Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

XV Francesco de Sanctis

F. de Sanctis: development of his thought.

On the other hand, the autonomy of art found a strong supporter in 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

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 Italians3 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.

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

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

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 Cantù19) 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

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

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

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.

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.

Notes

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.

24 Nuovi saggi critici, loc. cit.

25 Ibid. and cf. Saggio sul Petrarca, p. 182; also Scritti varî, i. pp. 209-212, 226.

26 Lettres à George Sand, Paris, 1884 (Letter of Feb. 2, 1869), p. 81.

27 See above, p. 363, the judgement of De S. on French criticism.
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