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.
[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.