Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General LinguisticCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic
Croce, Benedetto
Aesthetics; Language and languages -- Philosophy; Philosophy
The words "imagination" and "fancy" were also passed through the
crucible in this century. We find the Cardinal Sforza-Pallavicino (1644)
blaming those who look for truth or falsehood, for the verisimilar or
for historical truth, in poetry. Poetry, he holds, has to do with the
primary apprehensions, which give neither truth nor falsehood. Thus the
fancy takes the place of the verisimilar of certain students of
Aristotle. The Cardinal continues his eloquence with the clinching
remark that if the intention of poetry were to be believed true, then
its real end would be falsehood, which is absolutely condemned by the
law of nature and by God. The sole object of poetic fables is, he says,
to adorn our intellect with sumptuous, new, marvellous, and splendid
imaginings, and so great has been the benefits accruing from this to the
human race, that poets have been rewarded with a glory superior to any
other, and their names have been crowned with divine honours. This, he
says in his treatise, _Del Bene_, has been the just reward of poets,
albeit they have not been bearers of knowledge, nor have they manifested
truth.
This throwing of the bridle on the neck of Pegasus seemed to Muratori
sixty years later to be altogether too risky a proceeding--although
advocated by a Prince of the Church! He reinserts the bit of the
verisimilar, though he talks with admiration of the fancy, that
"inferior apprehensive" faculty, which is content to "represent" things,
without seeking to know if they be true or false, a task which it leaves
to the "superior apprehensive" faculty of the intellect. The severe
Gravina, too, finds his heart touched by the beauty of poetry, when he
calls it "a witch, but wholesome."
As early as 1578, Huarte had maintained that eloquence is the work of
the imagination, not of the intellect; in England, Bacon (1605)
attributed knowledge to the intellect, history to memory, and poetry to
the imagination or fancy; Hobbes described the manifestations of the
latter; and Addison devoted several numbers of the _Spectator_ to the
analysis of "the pleasures of the imagination."
During the same period, the division between those who are accustomed "à
juger par le sentiment" and those who "raisonnent par les principes"
became marked in France, Du Bos (1719) is an interesting example of the
upholder of the feelings as regards the production of art. Indeed, there
is in his view no other criterion, and the feeling for art is a sixth
sense, against which intellectual argument is useless. This French
school of thought found a reflex in England with the position assigned
there to emotion in artistic work. But the confusion of such words as
imagination, taste, feeling, wit, shows that at this time there was a
suspicion that these words were all applicable to the same fact.
Alexander Pope thus distinguished wit and judgment:
For wit and judgment often are at strife,
Though meant each other's aid like man and wife.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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