in the Aeneid itself 'there is 
 a something which transcends art, properly so called,^ for the function 
 of art is to create and embody some image of perfection ; and the 
 image which Virgil finally sets before us is of imperfection ; the wist- 
 fulness, the haunting trouble of its poetry, is of its inmost quality.'' 
 ' That transcendence, that continued search further and further after 
 what cannot be found, that stretching out of the hands (to use his own 
 words rather than those of any later appreciation) in love of a further 
 shore, is not consistent with the requirements of a complete and 
 finished work of art.' 
 
 The evolution from tragedy in the direction of the larger and 
 looser texture which is characteristic of comedy in the widest sense, or 
 of romance; the transcendence of the limits of art just when the 
 summit appears to have been attained — who that is familiar with the 
 theory of Hegel will feil to recognize, in the finer and subtler design 
 of the critic of to-day, the impulse of transformation which the 
 philosopher's insight detected ? Here is what Hegel intended when 
 he portrayed the longdrawn dissolution or resolution of art, as it 
 passed Irom the age and habit of classical tradition to the freedom 
 
 ^ A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poctri/; Shakesperiun T raged ij. 
 
CROCKS AESTHETIC 19 
 
 and fullness, or the constant verge of self-transcendence, which belongs 
 to the modern artist. 
 
 As Mr. Mackail applies to the Shakespeare of the romantic plays 
 Virgil's crowning address to Dante, so we might apply it to the free 
 and modern artist as Hegel portrays him.^ And in Croce's mis- 
 conception which has fatally obscured for hiiYi Hegel's gi'eat work of 
 insight, and has reiteratedly impeached the profoundest student of 
 beauty with teaching as a truth and necessity that art's life has 
 reached its term, and the hour of its dissolution, which is its death, 
 has come,^ we see the reaction of the fatal pursuit of singleness, which 
 insists that to assign a meaning to expression is to turn it into bare 
 philosophy. 
 
 The truth is surely other. Schiller was right, and to love and look 
 at the appearance for its own sake, which is for the sake of its 
 meaning, is not a primitive gift, but perhaps man's most typical self- 
 conquest on the path to civilization. It is well to proclaim the unity 
 of beauty and the autonomy of the shaping imagination ; but it is not 
 well to disregard the fact which forms the glory of art, that in it 
 alone the body of man and of nature rushes to meet the soul in 
 a splendour which springs from both, and every pai*ticle of which is 
 charged with siunificance. 
 
 Bernard Bosanquet. 
 
 ^ Aesthetik, ii. 232. 
 
 "^ Croce, Scritti di storia letteraria, x. 306 and passim. The phrase ' death 
 of art', which Croce constantly cites as if verbatim from Hegel, does not, so far 
 as I know, occur iu his writings. It is, I presume, a mistranslation oi Avftosuug 
 der Kuitst, 
 
APPENDIX ON CROCKS CONCEPTION OF THE 'DEATH 
 OF ART^ IN HEGEL 
 
 Considerable interest attaches to the problem raised by a hostile 
 criticism of Hegel's aesthetic theory, which Croce repeats, so to 
 speak, at the top of his voice, throughout the whole range of his 
 writings. The statement has passed unchallenged in English critical 
 literature, although it concerns no mere question of technical 
 philosophy, but the appreciation of a whole aspect of beauty, in his 
 vision of which Hegel was right, and profound, and in harmony with 
 what our best recent critics have taught us. Here is the statement 
 in its fullest form.^ 
 
 ' (For Hegel) the artistic activity is distinguished from the philo- 
 sophical solely by its imperfection, solely because it grasps the 
 Absolute in sensible and immediate form, whereas philosophy grasps it 
 in the pure element of thought. Which implies, logically, that it is 
 not distinguished at all, and that art, for Hegel, reduces itself 
 substantially, whether he will or no, to a philosophical error, an 
 illusory philosophy. The true art, then, must be philosophy, which 
 re-proposes to itself the same problem on which the other [art] 
 labours in vain, and resolves it in a {)erl'ect manner. 
 
