Benedetto Croce was thirty-four years old in nineteen hundred: his
education (if it is possible to set a term to the education of
a philosopher) is therefore the work of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. A rapid examination of the intellectual conditions
of Italy during those years will help us to see that education in its
true light, that is, as a reaction to, rather than a fruit of, the
environment.
The Risorgimento, with its fifty years of wars and revolutions
coming close on the heels of the great Napoleonic upheaval, left
Italy materially and morally exhausted. After centuries of foreign
domination, of political and spiritual servitude, all the elements
of Italian culture had been gathered by the two generations of the
Risorgimento into a new culture, which was much more an instrument
of combat, for the conquest of unity and independence, considered as
the necessary premises of national life, than the best soil for the
spiritual growth of that life after the conquest. This new culture, in
the poets who had announced and formed it, Parini, Alfieri, Foscolo,
Leopardi, Manzoni, in its philosophers, Rosmini and Gioberti, and in
its prophet and apostle, Mazzini, had forms and spirits, the value and
meaning of which by far transcended the importance of its immediate
historical purpose; but through the difficulties and labors of the
practical effort, it reached the end of the period shorn of a good deal
of what was deepest, most beautiful, nearest to the universal, in it.
Italy in 1870 was very much like the sprinter who wins the race, but
collapses at the crossing of the line.
The culture of Italy had been for centuries oscillating between
the pursuit and discovery of certain universal values, which had
gradually become part of the common European culture (the Roman
idea, the Christian idea, the main principles, æsthetic and moral,
of the Renaissance), and the development of purely local, regional
characteristics. At the end of the Risorgimento, the links that had
kept Italian culture in constant contact with the rest of Europe were
broken, and on the other hand the local cultures found themselves,
as it were, lost and submerged in the new political readjustment,
threatened in their very existence by the new claim of loyalty advanced
by a literary and abstract national ideal. The duties of Italian
culture, clearer to us now than to the men who lived in the midst of
those events, were then, on one side, to re-establish the connection
between Italian and European culture, and this time more by learning
than by teaching--and on the other side to utilize the less particular
elements of the regional cultures as a foundation for a real and
concrete and diffused cultural life in the nation.
Thus Italy becomes, at the beginning of her new, unified existence,
little more than a province of European thought. She looks around
herself and she is compelled to take notice of what had happened beyond
her frontiers during the last two or three centuries. It is interesting
to compare the characteristics of the other great nations of Europe
as they appear to Italy during and after the Risorgimento. England,
who had been a symbol of political liberty, a source of political and
economic wisdom, reappears as a model of industrial development and
at the same time as the proclaimer of a new creed to the world, the
creed of evolution, which after having infused a fresh spirit in the
natural sciences with Darwin, seems to promise a new interpretation of
human life, a new organization of science and of social thought, with
Spencer. France, the mother of revolutions, the deliverer of the spirit
of man from the shackles of divine and earthly tyranny, remains, in
a vague and hazy fashion, through the many disappointments that her
policies give to her Italian lovers during all this period, the same
kind of inspiration that she has been ever since the Encyclopédie and
the Revolutions; but contributes to the new effort little more than her
veristic fiction, in which art itself is reduced to a handmaid of the
goddess of the hour, biological and social science.
Germany had saturated with the romantic atmosphere of her poetry the
passionate struggle of the times, and she had captured a little band
of thoughtful patriots, among whom we find Croce's uncle, Bertrando
Spaventa, with the fascination of her new metaphysics, in which they
found the fulfilment of all the promises of Italian thought in the
foregoing centuries; but after her victory over France, the same cause
that makes French influence less vigorous, makes also German influence
less deep and less inspiring. A Germany who has like Faust sold her
romantic and metaphysical soul, yields only a shadow of her great
historical and philosophical culture of the eighteenth and of the
first half of the nineteenth century, though a tremendously powerful
one, and such that for a long time it overawes the academic mind not
of Italy only, but of the whole continent. A narrow and materialistic
philology, under the name of historical method, becomes the heir to
the humanistic tradition, and substitutes itself for every native
impulse, even in fields in which Italian thought had been master for
centuries, as in that of law: where it mercilessly destroys, of the
ideologies of the Risorgimento, not only that which was arbitrary and
fanciful, and therefore destined to perish, but even that which through
the subsequent course of history was to prove vital and sound. The
Italian school of international law, the new conception of the Law of
Nations, for instance, which was the fruit of the Italian juridical
tradition during the experiences of the Risorgimento, and which is
the more or less consciously accepted foundation of all the doctrines
of international relations striving for realization in our times, in
no country and in no schools was so resolutely repudiated as in the
Italian universities. And it could not have been otherwise, since the
new philology was as static and deterministic a doctrine, only more
logically and rigorously so, as the evolutionary positivism which we
had learnt from England.
