remembrance must finally rest upon his less celebrated labors in literary criticism; and it is a matter for chagrin that the few of these which have thus far appeared in English translations should have been so completely outmoded by his philosophical writings. The second and particular specification of my remonstrance is the undisturbed obscurity in which Croce's master, and a much more interesting critic than he, Francesco de Sanctis, has been permitted to remain through this recent enthusiasm for Italian criticism. Despite Croce's enormous vogue and his very substantial achievement, the future will probably justify the opinion that De Sanctis remains the greatest literary critic that Italy has thus far produced. Already we are beginning to perceive the discreet radiance of Carducci's poetry through the diminishing battle-dust of D'Annunzio's lush splendors, and the perfect sublimity of the meagre handful of lyrics which Leopardi bequeathed to us as compared with the sedate and voluminous deftness of Carducci's poetical works. So, presently, we shall return to the essays of De Sanctis.

Italian literature is unique in that it has produced so few considerable critics, yet has thrived so admirably without them. There were written in Italy before the time of De Sanctis, of course, a great many isolated critical monographs and essays of excellent merit; but there was no writer among those who made literary criticism their especial purpose, who succeeded so admirably as he and upon so substantial a scale. Great critics are as few in Italian literature as they are in American; great philosophers are fewer.

Admitting the obvious faults of De Sanctis's critical method and the errors into which his sympathies, his lack of diligent preparation, and his ignorance often betrayed him, Italy has still to produce a more intimately suggestive critic than this simple Neapolitan schoolmaster. Carducci, and more presently Croce, have extended the glory of Italian letters by some of the most exemplary essays in literary criticism written in modern Europe,

essays, any one of which puts the totality of De Sanctis's work to shame, when judged by modern standards, but these more recent critics must be observed from different perspectives; and when this historical difference is allowed, the pioneer achievement

of De Sanctis in its entirety and its original spirit remains undiminished by the most fastidious comparisons.

The genius of De Sanctis resides in the spirit of quick humanity with which he approached literature as a living thing; in the hospitality and sincerity of his enthusiasms, and in the ingenuous and uncontaminated quality of his sympathies. His literary studies are more than books; they are a man. De Sanctis wrote before strait historical accuracy had come to be regarded an indispensable adjunct to criticism; and if he errs sometimes absurdly in matters of dates and places, it is not important: one can always consult the literary encyclopædias compiled by more reliable historians, whose aptitude is for dates and places. De Sanctis knew little of these particular details of literature, and it is certainly not for these that we go to him. All he was interested in was the man, and the works of the man as an interpretation of his life and heart, and as a reflection of his epoch. His alertness of sympathy and the profundity of his spiritual insight rendered him eloquent within these limitations, and I take it that this is enough.

Francesco de Sanctis was a Neapolitan. He was born at Morra Ispina in 1818, and died in 1883, full of honors and remembered in his native city as the veritable genius of patriotism and erudition. The facts of his life, recorded by his pupils in a score of volumes, are not important here; they are, in truth, simple and unpretentious. Determined from his earliest youth upon a literary career, he drifted by the merest chance into the school of the eccentric Marquis Basilio Puoti, whom he has celebrated in his Saggi critici and Nuovi saggi critici. There were at that time almost no reputable schools in Southern Italy. The Universities, maintained by the State, were quite inconsiderable and their methods of teaching hopelessly obsolete. To rectify this deficiency, a large number of private academies of every description had been established, among them the famous school of the Marquis Puoti; but these, on the whole, shared the defects of the State institutions. The situation was painful for an Italian scholar of moderate means and earnest purposes. Italy, subjected to a foreign despot, had abased her national pride and ceased to cherish her ancient glories. Her scholars, absorbed in the study of French, German, and English literature, no longer

considered the Italian language and its literature as subjects worthy of their contemplations. There was current a ruinous prejudice for all things foreign; an absurd condition, which finally resulted in the popularization of a degenerated dialect largely mixed with French words, and the decline in use of the pure, hardy Tuscan of the Trecento.

The school of the Marquis Puoti was certainly not an exception to the prevailing inadequacy; but it was better than most and produced, among other eminent scholars, the critic and patriot, Luigi Settembrini. The Marquis was an eccentric nobleman who established his school to serve his hobby, and governed it like a petty martinet. He, however, reversed with a vengeance the common prejudice for foreign works, leaving them almost entirely out of account in his instructions. His decisions were not less arbitrary in Italian literature, from the body of which he chose for consideration, without regard for their intrinsic excellence, only such works as might serve his immediate purposes. He affected a florid, quasi-rhetorical style in writing, which he required his pupils to imitate without regard for the natural gesture of their expression. Pasquale Villari has left an interesting account of the Marquis's pedagogical method:

