When we consider these paradoxes we understand why the generations that came after Croce were fascinated by alternative theories: by Pareyson’s appeal to the fundamental importance of the materials in the genesis of a work of art, by Anceschi’s concern for the artist’s poetics, by Dorfles and Formaggio’s emphasis on artistic techniques, by Morpurgo Tagliabue’s return to the hoary concepts of style and rhetorical apparatus, by Della Volpe’s insistence on the “rational” moment in the artistic process, not to mention the liberation that came with reading Dewey’s Art as Experience, in which the fullness of naturalistic empiricism is revalued. The question was what was the place of “the philosophy of the four words” (the polemical characterization is Gentile’s) within that vital flux to which Croce was after all so attentive.3 How to do justice to Croce himself, in whom there was constantly “a hiatus, as it were, a hidden conflict between his extremely detailed analysis of vast sectors of human experience and culture, and his ‘system.’… On the one hand, part and parcel of the precise discussion of cultural data and experience, we find ‘concepts,’ extremely ‘impure’ if you will, but precious if we are to understand, in other words, connect and clarify, the multiple forms taken by human action and history. On the other, a few extremely abstract ideas, whose development is affirmed rather than demonstrated” (Garin 1966: 2:1315).
6. Perhaps, however, it is the unresolved persistence of this gap that accounts for the influence Croce’s works have enjoyed: readers grasped the abstractness of the few ideas, but they were attracted to them because they saw them as the logical conclusion of the concrete analysis, admirable for its common sense, clarity, and penetration. In the hotchpotch the readers recognized both the embarrassments of their own personal experience and their longing for an uncontaminated idea of beauty, truth, goodness, and the useful itself—values that all the metaphysical systems so abhorred by Croce had defined in their hyperuranic spiritual nature, without descending to compromise with that corporality that is mere envelope, mortal coil, the prison of the soul. In Croce they saw both the confirmation of the inevitable and the promise of the desirable, interpreting as systematic mediation what was instead an unresolved contradiction.
These readers were delighted to be told that art was fundamentally what they were hoping it was, and non-art what they—perturbed and disturbed—could witness all around them. What exactly pure forms were they did not know, but they were quick to embrace a judgment of taste such as that on Proust: “one feels that what is dominant in the author’s soul is a rather perverse sensual eroticism, an eroticism that already permeates his eagerness to relive the sensations of a distant past. But this state of mind does not achieve clarity in a lyric motif or a poetic form, as occurs instead in the better works of the less complicated but more inspired Maupassant” (“Postille” to La poesia). Of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, Croce asserts “the critics stubbornly continue to analyze and discuss it as an inspired and poetically successful novel,” whereas all it is “from one end to the other, is a novel of moral exhortation, measured and conducted with a firm eye” (La poesia, VII). And, if I may be forgiven the invidious comparison (the two texts after all display certain similarities), when in 1937, one year after the appearance of La poesia, a much lesser writer attempted to justify his Philistine parody of Manzoni, after praising the author’s workmanship in I promessi sposi (“ah! what a genius he was!”), he adduced the following alibi for the sacrilege he was about to commit: “The truth is this: that in Manzoni the only thing missing is the poet.… Is there a single episode, a character, a personage that remains impressed on my mind with the same ever purer and more glittering clarity that characterizes the immortal creations of art? Well, if I must be sincere, I have to reply in the negative” (Da Verona 1937: viii–xiii).
The thought occurs to us that, instead of Croce creating a readership of Croceans, a readership that already existed, with its own myths and its own unshakable uncertainties regarding the good and the beautiful, adopted him as their spokesperson.
For this readership (and for our good fortune) Croce was then obliged (in La poesia) to open up a no man’s land (no man’s and everyman’s), where hotchpotch and purity could live together in peace and reconciliation, a space he called literature. To this space Croce could allocate the entertainments composed by the likes of Dumas and Poe, whom he basically enjoyed, as well as the works of authors he did not relish, like Horace and Manzoni. “Literature” is not a spiritual form, it is a part of civility and good manners, it is the realm of prose and civil conversation.
And this is the region from Croce writes. Why are Croce’s readers not aware of the unresolved contradiction, why do they see a well-knit system where things were falling apart? Because Croce is a masterly writer. The rhythm, the subtle dosage of sarcasm and pacific reflection, the perfection of his periodic sentences, make everything he thinks or says persuasive. When he says something, he says it so well, that, being said so well, it is unthinkable that it shouldn’t also be true. Croce, the great master of oratory and style, succeeds in convincing us of the existence of Poetry (incorporeal and angelified as he understands it) through a corporeal, courtly, harmonious example of Literature.4
A reworking of a book review, written for La rivista dei libri in October 1991, of the new edition of Croce’s Estetica published in 1990 by Adelphi. The essay was republished in Eco (1997) with the title “Croce e l’intuizione” (but it was not included in the English translation of that work, Kant and the Platypus [Eco 2000]). [Translator’s note: Page references to Croce’s Estetica in this chapter are to the English translation by Colin Lyas (Croce 1992).]
1. The work was first published by Sandron in 1902 (when Croce was thirty-five years old) and represented the point of arrival of a study begun in 1898. After an initial reprint by Sandron in 1904, subsequent editions were published by Laterza, with the ninth edition—the last in the author’s lifetime—appearing in 1950. For three of these reprintings, Croce wrote new prefaces (dated November 1907, September 1921, and January 1941) pointing out corrections that he had made in the text (see Maggi 1989) to bring it into line with the subsequent development of his thought (his Logica, Filosofia della pratica, Teoria e storia della storiografia, and, naturally, his Breviario d’estetica, Aesthetica in nuce, Problemi di estetica, Nuovi saggi di estetica, and La poesia). Since the author did not make any changes after the 1941 edition, we must presume that he still considered it current at mid-century. The 1941 ne varietur is the text reprinted by Adelphi and discussed in what follows.