Chapter XX: Conclusion (9)

It must be admitted that in Italy Æsthetic received but inadequate treatment in the revival of philosophical speculation effected by the work of Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti. It is treated in a merely incidental and popular manner by the first named.[19] Rosmini devotes a section of his philosophical system to the deontological sciences, which "treat of the perfection of being, and the method of acquiring or producing such perfection or losing it"; among these sciences is that of "beauty in the universal" under the name of Callology, of which a special part is Æsthetic, the science of "beauty in the sensible," establishing the "archetypes of beings."[20] In his longest literary work, considered by him as his Æsthetic,[21] his essay on _The Idyl_,[22] Rosmini declares the aim of art to be neither imitation of nature nor direct intuition of the archetypes, but the reduction of natural things to their archetypes, which are arranged in a hierarchy of three ideals, natural, intellectual and moral. Gioberti[23] is clearly under the influence of German idealism, especially of Schelling's; for him the beautiful is "the individual union of an intelligible type with an imaginative element called into being by fancy"; the phantasm gives material, while the intelligible type (concept) gives form, in the Aristotelian sense,[24] and since the ideal element predominates over the sensible or fantastic, art is a propædeutic to the true and the good. Gioberti is of opinion that Hegel was wrong in detaching natural beauty from Æsthetic, for perfect beauty of nature is "the full correspondence of sensible reality with the Idea which informs and represents it," and as such "makes its appearance in the sensible universe during the second period of the primordial age described in detail by Moses in the six days of creation"; it is only through original sin that imperfection and ugliness arose in nature.[25] Art is nothing but a supplement to natural beauty, whose decadence it presupposes, and thus art is at once record and prophecy, referring to the first and last ages of the world. The Last Judgement will reintroduce perfect beauty: "organic restitution, by empowering the faculties to contemplate the intelligible in the sensible, and by refining their capabilities, will greatly intensify and purify æsthetic enjoyment. The contemplation of perfect beauty will be the beatitude of imagination, of which Christ gave an ineffable foretaste by appearing to his disciples visibly transfigured and shining with celestial radiance."[26] Gioberti agrees with Schelling's division of art into pagan and Christian, a "heterodox beauty" (Oriental and Græco-Italian art), imperfect when compared with "orthodox beauty"; and between the two, a "semi-orthodox" beauty,[27] transitional to Christian art; he also attempted a doctrine of modifications of the beautiful, wherein he held the sublime to be creator of the beautiful. Beauty is the relative intelligibility of created things apprehended by fancy: the sublime is the absolute intelligibility of time, space and infinite power as presented to itself by the faculty of imagination: "The ideal formula: the Being creates the Existing, translated into æsthetic language, gives the following formula: by means of the dynamical sublime Being creates the beautiful; and by means of the mathematical sublime contains it: this shows the ontological and psychological connexions of Æsthetic in First Science." Ugliness enters into the beautiful either as relief and counterpoise, or to open a way to the comic, or to depict the struggle between good and evil. The Christian ideal of artistic beauty is the figure of the God-Man, absolute union of the two forms of beauty, the sublime and the beautiful, a transfigured and divinely illuminated expression of man.[28] However carefully we sift the thoughts of Gioberti from their mythological Judaico-Christian husk, we find nothing of the least value to science.

[Sidenote: _Italian Romantics. Dependence of Art._]

On the other hand, if Italian literature of the day chose to revive and refurbish certain antiquated critical ideas, a much wider field was opened by social and political upheavals which tended to make use of literature as a practical instrument for spreading abroad the truths of history, science, religion and morality. In 1816 Giovanni Berchet wrote that "poetry ... is intended to improve the habits of man and satisfy the cravings of his imagination and heart, since the tendency towards poetry, like every other desire, awakens in us moral needs";[29] and Ermes Visconti in his _Conciliatore_ of 1818 says that æsthetic aims must be subordinated "to the improvement of mankind and public and private weal, the eminent aim of all studies." Manzoni, who subsequently took to philosophizing on art on the principles of Rosmini, declared in his letter on Romanticism (1823) that "poetry or literature in general should have utility as its objective, truth as its subject and interest as its means";[30] and though noticing the vagueness of the concept of truth in poetry, he inclined always (as is seen also in his discourse on the historical novel) to its identification with historical and scientific truth.[31] Pietro Maroncelli proposed as a substitute for the classic formula of art, "founded on imitation of the real and having pleasure as its object," a formula of art as "founded on inspiration, having the beautiful as means and good as end"; this doctrine he baptized "cormentalism," contrasting it with the doctrine of art for art's sake found in the writings of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Victor Hugo.[32] Tommaseo defined beauty as "the union of many truths in one concept" effected by the power of feeling.[33] Giuseppe Mazzini, too, always conceived literature as the mediator of the universal idea or intellectual concept.[34] Attempting to restore serious content to a literature grown weak and frivolous, the Italian Romantics found themselves forced on the theoretical side, by a natural reaction, into constant and perpetual opposition to every tendency of thought likely to affirm the independence of art.