The pupils began with the easiest of the Trecento writers, but had only to study their wording and phraseology; then they passed on to writers who were stylists, and first of all to books of a simple style, such as Villani's Chronicles, the Fioretti of Saint Francis, and the Deeds of Eneas. Afterwards they had to study subtler and more artificial authors, such as Dino Compagni, Passavanti, and last of all, Boccaccio. The same method was applied to the writers of the Cinquecento. The Marquis admired Machiavelli, but of all his works preferred the most artificial, and especially his account of the Plague after the manner of Boccaccio (a highly artificial production, erroneously attributed—at that time to Machiavelli), and certain orations he had placed in the mouths of the historical persons he described. We pupils carefully filled our note books with fine tricks of speech, endeavored to round off our periods, and zealously studied our grammars and manuals of rhetoric. . . . To the Marquis, words seemed to have the glitter of gold. He was always talking of words of fine or of bad alloy, words of the best alloy, or words of pure gold. So every one became accustomed to writing with a dictionary in front of him and a notebook of phrases from which all the words of bad alloy had been weeded out.

The Marquis had far less difficulty in forgiving bad grammar and even bad spelling than defective phraseology. On this head he was inexorable, and he

had a special hatred of all Frenchified expressions. In his opinion, elegant writing consisted in avoiding every word and turn of phrase which was in common use, and substituting others unknown to everyday speech, such as saper grado e grazia for "to offer thanks"; essere di credere for "believe"; tener per fermo for "to be sure"; essere tenero e sollecito per una cosa for "to greatly desire a thing". The words "society" and "social" were forbidden, and the word socio was to be sozio, instead. Being ordered one day to compose an address to young men, I happened to write, "Some of you study theology, medicine, or jurisprudence". The Marquis immediately corrected the sentence thus: "There are some who study divinity, some who give their labor to medical science, many to civil and canonical law". Importance was given to the word itself and to the mechanical part of composition, and in the quest for purity of expression nothing was clearly expressed. Every one ended by writing in the same way, for even the slowest pupils attained to this superexcellent style, a fact in which the Marquis, who had no nose for real talent, took the greatest pride. Nevertheless, the foundation of this school seemed a grand event to us at that period. The desire to write good Italian and discard foreign modes of speech was a sign of the times, and almost a patriotic demonstration.

De Sanctis's career at the academy of the Marquis Puoti was brief; but it was sufficient to give him the best that the school had to offer, and to make him keenly aware of the errors of the systems of education then prevailing in Southern Italy. Soon thereafter, unostentatiously and all but unnoted, he opened his own school, in one of the dilapidated old palaces of which there are so many in Naples. It was here that his life work was really begun. His pupils adored him, and his lecture hall was always crowded to overflowing. A new and hitherto unknown spirit in the contemplation of literature had its birth in these lectures. Learning was no longer formal and fatigued; it was living and vital. The subjects discussed were no longer prescribed and hackneyed; they were fluid and volatile, spontaneous and universal, comprehending the whole range of the world's intellectual progress. The Professor no longer disputed phrases and admonished speculative excursions; he was himself the most flagrant offender. The eloquence of De Sanctis has been much remarked, and the immediate enthusiasm that his lectures on the Divina Commedia aroused, when he had fled to Turin after his exile, completely unknown and penniless (for he had at that time published nothing), to take an instance, is suggestive of this. It has been said of De Sanctis that he "had a mysterious gift of gleaning inspiration from the

sight of a work of art and of discerning, as if by instinct, its fundamental idea; and of tracing back this idea to its primary elements, of divining how these had germinated and developed in the mind of the poet whose secret he revealed, and then recomposing the whole and bringing it before us in a plainer and more intelligible fashion." His spirit of comradeship with his students, whom he invariably addressed as his "friends and fellow-workers", must have been charming.

It should, however, be pointed out that the most immediate impulse in the De Sanctis school was not literary, but patriotic. The whole function of the school was in the nature of a patriotic demonstration. The nationalistic spirit, which was elsewhere little more than a wistful and impotent aspiration, found a renewed vigor in the Master's lectures. The subject was seldom directly mentioned and never emphasized, but love of the Italian soil and appreciation of the neglected Italian culture formed the most profound and insistent undercurrent among the group. When the disastrous demonstrations which culminated in the outbreak of 1848 began, De Sanctis closed his lecture hall and thereafter addressed his students in the streets, where they might be closer to their countrymen and share their righteous anger. Reticence was forgotten. One of the students, Luigi La Vista, a youth of twenty-two, was shot by the Swiss Guard in the sanguinary riot of May 15; his death, as Ernesto Masi said, "the finest work of poetry produced by the school."

De Sanctis's school was broken up that day at the barricades, and the Master himself taken prisoner by the Swiss mercenaries. A few days later he was released, and sought a temporary refuge in the country; but soon afterward he was again taken into custody, tried in Naples for rioting, convicted, and for two years was confined in the dungeons beneath the Castel dell' Uovo, in a cell at sea level. This confinement he employed in learning the German language, in prodigious study, in writing poetry, and in composing his first dramas. Eventually, by the vicissitudes of political events, he was deposited, without means of support, in Malta, as a political exile. Two months later, in the most painful poverty, he reached Turin, where he delivered his famous lectures on Dante. De Sanctis was completely unknown in Turin at this