treatise, there had appeared in Naples (1725) the first _Scienza
nuova,_ which developed ideas on the nature of poetry outlined in
a former work (1721), _De constantia iurisprudentis,_ outcome of
"twenty-five years' continuous and harsh meditation."[1] In 1730 Vico
republished it with fresh developments which gave rise to two special
books (_Della sapienza poetica_ and _Della discoperta del vero Omero_)
in the second _Scienza Nuova._ Nor did he ever tire of repeating his
views and forcing them upon the attention of his hostile contemporaries
at every opportunity, seizing such occasion even in prefaces and
letters, poems on the occasion of weddings or funerals, and in such
press notices as fell to his duty as public censor of literature.
And what were these ideas? Neither more nor less, we may say, than
the solution of the problem stated by Plato, attacked but not solved
by Aristotle, and again vainly attacked during the Renaissance and
afterwards: is poetry rational or irrational, spiritual or brutal?
and, if spiritual, what is its special nature and what distinguishes
it from history and science?
As we know, Plato confined it within the baser part of the soul, the
animal spirits. Vico re-elevates it and makes of it a period in the
history of humanity: and since history for him means an ideal history
whose periods consist not of contingent facts but of forms of the
spirit, he makes it a moment in the ideal history of the spirit, a form
of consciousness. Poetry precedes intellect, but follows sense; through
confusing it with the latter, Plato failed to grasp the position it
should really occupy and banished it from his Republic. "Men at first
feel without being aware; next they become aware with a perturbed and
agitated soul; finally they reflect with an undisturbed mind. This
Aphorism is the Principle of poetical sentences which are formed by the
sense of passions and affections; differing thereby from philosophical
sentences which are formed by reflexion through ratiocination; whence
the latter approach more nearly to truth the more they rise towards
the universal, while the former have more of certainty the more they
approach the individual."[2] An imaginative phase of consciousness, but
one possessed of positive value.
[Sidenote: _Poetry and Philosophy: imagination and intellect._]
The imaginative phase is altogether independent and autonomous with
respect to the intellectual, which is not only incapable of endowing
it with any fresh perfection but can only destroy it. "The studies of
Metaphysics and Poetry are in natural opposition one to the other;
for the former purges the mind of childish prejudice and the latter
immerses and drowns it in the same: the former offers resistance to
the judgement of the senses, while the latter makes this its chief
rule: the former debilitates, the latter strengthens, imagination: the
former prides itself in not turning spirit into body, the latter does
its utmost to give a body to spirit: hence the thoughts of the former
must necessarily be abstract, while the concepts of the latter show
best when most clothed with matter: to sum up, the former strives that
the learned may know the truth of things stripped of all passion: the
latter that the vulgar may act truly by means of intense excitement
of the senses, without which stimulant they assuredly would not act
at all. Hence from all time, in all languages known to man, never has
there been a strong man equally great as metaphysician and poet: such a
poet as Homer, father and prince of poetry."[3] Poets are the senses,
philosophers the intellect, of mankind.[4] Imagination is "stronger in
proportion as reason is weaker."[5]
No doubt "reflexion" may be put in verse; but it does not become poetry
thereby. "Abstract sentences belong to philosophers, since they contain
universals; and reflexions concerning such passions are made by poets
who are false and frigid."[6] Those poets "who sing of the beauty and
virtue of ladies by reflexion ... are philosophers arguing in verses
or in love-rhymes."[7] One set of ideas belongs to philosophers,
another to poets: these latter are identical with those of painters,
from which "they differ only in colours and words."[8] Great poets are
born not in epochs of reflexion but in those of imagination, generally
called barbarous: Homer, in the barbarism of antiquity: Dante in that
of the Middle Ages, the "second barbarism of Italy."[9] Those who have
chosen to read philosophic reason into the verse of the great father
of Greek poetry have transferred the character of a later age into
an earlier, since the era of poets precedes that of philosophers and
countries in infancy were sublime poets. Poetic locutions arose before
prose, "by the necessity of nature" not "by caprice of pleasure";
fables or imaginative universals were conceived before reasoned, _i.e._
philosophical universals.[10]
With these observations Vico justified and at the same time corrected
the opinion of Plato in the _Republic,_ denying to Homer wisdom, every
kind of wisdom; the legislative of Lycurgus and Solon, the philosophic
of Thales, Anacharsis and Pythagoras, the strategic of military
commanders.[11] To Homer (he says) belongs wisdom, undoubtedly, but
poetic wisdom only: the Homeric images and comparisons derived from
wild beasts and the elements of savage nature are incomparable; but
"such success does not spring from talent imbued with domesticity and
civilized with any philosophy."[12]
When anybody takes to writing poetry in an era of reflexion, it is
because he is returning to childhood and "putting his mind in fetters";
no longer reflecting with his intellect, he follows imagination
and loses himself in the particular. If a true poet dallies with
philosophical ideas, it is not "that he may assimilate them and dismiss
imagination," but merely "that he may have them in front of him, to
examine as though on a stage or public platform."[13] The New Comedy
which made its appearance after Socrates is undeniably impregnated with
philosophic ideas, with intellectual universals, with "intelligible
kinds of human conduct"; but its authors were poets in so far only as
they knew how to transform logic into imagination and their ideas into
portraits.[14]
[Sidenote: _Poetry and History._]
The dividing line between art and science, imagination and intellect,
is here very strongly drawn: the two distinct activities are repeatedly
contrasted with a sharpness that leaves no room for confusion. The
line of demarcation between poetry and history is hardly less firm.
