Italy in the critical work of Francesco de Sanctis, who held private
classes in literature at Naples from 1838 to 1848, taught at Turin and
Zürich from 1852 to 1860 and in 1870 became professor in the University
of Naples. He expressed his doctrines in critical essays, in monographs
on Italian writers and in his classic _History of Italian Literature._
Receiving his first elements of old Italian culture in Puoti's
school, his natural bent! towards speculation led him to investigate
grammatical and rhetorical doctrines with the view of reducing them
to a system; but he soon began to criticize and to grow out of this
phase. He pronounced Fortunio, Alunno, Accarisio and Corso "empirics";
he had a slightly better opinion of Bembo, Varchi, Castelvetro and
Salviati, who introduced "method" into grammar, a process completed
subsequently by Buonmattei, Corticelli and Bartoli; and he proclaimed
Francisco Sanchez, author of the _Minerva,_ "the Descartes of
grammarians." From these his admiration spread to the French writers of
the eighteenth century and the philosophical grammars of; Du Marsais,
Beauzée, Condillac and Gérard; following in their wake and pursuing the
ideal of Leibniz, he conceived a "logical grammar"; in this effort,
however, he soon began to recognize the impossibility of reducing the
differences of languages to fixed logical principles., If he found
the French theorists admirable in their ability to reconstitute the
simple and primitive forms; from "I love" to "I am loving," something
disquieted him; "Such decomposition of 'I love' into 'I am loving'"
(said he) "deadens the word by depriving it of the movement proceeding
from active will."[1] In the same way he read and criticized the
writers of treatises on Rhetoric and Poetics from sixteenth-century
men such as Castelvetro and Torquato Tasso (whom he dared to describe
as an "indifferent critic," to the great scandal of Neapolitan men
of letters) to Muratori and Gravina, "more acute than accurate"; and
eighteenth-century Italians, Bettinelli, Algarotti and Cesarotti.
Coldly rational rules found no favour with him: he urged the young to
confront literary works boldly and freely absorb impressions, the only
possible foundation for taste.[2]
[Sidenote: _Influence of Hegelism._]
Philosophical study had not been abandoned and had not even fallen
into entire decadence in Southern Italy; in these days of renewed
interest in philosophy the theories on Beauty from over the Alps and
the new ideas of Gioberti and other Italians[3] aroused enthusiastic
discussion. Vico was read again, and Bénard's French translation of
Hegel's _Æsthetic_ appeared and was canvassed in Naples volume by
volume (the first in 1840, the second in 1843, and the rest between
1848 and 1852). In its desire for new intellectual food Italian youth
set itself to learn German: De Sanctis himself had to translate the
greater _Logic_ of Hegel and Rosenkranz's _History of Literature_
in the dungeon of the Bourbon prison where he was incarcerated on
account of his liberal opinions. The new critical tendency was named
"philosophism" to distinguish it from the old grammatical criticism
and from the vague, incoherent, exaggerated Romanticism. Philosophism
attracted De Sanctis; to show how deeply he was imbued with the
Hegelian spirit a tale was told that, having devoured the first volumes
of Bénard's translation, he guessed the contents of the remaining
volumes and, before they could appear, was expounding them publicly in
his classroom.[4]
His first writings show traces of metaphysical idealism and Hegelism;
and they still linger here and there in the terminology of his later
works. In a lecture prior to 1848 he placed the safety of criticism in
the philosophic school which, in works of literature, fixed its eyes
upon "that absolute part ... that uncertain idea which moves within the
mind of great writers, till it appears abroad clothed in fine raiment
only less beautiful than itself."[5] In a preface to Schiller's plays
(1850) he wrote, "The Idea is not thought, nor is poetry reason in
song, as a poet of our time is pleased to assert; the idea is at once
necessity and freedom, reason and passion, and its perfect form in
drama is action."[6] Elsewhere he calls attention to the death of faith
and poetry, absorbed by the development of philosophy: a thesis, he
remarked some years later, "imposed on our generation by Hegel with his
omnipotent thought."[7] In 1856 he attempted a definition of humour as
"an artistic form having for signification the destruction of limit,
with consciousness of such destruction."[8] Not to dwell too long on
other particulars, in the distinction to which De Sanctis always held
firm throughout his critical work, that between Fancy and Imagination,
the latter considered as the true and only faculty of poetry, arises
undoubtedly from suggestions of Schelling and Hegel (_Einbildungskraft,
Phantasie)_; from the same philosophers come the phrases "prosaic
content," "prosaic world," sometimes used by him.