 That such is Hegel's genuine thought is proved by the fact that he 
 does not repudiate the extreme consequence of this theory ; when 
 philosophy is completely developed, art must disappear, as a super- 
 fluity ; art must die, and, moreover, is to-day stark dead {hella 
 e viorta). If it is an error, it is not necessary and eternal. The 
 history of art, as Hegel traces it, is directed to exhibit the progressive 
 dissolution of artistic form, which, in modern times, no longer 
 pertains to our true and profound interest ; it is a past, or a survival 
 of the past. This immense paradox illuminates HegePs aesthetic 
 error in all its detail ; and better perhaps than any other example, 
 ekicidates the error of the logical presupposition itself. It has been 
 said, in defence of Hegel, that the death of art, of which he speaks, is 
 that eternal dying which is an eternal rebirth ; as it is observed in 
 the spirit of man, when from poetry it makes a transition to philo- 
 sophy, from intuition exalts itself to the universal, and thereupon 
 the world of intuitions loses its visible hues. But contradicting this 
 intei-pretation there is the fact that Hegel speaks of a death oi art, 
 not perpetually renewing itself, but, strictly, as happening and 
 
 ^ Croce^ Saggio suUo Hvgel, p. 89. 
 
CROCE'S AESTHETIC 21 
 
 having happened ; of a death of art in the world of history. And 
 this is fully in agreement with his treatment of the grades of reality 
 as if they were a series of opposites,* infelicitously abstracted and 
 dissevered. Given this application which he made of the dialectic, 
 Hegel was left no choice but either to suppress art by that immense 
 paradox, or to preserve it by an inconsistency no less immense.'' ^ 
 
 This and many similar passages raise two questions, one of logical 
 necessity, one of historical judgement. I believe that it can be 
 shown briefly and finally that the author is wrong in his answer to 
 both. Hegel was under no logical necessity to infer the death of fine 
 art ; and in his historical judgement he affirmed not that, but some- 
 thing very different, which is still of interest. 
 
 1. Croce himself has formulated an unanswerable criticism on the 
 inference which he here asserts that Hegel is logically compelled to 
 draw. ' On the assumption that art is a necessary grade of the spirit, 
 to question whether art is eliminable would be neither more nor less 
 than like asking whether sensation or intelligence is eliminable.' 
 Now why does he launch this as a criticism against Hegel, instead of 
 advancing it as an interpretation of Hegel's view? The answer is 
 indicated in my quotation. It is because, in theory, Hegel treats the 
 phases of experience as degrees of completeness in the characterization 
 of reality, and because, in fact, as we shall see directly, Croce mis- 
 translates and misreads Hegel's historical judgement upon *the 
 dissolution of art '. The former point could only be explained with 
 completeness in a logical discussion.^ But the net result is this. 
 Croce thinks that if you treat the forms of experience as terms in 
 a logical progress towards perfection, you have committed yourself to 
 regard them as no more than logical abstractions, of which every 
 earlier is absorbed and included without remainder in every later 
 term. He seems unable to employ the conception of a system whose 
 members, just because each implies a logical progress to some other, 
 are constituent factors of it, as well as degrees of its perfection. 
 Croce's own * grades of the spirit' are not ' degrees of reality ', although 
 
 ^ ' Opposite ' concepts are for Croce such as ' true ' and ' false ' ; ' distinct ' 
 concepts are such as ' true ' and ' beautiful '. His technical criticism is that 
 Hegel treats the latter just like the former, and therefore as inadequate on one 
 side at least. Croce's own doctrine is difficult to reconcile with his account of 
 the stimulus to progress from phase to phase of the spirit. Breviaiio di Estetica, 
 p. 82. 
 
 ^ Compare Estetica, p. 70. 
 
 3 Estetica, p. 76. The passage is directed, I take it, against Hegel's and 
 kindred views, though his name is not tliere mentioned. 
 
 * tSee Mind, Octol)er, 1'J18, review of C^roce's logic. 
 
22 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 he makes use of this expression. They are successive and alternative 
 phases of spiritual activitity, and each contains in itself no logical 
 demand for advance or completion beyond itself and towards any 
 other. 
 
 Thus when Hegel exhibits fine art as continuous with religion, 
 which is its complement, and both of them together as experiences 
 which demand a fuller understanding in philosophy, and apart from 
 which philosophy would itself be incomplete, Croce holds himself 
 entitled to infer that when philosophy comes on the scene the other 
 two are taken to be ipso facto swallowed up and annulled, as the 
 Ptolemaic by the Newtonian astronomy. 
 