While not quoting Aristotle's passage, Vico implicitly shows why
poetry seemed to Aristotle more philosophical than history, and at
the same time he dispels the erroneous opinion that history concerns
the particular and poetry the universal. Poetry joins hands with
science not because it consists in the contemplation of concepts but
because, like science, it is ideal. The most beautiful poetic story
must be "wholly ideal": "by means of idea, the poet breathes reality
into things otherwise unreal; masters of poetry claim that their art
must be wholly compact of imagination, like a painter of the ideal,
not imitative like a portrait-painter: whence, from their likeness to
God the Creator, poets and painters alike are called divine."[15] And
against those who blame poets for telling stories which, they say, are
untrue, Vico protests: "The best stories are those approximating most
nearly to ideal truth, the eternal truth of God: it is immeasurably
more certain than the truth of historians who often bring into play
caprice, necessity or fortune; but such a Captain as, for instance,
Tasso's Godfrey is the type of a captain of all times, of all nations,
and so are all personages of poetry, whatever difference there may be
in sex, age, temperament, custom, nation, republic, grade, condition
or fortune; they are nothing save the eternal properties of the human
soul, rationally discussed by politicians, economists and moral
philosophers, and painted as portraits by the poet."[16] Referring
to an observation made by Castelvetro, and approving it in part, to
the effect that if poetry is a presentiment of the possible it should
be preceded by history, imitation of the real, yet finding himself
confronted by the difficulty that, nevertheless, poets invariably
precede historians, Vico solves the problem by identifying history
with poetry: primitive history was poetry, its plot was narration of
fact, and Homer was the first historian; or rather "he was a heroic
character amongst Greek men, in so far as they poetically narrated
their own history."[17] Poetry and history, therefore, are originally
identical; or rather, undifferentiated. "But inasmuch as it is not
possible to give false ideas, since falsity arises from an embroiled
combination of ideas, so is it impossible to give a tradition, however
fabulous, that has not had, at the beginning, a basis of truth."[18]
Hence we gain an entirely new insight into mythology: it is no longer
an arbitrary calculated invention, but a spontaneous vision of truth
as it presented itself to the spirit of primitive man. Poetry gives an
imaginative vision; science or philosophy intelligible truth; history
the consciousness of certitude.
[Sidenote: _Poetry and language._]
Language and poetry are, in Vico's estimation, substantially the same.
In refuting the "vulgar error of grammarians" who maintain the priority
of the birth of prose over that of verse, he finds "within the origin
of Poetry, so far as it has been herein discovered," the "origin of
languages and the origin of letters."[19] This discovery was made by
Vico after "toil as disagreeable and overwhelming as we should undergo
had we to strip off our own nature and enter into that of the primæval
men of Hobbes, Grotius, or Puffendorf; creatures possessing no language
at all, by whom were created the languages of the ancient world."[20]
But his painful labour was richly repaid by his refutation of the
erroneous theory that languages sprang from convention or, as he said,
"signified at will," whereas it is evident that "from their natural
origin words must have had natural meanings; this is plainly seen
in common Latin ... wherein almost all words have arisen by natural
necessity, either from natural properties or from their sensible
effects; and in general, metaphor forms the bulk of language in the
case of every people."[21] This argument strikes a blow at another
common error of the grammarians, "that the language of prose writers
is correct, that of poets incorrect."[22] The poetic tropes grouped
under the heading of metonymy seem to Vico to be "born of the nature
of primitive peoples, not of capricious selection by men skilled in
poetic art";[23] stories told "by means of similitudes, imagery and
comparisons," result "from lack of the genera and species required to
define things with propriety," and "are therefore, by reason of natural
necessities, common to entire peoples."[24] The earliest languages
must have consisted of "dumb gestures and objects which had natural
connexions with the ideas to be expressed."[25] He observes very
acutely that to these figurate languages belong not only hieroglyphics
but the emblems, knightly bearings, devices and blazons which he calls
"mediæval hieroglyphics."[26] In the barbarous Middle Ages "Italy was
forced to fall back on the mute language ... of the earliest gentile
nations in which men, before discovering articulate speech, were
obliged like mutes to use actions or objects having natural connexions
with the ideas, which at that time must have been exceedingly sensuous,
of the things which they wished to signify; such expressions, clad in
almost vocal words, must have had all the lively expressiveness of
poetic diction." [27] Hence arise three kinds or phases of language:
dumb show, the language of the gods; heraldic language, or that of the
heroes; and spoken language. Vico also looked forward to a universal
system of etymology, a "dictionary of mental words common to all
nations."
