SOURCE: “Respice Finem: The Literary Criticism of Giovanni Gentile,” in Italica, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring, 1970, pp. 3-27.

[In the following essay, Brown discusses Gentile's literary essays analyzing the poetry of Dante and Leopardi.]

I.

If the primary purpose of literary criticism is to convey a sense of the unique individuality of a poet and his poems, as most Italian critics since Francesco De Sanctis have believed, then Giovanni Gentile is a much finer critic than has yet been recognized. Although Gentile's main interests, from the turn of the century until his death in 1944, were in philosophy and educational reform, he also wrote a series of critical essays in which he struggles, with increasing insight, to understand the nature of poetic individuality and to articulate his sense of the individuality of the poetry of Dante and Leopardi. Although Petrarch, Alfieri, and Manzoni also came under his scrutiny, only Dante and Leopardi sustained his interest and elicited efforts of understanding. Only his essays on them are complex enough to serve as counterparts to the advances in his philosophy. If his response to poetry seriously affected the nature of his philosophy, as I think it did, it is mainly the poetry of Dante and Leopardi that had this effect.

The significance of Gentile's criticism must be maintained in the face of almost universal opposition by Italian philosophers and critics. Croce felt that Gentile was utterly anaesthetic in his reading of any and all poems and that his actualistic philosophy, as logocentric, was fundamentally at odds with poetry. Guido Calogero has said that the aesthetics of a man as insensitive to art as Gentile could not be taken seriously. For Eugenio Garin, Gentile and all his Actualistic disciples were basically indifferent to the rich multiplicity of life usually associated with art and poetry. Philosophers of the stature of Augusto Guzzo and Luigi Pareyson have agreed with Garin that Gentile consistently neglected the individuality of persons and reduced all experience to variations on the absolute and universal act of thinking, the notorious pensiero pensante. Most of those who commented, during Gentile's lifetime, on his Filosofia dell'arte, of 1931, claimed that it was written only as an effort to supersede Croce and not out of any genuine interest in poetry. Although a few Italians, including Alberto Moscato and Antimo Negri, have recently taken exception to this, no one to my knowledge has gone so far as to suggest that we should look afresh at Gentile's practical criticism, just on the chance that it is not anaesthetic and logocentric, as Croce claimed fifty years ago.

Some asides, it is true, in surveys of recent criticism on Dante and Leopardi, have been made with reference to Gentile, suggesting that his work was innovative and influential.¹ The references, however, are invariably brief and their point broken by qualifications to the effect that Gentile did not develop his insights or expressed them clumsily or buried them under irrelevant philosophical formulations. The unique individuality of any poet or poem: who was less able to respond to it and to articulate that response than Giovanni Gentile? That rhetorical question represents the Italian consensus, even to this day.

Though wrong, the consensus is understandable. It stems from the belief that there is little significant development in Gentile's career, and that what development there was terminated by 1923, with the publication of the second volume of his Sistema di logica. Gentile began as a Hegelian, believing that the ultimately real is the Absolute Spirit, as it develops objectively in history. By 1912 he had undergone his one major transformation. He had discovered that ultimate reality is not objective, historical Becoming, but is the very act of thinking itself, an act which synthesizes subjectivity and objectivity in its immediately present movement. This ultimately real act of thinking cannot be conceived as an object of thought, because the very act of conceiving it turns into a fact and thus belies its nature as an immediate action. In contrast to the pensiero pensato, the pensiero pensante can never finally be put into any objective series, whether Hegelian or other; for it is the act that creates any and all systems and series and goes beyond them in the very positing of them. It is endlessly becoming infinite because it goes beyond all finite limits at the very moment it establishes them.

The consensus is that after 1912 Gentile dedicated himself to the promulgation of this single discovery and that all his multifarious writings thereafter were amplifications or clarifications of it. If something seems new, it is because Gentile has momentarily forgotten his mission or it is no more than a rhetorical flourish made for political purposes. Thus, when Roger Holmes based his The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile on the two volumes of Gentile's Sistema di logica and ignored all else, he was in line with Gentile's own Italian students. Luigi Russo, who wrote the one good study of Gentile's criticism, claims that Gentile's fullest criticism of Dante had been written by 1912 and that his thought in aesthetics had been completed by that date.² Nowhere in his study does Russo point to any significant change in Gentile's later thought.

With so widespread and deepseated a conviction as to Gentile's constancy, it is no surprise that Italians missed the originality of his later work. His thought during the period between 1912 and 1923 was so profound and revolutionary, it was so difficult to take in and comprehend, how could any one expect him to go even further, during the last third of his career, especially since he was then occupied with problems of a practical nature?

During the past few years, however, the originality of Gentile's late work has at last been recognized: in political theory and logic by Ugo Spirito and H. S. Harris, and in aesthetics by Moscato and Negri and in my book on Neo-Idealistic aesthetics.³ Within this new context, it is now possible to observe the significance of Gentile's late essays on Leopardi, those written in 1927, and of his 1937 essay on the Sordello canto of the Purgatorio. In the light of these, his finest critical essays, we can understand his earlier works on Dante and Leopardi as moments in his growing awareness of the nature of the individuality of poetry. Respice finem. The value of a man's work is determined by his finest achievements. His true nature is manifest, is embodied, only in his intensest and richest actions. All else that he does, leading up to or falling away from those actions, can be understood and evaluated only in their light.

II.

