Better Not Say This to the Housemaid

Benedetto Croce thinks he has his job, she has hers:

Certamente, la verità corre per le strade, come l'esprit nel noto proverbio francese, o come la metafora "regina dei tropi", secondo i retori, che Montaigne ritrovava nel “babil” della sua “chambrière.” Ma la metafora della cameriera è la soluzione di un problema espressivo, proprio dei sentimenti che agitano in quel momento la cameriera;   e le ovvie affermazioni,  che di proposito o per incidenti tuttodì si ascoltano sulla natura dell'arte, sono soluzioni di problemi logici, quale si presentano a questo o quell'individuo che non fa professione di filosopho, e che pure come uomo è anche lui, in qualche misura, filosofo. E come la metafora della cameriera esprime di solito una breve e povera cerchia di sentimenti rispetto a quella del poeta, così l'ovvia  l'affermazione del non filosofo risolve un lieve problema rispetto a quello che si propone il filosofo.

That is:

Certainly, truth does walk the streets, like the esprit of the well known French proverb, or like metaphor, “queen of tropes” according to rhetoricians, which Montaigne discovered in the babble of his housemaid. But the metaphor used by the maid is the solution of a problem of expression proper to the feelings that affect the maid at that moment; and the obvious affirmations that by accident or intent one hears every day as to the nature of art, are solutions of logical problems, as they present themselves to this or that individual, who is not a philosopher by profession, and yet as man is also to some extent a philosopher. And as the maid’s metaphor usually expresses but a small and vulgar world of feeling compared with that of the poet, so the obvious affirmation of one who is not a philosopher solves a problem small by comparison with that which occupies the philosopher.

--Benedetto Croce, Breviary of Esthetics (1913)
(Douglas Ainslie, trans.)

This the text of a lecture first presented by Croce in 1912 at, of all places, the opening of Rice Institute in Houston, TX (i.e., 
Rice University).  Apparently it was widely used as a school exercise in Italy, though whether this is still true today, I cannot say.