The faults of Italian culture during this period are therefore the
faults of the other European cultures which Italy had to assimilate:
at a time when Italy was most in need of cultural help from without,
she found that, for reasons infinitely complex and totally different
from those which had caused her own exhaustion, the other nations of
Europe were also spiritually exhausted. And yet it cannot be said that
from these very faults Italy did not draw some useful lessons. The
so-called historical method, which completely disregarded the great
forces of history, and made of the least significant historical datum
a _Ding an sich_ in which the mind of the scholar seemed to find its
ultimate object, proved in the end to be a salutary discipline as
against the facile and enthusiastic generalizations of the historians
of the Risorgimento. Positivism, however barbarous and uncouth in
itself, was a powerful weapon for the destruction of the last remnants
of a more or less mythological metaphysics, and in that sense it
afforded an example of intellectual honesty; and at the same time it
awakened the consciousness of the continuity of natural and spiritual
life, announcing, though in a hasty and imperfect synthesis, what
every philosophy of the future will have to be. And about the middle
of the period which we are now considering, the only real contribution
of Germany to European thought in the second half of the century
became known in Italy with the advent of Marxism, in which we found
a new conception of history, in so far adequate to the true spirit
and conditions of the times, as it afforded to blind social forces,
striving for political expression, an interpretation of their needs and
a rationalized programme of action.
The analogies between this general cultural atmosphere, and the present
conditions of the intellectual world in America, are, provided we
do not stress them too hard, so striking that I cannot refrain from
calling the attention of the reader to them. I believe this will help
him to apply a good many of Croce's criticisms and ideas to tendencies
and problems with which he is thoroughly familiar. The most recent
forms of American philosophy, pragmatism, instrumentalism, realism,
are indigenous elaborations of that same English positivism and
empiricism which was dominant in Italy a generation ago: the relations
between science and philosophy are seen in the same light in America
to-day as in Italy before the beginning of this century. And the two
most significant and far-reaching directions of research, social
psychology and psychoanalysis, branching out into every ramification
of social and moral and æsthetic thought, are based on assumptions,
and lead to results, very similar to those of the Spencerian sociology
and of the Lombrosian theory of insanity and genius. Even in fiction
America is to-day trying her hand at verism, and in poetry, apart
from a few marked exceptions, she is experimenting in the same spirit
in which we began to follow, about the end of the period, the most
recent fashions of Paris in verslibrism and decadentism. In academic
circles German philology has maintained its sway for a much longer
time than in Europe, and the war has brought about more an emotional
than an intellectual consciousness of the need of a vaster and deeper
understanding of history. Finally, certain aspirations towards ancient
and totally different systems of moral and æsthetic standards, embraced
with an enthusiasm that is akin to an act of faith--the hope to
discover a refuge and a consolation from the chaos of modernity in a
restoration of classical or mediæval ideals--are American varieties
of an attitude of mind which found its satisfaction in Italy in
patterns which we drew after the models of Ruskinism and of French
traditionalism.
On the whole, Italian culture was suffering from the effects of the
same delusion which accounts for the straits in which American culture
is to-day: that European culture could be assimilated through its
representatives at one particular moment only, and as if it were at
the surface of time, rather than by the only legitimate and fruitful
method, which is that of delving beneath that surface for the truly
fundamental contributions that each nation has made to the common
mind. Not one of the nations of Europe was then, or is now, at one of
those turning points in the history of culture in which principles of
universal value are elaborated within the limits of a single national
group. The only possible exception was that of Russia, sending out to
an age-worn Europe a fresh message of human pity and Christian love in
a succession of epic masterpieces; but the quality of the message was
such as to affect the heart much more than the intellect, to produce a
new and deeper feeling rather than a sounder knowledge.
Two great individual figures, however, dominate the whole period, and
among so many contrasting currents of thought and feeling, among the
fluctuating fashions of the times, connect the new generations with
the traditional elements of Italian culture. That breadth of vision,
that sense of the perspective of history, which was totally lacking in
the prevailing cosmopolitan thought, was a conspicuous characteristic
of the work of a great critic, Francesco de Sanctis, and of a great
poet, Giosuè Carducci. And what made the secret of the strength of
the one as well as of the other, was their fidelity to the regional
traditions from which they were issued, coupled with a power to invest
them with a much broader significance than they had ever possessed.
With De Sanctis, the speculative trend of the Southern Italian mind,
with Carducci the humanism of Florence and Tuscany, for the first time
in history become real elements of a greater national consciousness.