[1] Émeric-David, _Recherches sur l'art du statuaire chez les anciens,_ Paris, 1805 (Ital. trans., Florence, 1857).

[2] Quatremère de Quincy, _Essai sur l'imitation dans les beaux arts,_ 1823.

[3] _Recherches sur la nature et les lois de l'imagination,_ 1807.

[4] _Du vrai, du beau et du bien,_ 1818, many lines revised (23rd ed. Paris, 1881).

[5] _Op. cit._ lectures 6-8.

[6] _Cours d' esthétique,_ ed. Damiron, Paris, 1843.

[7] _De l'art et du beau,_ 1843-1846.

[8] Victor Hugo, Preface to _Cromwell,_ 1827.

[9] Dugald Stewart, _Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind,_ 1837.

[10] Gayley-Scott, _An Introd._ pp. 305-306.

[11] P. B. Shelley, _A Defence of Poetry_ (in _Works,_ London, 1880, vol. vii.)

[12] Parini, _Principi delle belle lettere applicati alle belle arti,_ from 1773 onward; Foscolo, _Dell' origine e dell' uffizio della letteratura,_ 1809, and _Saggi di critica,_ composed in England.

[13] M. Delfico, _Nuove ricerche sul bello,_ Naples, 1818, ch. 9.

[14] Malaspina, _Delle leggi del bello,_ Milan, 1828, pp. 26, 233.

[15] P. Balestrieri, _Fondamenti di estetica,_ Naples, 1847.

[16] Friedrich Bouterweck, _Ästhetik,_ 1806, 1815 (3rd ed., Göttingen, 1824-1825).

[17] O. Colecchi, _Questions filosofiche,_ vol. iii., Naples, 1843.

[18] P. Lichtenthal, _Estetica ossia dottrina del bello e delle arti belle,_ Milan, 1831.

[19] _Elementi di filosofia_ (5th ed., Naples, 1846), vol. ii. pp. 427-476.

[20] _Sistema filosofico,_ by A. Rosmini-Serbati, Turin, 1886, § 210.

[21] Cf. _Nuovo saggio sopra l' orig. delle idee,_ § v. part iv. ch. 5.

[22] _Sull' idillio e sulla nuova letteratura italiana (opuscoli filosofici,_ vol. i.).

[23] V. Gioberti, _Del buono e del bello_ (Florence ed., 1857).

[24] _Del bello,_ ch. 1.

[25] _Op. cit._ ch. 7.

[26] _Op. cit._ ch. 7.

[27] _Del bello,_ chs. 8-10.

[28] _Op. cit._ ch. 4.

[29] G. Berchet, _Opere,_ ed. Cusani, Milan, 1863, p. 227.

[30] Words suppressed in ed. of 1870.

[31] _Epistolario,_ ed. Sforza, i. pp. 285, 306, 308; _Discorso sul romanzo storico,_ 1845; _Dell' invenzione,_ dialogue.

[32] _Addizioni alle Miei Prigioni,_ 1831 (in Pellico, _Prose,_ Florence, 1858); see pp. about the _Conciliatore._

[33] _Del bello e del sublime_, 1827; _Studî filosofici_ (Venice, 1840), vol. ii. part v.

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

XV

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS

[Sidenote: _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]

[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.

[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.