 But this whole reading of HegePs logical method is erroneous. 
 The phases of experience which reveal relative approximations to 
 completeness are not successive in time nor vanishing in logic. 
 Croce's own observation above cited shows the absurdity of trying to 
 take them so. As factors implying the whole system and implied in 
 it they are grades of the spirit in the fullest sense. The absolute is 
 the whole which they constitute, and if any of them were eliminated 
 would be the absolute no longer.^ If art finds its completion in 
 philosophy, then a philosophy lacking the peculiar experience of art 
 is an incomplete philosophy. One might as well argue that philosophy 
 must be taken to supersede and become a substitute for life or 
 being. 
 
 Thus the defence of HegePs view, to Avhich Croce refers in the 
 passage quoted above, has a sound logical basis, which in his version 
 is insufficiently explained. The terms of a logical progression whose 
 mainspring is the spirit of an immanent whole, must necessarily tend 
 each to pass beyond itself, into the more complete terms which 
 succeed it, while each nevertheless retains its being as in itself an 
 irreplaceable experience. Croce knows no immanent whole, no 
 systematic unity W'hich is the mainspring of a logical advance towards 
 the definition of an inclusive perfection. And therefore he can 
 understand no logical advance which does not supersede whatever 
 came before it. 
 
 2. On the question of HegePs de facto historical judgement the 
 evidence leaves no room for doubt. The points can be stated very 
 shortly. 
 
 (1) The phrase 'the death of art\ which Croce reiterates as if 
 a verbal quotation, does not occur in the sixteen hundred pages of 
 
 ' On tlie absolute as the inclusive whole of its stages, cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, 
 sect. 237. 
 
CROCKS AESTHETIC 23 
 
 HegePs Lectures on Aesthetic and I do not believe that it occurs 
 anywhere in his woi'ks. It probably represents a mistranslation of the 
 term ' Auflosung' encouraged by the logical misunderstanding eluci- 
 dated above. This word has a pregnant meaning of great interest, 
 Avhich we will examine below, 
 
 (2) The general relation of philosophy to life in Hegel's theory 
 excludes the possibility of an historical judgement which involves 
 a prediction, such as that of the non-persistence of art in human life. 
 All students are aware that for Hegel philosophy explains but does 
 not predict. It is needless to labour this point further. 
 
 It is. however, interesting to note that as a mere illustration Hegel 
 does at . one point permit himself to speak of the future of epic 
 poetry, and expresses the opinion that the necessary national contrast 
 for a great war epic of the future could only be found in the relations 
 between America and Europe, and not within the European complex 
 of peoples.^ It is plain that the disappearance of art from human 
 experience has never occurred to his mind. The same ridiculous 
 mistake is frequently made by neglect of the same principle, about 
 his view of the historical succession of peoples in the leadership of the 
 world. Philosophy for him deals with the past and present. He 
 actually mentions America as the country of the future, and as, being 
 so regarded, no subject for philosophy. ^ 
 
 (3) The citation of texts almost weakens an argument which 
 depends on the appreciation of a philosopher's entire attitude and 
 systematic convictions ; but so far as any expression can be decisive, 
 the following words, the authenticity of which there is no reason to 
 doubt, forming the close of the Introduction prefixed to his posthu- 
 mous Lectures on Aesthetic, appear to settle the question of his de 
 
 facto belief and opinion. ' What, therefore, the particular arts bring 
 into being in individual works of art are according to their notion 
 only the universal forms of the self-developing idea of beauty, as 
 whose external realization there is rising the immense Pantheon of 
 art, whose architect and director is the self-recognizing spirit of the 
 beautiful, but which to complete, the world-history will require its 
 evolution of millennia."' ^ 
 
 (4) And the question is set at rest finally and in detail, as it seems 
 to me, by the elaborate and most interesting discussion devoted by 
 Hegel to the function and position of ' the modern artist ', the artist 
 * of our own day V considered with reference to the situation which 
 existed after the period of ' romantic ' art had come to an end, and 
 
 * Aesthetik, iii. 355. '^ Philosophie der Geschkhte, pp. 107-8. 
 
