Criticism in Italy Author(s): Benedetto Croce and Francis J. Thompson Reviewed work(s): Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol.

10, No. 4 (Autumn, 1948), pp. 629-637 Published by: Kenyon College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4332989 . Accessed: 01/11/2011 06:44
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Benedetto Croce

CRITICISMIN ITALY'
(Translated by FRANCIS J. THOMPSON)
C

history of RITICISM poetryand arthas had a veryimportant

J in Italy since the time in the Renaissance when Aristotle's Poetics and other treatisesof the ancientswere rediscovered.Their doctrines were then expanded and adapted in the new poetry, literature,and art which were in full bloom, and made the object of fruitful controversies. A learned American, whose premature passing we still lament, my friend, Joel Elias Spingarn, devoted one of his books to this period of criticism, and showed that these doctrines then became the poetic of all civilized countries, Latin and Germanic; and a German historian, Borinski, recognized independently that the maestro of German criticism, Lessing, had based his work on that same source. In spite of disturbedconditions in national politics, a weighty and the triumph of the baroque, in Catholic Counter-Reformation the following age the quick Italian genius continued to make progress in that field, forming new concepts and opening new paths which are still quite serviceablein modern thought. Among these was taste or judgment of sense, an exact judgment,neitherintellectual nor hedonistic,which distinguishedbetween the beautiful and ugly. Another was wit or genius, the inventive or creative ability. Yet another was style, the expression of the individuality of the writer; and, above all, there was imagination, conceived to be the faculty proper to poetry and art.
on "The 1. 'This essay was written for the symposium University, and read by the translator on that occasion, Great Critics," at Johns April 15, 1948. Hopkins

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Between the 17th and 18th Centuries,the treatisesof Gravina and Muratori, and the dissertationsof Calepio, had considerable influence even outside Italy. Still later they worked upon the so-called Swiss School of Bodmer and Breitingerto such an extent that an English historian, Robertson, has traced the origin of romanticismto these Italians. This is true if it means by 'romanticism" the discovery of a more intimate meaning and a new dignity in poetry. At the same time Vico, in his Scienza Nuova, with philosophic profundity and rigor marked out the exact place in the human spirit which belongs to poetry and to language, which has its origin in poetry and song; and celebratedas supreme poets not Virgil and Petrarchwhose refined culture was preferred in the Renaissance,but the genuine, powerful, though sometimes rude, Homer and Dante. This tradition had its effect on Italian criticism and literary history at the beginning of the 19th Century, on Foscolo among others. Soon it entered into the aesthetic speculations of the
Germans Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Solger, and Hegel
-

and

into the criticism of the two Schlegels and other German and Italian Romantics. FrancescoDe Sanctisgave birth to his theory in the middle of the 19th Century amid these cultural surroundings, and worked among them for many years, selecting and rejecting, with fresh intuition and with a sure sense of what is the truth and reality of poetry. For such work he has been and must be recognized as the founder of the new criticismin Italy. And he deserved that his influence should spread through the culture of Europe, though it did not at that time. As early as the period between 1850 and 1860 De Sanctis had pointed out what the scope of the new criticism should be. He opposed two schools the merits of which he recognized but which basically did not satisfy him: the German, which sought ideas in poetry and reduced it to philosophical dialectic, not realizing that the true importanceof poetry is elsewhere, namely in its frank and a-philosophical representation of the

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human soul; and French criticism, which neglected or trespassed against poetry in order to make it a document of the emotional and everyday life of the writer. Against these two schools De Sanctis maintained that poetry is neither philosophy nor history, let alone biographical chroniicle. It is the creation of aesthetic life. Similarly he ruled out all the infinite and various disquisitions that had been toiled over for centuries and which were concernedwith the theories and intentions which poets held, or were supposed to hold, about their "poetics" and their "ends." On the contrary,he insisted on the essential point that poetry is not what the poet resolves, or thinks he has resolved to do. But it is only what he really and successfullyaccomplishesin the poetic ecstasywhich inspiredhis song, of which he is sometimes unaware, and which the reader and the critic must be able to relive. And they do relive it and feel it again when, in reading a poem, they yield themselves and gather the pure impression, that is, the same image which was the end-product of the creative process of the poet. Anyone who fails to gather that impression, anyone who loses it after having gathered it, yet keeps on reasoning about art, inclines toward subtleties and wearies himself in empty thoughts, because he has lost the only compass that could have guided him. De Sanctis proposed his doctrine in conformity with this and in spite of the aesthetics of his own time, which in Germany above all was notoriously productive of philosophical treatises, setting "aesthetics of content" against "aesthetics of form," and finding no peace, because none could be found in eclectic efforts to unify the two points of view. For De Sanctis, aesthetic is, to be sure, form and nothing but form; but it is not dead form separablefrom content or added to content in a rhetorical way. It is what he called "living form," form which overcomes the chaos which is its matter or abstractcontent and makes it concrete by transfiguringit into the aesthetic image. De Sanctis had few followers except in Naples, where he taught. For it is a region singularly favorable to philosophizing,

