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 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]
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.