[Sidenote: _Unconscious criticism of Hegelism._]
For De Sanctis the Hegelian Æsthetic was but a lever wherewith to
lift himself clear of the discussions and views of the old Italian
schools. A fresh, clear spirit such as his could not escape the
arbitrary shackles of grammarians and rhetoricians only to fall into
those of metaphysicians, the torturers of art. He absorbed the vital
part of Hegel's teaching and re-expressed the Hegelian theories in
correct or somewhat attenuated interpretations; but he only maintained
with hesitation, and in the end openly rebelled against, all that was
artificial, formalistic and pedantic in Hegel.
The following examples of such reductions and attenuations show how
substantial and radical was the change he effected. "Faith has vanished
and poetry is dead" (he wrote in 1856, echoing Hegel); "or it were
better to say" (here is De Sanctis' own correction) "faith and poetry
are immortal: what has disappeared is but one particular mode of their
being. To-day faith springs from conviction and poetry is the spark
struck from meditation; they are not dead, they are transformed."[9]
Certainly he distinguished between imagination and fancy; but for
him imagination was never the mystic faculty of transcendental
apperception, the intellectual intuition of German metaphysicians,
but simply the poet's faculty of synthesis and creation, contrasting
with fancy as the faculty of collecting particulars and materials in
a somewhat mechanical fashion.[10] When students of Vico and Hegel
understood and expounded their master's theories as emphasizing the
importance of concepts in art, De Sanctis replied, "The concept does
not exist in art, nature or history: the poet works unconsciously and
sees no concept but only form, in which he is involved and well-nigh
lost. If the philosopher, by means of abstraction, can extract the
concept thence and contemplate it in all its purity, he acts in a way
entirely contrary to that of art, nature and history." He warned his
hearers not to misunderstand Vico, who, when he extracts concepts and
exemplary types from the Homeric poems, is not writing as an art critic
but as a historian of civilization: Achilles is artistically Achilles,
not strength or any other abstraction.[11] Thus his polemic is directed
in the first instance against misunderstanding what he called the true
Hegelian thought, which was in fact usually a correction made upon
Hegel more or less consciously by himself. He was able to boast in
his latter years that even at the time when all Naples went wild over
Hegel, "at the time when Hegel was master of the field," he had always
"made certain reservations and refused to accept his apriorism, his
triad or his formulæ."[12]
[Sidenote: _Criticisms of German Æsthetic._]
De Sanctis also took up an independent attitude towards the other
German æstheticians. The views of Wilhelm Schlegel, very advanced
for the day in which they had been promulgated, seemed to him to
have been already superseded. In 1856 he wrote that Schlegel strives
to "transcend ordinary criticism, which leads a humdrum existence
among phraseology, versification and elocution, but loses its way
and never comes face to face with art: whereas Schlegel throws
himself headlong into the probable, the decorous and the moral; into
everything save art."[13] Thrown by the hazards of life into German
territory, he found himself at the Zürich Polytechnic, and found among
his colleagues (only imagine such a thing!) Theodor Vischer. What
opinion can he have formed of the ponderous Hegelian scholastic who
emerged dusty and panting from the systematic labours so well known to
us, and smiled disdainfully at the poetry and music of the decadent
Italian race? De Sanctis writes, "I went there with my opinions and
my prejudices and ridiculed their ridicule. Richard Wagner seemed to
me a corrupter of music, and nothing could be more inæsthetic than
the Æsthetic of Vischer."[14] His desire to correct the distorted
views of Vischer, Adolf Wagner, Valentin Schmidt and other German
critics and philosophers led him to undertake in 1858-59 a course of
lectures before an international audience at Zürich upon Ariosto
and Petrarch, the two Italian poets worst maltreated by these judges
because hardest to reduce to philosophical allegory. He sketched a
typical German critic and contrasted him with a French one, each with
his own characteristic defects. "The Frenchman does not indulge in
theories; he goes straight to the subject: his argument palpitates with
warmth of impression and sagacity of observation: he never leaves the
concrete: he estimates the quality of the talent and the work, studying
the man in order to understand the writer." He makes the mistake of
substituting reflexion on the psychology of the author and history of
his time for reflexion upon art. "Quite otherwise is your German: be a