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as Herder had already observed a century before, saying that "freedom of thought illuminates and favors the Bay of Naples." De Sanctis'words were reechoed at first, but his thought was not thoroughly understood because no theory is truly understood except in the light of the critical judgment which continues and perfects it. When he put down his pen, the positivistic and antiphilosophic age was already in full bloom. Closed to the life of the spirit, it vainly sought truth where it could not be found, in the natural sciences. And contemporarywith the European age of positivism, there was "philologism" in the study of poetry and art. Even at its best the result was certainlynot the understanding with the surroundof poetry and art; it specializedin acquaintance ings of art, bibliography and the study of the fortunes of works, searching and editing the texts to make them as exact as possible, providing the biography of artists in their everyday life, the formation and succession of their works considered extrinsically and not felt or understood aesthetically,and other similar things. There resulted, on the part of philologists, a scorn for De Sanctis, who was considered a dilettante and eccentric. They did not find him a colleague in their work, for such in effect he was not, and they could not understand that in him whiclh departed so much from and was so far superiorto and more complex than the sphere of their quite useful labors. A periodical entitled the Giornale storico della letteraturaitaliantais one to be remembered because in its own province it was very important and worthy. It was opposed to what De Sanctis stood for in its very program, and proclaimed its forebearsand masters (to whose examples it wished to return) to be Tiraboschi, Quadrio and Crescimbeni, and such erudites of the 18th Century. The journal still ekes out its life today, although disturbed and contaminated, even in its philological and bibliographicalprobity, by Fascism, the corruptorand murderer of life, which twisted even that philological shop to factious and wretched political propaganda. The recoveryof the tradition of De Sanctis became evident in

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the last years of the 19th Century. It grew and waxed strong in the first half of our own century, with the resurgence of truly philosophical speculations as opposed to the hybrid variety of the natural sciences, puffed up into positivistic pseudo-philosophy. It was necessaryabove all to reduce to a rigorous and coordinated philosophical form that which De Sanctis had formulated somewhat aphoristically, and not without lacunae, uncertainties and with some contradictions. And this was achieved by interpreting the concept of "form," which he considered to be the queen of art, as an a priori synthesis of a Kantian type but of which Kant had not thought, a synthesis which, in analogy with the logical synthesis of judgment, is "emptywithout material (which is sentiment) just as sentiment is blind without category (which, in this case, is intuition)." This, therefore, may, from the categorical element which shapes it, be named briefly "intuition," a word which here designates the office or proper characterof poetry and of art, and gives the definition of it which Kant did not succeed in giving in his Critique of Judgment, where art remains not a synthesis but an amalgamation of intellect and imagination. In De Sanctis, aesthetic form, which is made up of poetry, art, language, becomes the first act of frank and unreflecting cognition, and, for that reason,necessarilyprecedesthe act of logic. Whereas in Kant what went before abstractand arbitrary judgmentwere the forms or, as he called them, the categories of intuition, space and time, that possess a different importanceto the understanding and requirethe intellect. In De Sanctis, in addition to the absence of a methodical criticismof all other theories of art that had been proposed, there lingered residtuesof old distinctions which had been virtually, though not logically and expressly, surmountedby him. Among these were the longstanding distinction between the beautiful and art, where an identificationshould have been made; the doctrine of literarygenres, which should be rejectedbecause it is extrinsicallyclassificatoryand not serviceableas a criterioneither in artistic production or judgment; the doctrine of the specific

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characterof each art; the relation between intuition and expression, which is one of identity, and so on; points which were all reexamined and resolved in conformity with the principle of intuition. De Sanctis'idea of the history of poetry was also corrected,an idea which, due to a certain Hegelian bent, showed not a few traces of a dialectic of forms bound one to the other by thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But every poem is an original creative process and for that reason demands a monographichistory which will tie it in securely with the whole history of the human spirit, not merely with one or several works of art. Thus an aesthetics, extensively developed and particularized,replaced the principles expressed by De Sanctis. From these principles it received its original impluse and they are all contained in it, but placed in new relations, better clarified and thought out, and enriched with the many complements and consequenceswhich they bear within themselves, but which had not been deduced or not well deduced. Anyone who would like readily to know a great many of these principles may refer to the book of the distinguished American thinker Dewey, Art as Experience (1934). By the spontaneous virtue of his acute mind, contraryto the intentions of the author, this contains a good speculative philosophy (or "organic"philosophy, as he might distastefully call it). Although Italian aesthetic does not figure therein, except for a few rare critical allusions (which I find not justified), in innumerable points it entirely conforms to the aesthetic which for half a century now has been cultivated and is widely spread over Italy, as I showed in an article I of mine when the book by Dewey appeared.2 say this, not in order to make the least protestationof priority,but only to point out the coincidence; because if Dewey came to these conclusions independent of Italian works in aesthetics (and that is something quite possible), I should be quite happy about it, as a spontaneous
2. It can be seen now in Discorsi di vatia filosofia (Bari, Laterza, 1945), II, 112-119.