 3 Aesth. i. 114. * Jb. ii. 233-5. 
 
M PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 therefore, after the final Auflosung of classical and romantic art, to 
 which as a rule, and not to art in general, he attaches the term 
 Auflosung.^ In a word, after all the AuHosung had taken place, art 
 and the artist survived in a new attitude and a new world. On the 
 main point at issue this is enough. But the interest of the question 
 will justify a brief examination of what Hegel meant by the 
 Auflosung or any similar term as applied to art or to any form of it ; 
 and what was this function and position which he recognized as that 
 of the 'modern artist \ the 'artist of our own day\ 
 
 (5) The word ' Auflosung ■", like the English word ' dissolution \ may 
 of course in certain contexts be equivalent to ' death '. But its 
 natural usage rather follows the suggestion of loosening a knot, as in 
 a tragic complication (denouement), resolving a contradiction or a dis- 
 sonance, solving a problem or difficulty, elucidating by analysis. In 
 Hegel we find it once at least in the Logic bearing such a meaning, 
 where the contradiction embodied in an infinite series is said to be 
 ' resolved ' into the end or terminus.^ Of course this does not imply 
 that the contradiction so resolved ceases to be experienced. It is used 
 in the extra-logical works in a sense akin to that of the familiar 
 logical verb ' aufheben ' or ' sich aufheben \ which expressly involves 
 the persistence ot the element so ' set aside \ And it is noticeable 
 that in a crucial passage of the Aesthetic lectures^ Hegel applies 
 the term 'sich aufhebt' (transcends itself) to the process which he 
 mostly describes as the Auflosung of art in some special form. What 
 Hegel means by the dissolution of art is the course of development 
 which transformed the art of classical Greece into the art of "Christian 
 Europe, and ultimately into the art of the world in the early nine- 
 teenth century. It divides itself primarily in his rubrics into the 
 dissolution of classical art and the classical ideal, and the dissolution 
 and the close of romantic art. But this matters little for the general 
 problem, since what he means by romantic art m* for him, in its 
 several stages, one and the same thing with the dissolution of classical 
 art, with its own dissolution, and with the dissolution of art as 
 such, in so far as he intended to speak of any such thing. 
 
 The meaning of the term is double, logical and aesthetic. Art is 
 being dissolved or set aside, as any logical form is dissolved or set 
 aside, which becomes by its inadequacy a source of contradiction 
 demanding resolution and explanation by larger points of view. 
 
 * On a rare example to the contrary see below. 
 ^ EncycL, sect. 242. Cf. Wins. d. Logik, p. 7. 
 ^ Aesth. ii. 138. 
 
 * lb. ii. 217, where this is very definitely stated. 
 
CROCE'S AESTHETIC 25 
 
 Undoubtedly the whole world of art, as addressing itself to sensuous 
 intuition, was in his eyes tending to become a spring of such contra- 
 diction and transcendence when compared with the full resources of 
 the human spirit in religion and philosophy. And art is within 
 itself in a parallel way being dissolved, resolved, or disintegrated 
 in abandoning the relative narrowness and fixity of early traditional 
 vision, and expanding from the relatively rigid and inherited basis of 
 Greek and of Christian art into nothing; less than the love and imairiua- 
 tive penetration of any and every feature by which man or the 
 world can touch in the region of sense man's own heart and mind. 
 This is ' Dissolution ', if we will have it so ; after all, it is Browning's 
 metaphor 
 
 That one face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 
 Or decomposes but to recompose. 
 
 Become my universe that feels and knows. 
 
 Necessarily in this 'resolution' a cha'ige has come about not only 
 within art, but in the relation of art to our whole experience. 'One 
 may hope that art will continue to ascend and to perfect itself; but 
 its form has ceased to be the highest demand of the spirit. How 
 excellent soever we find the Greek statues, however nobly and 
 perfectly we see portrayed God the Father, Christ, and Mary, it 
 makes no difference, our knees no longer bend.' ^ The observation is 
 surely a simple truism, and even of the most modern and most 
 comprehensive art it holds good in spirit. There are more things in 
 heaven and earth than are dreamed of even in beauty. The 'dis- 
 solution ' of art is both into an altered art, and also into an altered 
 status in life. 
 