Perhaps the major problem in Dante criticism since De Sanctis has been the unity or lack of unity of the Commedia. De Sanctis believed that the Commedia is split between Dante's intentions, his poetics, which were shaped according to the ideas of his age, and the realized poetry, those aspects of the poem that transcend its age and make it endure as poetry through all times. Karl Vossler, in the first version of his massive study of Dante and the Middle Ages, followed De Sanctis in all the essentials of his analysis of the Commedia. Croce's well known study of Dante, which was first published in book form in 1921, is based on a similar argument: the poem is split between structure and poetry; as a whole it is a non-poetic, theological romance, and in its most valuable particulars alone is it genuine poetry. For Croce the Commedia is unified as an expression of Dante's spirit, but Dante's spirit is split down the middle into its practical and its poetic halves. In response to this argument an enormous literature has accumulated over the past fifty years.⁴ Those who have argued against the duality of the poem have been heavily indebted to Gentile, who was maintaining, even as early as his 1908 review of Vossler's work, that the Commedia is unified as a poem.

Gentile's earlier essays, however, can be understood best in the light of his last effort, his 1937 essay on the sixth canto of the Purgatorio.⁵ This is his only essay limited to a single canto and the canto chosen presents an extremely difficult test of his belief that the Commedia is a poetic unity. The canto appears to be a series of incidents not even unified by the scene, the second “balzo” of the antipurgatorio. An extended analogy opens the poem; Dante is being besieged by spirits that need prayers from earth and Dante compares himself to the winner at a game of dice about whom the onlookers crowd asking for favors. After naming several of the spirits, Dante withdraws himself, the crowd and the scene are forgotten, and Dante and Virgil enter into a discussion about just what earthly prayers can be efficacious for what spirits. Virgil concludes by saying that whatever doubts Dante still has on the subject will be resolved when he sees Beatrice, “ridere e felice” on the top of the mount. With a glimpse of this image, Dante is eager to quicken his pace, but Virgil says they can go only so fast and that the sun must set and rise before they reach the top. A solitary figure is then noticed and Virgil asks him the best way up the mountain. Instead of replying, the figure asks where on earth they come from. At Virgil's one word, “Mantova,” the figure abandons his aloof isolation, says “O Mantovano, io son Sordello / della tua terra!” and Virgil and Sordello embrace. With no transition at all, Dante then appears to abandon the scene entirely and begins his famous, seventy-five line apostrophe, “Ahi serva Italia,” addressed to Italy, the popes, the emperor, God, and, finally, against Florence, with which the canto ends. Few cantos in the whole Commedia seem as disjointed as this one.

Yet Gentile, who has never before argued for the unity of the Commedia except in a general way, here undertakes to prove that this disjointed canto is unified and to show in detail that it is unified poetically. Nothing in his previous criticism of Dante suggests that Gentile would or could carry out such an undertaking. He does not argue here that the canto is organized around some philosophical concept, as he would have in 1902, if he could have restricted himself to a single canto. He does not take an image and a concept from the poem and dogmatically assert that they are immediately fused in Dante's imagination, as he does in his 1908 and 1912 reviews of Vossler's work. Nor does he do the most obvious and the easiest thing, taking his argument of 1918 that Dante is a poet-prophet and applying it to this canto, with the claim that the whole canto is just the setting of the stage for the concluding harangue against the corruptions of Italy and particularly Florence. Nor, finally, does he do the kind of thing he did in 1921, admitting that objectively the canto is utterly disjointed, and then turning about and asserting that the whole is unified by the shaping action of Dante's pensiero pensante, by the movement of his thought as he carves the canto out, line by line.

Instead of jumping from multiple disorder to some comfortable, unifying concept, here as nowhere else Gentile works out an exegesis of the whole canto, as a unified poem and work of art; and he does so in such a way as to show that this canto is an integral, poetic part of the Purgatorio. He begins with a detail rather than a generalization, with the incongruity of tone between the opening of Canto VI and the conclusion of Canto V: Montefeltro was made to appear heroic and Pia sublime, but the analogy between Dante and the winner of a game of dice, the sort of thing he must have seen often in Florence in the Mercato vecchio, is trivial and quotidian. This is like mixing the sacred with the profane, tragedy with farce, man at the height of his spirit and man in the dust of the lowliest earth. The material of the two cantos is the same: spirits are asking a favor of Dante. But the mode of treatment could not be more diverse.

In what he calls a digression, Gentile then argues that such jumps in tone and quality are of the very essence of the art of the Purgatorio. Stylistically it is a continuous, dialectical alternation between magnanimity and vulgarity, between passages “that move us even to tears and those in which we indulge our habit of laughter, which is also a privilege and prerogative of man.”⁶ Contrary to De Sanctis' belief, the Purgatorio is not primarily contemplative and thus inferior to the Inferno, which is full of action. Instead it is concerned with the more human and refined forms of action and is vibrant with intimate feelings for the home and with love for one's homeland. The style, Gentile claims, the dialectical alternation between the heroic and the vulgar, makes a continuous harmony out of these discordant motifs, which are the intricate and diverse aspects of man's life when he is truly human, neither vicious nor virtuous, but a mixture of both. Like Dante's apostrophe at the end of the sixth canto, as Gentile will explain it, these comments on the whole of the Purgatorio are only apparently a digression.

