[34] Cf. De Sanctis, Lett. Hal. nel s. XIX, ed. Croce, Naples 1896, pp. 427-431.
[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 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.