XVI

ÆSTHETIC OF THE EPIGONI

[Sidenote: _Revival of Herbartian Æsthetic._]

When the cry "Away with metaphysic!" was raised in Germany, and a furious reaction began against the kind of Walpurgis-night to which the later Hegelians had reduced the life of science and history, the disciples of Herbart came to the front and seemed to ask, with an insinuating air: "What is all this? a rebellion against Idealism and Metaphysic? why, it is exactly what Herbart wished and undertook all by himself half a century ago! Here we stand, his legitimate descendants, and we offer you our services as allies. We shall not find it hard to agree. Our Metaphysic accords with the atomic theory, our Psychology with mechanism, and our Ethics and Æsthetic with hedonism." Herbart himself (had he not died in 1841) would most likely have spumed these disciples of his who pandered to popularity, cheapened metaphysics and gave naturalistic interpretations to his reals, his representations, his ideas, and all his highest conceptions.

With the school thus coming into fashion, the Herbartian Æsthetic too tried to put on flesh and acquire a pleasing plumpness so as not to cut too miserable a figure beside the well-nourished _corpora_ of science launched upon the world by idealists. The feeding-up process was accomplished by Robert Zimmermann, professor of philosophy at Prague and later at Vienna, who, after years of laborious effort and an introductory sample in the shape of an ample history of Æsthetic (1858), at length produced his _General Æsthetic as Science of Form_ in 1865.[1]

[Sidenote: _Robert Zimmermann._]

This formalistic Æsthetic, born under bad auspices, is a curious example of servile fidelity in externals combined with internal infidelity. Starting from unity, or rather from subordination of Ethics and Æsthetic to a general Æsthetic defined as "a science which treats of the modes by which any given content may acquire the right to arouse approval or disapproval" (thereby differing from Metaphysic, science of the real, and from Logic, science of right thinking), Zimmermann places such modes in form, that is to say, in the reciprocal relation of elements. A simple mathematical point in space, a simple impression of hearing or sight, a simple note, is in fact neither pleasing nor displeasing: music shows that the judgement of beauty or ugliness always depends on the relation between two notes at least. Now these relations, _i.e._ forms universally pleasing, cannot be empirically collected by induction; they must be developed by deduction. By the deductive method it can be demonstrated that the elements of an image, which in themselves are representations, may enter into relations either according to their force (quantity), or according to their nature (quality); whence we have two groups--æsthetic forms of quantity, and æsthetic forms of quality. According to the first, the strong (large) is pleasing in comparison with the weak (small), and these latter are displeasing when set beside the former; according to the other form, that pleases which is substantially identical in quality (the harmonious), and that displeases which is on the whole diverse (the discordant).

But the substantial identity must not be pushed to the point of absolute identity, for in that case the harmony itself would cease to be. From harmonious form is deduced the pleasure of the characteristic or expression; for what is the characteristic but a relation of prevalent identity between the thing itself and its model? But while similarity prevailing in the distinction produces accord (_Einklang_), qualitative disharmony is as such disagreeable, and demands a resolution. (It is easy to detect the sleight of hand with which Zimmermann first slips the characteristic into the relations of pure form, thereby entirely altering Herbart's original thought; and how, by a second trick, he here introduces into pure beauty the variations and modifications of the beautiful, by the help of the despised Hegelian dialectic.) If such resolution is effected by the skilful substitution of something other than the unpleasant image, we shall certainly have removed the cause of offence and established quietude (not accord: _Eintracht, nicht Einklang_), but we shall have gained the mere form of correctness: it is better, then, to supersede this by means of the true image so as to reach the form of compensation (_Ausgleichung_); and, when the true image is also pleasing in itself, the final form of definitive compensation (_abschliessende Ausgleich,_) with which we exhaust the series of possible forms. And, in conclusion, what is Beauty? It is a conjunction of all these forms: a model (_Vorbild_) which has grandeur, plenitude, order, accord, correctness, definitive compensation; all this appears in a copy (_Nachbild_) in the form of the characteristic.

