Dr. Bosanquet describes the Crocean view quite fairly. “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 æsthetic phase of the spirit, and consists merely of 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 and the music are by themselves neither art nor beauty nor intuition-expression.”
But when Dr. Bosanquet goes on to make his inferences, I suggest that he infers too much. “Thus,” he says, “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.... There is nothing to be learned from the practical means by help of which intuitions of beauty receive permanence and communicability.” “Wholly foreign” and “nothing to be learned” are, I think, too strong. Though the practical means are distinct from art, they are part of the artist’s experience. The artist is not working in vacuo. He is a certain man, with a certain nature and experience, at a certain moment of time. His joy, say, in handling and modelling clay (I take this example from an old lecture of Dr. Bosanquet’s) will be one of the factors in his experience. In that sense it will not be “wholly foreign” to his art, and he will have “learned” something from it. It is not itself the art-impulse, the expressive activity, but it is, what Croce calls it, a point d’appui for a new one.
For let us hear what Croce himself says on this point (“Estetica,” Ch. XIII.). “To the explanation of physical beauty as a mere aid for the reproduction of internal beauty, or expression, it might be objected, that the artist creates his expressions in the act of painting or carving, writing or composing; and that therefore physical beauty, instead of following, sometimes precedes æsthetic beauty. This would be a very superficial way of understanding the procedure of the artist, who, in reality, makes no stroke of the brush without having first seen it in his imagination; and, if he has not yet seen it, will make it, not to externalize his expression (which at that moment does not exist), but as it were on trial and to have a mere point d’appui for further meditation and internal concentration. The physical point d’appui is not physical beauty, instrument of reproduction, but a means that might be called pedagogic, like retiring to solitude or the many other expedients, often queer enough, adopted by artists and men of science and varying according to their various idiosyncrasies.” Can we not put it more generally and say that the artist’s historic situation is changing at every moment and his experience with his medium is part of that situation (just as is the date of his birth, his country, or the state of his digestion), or in other words, one of the influences that make him what he is and not some one else? But to admit that, it seems to me, is not at all to deny the independence of his spiritual activity in expression any more than the freedom of the will is denied by the admission that will must always be exercised in a definite historical situation.
What Dr. Bosanquet cannot abide is Croce’s great principle that in æsthetic philosophy there are no arts but only art. He says this “offers to destroy our medium of intercourse through the body and through natural objects.” Why “destroy”? Surely it is not a case of destruction but of removal; removal from the philosophy of art to that of practice. Croce is not quite so foolish as to offer to destroy things indestructible; he is only trying to put them in their place.
“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 completely 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.” Who denies anything so obvious? Certainly not Croce. What he denies, I take it, is that these considerations, however valuable in their right place, are proper to a philosophy of art. They are classifications and generalizations, he would say, and philosophy deals not with generalia but with universals. To say that art is one is not to say that Raphael and Mozart are one. There are no duplicates in human life and no two artists have the same activity of intuition-expression. You may classify them in all sorts of ways; those who express themselves in paint, those who express themselves in sounds, and so forth; or sub-classify them into landscapists, portraitists, etc., etc.; or sub-sub-classify them into “school” of Constable, “school” of Reynolds, etc., etc. But you are only getting further and further away from anything like a philosophy of art, and will have achieved at best a manual or history of technique. In a philosophic theory Dr. Bosanquet’s “affinities of the spirit” are a will-o’-the-wisp. Thereupon he says, crushingly, “if you insist on neglecting these affinities of the spirit, your theory remains abstract, and has no illuminating power.” Well, Croce’s theory is certainly “up there,” it inhabits the cold air of pure ideas; it will not be of the least practical use at the Academy Schools or the Royal College of Music; but when a philosopher like Dr. Bosanquet finds no illumination in a theory which unifies the arts, gives a comprehensible definition of beauty and, incidentally, constructs, to say the least of it, a plausible “cycle of reality,” I can but respectfully wonder.