Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, Benedetto Croce [read e books online free TXT] 📗

whereby the finite or terrestrial element is absorbed and annihilated in the divine and thus becomes the tragic, or vice versa, and the result is the comic. Rosenkranz published in K�nigsberg an Aesthetic of the Ugly, and the works of Vischer and Zeising abound in subtleties relating to the Idea and to its expression in the beautiful and sublime. These writers conceived of the Idea as the Knight Purebeautiful, constrained to abandon his tranquil ease through the machinations of the Ugly; the Ugly leads him into all sorts of disagreeable adventures, from all of which he eventually emerges victorious. The Sublime, the Comic, the Humorous, and so on, are his Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena. Another version of their knight’s adventures might be described as his conquest by his enemies, but at the moment of conquest he transforms and irradiates his conquerors. To such a mediocre and artificial mythology led the much-elaborated theory of the Modifications of the Beautiful.

In England, the associationist psychology continued to hold sway, and showed, with Dugald Stewart’s miserable attempt at establishing two forms of association, its incapacity to rise to the conception of the imagination. With the poet Coleridge, England also showed the influence of German thought, and Coleridge elaborated with Wordsworth a more correct conception of poetry and of its difference from science. But the most notable contribution in English at that period came from another poet, P.B. Shelley, whose Defence of Poetry contains profound, though unsystematic views, as to the distinction between reason and imagination, prose and poetry, on primitive language, and on the poetic power of objectification.

In Italy, Francesco de Sanctis gave magnificent expression to the independence of art. He taught literature in Naples from 1838 to 1848, in Turin and Zurich from 1850 to 1860, and after 1870 he was a professor in the University of Naples. His Storia della letteratura italiana is a classic, and in it and in monographs on individual writers he exposed his doctrines.

Prompted by a natural love of speculation, he began to examine the old grammarians and rhetoricians, with a view to systematize them. But very soon he proceeded to criticize and to surpass their theories. The cold rules of reason did not find favour with him, and he advised young men to go direct to the original works.

The philosophy of Hegel began to penetrate Italy, and the study of Vico was again taken up. De Sanctis translated the Logic of Hegel in prison, where the Bourbon Government had thrown him for his liberalism.

Benard had begun his translation of the Aesthetic of Hegel, and so completely in harmony was De Sanctis with the thought of this master, that he is said to have guessed from a study of the first volume what the unpublished volumes must contain, and to have lectured upon them to his pupils. Traces of mystical idealism and of Hegelianism persist even in his later works, and the distinction, which he always maintained, between imagination and fancy certainly came to him from Hegel and Schelling. He held fancy alone to be the true poetic faculty.

De Sanctis absorbed all the juice of Hegel, but rejected the husks of his pedantry, of his formalism, of his apriority.

Fancy for De Sanctis was not the mystical transcendental apperception of the German philosophers, but simply the faculty of poetic synthesis and creation, opposed to the imagination, which reunites details and always has something mechanical about it. Faith and poetry, he used to say, are not dead, but transformed. His criticism of Hegel amounted in many places to the correction of Hegel; and as regards Vico, he is careful to point out, that when, in dealing with the Homeric poems, Vico talks of generic types, he is no longer the critic of art, but the historian of civilization. De Sanctis saw that, artistically, Achilles must always be Achilles, never a force or an abstraction.

Thus De Sanctis succeeded in keeping himself free from the Hegelian domination, at a moment when Hegel was the acknowledged master of speculation.

But his criticism extended also to other German aestheticians. By a curious accident, he found himself at Zurich in the company of Theodore Vischer, that ponderous Hegelian, who laughed disdainfully at the mention of poetry, of music, and of the decadent Italian race. De Sanctis laughed at Vischer’s laughter. Wagner appeared to him a corrupter of music, and “nothing in the world more unaesthetic than the Aesthetic of Theodore Vischer.” His lectures on Ariosto and Petrarch, before an international public at Zurich, were delivered with the desire of correcting the errors of these and of other German philosophers and learned men. He gave his celebrated definitions of French and German critics. The French critic does not indulge in theories: one feels warmth of impression and sagacity of observation in his argument. He never leaves the concrete; he divines the quality of the writer’s genius and the quality of his work, and studies the man, in order to understand the writer. His great fault is shown in substituting for criticism of the actual art work a historical criticism of the author and of his time. For the German, on the other hand, there is nothing so simple that he does not contrive to distort and to confuse it. He collects shadows around him, from which shoot vivid rays. He laboriously brings to birth that morsel of truth which he has within him. He would seize and define what is most fugitive and impalpable in a work of art. Although nobody talks so much of life as he does, yet no one so much delights in decomposing and generalizing it. Having thus destroyed the particular, he is able to show you as the result of this process, final in appearance, but in reality preconceived and apriorist, one measurement for all feet, one garment for all bodies.

