Irving Babbitt the Aestheticians

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cline and fall whose most characteristic symptom is the acceptance of “a kind of ugliness” as the highest artistic standard. A German critic, Gustav Ren6 Hocke, has recently devoted a very learned work to the artistic and literary parallels between the twentieth century and the period 1520- 1660, a historical context already familiar through T. S. Eliot’s favorable criticism of the Metaphysical Poets. Hocke’s own perspective, covering both art and literature, is European in general, and he is an ardent admirer of both the Baroque and Modern periods. His evaluations are therefore diametrically opposed to those of Croce. In order to do perfect justice to the Classical element in Croce’s writings (which Babbitt never did), one should fol- low above all the international discussion of the Baroque, where Croce emerges as the staunch upholder of Classical stand- ards. I11 For an elucidation of what has been said we may therefore turn to Croce’s studies of the Seicento. There were two tendencies at work in those days, says Croce [in 19111 : The first of them is the tendency we would call sensual and which in those days people called LLlascivious.’’ . . . The second tendency is the predilection for ingegnositci, for ‘Lconceit” and wit. . . . Of these two tendencies the first could be artistically fertile, the second not. When in a historical epoch every other sort of sentiment is weak and only sensuality remains vivid-sensuality in the sense of primal and almost animal passion-it is evident that this, and nothing else, constitutes the material for the poetry and art of the period. But did the Marinist poets express nothing but erotic states of mind?-they did, but without poetic inspiration. Croce quotes a few lines from Marino’s La bruna pastorella, where two lovers are looking at a volume of poetry and one of them says: Here is the table of contents, which accounts for the subjects, listed under headings. Let us skip the serious songs, with which he lauds the heroes, prays to the gods, and bemoans the trophies of death. Let us come to those more suave, in which in a sweet vein he expresses the charming and soft tender- nesses and delights of love. Croce comments: Without willing it or thinking of it, Marino here describes the method by which one should also read all the poets of the Seicento. Their poems are usually divided into amorous, elegiac, heroic, moral, religious and so on, but only the love songs really count. The rest are written in a mechanical or hypocritical way. Strings other than the sensual do not vibrate, or they merely vibrate weakly, in the poets of those days. If, as we have remarked, they write much on religion, there is very little feeling in it. . . . One rarely finds an expression of moral sentiment comparable in energy with the expression of sensual enjoyment. The Arcadian movement that supplanted Marinism in Italy was equally sterile, Croce goes on to say. And why? Because the sentiments expressed were still the same. “The frivolous habit of mind lived on, the weak religious and political faith, the superficial interest in philosophy.” Marinism, Croce concludes, rappresenta I‘assenza del sentimento etico; it was the absence of moral sentiment; that is what was wrong with it; and that is the reason why its poetry was bad. Croce is very ex- plicit on this point: Marinist poetry was Po2 Fall 1960
poor and bad, because what was expressed was mere sensuality and because moral sentiment was absent. Thus speaks Croce the Humanist, but how does it fit in with his aesthetic theories ? It is an art and a literature deprived of moral sentiment and therefore, under apparent luxuriance, very restricted and poor. When from the most splendid productions of this art one turns to a picture by Giotto or a terzina by Dante, one is aware of the whole difference. Let us enjoy this literature for what it is, he continues, and not claim too much for it. Would an Irving Babbitt or a Paul Elmer More have judged otherwise? The divergence between Croce the Human- ist and Croce the Romantic aesthete be- comes striking, if we now turn to what he says about Pallavicino, an important thinker of the period. Pallavicino wrote an early work on poetry in which he antici- pated Croce’s own aestheticism in a most remarkable way. Away with all talk about probability; the imagination must be free! Poetry consists of “primary apprehensions” that have nothing to do with truth or falsehood. The sole aim of poetic tales, says Pallavicino, is to adorn our understanding with imagery, that is to say, with sumptuous, novel, marvellous and splendid appear- ances. . . . See how the world thirsts for beautiful first apprehensions, although these are neither laden with science nor are vehicles of truth. But later Pallavicino grew dissatisfied with this view of poetry. This is just the lowest function of the imagination, he says, and poetry has the higher and more important task of giving us insight. In his Estetica Croce calls this a relapse into the pedagogic, moralist, and intellectualist theory that the young Pallavicino had so happily escaped from. He has not a word about a legitimate motive for Pallavicino’s change of mind. Of course Pallavicino could not expound the higher aim of poetry without falling in some degree into the error of intellectualism ; that much should be granted to Croce. Yet he was dissatisfied with Marinist poetry for pre- cisely the same reasons as is Croce himself. How, then, can Croce applaud the young Pallavicino and regret his supposed later back-sliding into error? The Classicism that supplanted Marinism in France was built upon that element of moral insight the absence of which in Italian poetry seems to Croce the cause of its weakness. The conclusions for aesthetic theory should be evident, although Croce -even in his later work-failed to draw them with full clarity. In his definitive work on the period, Storia della et2 baroc- ca in Ztalia (1929), he came as close to a thorough revision of his youthful amoral- ism as he would ever come: It [i.e., Baroque art] did not lack the force of expanding on the surface, but it lacked that of getting to the depths, because, although born out of a human impulse, it was not referred back to and regenerated in our complete hu- manity. For this reason it always re- tained something abstract in its apparent concreteness, something willed in its apparent spontaneity. A narrow poetry; and true poetry is never narrow. Baroque art, accordingly, is imperfect as expression, because it is not the expression of the whole man; art that expresses the whole man has moral profundity; narrow art is the expression of only a part of human nature. The difficulty of this view comes to the fore in what is said about (6 narrow art”: it is not “true art,” yet it is “art,” which is a contradiction in terms according to Crocean aesthetic theory. Croce is left floundering among inconsist- encies, because he is unwilling to give up Modern Age 403
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Irving Babbitt the Aestheticians

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