This is Croce's great fault—that he tries to rid poetry of what he calls any suggestion of intellectualism.[146-A] He identifies the first rudimentary form of knowledge with intuition, he distinguishes the so-called first degree of the activity of the mind, the unreflecting, unreasoning emotion, from intellectual and perceptual knowledge, which involves concepts, so that his view of poetry is that of the art for art's sake school,—that poetry deals not with ideas but with intuitive feeling.
Now, feeling and thought are not separable. Feeling involves knowledge and instant reflection. The bereaved poet knows and reflects on many things at the very instant he is suffering the shock of his loss. His intellectual and perceptual faculties cannot be set apart from the psychical activity of his emotions. The authors of the greatest English elegies philosophized while bemoaning their loss. The moral, intellectual and logical faculties are at work along with the intuitive faculty, or immediate knowledge of feeling, in all great poets.
It is in his views on intuition that Croce reduces art to presentation of childish impressions or views, divested of judgment and reflection. He discourages reasoning and thinking on the part of the artist. He seeks only the first instant of the poet's emotions, though he admits that in real life sensations are followed by reflections and mental solutions. He thinks the purest artists are those who persist longest in that first moment of intuition, and are innocent and childish in their outlook.
Art is not, as Croce thinks, devoid of the character of conceptual knowledge. No, discrimination and judgment, distinction between reality and unreality, is an important part of the poet's work, and to say that it matters little what the poet thinks or says or concludes, that correct ideas, judgments, statements, are not to be sought from him, is to reduce him to the level of a babbling child. The ideality of poetry does not, as Croce thinks, disappear as soon as reflection and judgment enter, for these may be bathed in ecstasy. Croce's definition of imaginative literature excludes ideas, except as casually introduced, or as the utterances in accordance with the truth of the character portrayed. He levels literature to a primitive degree.
Croce seems to think that art is expression of only intuition, but is not expression of intellectual concepts which he claims belong to philosophy. He who did so much to clear away the artificial divisions reigning in the various arts, commits a greater error. He assigns one kind of expression—intuition—to one branch of human endeavor—art; and another kind of expression—true concepts—to another branch of human endeavor,—logic. Yet he admits that intuition and concepts are two moments in a single process. As a matter of fact, expressed concepts are also literature when emotionalized, and logic is poetry when combined with ecstasy.
Man cannot separate the two faculties, and we seldom have what Croce calls pure intuition, that is, knowledge free of concepts. Hence poetry scarcely deals with intuition in Croce's understanding of the term. Croce takes care to distinguish intuition from mere physical sensation, and from association. For him intuition is not unconscious memory but the first degree of the mind's activity which is expression. One fails to see why even
sensation may not be intuition and hence art; some of the world's best literature describes hunger. And to deny that intuition includes unconscious memory is to deprive it of its essential quality.
Croce lost sight of the importance of that phase of art which deals with the thinking man who feels, and he tried to bridge over the gap by asserting that what determined the difference of the intellectual and intuitive fact lay in the result, in the effects aimed at by their authors. Yet Virgil thought he was a poet in his Georgics but he gave us a book in farming instead. Plato sought to be a philosopher in his Banquet but he wrote a poem also.
Croce's conclusions lead to strange anomalies. His view that philosophical passages, that is, intellectual concepts occurring in a novel or play, become part of the intuition of the author, would mean that the most unecstatic concept transposed from, say Hegel, to a Shakespearean play, becomes intuition. The converse would also follow that a passage of Shakespeare incorporated in Hegel is no longer poetry.
One of the results of Croce's aesthetic views on intuition is to drive out of literary criticism the exercise of the intellect. He would have us judge a book by its own standards and merely seek to find if the author succeeded in doing what he intended. This view has been wrongly attributed also to Goethe and Carlyle. It is, however, Maupassant's view about the novel as he expounded it in his preface to Pierre and Jean. We cannot accept this view. We must ask why does the author intend what he does, and is he justified in his intentions? We must go back of his intentions and show him that his intellect and outlook are due to certain causes and we must state whether or not we agree with him, and why. An author