Putting on one side the artificial connexion Zimmermann makes between the sublime, the comic, the tragic, the ironic, the humorous and the æsthetic forms, notice must be taken (so that we may recognize into which of the seven heavens he is wafting us) that these general æsthetic forms concern art equally with nature and morality, whose individual spheres are differentiated solely by the application of the general æsthetic forms to particular contents. These forms, applied to nature, give us natural beauty, the cosmos; applied to representation, beauty of wit (_Schöngeist_) or imagination; applied to feeling, the beautiful soul (_schöne Seele_) or taste; applied to the will, character or virtue. On one side, then, is natural beauty, on the other human beauty, in which (latter), on one hand, we have the beauty of representation, that is to say æsthetic fact in the strict sense (art); on the other, we have the beauty of will, or morality; and between the two, lastly, we have taste, common to Ethics and Æsthetic. Æsthetic in the narrow sense, as the theory of beautiful representation, determines the beauty of representations, divided into the three classes of the beauty of temporal and spatial connexion (figurative arts); the beauty of sensitive representation (music); and the beauty of thoughts (poetry). This tripartition of beauty into figurative, musical and poetical brings to a conclusion theoretical Æsthetic, the only section developed by Zimmermann.

[Sidenote: _Vischer versus Zimmermann._]

Zimmermann's work was a polemic against the principal representative of Hegelian Æsthetic, Vischer, who had little difficulty in defending his own position and counter-attacking that of his assailant. He held Zimmermann up to ridicule, for example, in connexion with his view of symbolism. Zimmermann defined a symbol as the object "round which beautiful forms adhere." A painter depicts a fox simply for the sake of painting a part of animal nature. Nothing of the sort: this is a symbol, because the painter "makes use of fines and colours to express things other than fines and colours." "You think I'm a fox," says the animal in the picture, "but you make a great mistake: I'm a clothes-peg: I'm an appearance created by the painter with gradations of grey, white, yellow and red." Even easier was it to make game of Zimmermann's enthusiastic praises of the æsthetic quality of the sense of touch. It was a pity, the latter had written, that the pleasures of this sense were so difficult to attain; since "to touch the back of the Resting Hercules and the sinuous limbs of the Venus of Melos or the Barberini Faun would give to the hand a delight comparable only with that felt by the ear when listening to the majestic fugues of Bach or the suave melodies of Mozart." Vischer does not seem to be far wrong in declaring formalistic Æsthetic to be "a grotesque union of mysticism and mathematics."[2]

[Sidenote: _Hermann Lotze._]

The works of Zimmermann seem to have given satisfaction to nobody save himself. Even Lotze, by no means an adversary of Herbartianism, blames him severely in his _History of Æsthetic in Germany_ (1868) and other writings. Still, Lotze was unable to offer any better substitute for æsthetic formalism than of a variant of the old idealism. "Can any one persuade us," he wrote in criticism of the formalists, "that a spiritual discord expressed by a corresponding discord in external appearances may have a value equal to that of the harmonious expression of a harmonious content solely because, in both cases, the formal relation of accord is respected? Can any one persuade us that the human form is pleasing solely for its formal stereometric relations, irrespective of the spiritual life by which it is animated? In empirical reality the three domains of laws, facts and values invariably appear as divided; and although they are united in the Highest Good, in Goodness in itself, in the living Love of a Personal God, in the Ought which is the basis of Being, our reason is unable to attain or to know such union. Beauty alone can reveal it to us: it is in close connexion with the Good and the Holy and reproduces the rhythm of the divine ordinance and the moral government of the universe. Æsthetic fact is neither intuition nor concept; it is idea, which presents the essential of an object in the form of an end referred to the ultimate end. Art, like beauty, must include the world of values in the world of forms."[3] The war between the Æsthetic of content and that of form, having Zimmermann, Vischer and Lotze as protagonists, reached its culminating point between 1860 and 1870.

[Sidenote: _Efforts to reconcile Æsthetic of form and Æsthetic of content._]

Several people were in favour of a reconciliation. But the reconciliations they offered were not the right one, which was at least glimpsed by a certain young Johann Schmidt, who in his thesis for doctorate observed (1875) that, with all respect for Zimmermann and Lotze, it seemed to him they were both wrong in confusing the various meanings of the word "beauty," and discussed such an absurdity as a beauty or ugliness of natural objects, that is to say, of things external to the spirit; that Lotze, following Hegel, added the second absurdity of an intuitive concept or conceptual intuition: lastly, that neither of them grasped the fact that the æsthetic problem does not turn upon the beauty or ugliness of the abstract content or of form understood as a system of mathematical relations, but with the beauty or ugliness of representation. Form undoubtedly must exist, but "concrete form, full of content."[4] These utterances of Schmidt met with a hostile reception: it is easy (he was told in reply) to identify beauty with artistic perfection, but the whole crux of the matter lies in finding whether, beside this perfection, there exists another beauty dependent on a supreme cosmic or metaphysical principle: otherwise one is guilty of a naïve _petitio principii_.[5] It was thought better, therefore, to seek other modes of reconciliation, which consisted in cooking up an appetizing dish in which a little formalism and a little contentism were mixed to taste, the latter as a rule giving the predominant flavour.