With the game of dice Dante counters the solemn piety of Pia's “ricorditi di me che son la Pia.” From the low humor of the crowd of spirits, urgent as a crowd in the Mercato vecchio, from this mob he moves to a more serious community, that of two souls discussing a theoretical point, to his discussion with Virgil of the efficacy of the prayers of the living for the dead. The climax of this discussion is a further withdrawal, to the momentary image of Beatrice, alone and aloof on the very top of the mountain, with a hint at that higher community of Dante in joyous harmony with the woman he loves. Dante then lightens the mood with a moment of comedy, with his own urgency to get on with the trip and with Virgil's indulging him by asking for directions so that they can travel as rapidly as possible. This light mood, however, is immediately replaced by the sublimely aloof and solitary image of Sordello, and that by the even more sublime embrace of Sordello and Virgil, which for Gentile embodies the most intimate essence of patriotism, of that love of one's homeland which is as profound as one's love of his mother. Out of this embrace Dante then breaks into his vehement and heroic castigation of his fellow countrymen, who, even within their own walls, fight against one another, when they should be living in love and peace. For Gentile this apostrophe is not a rhetorical break in the continuity of the poetry. Dante's vehement speech does not leave Virgil and Sordello behind, but issues straight out of the magnanimous and loving patriotism of those two heroic poets. The material of his attack is scurvy and vulgar, blatantly so. The canto ends with an image of Florence, constantly changing its policies in an irresponsible and cantankerous manner, as a sick person turning again and again on his bed in a vain effort to find relief from his pain. But Dante's anger is expressed heroically, in the manner of Sordello. Even in the fullness of his detestation he can turn to God with the hope that He is preparing for some glorious future to issue out of this degraded Italy. As moments of sublimity spring out of passages of vulgarity, in the rhythm of the Purgatorio, so Dante can hope that out of the present meanness of Italy God may draw some future moment of greatness.

Gentile's essay depends on his making good his claim that the apostrophe is poetic rather than an oratorical digression. The image of Sordello, he argues, is a supreme moment of poetry. Dante begins the passage by addressing Sordello directly:

Venimmo a lei: o anima lombarda,
come ti stavi altera e disdegnosa
e nel mover delli occhi onesta e tarda!
Ella non ci dicea alcuna cosa,
ma lasciavane gir, solo sguardando
a guisa di leon quando si posa.

(61-66)

The form of address implies the poet's distinctness from the figure he addresses. But Sordello's grandeur immediately obliterates the separateness and Dante, in his marvel and admiration, becomes utterly at one with the intense vision. Virgil embraces Sordello and one feels that the shades are for a moment indistinguishable. In the forcefulness of this moment of sublime patriotism, Dante as poet in effect embraces his fellow poets. His apostrophe, in all its love and hate and anger and hope, comes straight out of this sublime embrace. Read with the proper intonation, Gentile says, coming out of this most intimate, masculine form of love, Dante's cry,

Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello,
nave senza nocchiere in gran tempesta,
non donna di provincie, ma bordello!

(76-78)

is the quintessence of the poetry of the Purgatorio, a fusion of magnanimity and vulgarity, two opposites fused in the intensity of Dante's unquenchable love for his homeland. Gentile's argument, in my opinion, is compelling.

If Gentile's essay itself is read with the proper intonation, one cannot but respond to the crescendo of his own feeling and recognize that it reaches its climax as Gentile himself embraces Dante, who has embraced his sublime companions. Does this mean that Gentile has betrayed his critical obligation and used this occasion for one more harangue, as one more effort to make his Italian compatriots more loyal to the troubled Fascist regime? To me it is clear that he has not. He has instead come close to achieving the goal of all serious criticism, as he envisages it in the Filosofia dell'arte.

For Gentile every genuine poem is a synthesis of feelings, objective articulation, and overarching awareness. The Sordello canto is just such a synthesis, with the moment of feeling, the special form of patriotism cultivated in solitude by Sordello and shared by Virgil and Dante, dominating and suffusing the whole. The critic's job is to experience that synthesis in utter oneness and then to pull back, still at one and yet distinct, and articulate its individual nature so that others may both experience and understand it. In his critical awareness of the pattern of the canto and in his concern for problems in his own present, Gentile is clearly distinct from the poem. If one reads the poem along with the essay—an obligation every reader of criticism is required to fulfill—he will feel and recognize that Gentile is also at one with Dante.

At the same time, if he knows much about Gentile's career, he will also recognize the individual feeling that is a necessary though subordinate part of Gentile's own essay. This feeling is a coupling of anguish at the vulgarity of the national community, at the failures of the nation to live with dignity, accepting and affirming the value of the labor of all; it is a coupling of this anguish with the joyful realization of a finer and more intimate community, of the spiritual community which Gentile as an Italian has finally realized with the kindred and yet diverse spirit of Dante, the true father for Gentile of the homeland he loves in spite of its degradedness. Such a community requires no coercion; it is like a church built on top of the state; it is, moreover, a church without power, the church of St. Francis, the absolute community of love, a twoness in oneness, which is the ultimately real and the ultimately valuable, that alone which makes life bearable even in its meanness. This is the labor that redeems all other labor. Its forms are endless, but during his last years the form it took for Gentile was the form of literary criticism. And in this particular critical essay Gentile not only comes to experience communal oneness with Dante, but he also discovers and understands its full significance. Out of this critical experience, he must, as I see it, have come to realize how much more valuable the intimate philosophical community which he and Croce had sustained into the early twenties was than his allegiance to the Fascist state ever could be. And he must have deepened his sense that, contrary to the position he held to through 1923, the pensiero pensante, the ultimately real act of thinking, is communal rather than solitary, is a dialogue and not a monologue, is “our” act rather than “my” act. This critical essay is the best record we have that Gentile was preparing, at least spiritually, to compose his last philosophical work, his Genesi e struttura della società, the main point of which is that human experience is ultimately a spiritual, internal community.