Neither the one nor the other was, moreover, without a knowledge of,
and a taste for, foreign cultures; but what they gained from these
were elements of more permanent value than the ones which attracted
the attention of the crowds, and they both succeeded in grafting those
foreign elements on their native dispositions in such a way and with
so little violence that they seemed to belong rightfully to them. This
is true of what De Sanctis learnt from the idealistic philosophers
of Germany, and particularly from Hegel, as well as of what Carducci
acquired from the great poets and historians of the two previous
generations in France, in England, and in Germany. Nor should we marvel
at this, since by going deep enough or high enough into any of the
European cultures, it is always possible to find a level that is common
to all of them.
Francesco de Sanctis was not a philosopher in the strict meaning
of the word; yet, among all the European critics of the nineteenth
century, he is the only one from whose works it is possible to derive
a consistent line of æsthetical thought. His education had been partly
philosophical, of old Italian and modern German philosophy; and partly
grammatical and rhetorical, in those literary doctrines of the old
school which embodied a secular experience, and in comparison with
which the modern _science_ of literature is ineffably shallow and
puerile. It was through a philosophical elaboration of those doctrines,
and through a criticism of the intellectualistic æsthetics of Hegel
and his followers, for whom art was the sensuous clothing of the
concept, that De Sanctis, guided by an unerring taste and by a unique
power for discerning the essential and vital element in poetry, came
to his conception of form as not an _a priori,_ a thing by itself and
different from the content, but something that is generated by the
content itself when active in the mind of the artist. This is the
principle which he had constantly in mind in approaching the concrete
works of poetry, and which enabled him to analyze and reproduce the
terms of the spiritual experiences of which they are an expression.
Thus his _Essays_ and his _History of Italian Literature,_ though
in a sense the purest and most genuine kind of literary criticism,
are at the same time a complete spiritual history of a people, as it
reveals itself in its literary manifestations, such as no other country
possesses. The immediate influence of his work was not as great as it
ought to have been: the generation of philologists who immediately
followed him was unable to see in him more than a brilliant exponent of
what was then contemptuously called æsthetic criticism, and could never
forgive him for his apparent lack of method, due to the circumstances
of his life as an exile and a politician. It was only unwittingly, and
through the intermediary of a German disciple of De Sanctis, Gaspary,
who wrote a standard handbook of Italian literature, that they came to
accept the greatest part of his interpretations, and followed the main
directions of his thought in their own researches.
Giosuè Carducci was a disciple of Parini and Alfieri, of Foscolo
and Leopardi, and in a sense of all that lineage of Italian poets,
beginning with Dante and Petrarch, for whom poetry was not less an
arduous discipline for the attainment of a certain standard of formal
beauty, set down once and forever by the poets of the classical
tradition, than a moral and political function in the life of the
nation. As his predecessors had been, he was not only a poet, but
also a student and historian of literature, of literature as the
only field in which that life had truly realized itself. But though
his contributions to the study of Italian literature were many and
important, and the knowledge and taste which were the instruments of
his art made of him an exquisite critic of poetry, yet what even in
his historical and critical prose attracts us most is his lyrical
imagination, his poetry. And his poetry, on the other hand, is mainly
the poetry of the history and of the historical and poetical landscape
of Italy,--of an Italy which was to him not merely one among the
nations of Europe, but the heir of Greece and of Rome, the cradle of
western civilization; not a land and a community limited in space
and in time, or not that only, but an ideal of beauty, of freedom,
of right, of a full and harmonious life, which was Italian, as it
had been Greek and Roman, because it was universally human. In his
early works, the contrast between this ideal and the actual conditions
of Italy in his times found expression in a strain of invective
and satire, from which the poet lifted but rarely his soul to the
contemplation of the great deeds and thoughts of the past; of a past
which in some cases was very recent, as some of the men of the French
Revolution and of the Risorgimento were among his favourite heroes.
But later, and especially in his _Odi Barbare,_ for which he adapted a
new technique from the metres of ancient Greece, while he added many
personal notes to his lyre, his historical inspiration became higher
and deeper and purer, and Italy had in his poetry that which she had
lacked in all the course of her literature, a true _epos,_ though in a
lyrical form, of her secular life, from the fabulous kings and priests
of Etruria to that most legendary of all her heroes, Garibaldi.
The influence of Carducci, not a purely literary, but a moral and
political one, on the generation to which Croce belongs, can hardly be
overestimated; and Croce himself calls his own generation _carducciana_
And the two other great poets that Italy has produced after him,
D'Annunzio and Pascoli, were both disciples of Carducci at the
beginning of their careers. But the formation of their personalities,
so widely divergent in their later developments, is contemporaneous
with what we have called the education of Croce, and therefore outside
the scope of this rapid review of the circumstances under which that
education took place. The growth of the erotic-heroic poetry of
D'Annunzio and that of the idyllic-humanitarian poetry of Pascoli are
no longer among those circumstances but rather products of the same
environment.