Some Herbartians were found in the ranks of the mediating or conciliatory party. Hardly had Zimmermann's rigid formalism appeared, when Nahlowsky jumped up to protest that it had never entered the master's head to exclude content from Æsthetic;[6] but even the ablest of the school, men such as Volkmann and Lazarus, chose a middle course.[7] In the opposite camp Carrière,[8] and even Vischer himself (in a criticism of his own old _Æsthetic_), began to concede a larger part to the consideration of form; thus for Vischer beauty became "life appearing harmoniously," which when it appears in space is called form, and must always possess form, _i.e._ limitation (_Begrenzung_ ) in space and time, measure, regularity, symmetry, proportion, propriety (these characters constituting its quantitative moments) and harmony (qualitative moment), which includes variety and contrast and is therefore the most important characteristic.[9]

[Sidenote: _K. Köstlin._]

A conciliatory Æsthetic in which formalism prevailed was attempted by Karl Köstlin, a professor at Tübingen and formerly collaborator in the musical section of the works of Vischer. Köstlin[10] had been influenced by Schleiermacher, Hegel, Vischer and Herbart, but, truth to tell, does not seem to have perfectly understood the teaching of any one of his predecessors. According to him, the æsthetic object presented three requirements: richness and variety of imagery (_anregende Gestaltenfülle_), interesting content and beautiful form. Under the first we recognize, with no little difficulty, a distorted reflexion of Schleiermacher's "inspiration" (_Begeisterung_). Interesting content he defined as that which concerns man; that which he knows or does not know; that which he loves or hates (it is thus always relative to the individual and the conditions in which he exists); and he asserted that interest of content is joined to value of form, that is, he conceived content as a second value, the same of which we have heard Herbart speak. He also agreed with Herbart that form is absolute, and that its general character is determined as being easily perceptible by intuition (_anschaulich_), and by its power of giving satisfaction, pleasure and delight, in fact, as being beautiful. Its particular characteristics for Köstlin were, according to quantity, circumscription, simplicity (_Einheitlichkeit_), extensive and intensive size, and equilibrium (_Gleichmass_); according to quality, determination (_Bestimmtheit_), unity (_Einheit_), importance (_Bedeutung_) extensive and intensive, and harmony. But when Köstlin sets himself to the empirical verification of his categories, he falls into hopeless confusion. Greatness is pleasing, but so is smallness; unity is pleasing, but so is variety; regularity is pleasing, but so, confound it, is irregularity: uncertainties and contradictions at every step; he was aware of them and made no effort to conceal them; but they should have convinced him that the abstraction of "beautiful form," whose qualities and quantities he had so laboriously collected, is a ghostly shape without body, since that alone gives æsthetic pleasure which fulfils an expressive function. But having illustrated the three demands of the æsthetic object, Köstlin wasted all his remaining breath in constructing a kingdom of intuitive imagination in the manner of Vischer, _i.e._ beauty of organic and inorganic nature; of civil life; of morality; of religion; of science; of games; of conversations; of feasts and banquets; and lastly of history, reviewing and passing æsthetic comment on its three periods, patriarchal, heroic and historical.