The final value of the essay on the Sordello canto is, however, internal to itself. Gentile discovers the individuality of the poem in its feeling, which is the first and essential moment of the poem as a dialectical action. But in this essay it is clear to him that the feeling in itself is non-existent; that to exist it must break into its opposite, into objective articulation; and that both feeling and articulation must be synthesized by the poet's own critical awareness, by means of which he makes feeling and articulation adequate to each other. The essence of the poem is patriotism; but, if it is to exist, that feeling must be objectified, it must become the feel of things; and, finally, both feeling as impulsion and the feel of things must be subsumed under the act of feeling, that prehensile outreaching which is like the act of feeling about in the dark for a light. With feeling thus activated, the critic cannot be content with a formula for the quality of the poem, for its poetic essence. To sense and express the uniqueness of the poem, he must explicate the way the feeling is objectified and show how the poet has given shape to his feeling even in the most intricate details of the poem. In this one essay at least Gentile has demonstrated in practice just what he meant by the ideal of criticism propounded philosophically in the Filosofia dell'arte.

Finally, there are some implications in this essay concerning the Commedia as a whole. Gentile must be recognizing that the Commedia develops as poetry along with the development of its content; that Dante as poetic shaper is changing and developing his style as the poem progresses. He is clearly aware that Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim are distinct and that the most forceful action of the poem is Dante's shaping style. Dante as poet is most fierce and mundane in the composing of the Inferno. Thereafter he gradually detaches himself from wordly passions, realizing that the political and public arena is no place for redemption. Gentile's discrimination, in the Sordello canto, between Italy as a public community and the spiritual community of Sordello, Virgil, Dante as pilgrim and Dante as poet and, finally, Gentile as reader and critic, is one aspect of this sense that the ultimately real is to be found in the intimacy of a spiritual community.⁷ Furthermore, it is clear from what he says that Gentile recognizes, as a peculiar aspect of Dante's act of shaping the poem, the way he identifies himself again and again with himself as pilgrim. Dante may be detaching himself from the world and refining his feelings as the poem develops; but he remains a poet of extraordinarily intense feeling, whose style is at one with his sense of non-poetic felt experience. Thus, when Dante makes his vehement apostrophe to servile Italy, he makes it as pilgrim and poet, as one: it is made as from within the scene, but it is also made as a part of the very shaping action which creates the scene. Dante's love of his homeland and his love of that very love and of those who are capable of it is so intense that all nice distinctions between characters within the poem and the character of the poem become minimal and are absorbed within the unifying energy of the poem as a poetic action. The broader implications of Gentile's essay are truly breath-taking. One's sense of this is strengthened by the fact that the best criticism of the Commedia as a whole written during the past thirty years, that of Natalino Sapegno's, in his Trecento of 1963, is in very close agreement with the implications of Gentile's essay.⁸

III

Gentile's ideal of literary criticism requires that the critic do more, however, than capture the inner movement of an individual poem; he must go deeper and understand the essential poetic action of the poet as an individual. The Sordello essay contains suggestions that range beyond the one canto, but they are only suggestions, and Gentile never wrote its companion piece on Dante as the maker of the entire Commedia. That, however, was the objective of each of his six earlier essays on Dante. But they are all flat failures; as efforts to explain the essential action of Dante as maker of the whole poem they are incomparably inferior to his study of the one canto from the Purgatorio. In 1902 Gentile writes as a Hegelian. The Commedia proves to be a philosophical system which is a link in the dialectical series of the history of philosophy. Between 1908 and 1912 he is Crocean: the poem stands outside history as aesthetic form, as an immediate, spiritual, organic object, an individual intuition that fuses all thought and feeling in a poetic image. In the two essays of 1918 and 1921 Gentile writes as an Actual Idealist. The Commedia is neither system nor intuition, but action: in the first essay it is prophetic action, a prophecy superior to that of Savonarola or that of St. Francis, in fact a prophecy identical with Gentile's own; in the second it is philosophical action, and this too is virtually indistinguishable from Gentile's own thinking.

Looked at closely, and flawed as they are, the essays do reveal Gentile's progressive effort to understand the essential action of Dante as poet. In a letter written in 1899 to Croce and first published during the past year, Gentile explains his belief that all reality is history and that history is an objective, rational, dialectical series.⁹ To discover the reality of any action is to show how it fits into the series, to place it. If an action is philosophical it will differ from all other actions because it is by its nature aware of itself. A philosophical action fits into the series like any other action; its distinctiveness is that it incorporates the whole past within itself and understands not only what it includes, but also its own act of inclusion. Other forms of action lack such awareness. They may even appear to be “fantasticherie,” idle day-dreams, events that do not fit into the dialectical series of history. Usually, however, a philosopher can show that what appears irrelevant is not so at a deeper level. Reality is rational and the rational is real; in philosophy, in the history written by a philosopher, this truth is not only understood, but actually realized. If something is genuinely fantastic, utterly subjective, and irrelevant to the dialectical series, then its irrationality is its unreality.

In 1902, working within this Hegelian framework, Gentile finds Dante to be both philosopher and poet.¹⁰ The system of the Commedia is viewed as a dialectical synthesis of Aquinas and Bonaventura; its basic concept is the absolute transcendence of all value and truth. Virgil, who represents human reason without faith, cannot move to help Dante until Beatrice, theology or reason based on faith, descends from heaven and orders him into action. Thus motivated, Virgil can guide Dante through the Inferno and Purgatorio, after which Beatrice must take over. For Gentile all this is straight Thomism and concepts are the moving forces behind the events of the poem. It is by way of philosophical insight, then, that Dante goes beyond Thomism, recognizing as the logical conclusion of all Scholasticism not theology, but the “ascensione mistica,” the ascent by love into the “nichil glorioso” of Jacopone da Todi. So San Bernardo replaces Beatrice.