[Sidenote: _Inductive and formalistic_]
A man with ideas of this sort about imagination, language and poetry
could not say he was satisfied with formalistic and verbal Logic,
whether Aristotelian or scholastic. The human mind (says Vico) "makes
use of intellect when from things which it feels by sense it gathers
something that does not fall under sense: this is the true meaning
of the Latin _intelligere_."[28] In a rapid outline of the history
of Logic, Vico wrote: "Aristotle came and taught the syllogism, a
method more suited to expound universals in their particulars than to
unite particulars by the discovery of universals: then came Zeno with
his sorites, which corresponds with modern philosophic methods and
refines, without sharpening, the wits; and no advantage whatever was
reaped from either by mankind at large. With great reason, therefore,
does Verulam, equally eminent as politician and philosopher, propound,
commend and illustrate induction in his Organum: he is followed by the
English with excellent results to experimental philosophy."[29] From
this source is derived his criticism of mathematics, which have always,
but especially in his day, been considered as the type of perfect
science.
[Sidenote: Vico opposed to all formal theories of poetry.]
In all this, Vico is not only a thorough revolutionary, but is quite
conscious of being so: he knows himself to be in opposition to all
previous theories on the subject. He says that his new principles of
poetry "are wholly opposed to, and not merely different from, all which
have been imagined from the time of Plato and his disciple Aristotle
to Patrizzi, Scaliger and Castelvetro among the moderns; poetry is now
discovered to have been the first language used by all nations alike,
even the Hebrew."[30] In another passage he says that by his theories
"is overthrown all that has ever been said of the origin of poetry,
beginning from Plato and Aristotle, right down to our own Patrizzi,
Scaliger and Castelvetro; and it is found that poetry arising through
defect of human ratiocination is as sublime as any which owes its
being to the later rise of philosophy and the arts of composition and
criticism; indeed, that these later sources never gave rise to any
poetry that could equal, far less surpass it."[31] In the Autobiography
he boasts of having discovered "other principles of poetry than those
found by Greeks and Latins and all others from those times down to the
present day; on these are founded other views on mythology."[32]
These ancient principles of poetry "laid down first by Plato and
confirmed by Aristotle" had been the anticipation or prejudice which
had misled all writers on poetic reason (among whom he cites Jacopo
Mazzoni). Statements "even of most serious philosophers such as
Patrizzi and others" upon the origin of song and verse are so inept
that he "blushes even to mention them."[33] It is curious to see him
annotating the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace, with a view to finding some
plausible sense in it by applying the principles of the _Scienza
nuova_.[34]
It is probable that he was familiar with the writings of Muratori
among contemporaries, for he quotes him by name, and of Gravina, who
was a personal acquaintance; but if he read the _Perfetta Poesia_ and
the _Forza della fantasia_ he could not have been satisfied by the
treatment meted out to the faculty of imagination, so highly valued
and respected by himself; and if Gravina influenced him at all it must
have been by provoking him to contradiction. In this latter (if not
directly in such French writers as Le Bossu) he may have met with the
fallacy of regarding Homer as a repository of wisdom, a fallacy which
he combated with vigour and pertinacity. In his estimation, among the
gravest faults of the Cartesians was their inability to appreciate the
world of imagination and poetry. Of his own times he complained they
were "benumbed by analytical methods and by a philosophy which sought
to deaden every faculty of soul which reached it through the body,
especially that of imagination, now held to be mother of all human
error": times "of a wisdom which freezes the generous soul of the best
poetry," and prevents all understanding of it.[35]
[Sidenote: _Judgments of grammarians and linguists who preceded him_]
It is just the same with the theory of language. "The manner of birth
and the nature of languages has been the cause of much painful toil
and meditation: nor, from the _Cratylus_ of Plato, in which in our
other works we have falsely delighted and believed" (he alludes to
the doctrine followed by him in his own first book, _De antiquissima
Italorum sapientia_), "down to Wolfgang Latius, Julius Cæsar Scaliger,
Francisco Sanchez and others, can we find anything to satisfy our
understanding; so much that in discussing matters of this kind Signor
Giovanni Clerico says there is nothing in philology involved in such a
maze of doubt and difficulty."[36] The chief grammarian-philosophers do
not escape criticism. Grammar, says he, lays down rules for speaking
correctly: Logic for speaking truly; "and since in the order of
nature we must speak truly before learning to speak correctly, Giulio
Cesare della Scala, followed by the best grammarians, employs all his