 It is an obvious case of such transcendence and displacement, both 
 logical and aesthetic, when Hegel speaks definitely of comedy as 
 ' leading to the dissolution of art in general '.^ It is a truth akin to 
 that which recent criticism has recognized in agreement with Hegel 
 to the effect that 'in the evolution of poetry, comedy tends to 
 displace tragedy '.^ ' All the more tense and exclusive forms of 
 poetry gradually translate themselves into a larger pattern and 
 looser texture.' When ' Dante meant to include everything in his 
 poem ', he called it a Comedy. And to include everything would be 
 to transcend the limits of art. There is always a Avorld which art 
 cannot include. So even with the Aeneid; there is in it, the same 
 critic has pointed outs'* a transmutation and spiritualization of poetry 
 
 1 Aesth. i. 132. ^ lb. iii. 580. 
 
 ' Mackail^ Lectures on roctry, pp. 176-7. * lb., p. 90. 
 
26 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 which transcends art properly so called, 'a continued search further 
 and further after what cannot be found \ 
 
 But that art, like every experience, has in it the spirit which leads 
 it at a certain point to pass beyond itself, tells no more, as we saw, 
 against its persistent vitality than the same characteristic tells against 
 the vitality of sensation or of science. 
 
 The whole 143 pages ' of HegePs Aesthetic lectures which deal 
 with the Auflosung of the special art-forms and of art bear out the 
 above account, which is a very brief and unworthy summary of them. 
 The Auflosung, the dissolution or resolution, goes hand in hand, for 
 example, wqth the Versohnung^ — the reconciliation or union of inward 
 feeling and the complex actual world, with the Aufschliessung ^ — 
 the unfolding or self-manifestation of the divine, and the infinite 
 Erweiterung^ — expansion of the range of art, obtained by a correlative 
 concentration in the focus of the human soul. 
 
 (6) Enough has really been said. But a word mav be added on the 
 decisive climax, which comes in Hegel's explicit attitude to the 
 modern artist, the artist of his own day, whom he regards as living 
 and working after the Auflosung of art in general has fully come into 
 play. Here one or two quotations will be in place and will suffice. 
 
 'In contrast with the time in which the artist, owing to his 
 nationality and his age, stands essentially within a definite view of 
 the world and type of artistic production, w^e now find an absolutely 
 opposite standpoint, which in its complete development has become 
 important only in the most recent period. In our day, among almost 
 all nations, reflective culture and the critical spirit, and with us 
 Germans freedom of thought, have extended their domination to the 
 artists themselves, and have made them so to speak a tabula rasa with 
 regard to the matter and form of their production, after ^ even the 
 inevitable particular stages of the romantic form of art have been 
 traversed. For the artist of to-day it is a feature of the past to be 
 bound to a particular content and a mode of representation appropriate 
 to it, and art has become a free instrument by the fact that it can 
 operate in accordance with its subjective ability in relation to any 
 content of whatsoever kind. Hence the artist stands above the 
 determinate traditional forms and shapes, and moves freely in his own 
 mind, independently of the content and mode of intuition in which 
 consciousness in former ages envisaged the holy and the eternal.' ^ 
 
 » Aesth. ii. 100-243. '^ lb , p. 118: 
 
 3 lb., p. 123. * Jb., p. 281. * My italics. 
 
 ' lb. , p. 232. 
 