Unlike the philosophy of the Commedia its poetry seems irrational. Of course, to Gentile the philosopher, who is fully aware of the dialectical series, it is quite rational. But it seems irrational and thus is poetry or only incipient philosophy. For Dante was unaware of the concept that led him to write in the vernacular and to bring so many feelings and images from his homeland into this philosophical system. The concept of which Dante was unaware is that man is of absolute value in himself and that the truth is not transcendent but immanent. Beyond Dante's philosophical system, then, the Commedia contains this concept contradictory to the system, but in the form of poetry, as an unexamined thrust which, in the fuller self-awareness of Petrarch, will become the motor force, the reigning concept, of Italian humanism.

The true weakness in this, Gentile's first study of the Commedia, is that he has so thoroughly objectified it, treating it as a solid link in an utterly objective series. To analyze Dante's philosophy as the final product of two prior philosophies, as a perfected system, is bad enough; but even worse is Gentile's reduction of Dante's passionate attachment to the qualities of his vernacular and to the intimate details of so many individuals, of all the most obviously poetic aspects of the poem, to no more than a stage in the development of the objective Absolute Spirit, an individual whole that extends beyond the Commedia and covers all history. Such objectification is familiarly called “anaesthetic distancing.” Because it reduces the poem to a product with Aquinas and Bonaventura on one side and Petrarch on the other, it bars Gentile from entering into the living movement of the poem.

In his Crocean phase, Gentile at least lifts the Commedia out of any such series and treats it as an autonomous, self-originative creation. Even so, he is conceiving of the poem as an object rather than an action. The main point of his three reviews of Vossler—and by implication it is a repudiation of his own earlier study of Dante—is that the poem must not be split into its philosophy, or intentional framework, and its poetry or realized intuition. Vossler makes the split because of hidden Romantic or Vichian assumptions. Poetry for him is narrowly sensuous and passionate. Thus, any thought found in a poem must originate from a source different from that of its truly poetic elements. But, Gentile affirms, Virgil was never a mere sensuous creature for Dante, but was always a union of individual man and reason. Dante did not read the Aeneid as sensuous poetry and then decide to make its author stand for reason; he read the Aeneid itself as rational poetry, as a fusion of image and thought. And the obligation of every reader of Dante is to enter into Dante's viewpoint. There image and idea are inextricably fused; they are born as one.

These reviews of Vossler are long and impressive, so impressive indeed that Vossler rewrote his aesthetic analysis of the Commedia under their guidance.¹¹ Nonetheless, Gentile is hampered in his search for the essential poetic action of Dante by the fact that he thinks of the poem as an immediate intuition, much like a luminous ball, fully formed, before which one stands in silent awe. What really could he say of so perfected a whole? He can say of Beatrice: she is not the combination of a beautiful woman and the concept of theology, but is both at once, in utter fusion. The claim may make one dizzy, may lead him to swoon as a sharp distinction between woman and theology dissolves and the two blend into one. But it says nothing particular about the fusion. It dispels one fallacy but affirms another, that this great poem is a mystical, luminous object, to be experienced in rapt attention or not at all. Whereas every reader of Dante must sense the immense struggle of the concrescent development of the Commedia, must surely feel that the pain is not just his own, as a foolish, inexpert reader, but is also Dante's, is also an essential element in the action of Dante himself as poetic maker.

In his 1918 essay on the Commedia as Dante's prophecy, Gentile overcomes these mystical elements and at last attends to Dante as maker, not just to the poem as a made object. The poem, he finds, is Dante's act of making it, and that act is the prophetic expression of the need for a reform of both State and Church. The Church must be divested of all material power and become an expression of an ideal, spiritual community. For this to happen, the State must be reformed first, all of Italy brought under the rule of one emperor. Such a State can then insist effectively that the Church express its proper ideal. Gentile concludes his essay by noting that modern Italy stands in need of just this Dantean reform.

Gentile has effectively overcome the notion of the Commedia as an object and is treating it as an action. But instead of turning it from dead fact to living action, he has obliterated the poem both as fact and act and has reduced it to his own prophetic action. The poem is activated but as other than itself. During this early period of Actualism, the novelty of the made Gentile miss an obvious analogy: that between the importance of his own immediate thinking and, if the action of any other person is to be understood, the importance of that person's immediate act of thinking. Indeed, a few years before, in his Sommario di pedagogia, Gentile claimed that Dante is born again with each new reader and that there are as many Dantes as there are readers of his poem. On principle, the action of Dante is reduced to the action of his readers. This is Gentile's Actualism in its most subjective and irresponsible stage.

The last turn on Gentile's bed of pain comes in his 1921 essay on Dante's philosophy. This essay is meant to overcome all the errors of his previous studies. Gentile strives to synthesize his Crocean understanding of the Commedia as an intuitive object and his Actualistic understanding of it as an act of thinking, and to affirm that it is philosophy of a very different sort than he found it to be in 1902. Elementally, the poem is both passion and vision. As vision it is Dante's imaginative intuition of Scholasticism. In the vision, God, truth, and value are transcendent; the poem is man's ascent to and obliteration in the divine truth of God. As passion, as the forward thrust of Dante's energetic spirit, it is just the opposite; it is Dante's affirmation of man's virtú as of absolute value. Dante senses that it is really he as poet who originates the process of redemption. By creating Beatrice and setting her in motion, he is prior to all the action within the poem. In effect, it is Virgil, or human reason not based on blind faith, who orders reason based on such faith to inspire him, Virgil, or unassisted reason. This doctrine of the absolute immanence of truth and value in man as poetic creator is Dante's true philosophy in the Commedia.