thing never so plain, he makes it his business to manipulate, distort
and embroil: he accumulates a mass of darkness from whose centre rays
of dazzling light now and again shoot forth: truth is there at bottom,
in grievous pangs of parturition. Confronted with a work of art, he
labours to fasten down and fix the quality which is most evanescent
and impalpable. While nobody is more given to talk of life and the
world of the living, nobody on earth takes more pains to decompose and
disembody it in generalities: as consequence of this last process (last
in appearance, that is to say; in reality preconceived and _a priori_),
he is able to fit you the same boot on every foot and the same coat on
every back." "The German school is dominated by metaphysic, the French
by history."[15] About this time (1858) a Piedmontese review published
his exhaustive critical survey of the philosophy of Schopenhauer,[16]
which was then beginning to attract disciples among his friends
and companions in exile in Switzerland; the criticism provoked the
philosopher himself to confess that "this Italian" had "absorbed him
_in succum et sanguinem._"[17] What value did De Sanctis attach to
all Schopenhauer's subtleties concerning art? Having fully stated his
doctrine of ideas, he contents himself with the merest reference to the
third book "wherein is found an exaggerated theory of Æsthetic."[18]
[Sidenote: _Final rebellion against metaphysical Æsthetic._]
This moderate resistance and opposition to the partisans of the
concept and to the romantic Italian mystics and moralists (he directed
criticisms equally against Manzoni, Mazzini, Tommaseo and Cantù[19])
turned to open rebellion in one of his critical writings on Petrarch
(1868) in which this false tendency is characterized with biting
sarcasm. "According to this school" (he says, meaning the school of
Hegel and Gioberti), "according to this school the real and living is
art only in so far as it surpasses its form and reveals its concept or
the pure idea. The beautiful is the manifestation of the idea. Art is
the ideal, a particular idea. Under the gaze of the artist the body
becomes subtilized until it is nothing but the shadow of the soul, a
beautiful veil. The world of poetry is peopled with phantasms; and
the poet, eternal dreamer, with the eyes of one slightly intoxicated
sees bodies float unsteadily around him and change their shapes. Nor
do bodies merely become attenuated into forms and phantasms; these
forms and phantasms themselves become free manifestations of every
idea and every concept. The theory of the ideal has been driven to
its last victorious limit, to the destruction of the very phantasms
themselves, to concept as concept, form becoming a mere accessory."
"Thus the vague, the undecided, the undulating, the vaporous, the
celestial, the ærial, the veiled, the angelic, have now a high position
among artistic forms: whilst criticism revels in the beautiful,
the ideal, the infinite, genius, the concept, the idea, truth, the
superintelligible, the supersensible, the being and the existent, and
many more generalities cast into barbarous formulæ just like those
of the scholastics from whose influence we had so much difficulty in
escaping." All these things, instead of determining the character of
art, do nothing; save illustrate the contrary of art: its feebleness
and impotence, preventing it from slaying abstractions and laying hold
of life. If beauty and the ideal have actually the meaning given them
by these philosophers "the essence of art is neither the beautiful nor
the ideal, but the living, the form; the ugly too belongs to art since
ugliness lives also in nature; outside the domain of art lies nothing
but the formless and the deformed. Thais in Malebolge is more living
and poetical than Beatrice, who is pure allegory representing abstract
combinations. The Beautiful? Tell me of anything as beautiful as Iago,
a form uprisen from the profundity of real life; so rich, so concrete;
in every part, in each finest gradation, one of the most beautiful
creations in the world of poetry." If in the course of "wrangling
about the idea or the concept or real, moral, or intellectual beauty,
and confusing philosophical or moral truths with æsthetic" you choose
to call "a great part of the poetic world ugly, granting it a permit
merely that it may act as contrast, antagonist or foil to beauty,
accepting Mephistopheles as a foil to Faust, or Iago as foil to
Othello," you are imitating "those good folk who thought, _in illo
tempore,_ that the stars shone in the firmament in order to give light
to this earth."[20]
[Sidenote: _De Sanctis own theory_]
The æsthetic theory of De Sanctis himself arises entirely from the
criticism of the highest manifestations of European æsthetic as known