CROCKS AESTHETIC 27 
 
 * In this latter form of art (the romantic) as in those before it, the 
 divine was essentially and definitely the object of art. But this 
 divine element had to take objective shape, to particularize itself, and 
 thereby to advance out of itself into the secular import of subjectivity. 
 To begin with' (asHegel has described) 'the infinite value of personality 
 lay in honour, love, and loyalty, then in the peculiar individuality, 
 the determinate character, which fused itself with the special sub- 
 stance of a man's existence. The amalgamation with such a specific 
 limitation of content was finally set aside again by humour, which had 
 the power of rendering unstable and resolving every specification, and 
 thus caused art to transcend itself. Yet in this self-transcendence, it 
 is none the less a withdrawal of man into himself, a descent into his 
 own breast, whereby art strips off from itself every rigid limitation to 
 a definite sphere of content and of apprehension, and adopts as its 
 modern saint the human man,^ with the deeps and heights of the 
 human heart as such, with universal humanity in its joys and griefs, 
 its aspirations, acts, and destinies. Hereby the artist receives his 
 content within himself, and is one with the human mind as it actually 
 specifies itself, as it contemplates, creates, and expresses the infinity 
 of its feelings and situations, the mind to which nothing now is alien, 
 which can live in the human breast. This is a subject-matter which 
 is no longer essentially and definitely determined as artistic,^ but 
 surrenders the choice of content and of creative shaping to original 
 invention, but yet excludes no particular source of interest. For art 
 no longer needs only to represent that which is absolutely at home 
 in some one of its particularized stages, but has everything open to it 
 which man in general has capacity to make his own.' ^ 
 
 ' ^ The artist need feel no special necessity, with a view to his work, 
 of settling his own conviction and caring for his own salvation ; his 
 great and free soul must, fundamentally, and before he enters upon 
 production, know and possess the basis on which it is to stand, and be 
 sure and confident within itself; and more particularly the great 
 artist of to-day ^ is in need of the free development of mind, in which 
 all superstition and belief such as is permanently limited by deter- 
 
 * ' den humanus \ a reference probably to the famous line, ' Homo sum, 
 humani nihil a me alieuum puto'. See five lines below. 
 
 ''i.e. We do not now say ' these and these subjects are the subjects of art ; 
 those and those are not '. 
 
 ^ Aesth. ii. 204-5. This passage, besides indicating Hegel's view of modern 
 art, is a brief epitome of the Auf losung and self-transcendence of art, setting in 
 relation its positive and negative sides. 
 
 ^ Aesth. ii. 'l'^^. ^ heutige : cf. p. 234, Der moderne Kunstler. 
 
28 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
 
 minate forms of intuition and representation, are set aside as mere parts 
 and aspects, over which the free mind has made itself sovereign. For 
 he sees in them no consecrated conditions of his exposition and imagina- 
 tive shaping, but assigns value to them only in virtue of the higher 
 import with which, in his re-creation of them, he endows them as 
 their true belonging.' 
 
 In a word, art, after passing through phases determined by the 
 conditions of relatively early mind, has achieved its freedom, as 
 thought after a similar apprenticeship has achieved its own.^ What 
 the necessary evolution of the art-forms, in Hegel's view, here says 
 to the modern artist, inasmuch as the dissolution of art was con- 
 currently its liberation, is in the tone of what Virgil said to Dante : ^ 
 
 Tratto t' ho qui con ingegno e con arte, 
 I^o tuo piacere omai prendi per duce : 
 F'uor sei delF erte vie, fuor sei delP arte. 
 
 Non aspettar mio dir piu, ne mio cenno. 
 Libero, dritto e sano e tuo arbitrio, 
 E fallo fora non fare a suo senno : 
 
 Perch' io te sopra te corono e mitrio. 
 
 This I hold to be the truth about ' the death of art ' in Heirel. 
 
 ^ See the Phenomenology of Mind. 
 
 * Mackailj op. cit. , p. 218. This application of Dante's lines, analogous to 
 that made hy Mr. Mackail in speaking of Shakespeare's romantic plays, suggested 
 itself to the writer, he believes, independently. 
 
GENERAL LIBRARY 
 ' TALTFORNIA 
 
 14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 RENEWALS ONLY— TEL. NO. 642-3405 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 fgPB 2^ 19^^ ^A CjB.ft»e 16 T7. 
 
 F^ECEJVEO 
 
 NOV 6 1984 
 
 m 1 h '69 
 
 Prin 
 
 ^<^'-' DCP 
 
 ^^^-H RECEIVFr> 
 
 JUL 7 1971 7 
 
 AUG 14 1977 
 
 -N0V — ^^m^ 
 
 ^ CIRCULATIQ N-D£^ 
 
 h 
 
 o 
 
 LD 21A-38m-5,'6{ 
 (.J401slO)476B 
 
 
 tr 
 
 o 
 
 ^ 
 
 General Library 
 
 Jniversity of California 
 
 Berkeley