Like his disciples, Guido De Ruggiero and Vito Fazio-Allmayer, Gentile is claiming, against Croce, that poetry involves self-awareness and thus is a kind of philosophy.¹² In addition, he tries here to show that Dante was himself aware of his true, anti-Scholastic philosophy and that he, Gentile, is not just bringing Dante up to date by providing him with the latest discoveries of Actualism. Dante, he claims, may repeat what the theologians instruct concerning Grace and free will; but his true thought, which animates the whole poem, is expressed out of the mouth of Marco Lombardo, in the sixteenth canto of the Purgatorio: reason and choice are in you, man, and if the world goes astray it is your fault. This, Gentile says, is virtually heresy and is opposed to everything Dante learned in the schools. Needless to say, the claim that this heresy animates the entire Commedia is quite arbitrary; Gentile is not much closer to Dante's essential poetic action than he was in 1918.

Lurking behind this inadequate treatment of the Commedia is Gentile's first, truncated version of the dialectic as composed of only two terms, the pensiero pensante and the pensiero pensato, object and subject, thought and thinking. Even through the second volume of his Sistema di logica, which was published in 1923, he is failing to conceive of the first moment of the dialectic as a genuinely subjective impulsion and thus as truly distinct from the second, objective moment. With the first moment repeatedly collapsing into the second, all he is left with is the third, synthesizing moment, and its opposite, objective moment. Thus, in his 1921 essay he conceives of the Commedia as composed of only two moments, passion and vision, or pensiero pensante and pensiero pensato. Even worse, the movement of Gentile's own critical essay is composed of only two moments; in his treatment of the Commedia, it is reduced to the pensiero pensato of his own pensiero pensante. In other words, he has no way to consider the poem according to Dante's own internal movement, but rather has laid the poem out as an object, the unity of its passion and vision; thus even Dante's own imaginative thinking has been turned into an objectified thought. There is plenty of action in the essay, but it is all Gentile's. He remains without the idea of the immediate subject as feeling and thus as distinct from the mediate subject as thinking; and only with such an idea could he have released and articulated the imaginative, internal action of Dante as the poetic shaper of the Commedia. This idea is at the heart of his essay on the Sordello canto. But he was never to incorporate it into a study of the essential poetic action of Dante as the maker of the entire Commedia.

IV.

Gentile does, however, successfully compose a study of the essential action of a poet; but the subject is Leopardi, not Dante. This study, embodied in two essays published in 1927, is the culmination of a series of essays much like his series on Dante.¹³ It includes the one detailed study of an individual work which Gentile wrote in addition to his essay on the Sordello canto, his 1916 essay on Leopardi's Operette Morali. But unlike the Sordello essay, the essay on Leopardi's prose masterpiece is deeply flawed. Gentile understood the individuality of a poem by Dante, but not his poetic individuality. He understood the individual uniqueness of Leopardi as a poet, but never succeeded in articulating the inner movement of any one of his works.

In his series of essays on Leopardi, as in the series on Dante, Gentile becomes more and more willing to affirm the poet's self-awareness, in both his prose and poetry. But Leopardi was materialistic, pessimistic, and sceptical and he did not develop his thought systematically or coherently. Unlike Dante, Leopardi represents the extreme opposite of Gentile's manner of thought. As a result of this, there was no danger of Gentile's mistakenly identifying Leopardi with himself, of reducing him to an Actualistic philosopher. This fact served as a counterweight to Gentile's growing tendency to attribute philosophical awareness to Leopardi. The progress of his thought urged Gentile to take that direction, but the quality of Leopardi's imagination worked against this urgency. Thus, it was in his essays on Leopardi that Gentile most vigorously sought to satisfy his double need: to emphasize the full humanity of great poetry and yet to affirm its difference from philosophy.

That Leopardi was alien to Gentile is evident in his first essay on him, a review published in 1907. Gentile argues that Leopardi cannot be taken seriously as a philosopher. His scepticism is dogmatic and uncritical, even less critical than Montaigne's or Pascal's. Philosophically, then, Leopardi is an anachronism; he has no place in the dialectical series of history. His poetry is pure poetry, utterly subjectivistic. He expresses not a philosophy, but a state of mind. By implication, it may be said that Gentile views Leopardi's poems as “fantasticherie,” as idle day-dreams, irrelevant to historical reality and thus irrational and unreal.

In his second essay, a review written in 1911 during his Crocean phase, Gentile admits that, in a general way, Leopardi may be said to have a philosophy. He has a concept of Nature as materialistic and of man as a nullity before Nature. In agreement with De Sanctis, Gentile claims that all Leopardi's poetry is based on a contradiction between its form and its content. Its content is his concept of Nature and the nullity of man; its form is Leopardi's sense of his own and of man's greatness. But Gentile insists that Leopardi is unaware of his sense of human greatness; it is simply a blind feeling clashing against his pessimistic concept.

Neither of these first two essays on Leopardi is original or perceptive. His third essay, the longest study he made of any single work of art, is another matter. The importance of this study, an analysis of the structure of the Operette Morali, lies in the nature of its failure. Gentile tries here to make an immediate identification of the essential action of Leopardi's poetry and the structural development of this one work. It must have been as a result of this effort that Gentile learned how different the structure of an individual work, which is a temporal or spatial sequence, is from the innermost action of a poet, which must be deeper and more essential than any such sequence. For his failure in this essay to choose one or the other as his central concern is not repeated. In his later essays on Leopardi he concentrates on the poet's essential action; in the essay on the Sordello canto he limits himself to the individual poem.