to him. Its nature is revealed by the contrast. "If you desire a statue
in the vestibule of art," says he, "let it be that of Form; gaze upon
this, question this, begin with this. Before form is attained, that
exists which existed before the creation: chaos. Chaos is no doubt a
respectable thing, with a most interesting history: science has not yet
uttered its last word about this pre-world of fermenting elements. Art
also has its pre-world: art also has its geology, born but yesterday
and as yet scarcely stretched, a science _sui generis,_ which is
neither Criticism nor Æsthetic. Æsthetic appears when form appears,
in which this pre-world is sunk, fused, forgotten and lost. Form is
itself as the individual is himself; and no theory is so destructive
to art as the continual harping upon the beautiful as manifestation,
clothing, light, or veil of truth or the idea. The æsthetic world
is not appearance, it is substance; to it indeed belongs everything
substantial and living: its criterion, its _raison d'être,_ lies
nowhere save in this motto: I live."[21]
[Sidenote: _The concept of form._]
For De Sanctis, form did not mean form "in the pedantic sense attached
to it until the end of the eighteenth century," that is to say, that
which first strikes a superficial observer, the words, the period, the
sense, the individual image;[22] or form in the Herbartian sense, the
metaphysical hypostatization of the former. "Form is not _a Priori,_ it
is not something existing of itself and distinct from the content as
though it were a kind of ornament or vesture or appearance or adjunct
of the content: it is generated by the content acting in the mind of
the artist: such as the content is, such is the form."[23] Between
form and content there is at the same time identity and diversity. In
a work of art the content, which had been lying in a chaotic state in
the mind of the artist, appears "not as it was originally, but as it
has become; the whole of it, with its own value, its own importance,
its own natural beauty enriched, not weakened, by the process."
Therefore content is essential for the production of concrete form;
but the abstract quality of the content does not determine that of
artistic form." If the content, though beautiful and important, remain
inoperative or lifeless or waste within the mind of the artist, if it
have not sufficient generative power and reveal itself in the form as
weak or false or vitiated, why trouble to sing its praises? In such
cases the content may be important in itself, but as literature or
art it is worthless. On the other hand the content may be immoral,
absurd, false or frivolous: but if at certain times or in certain
circumstances it has worked powerfully on in the brain of the artist,
and taken form, such content is immortal. The gods of Homer are dead;
the _Iliad_ remains. Italy may die and, with her, every memory of Guelf
and Ghibelline; the _Divina Commedia_ will remain. The content is
subject to all the hazards of history; it is born and it dies; the form
is immortal."[24] He held firmly to the independence of art, without
which there can be no Æsthetic; but he objected to the exaggeration of
the formula of art for art's sake in that it tended to the separation
of the artist from life, to the mutilation of the content and to the
conversion of art into a proof of mere cleverness.[25]
[Sidenote: _De Sanctis as art-critic._]
For De Sanctis, the concept of form was identical with that of
imagination, the faculty of expression or representation, artistic
vision. So much must be said by any one anxious to express clearly
the direction which his thought was taking. But De Sanctis himself
never succeeded in defining his own theory with scientific exactitude;
and his æsthetic ideas remained the mere sketch of a system never
properly interrelated and deduced. The speculative tendency shared his
attention with many other lively interests, the desire to understand
the concrete, to enjoy art and rewrite its actual history, to plunge
into practical and political life; so that by turns he was professor,
conspirator, journalist and statesman. "My mind inclines to the
concrete," he was wont to say. He philosophized just so much as was
necessary to the acquisition of a point of view in problems of art,
history and life; and, having procured light for his intellect, found
his bearings, derived some satisfaction from the consciousness of his
own activity, he plunged as quickly as possible into the particular and
the determinate. To immense power of seizing the truth in the highest
general principles was joined a no less intense abhorrence for the
pale region of ideas in which the philosopher takes an almost ascetic
delight. As critic and historian of literature he is unrivalled. Those
who have compared him with Lessing, Macaulay, Sainte-Beuve or Taine are
making rhetorical comparisons.
Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand: "In your last letter you speak
of criticism, and say you expect it soon to disappear. I think, on the
contrary, that it is just appearing over the horizon. Criticism to-day
is the exact opposite of what it was, but that is all. In the days of
Laharpe the critic was a grammarian; to-day he is a historian like
Sainte-Beuve and Taine. When will he be an artist, a mere artist, but a
real artist? Do you know a critic who interests himself whole-heartedly
in the work itself? They analyse with the greatest delicacy the
historical surroundings of the work and the causes which produced
it: but the underlying poetry and its causes? the composition? the
style? the author's own point of view? Never. Such a critic must have
great imagination and a great goodness of heart; I mean an ever-ready
faculty of enthusiasm; and then, taste; but this last is so rare, even
among the best, that it is never mentioned nowadays."[26] Flaubert's
ideal has been worthily reached by one critic only (that is to say,
amongst critics who have given themselves to the interpretation of
great writers and entire periods of literature) and that one is De
Sanctis.[27] No literature of any country possesses so perfect a mirror
as that possessed by Italy in the _History_ and the other critical
essays of Francesco de Sanctis.
[Sidenote: _De Sanctis as philosopher._]
But the philosopher of art, the æsthetician in De Sanctis is less
great than the critic and historian of literature. The critic is
primary, the philosopher a mere accessory. The æsthetic observations
scattered in aphorisms up and down his essays and monographs take
various colours from various occasions, and are expressed in uncertain
and often metaphorical language; this has led to his being accused of
contradictions and inexactitudes which had no existence in his inmost
thought and whose very appearance vanishes as soon as one takes into
account the particular cases with which he was dealing. But form,
forms, content, the living, the beautiful, natural beauty, ugliness,
fancy, feeling, imagination, the real, the ideal, and all the other
terms which he used with varying signification, demand a science both
on which to rest and from which to derive. Meditation on these words
stirs up doubts and problems on every side and reveals everywhere gaps
and discontinuities. Compared with the few philosophical æstheticians,
De Sanctis seems wanting in analysis, in order and in system, and
vague in his definitions. But these defects are outweighed by the
contact he establishes between the reader and real concrete works of
art, and by the feeling for truth which never leaves him. He has, too,
the attraction possessed by those writers who lead one on to suspect
and to divine new treasures in store beyond what they themselves
reveal--living thought, which stimulates living men to pursue and
prolong it.
[1] _Frammenti di scuola,_ in _Nuovi saggi critici,_ pp. 321-333; _La
giovinezza di Fr. de S._ (autobiography), pp. 62, 101, 163-166 (works
cited are those of De S. in stereotyped Naples ed. by Morano, 12 vols.).
[2] _La giovinezza di Fr. de S._ pp. 260-261, 315-316.
[3] _Saggi critici,_ p. 534.
[4] De Meis, _Comm, di Fr. de S._ (in vol. _In Memoria,_ Naples, 1884,
p. 116).
[5] _Scritti vori,_ ed. Croce, vol. ii. pp. 153-154.
[6] _Saggi critici,_ p 18.
[7] _Op. cit._ pp. 226-228; _Scritti varî,_ ii. pp. 185-187; cf. vol.
ii. p. 70.
[8] _Saggi critici,_ ed. Imbriani, p. 91.
[9] _Saggi critici,_ p. 228; cf. _Scritti varî,_ vol. ii. p. 70.
[10] _Storia della letteratura,_ i. pp. 66-67 _ Saggi critici,_ pp.
98-99; _Scritti varî,_ vol. i. pp. 276-278, 384.
[11] _La giovinezza di Fr. de S._ pp. 279, 313-314, 321-324.
[12] _Scritti varî,_ vol. ii. p. 83; cf. p. 274.
[13] _Op. cit._ vol. i. pp. 228-236.
[14] _Saggio sul Petrarca,_ new ed. by B. Croce, p. 309 _seqq._
[15] _Saggi critici,_ pp. 361-363, 413-414; cf. as touching Klein,
_Scritti varî,_ vol. i. pp. 32-34.
[16] _Op. cit., Schopenhauer e Leopardi,_ pp. 246, 299.
[17] Schopenhauer, _Briefe,_ ed. Grisebach, pp. 405-406; cf. pp.
381-383, 403-404, 438-439.
[18] _Saggi critici,_ p. 269, note.
[19] Cf. _Scritti varî,_ i. pp. 39-45, and _Letterat. ital. nel sec.
XIX,_ lectures, ed. Croce, pp. 241-243, 427-432.
[20] _Saggio sut Petrarca,_ introd. pp. 17-29.
[21] _Saggio sul Petrarca,_ p. 29 _seqq._
[22] _Scritti varî,_ vol. i. pp. 276-277, 317.
[23] _Nuovi saggi critici,_ pp. 239-240, note.