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confirmation brought by him to the truth, which is all that matters. It is also worth remembering that in Italian aesthetics the distinction between the concept of poetry and that of literature has been expresslytreated, not in the usual manner, by considering literatureas a kind of inferior or conventional or bad poetry; but, differentiating it entirely from poetry, its own particular and proper character and value have been recognized. In poetry, content and form are one and the same thing: a poem cannot be 'translated" into other words or rhythmswithout being destroyed or changed. But, in literature, aesthetic form dresses a content which may be expressedalso non-aesthetically,in a phonic, graphic or any other systemof signs. Hence, for literature,the concepts of ancient rhetoric are valid, such as the distinction which is basic to those concepts, that of "bare form" and "adorned form." As distinguished from poetic genius, the positive function of literature is to respect and cultivate the aesthetic disposition of the humanmind and to make use of it for didacticand divers rhetorical ends, whence the attention to rhythm of the sentence, to appropriate images and other ingredients of what is called good taste. Literature so conceived, even if it never deserves the epithet "divine" with which poetry has been acclaimed, must be held in high esteem as a powerful instrument of refinement and civilization. If you would like a formula to express the figure of the critic which arises from the preceding development and intellectual education, I should say that it is not that desired by aestheticians who, by a curious reduplicationof the artist, would proclaim with d'Annunzio that the critic must be an artifex additus artifici; because, even if the critic, having identified himself with the poetic work, needs to capturethe moment in which he becomes himself a poet; and even if his poetic sensibility needs to be cultivated and refined: equally necessaryfor criticism is precision of concepts by which to determine the nature of the sentiment which has been

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experienced, whether it be pleasant or unpleasant, whether it be approval or disapproval, that is, whether it has an aesthetic characteror not; whether it is poetic, or instead to some degree literary; whether it is entirely of an emotional nature, or of a practical nature extraneous to art; for all of which, clarity in aesthetic concepts is required. And since the critic must also be able to state in reflective terms (and to the extent which that is possible) what the state of mind is which given poetry expresses, and since for this is required a wide experience with the human soul and the ability to describeits aspects, the critic, besides being a philosopher, must be a subtle and balanced "psychologist." Poetry, like painting, cannot be rendered in logical terms; to the question, What does it mean, no satisfactoryanswer can be given except to read it again, or, in the case of painting, to look at it again. But those psychological characterizations,altlhough they may always remain somewhat commonplace and abstract,impart to criticism an added and special function that may be called educational, similar to that of one who points out to the spectator the right spot from which a painting should be viewed and who, as he speaks of the painting, directs the attention to certain lines and planes, to certain shadows and colors. These are useful subsidia, even though, in the last analysis, everyonemust look and feel for himself. Modern Italian aesthetics could not and has not limited itself to the criticismand historyof poetryin the usual sense of the word, but inevitably has invaded all the other arts. This has occurredin the arts of design, in architecture,in music, accompaniedby many theoretical treatises and, better yet, many acute histories; work in this field is thriving. And what happened undeservedly to the work of De Sanctis has not happened to the new aesthetics and criticism,namely, to remain confined to Italy. For, due in part to the more general characterof its treatises and in part to favorable conditions of internationalculture, especially before the two great it wvars, penetratedmore or less extensively everywhere,and espec-

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ially in England (where, among many others, the sharp mind of Walkley, critic of the Times, embracedand defended it); in Germany (where it was effective in the formation of a new Sprachphilosophie); and in the United States of America (where it found a zealous champion, already mentioned, in Spingarn,who published The New Criticismin 1911). Italian aesthetics was translated even into Japanese,and also there found disciples; and in the early years of the Bolshevik revolution, when as yet a philosophy and a poetry of the state and of the party had not been established, there was even one who translatedit into Russian. But all this exceeds my theme, which was to inform you of the condition of criticism in Italy; where, to conclude, I should tell you that the school which was formed in the course of the first half of the centuryand is now in full vigor, has been and is today opposed by current"hermetic"or "stylistic"criticism,the younger sister of decadent "pure poetry." This opposition actuallyoffers nothing of any scientificinterest, although I have amused myself sometimes in commenting on the pronouncementsof these critics in Italy. In doing this I do not know if I did well or not. Everyone has his own temperament. I approve and admire the stern resolution of my venerable ancestor Baumgarten,who baptized the science which I foster and called it Aesthetics. In reply to the stupidities which were being printed against his theory, misunderstanding and perverting his
characterization of poetry as oratio sentsitiva perfecta to oratio

perfecte (that is, onmnino)sensitiva, [i.e., a perfect sensitive discourseto a wholly senzsitive discourse] he prayedthe Lord never to give him the time to terere (wear down), dilapidare (destroy), perdere (ruin) in such disputes. But 1, for my part, have not always found the calm to imitate him. In my turn I shall imitate him, however, by not causing you to waste time with such things.