His essay on the Operette was written against De Sanctis' then unchallenged judgment that the work is non-poetic, that it is a product of cold, cynical craft, written without heart or feeling. Gentile argues that the Operette appear cold and non-poetic only to those who neglect its development as a whole. With detailed, scholarly evidence used as support, he claims that Leopardi composed the Operette in three sections, each comprised of six chapters and all framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The first two sections, he admits, are bitterly pessimistic. The first is based on the notion that happiness is being unconsciously at one with Nature and that everything men do makes them more and more conscious and detached and thus less and less happy. In the second section Leopardi is viewed as tracing out the consequences of Nature's command that man should be great and unhappy. The more a man does as a man, the more clearly he sees that all human action is futile and meaningless. As a result, a great man must be afflicted by “noia,” by a terrible sense of the emptiness of human life. For Gentile, the third section, in contrast to the first two, reveals Leopardi's awareness that even great men can overcome “noia” and live happily. In the experiences of glory, of risking one's life, of being a dead, feelingless shade, of detaching oneself philosophically, of rising in the morning full of hope, and, finally, of singing poetically like the birds, men can and do experience joy and a sense of the value of their lives.

Obviously enough, this triadic structure sounds very philosophical, sounds in fact very much like the three-term poetic dialectic which Gentile will work out philosophically only much later, in 1931, in his Filosofia dell'arte. The first section of the Operette is like the thesis of the dialectic, immediate feeling, blind joy, the vis naturae which is pure pleasure for all who are at one with it. The second is the antithetical, objective moment. Here Leopardi articulates the painfulness that goes with the analytical breaking up of natural joy, as a man learns how little he is before the vast force of nature. The third would be the synthesis of the dialectic, would represent the mature joy that goes with being aware of the littleness and insignificance of men. The figures who speak in this section are aware that their pleasures are illusory, but their very awareness of the fictiveness of their triumphs provides a deeper and truer joy, the joy of knowing and facing unflinchingly the triviality and meanness of being a man.

Gentile insists, however, that the Operette are not philosophical, even though they are a full realization of the dialectic of thinking, of all the essential moments of human reality. In contrast to his 1911 essay, Gentile here affirms that Leopardi is conscious both of his concept of the nullity of man and of his sense of his grandeur. But this consciousness is only implicit. It can be sensed only by the reader who feels, in all three sections of the body of the work, the presence of the beliefs which Leopardi presents tentatively and indirectly in his prologue and epilogue. Actually, Gentile could not have claimed more than this, for the third section does not seem to affirm anything basically different from the first two. The experiences of the worth of human life that come with a moment of glory or that follow a daring act which defies death, these experiences of joy are affirmed sadly to be illusory, to be cultivated as ways of getting through life. They are overcast by “noia,” even though this boredom may be of a sublimer kind than that of the first two sections. To claim, as Gentile does, that the dominant feeling of these last chapters is essentially different from that of the first two sections, this requires repeated wrenching and distortion.

Gentile had, in truth, tripped over the hidden treasure, the secret, not only of Leopardi's poetry, but also of his own Actualistic dialectic. For the full, three-term dialectic is the essential poetic action present in every part of the Operette. In each part one senses the primitive impulsion and joy of natural feeling, and the sad, wise, serene awareness that such pleasure and such pain are essential moments of every human experience. But lacking the concept of this dialectic, Gentile could not distinguish Leopardi's essential poetic action from the objective, spatially extended structure of the Operette themselves. The full dialectic, as a result, is viewed as an objective series with each of its three moments spatially and conceptually separate from the others. In effect, then, the series is objectified as pensiero pensato; and the deeper force of the Operette, their true pensiero pensante, the love that grows out of truth instead of blissful, natural ignorance, is found to reside in the Prologue and the Epilogue alone. In them is the passion, the living feeling; in the other eighteen chapters is the vision, the structure over which the passion triumphs. Thus, what appeared to be a three-term dialectic of living, present action is turned into the object of a truncated, two-term dialectic. The troubles Gentile was having with his concept of the dialectic at this time drag his analysis of the Operette down into something confused and contradictory.

A hurriedly written newspaper review, published three years later, in 1919, reveals quite openly this contradiction, which is the hidden worm eating out the heart of his essay on the Operette. He begins by adopting De Sanctis's notion of Leopardi as always split between his feeling and his thought; but, when he turns to the Operette, he then claims that Leopardi was not split in this way, but synthesized his feeling and thought in the last section of that work. At one and the same time the Operette are an action which is both subjective and objective, an action in which feeling and thought contradict each other; and they are an action conceived as an objective fact, a structure in which the first and second parts are synthesized by the third. The Hegelian dialectic, an objective series of three moments, which Gentile had buried after his first study of Dante, is here resurrected in order to compensate for the weaknesses in his own dialectic.

In the twenties no one bothered to attack Gentile's criticism, but his philosophy was being attacked on the grounds, essentially, that it could not account for experience of a passionate and personal nature. Gentile's direct replies to these attacks were feeble. But his true reply came in the two essays on Leopardi which he delivered as lectures in 1927. There he discovered the fullest form his dialectic was ever to take by means of uncovering the essential movement of Leopardi's poetry. The originative moment of the essential action of all Leopardi's poetry is idyllic, the joyous sense of being in harmony with nature. The second moment, the moment of objectification and multiplication, is pure pain, is the awareness that by his very consciousness man is cut off from that animal joy. None of the poetry, however, is simply contradictory, for the pleasure and the pain are synthesized by Leopardi's sovereign and controlling awareness, by the Titanic pride he feels in knowing the inevitable misery of all men, and by his love and compassion for men because their pain is unavoidable. The very thought which brings man pain redeems him from it, as it achieves, in its farthest reaches, the grandeur of that Titanic pride and love. In essence, this is the poetic dialectic of the Filosofia dell'arte, expressed in an individualized form, as Gentile's penetrating response to the unique form of Leopardi's poetry. His deepest and most original philosophical insight came to him as a direct response to the poetry of Leopardi.