About this time he studied Schopenhauer, who was then becoming the fashion. Schopenhauer said of this criticism of De Sanctis: “That Italian has absorbed me in succum et sanguinem.” What weight did he attach to Schopenhauer’s much-vaunted writings on art? Having exposed the theory of Ideas, he barely refers to the third volume, “which contains an exaggerated theory of Aesthetic.”

In his criticism of Petrarch, De Sanctis finally broke with metaphysical Aesthetic, saying of Hegel’s school that it believed the beautiful to become art when it surpassed form and revealed the concept or pure idea.

This theory and the subtleties derived from it, far from characterizing art, represent its contrary: the impotent velleity for art, which cannot slay abstractions and come in contact with life.

De Sanctis held that outside the domain of art all Is shapeless. The ugly is of the domain of art, if art give it form. Is there anything more beautiful than Iago? If he be looked upon merely as a contrast to Othello, then we are in the position of those who looked upon the stars as placed where they are to serve as candles for the earth.

Form was for De Sanctis the word which should be inscribed over the entrance to the Temple of Art. In the work of art are form and content, but the latter is no longer chaotic: the artist has given to it a new value, has enriched it with the gift of his own personality. But if the content has not been assimilated and made his own by the artist, then the work lacks generative power: it is of no value as art or literature, though as history or scientific document its value may be great. The Gods of Homer’s Iliad are dead, but the Iliad remains. Guelf and Ghibelline have disappeared from Italy: not so the Divine Comedy, which is as vigorous to-day as when Dante first took pen in hand. Thus De Sanctis held firmly to the independence of art, but he did not accept the formula of “art for art’s sake,” in so far as it meant separation of the artist from life, mutilation of the content, art reduced to mere dexterity.

For De Sanctis, form was identical with imagination, with the artist’s power of expressing or representing his artistic vision. This much must be admitted by his critics. But he never attained to a clear definition of art. His theory of Aesthetic always remained a sketch: wonderful indeed, but not clearly developed and deduced. The reason for this was De Sanctis’ love of the concrete. No sooner had he attained from general ideas a sufficient clarity of vision for his own purposes, than he plunged again into the concrete and particular. He did not confine his activity to literature, but was active also in politics and in the prosecution and encouragement of historical studies.

As a critic of literature, De Sanctis is far superior to Sainte-Beuve, Lessing, Macaulay, or Taine. Flaubert’s genial intuition adumbrated what De Sanctis achieved. In one of his letters to Georges Sand, Flaubert speaks of the lack of an artistic critic. “In Laharpe’s time, criticism was grammatical; in the time of Sainte-Beuve and of Taine, it is historical. They analyse with great subtlety the historical environment in which the work appeared and the causes which have produced it. But the unconscious element In poetry? Whence does It come? And composition? And style? And the point of view of the author?

Of all that they never speak. For such a critic, great imagination and great goodness are necessary. I mean an ever-ready faculty of enthusiasm, and then taste, a quality so rare, even among the best, that it is never mentioned.”

De Sanctis alone fulfilled the conditions of Flaubert, and Italy has in his writings a looking-glass for her literature unequalled by any other country.

But with De Sanctis, the philosopher of art, the aesthetician, is not so great as the critic of literature. The one is accessory to the other, and his use of aesthetic terminology is so inconstant that a lack of clearness of thought might be found in his work by anyone who had not studied it with care. But his want of system is more than compensated by his vitality, by his constant citation of actual works, and by his intuition of the truth, which never abandoned him. His writings bear the further charm of suggesting new kingdoms to conquer, new mines of richness to explore.

While the cry of “Down with Metaphysic” was resounding in Germany, and a furious reaction had set in against the sort of Walpurgisnacht to which the later Hegelians had reduced science and history, the pupils of Herbart came forward and with an insinuating air they seemed to say: “What is this? Why, it is a rebellion against Metaphysic, the very thing our master wished for and tried to achieve, half a century ago! But here we are, his heirs and successors, and we want to be your allies! An understanding between us will be easy. Our Metaphysic is in agreement with the atomic theory, our Psychology with mechanicism, our Ethic and Aesthetic with hedonism.” Herbart, who died in 1841, would probably have disdained and rejected his followers, who thus courted popularity and cheapened Metaphysic, putting a literal interpretation on his realities, his ideas and representations, and upon all his most lofty excogitations.

The protagonist of these neo-Herbartians was Robert Zimmermann. He constructed his system of Aesthetic out of Herbart, whom he perverted to his own uses, and even employed the much-abused Hegelian dialectic in order to introduce modifications of the beautiful into pure beauty. The beautiful, he said, is a model which possesses greatness, fulness, order, correction, and definite compensation. Beauty appears to us in a characteristic form, as a copy of this model.

Vischer, against whom was directed this work of Zimmermann, found it easy to reply. He ridiculed Zimmermann’s meaning of the symbol as the object around which are clustered beautiful forms. “Does an artist paint a fox,