[Sidenote: _Æsthetic of content. M. Schasler._]

Schasler, who had written as vast a history on Æsthetic as Zimmermann's own, found a starting-point for a movement toward formalism in absolute idealism, or realism-idealism, as he called it. He began by defining Æsthetic as "the science of the beautiful and of art" (a single science ill defined as having two different objects), and proceeded to justify his unmethodical definition by saying that beauty does not exist in art alone, nor does art concern itself solely with beauty. The sphere of Æsthetic he defines as that of intuition (_Anschauung_) in which knowledge assumes a practical character and will a theoretical: the sphere of indivisible unity and absolute reconciliation of the theoretical and practical spirit, in which in a certain sense the highest human activities are developed. Beauty is the ideal, but the concrete ideal; this is why there is no ideal of a human body in abstraction from sex, no ideal of a mammal in general, but only of such and such species, as of horse or dog, and then only of determinate kind of horse or dog. Thus by descending from the more to the less abstract genus Schasler vainly attempted to reach the concrete, which inevitably escaped his grasp. In art we pass from the typical, which is natural beauty, to the characteristic, which is the typical of human feeling; hence we can frame the ideal of an old woman, a beggar or a ruffian. The characteristic of art is in closer relationship to the ugly than to the beautiful in nature. On this head (passing over the remainder, which is on familiar lines) it is well to notice that Schasler has a bias towards that version of the romaunt of Sir Purebeauty which ascribes the birth of the "modifications of Beauty" to the influence of the Ugly.[11] "Although," he writes, "the thought may disturb our minds, it must not be forgotten that were there no world of ugliness there could be no world of beauty; for it is only when the Ugly stirs up empty abstract Beauty, that it begins to combat the enemy and thus to produce concrete Beauty."[12] He even succeeded in converting Vischer himself, the chief supporter of the other version: "Formerly I had been accustomed to think in the old-fashioned Hegelian style," Vischer confesses, "that unrest, fermentation and strife dwelt in the essence of Beauty; that the Idea prevails and thrusts the image forth into the infinite; so arises the Sublime; that the image, offended in its finitude, makes war on the Idea; whence arises the Comic; this finished the struggle; Beauty returned to itself from the conflict of the two moments, and was created." But now, he continues, "I must acknowledge that Schasler is right, and so are his predecessors Weisse and Ruge: the Ugly has a hand in the matter; this is the principle of movement, the ferment of differentiation: without such leaven we never reach the special forms of Beauty, for each single one presupposes' the Ugly."[13]

[Sidenote: _Ed. von Hartmann._]

Closely allied to that of Schasler is the Æsthetic of Eduard von Hartmann (1890), preceded by a historical treatise on _German Æsthetic since Kant_[14] wherein with meticulous, critical and polemical study he upholds the definition of Beauty as "the appearance of the Idea" (_das Scheinen der Idee_). Inasmuch as he insisted on appearance (_Schein_) as the necessary characteristic of Beauty, Hartmann held himself justified in naming his Æsthetic the "Æsthetic of Concrete Idealism," and in ranging himself alongside Hegel, Trahndorff, Schleiermacher, Deutinger, Oersted, Vischer, Meising, Carrière and Schasler, against the abstract idealism of Schelling, Solger, Schopenhauer, Krause, Weisse and Lotze, all of whom, by placing beauty in the supersensible idea, overlooked the sensory element and reduced it to the rank of a mere accessory.[15] By his insistence on the idea as the other indispensable and determining element, Hartmann proclaimed himself as opposed to the Herbartian formalism. Beauty is truth; neither historical, scientific nor reflective, but metaphysical or idealistic, the very truth of Philosophy: "in proportion as Beauty is in opposition to every science and to realistic truth, so much nearer is it to Philosophy and metaphysical truth": "Beauty, with its own peculiar efficacy, remains the prophet of idealistic truth in an unbelieving age that abhors Metaphysic and recognizes no value in anything but realistic truth." Æsthetic truth, which leaps immediately from subjective appearance to ideal essence, is lacking in the control and method possessed by philosophical truth; in compensation, however, she possesses the fascinating power of conviction, the sole property of sensible intuition, and unattainable by gradual or reflected mediation. The higher Philosophy soars, the less does it need the gradual passage through the world of the senses and of science, and the slighter becomes the distance separating Philosophy and Art. The latter, for its part, will be well advised to start on its journey towards the ideal world as Bædeker's handbooks counsel the intending traveller, "with as little luggage as possible"; "not overloading herself with a weight which paralyses the wings and is made up of unnecessary and indifferent trifles,"[16] Logical character, the microcosmic idea, the unconscious are immanent in beauty; by means of the unconscious, intellectual intuition operates in it,[17] and, from its being rooted in the unconscious, it is a Mystery.[18]

[Sidenote: _Hartmann and the theory of Modifications._]