Although he illustrates Leopardi's pride and love with numerous references to individual poems, Gentile does not make the mistake he made in 1916 of structuralizing and spatializing the essential action of Leopardi's poetry by way of a detailed analysis of individual poems. His aesthetic tact is here impeccable. There is no violent effort to force one's way from the essential action to the development of any individual poem. Gentile now seems aware that each poem must be responded to on its own terms. Each would finally be a unique realization of Leopardi's Titanic and loving awareness. But rather than impose his general insight on poem after poem, wrenching them into that general form, he leaves them free, to be considered in their uniqueness by others, with the patience and delicacy and subtlety that he himself was to demonstrate only once, and that on the sixth canto of the Purgatorio.

Thus, Walter Binni's claim that Gentile flattened all Leopardi's poems into a monotonal expression of Titanic pride and tender love cannot stand. Binni's own effort to split Leopardi's poetry into an idyllic period and a heroic period is arbitrary and distorting. It is a case of misplaced objectification and temporalization, much like Gentile's own treatment of the Operette in 1916. Gentile's essays of 1927 were purposefully incomplete. These called, in effect, for the sort of development given them by Umberto Bosco, in his recent study of the Titanism and pietà of Leopardi.¹⁴ Bosco treats the poems sensitively and individually, and he works always in the light of Gentile's discovery of the essential action of Leopardi's poetry.

To have virtually originated, at best to have pointed out, new directions in the criticism of both Leopardi and Dante, such accomplishments force us to deny that Gentile was anaesthetic and logocentric in his critical approach to poetry. It is true that he began his career as a critic by reducing the Commedia to a stage in the development of Italian culture and philosophy and by discarding Leopardi's poetry as irrelevant to that development. And that, in the middle of his career, while riding the wave of the pensiero pensante, he reduced poems to the movement of his own immediate thinking. If, however, one attends to the end, to the essential end, not just the chronological end, he must recognize that at least once Gentile performed both of the central functions of criticism with the excellence of genius. To note the very winged movement of poetry, to catch the essential poetic action of Leopardi and the individual movement of one canto of the Commedia, this end ought to be sufficient to become the beginning of a new movement in criticism; and this movement ought to be able to compete with the now reigning school of criticism in Italy, the new historicism, which bends all its efforts to reducing poems to social facts, to expressions of the poet's cultural ambience.

Notes

1. Among others, see Giovanni Cecchetti, Leopardi e Verga: sette studi (Firenze, 1962), p. 4; Emilio Bigi, “Giacomo Leopardi,” I classici italiani nella storia della critica, II (Firenze, 1962), 381-2; Daniele Mattalia, “Dante Alighieri,” I classici italiani, I, 75, 80; Giuseppe Citanna, II romanticismo e la poesia italiana: dal Parini al Carducci (Bari, 1949), pp. 188-9. The qualifications are omitted in Aldo Vallone's Studi su Dante medievale (Firenze, 1965), pp. 23-27.

2. Luigi Russo, La critica letteraria contemporanea, II (Bari, 1954).

3. See the last three essays in Spirito's Giovanni Gentile (Firenze, 1969); H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1960); Moscato's “Saggio sulle teorie estetiche di Giovanni Gentile” and Negri's “Le teorie estetiche di Giovanni Gentile,” in Giovanni Gentile: la vita e il pensiero, IX (Firenze, 1961); and the fifth chapter of my Neo-Idealistic Aesthetics (Wayne State Univ. Press, 1966).

4. See my “Recent Italian Criticism: Poetics Replaces the Poem,” Philological Quarterly, XLVII (April, 1968), 253-279.

5. All Gentile's Dante criticism is now collected in his Studi su Dante (Firenze, 1965). His essay on the Sordello canto is reprinted in Letture Dantesche (Firenze, 1958), pp. 123-142.

6. Studi su Dante, p. 221.

7. Gentile's interpretation lends support to Spitzer's claim (Italica, XXXII, 1955) that Dante's addresses to his reader are intimale and personal; but it also accounts for Auerbach's belief (Romance Philology, VII, 1954), that such addresses are authoritative and public, the belief against which Spitzer argues.

8. In addition to Sapegno's Storia letteraria del trecento (Milano-Napoli, 1963) see Mario Fubini's Metrica e poesia (Milano, 1962), where similar ideas are developed.

9. The letter is included in a series of letters from Croce to Gentile, in the Giornale critico della Filosofia italiana (gennaio-marzo, 1969), 76-8.

10. This first study may be found both in the Studi su Dante and in its original place as a chapter of Gentile's Storia della filosofia italiana (fino a Lorenzo Valla), 2nd. ed. (Firenze, 1962).

11. The revised version is to be found as part 5, v. II of Vossler's Mediaeval Culture: An Introduction to Dante and His Times (New York, 1966).

12. See Fazio-Allmayer's “Arte e filosofia,” Annuario della Biblioteca filosofica di Palermo, III (1913); and De Ruggiero's “Arte e critica,” L'Arduo (novembre, 1921).

13. All the essays on Leopardi are in Gentile's Manzoni e Leopardi, 2nd. ed. (Firenze, 1960). The 1927 essays are numbers III and VI. Essays VII and VIII, of 1937 and 1938, add nothing, in my opinion, to the argument of 1927.

14. Titanismo e pietà in Giacomo Leopardi (Firenze, 1957). Bosco's sympathy for Gentile's aesthetics and criticism is expressed in his “Esperienze e conquiste della letteratura del novecento,” estratto da V. Rossi, Storia della letteratura italiana, 14th. ed. (Milano, 1942), p. 59.