magnificent energy to reason to the causes of the Latin language from
the principles of logic. But his great design ended in failure for this
reason, that he attached himself to the logical principles of a single
philosopher, namely Aristotle, whose principles are too universal to
explain the almost infinite particulars which naturally beset him who
would reason concerning a language. Whence it happened that Francisco
Sanchez, who followed him with admirable zeal, attempting in his
_Minerva_ to explain the innumerable particles which are found in
Latin by his famous principle of ellipsis, and trying thereby, though
without success, to vindicate the logical principles of Aristotle, fell
into the most cumbrous clumsinesses among an almost innumerable host
of Latin phrases whereby he meant to make good the slight and subtle
omissions employed by Latin in expressing its meaning."[37] The origin
of parts of speech and syntax is wholly different from that assigned
to them by folk who fancied that "the people who invented language
must first have gone to school to Aristotle."[38] The same criticism
undoubtedly must have extended to the logico-grammarians of Port-Royal,
for Vico remarked that the Logic of Arnauld was built "on the same plan
as that of Aristotle."[39]
[Sidenote: _Influence of seventeenth century writers on Vico._]
It may well be granted that Vico was more in sympathy with the
seventeenth-century rhetoricians, in whom we have detected a
premonition of æsthetic science. For Vico, as for them, wit (referring
to imagination and memory) was "the father of all invention": judgement
concerning poetry was for him a "judgement of the senses," a phrase
equivalent to "taste" or "good taste," expressions never used by him
in this connexion. There is no doubt he was familiar with the writers
of treatises on wit and conceits, for, in a dry rhetorical manual
written for the use of his school (in which one looks in vain for a
shadow of his own personal ideas), he quotes Paolo Beni, Pellegrini,
Pallavicino and the Marquis Orsi.[40] He highly esteems Pallavicini's
treatise on _Style_ and has knowledge of the book _Del bene_ by the
same author;[41] perhaps too his mind was not unaffected by the flash
of genius which had enabled the Jesuit for one instant to perceive that
poetry consists of "first apprehensions." He does not name Tesauro, but
there is no doubt he knew him; indeed the _Scienza nuova_ includes a
section, besides that on poetry, upon "blazons," "knightly bearings,"
"military banners," "medals," and so forth, precisely similar in
method to that of Tesauro when he treats of" figurate conceits" in
his _Cannochiale aristotelico_.[42] For Tesauro such conceits are
merely metaphorical ingenuities, like any other; for Vico they are
wholly the work of imagination, for imagination expresses itself not
in words only, but in the "mute language" of lines and colours. He
knew something also of Leibniz; the great German and Newton were by
him described as" the greatest wits of the time"[43]; but he seems to
have remained in complete ignorance of the æsthetic attempts of the
Leibnitian school in Germany. His "Logic of poetry" was a discovery
independent of, and earlier than, Bülffinger's Organon of the inferior
faculties, the _Gnoseologia inferior_ of Baumgarten, and the _Logik
der Einbildungskraft_ of Breitinger. In truth, Vico belongs on one
side to the vast Renaissance reaction against formalism and scholastic
verbalism, which, beginning with the reaffirmation of experience and
sensation (Telesio, Campanella, Galileo, Bacon), was bound to go on by
reasserting the function of imagination in individual and social life:
on the other side he is a precursor of Romanticism.
[Sidenote: _Æsthetic in the "Scienza nuova."_]
The importance of Vico's new poetic theory in his thought as a whole
as well as in the organism of his _Scienza nuova_ has never been fully
appreciated, and the Neapolitan philosopher is still commonly regarded
as the inventor of the Philosophy of History. If by such a science is
meant the attempt to deduce concrete history by ratiocination and to
treat epochs and events as if they were concepts, the only result of
Vico's efforts to solve the problem could have been failure; and the
same is true of his many successors. The fact is that his philosophy of
history, his ideal history, his _Scienza nuova d' intorno alia comune
natura delle nazioni,_ does not concern the concrete empirical history
which unfolds itself in time: it is not history, it is a science of the
ideal, a Philosophy of the Spirit. That Vico made many discoveries in
history proper which have been to a great extent confirmed by modern
criticism (_e.g._ on the development of the Greek epic and the nature
and genesis of feudal society in antiquity and in the Middle Ages)
certainly deserves all emphasis; but this side of his work must be kept
distinctly apart from the other, strictly philosophical, side. And
if the philosophical part is a doctrine expounding the ideal moments
of the spirit, or in his own words "the modifications of our human
mind," of these moments or modifications Vico undertakes especially
to define and fully describe not the logical, ethical and economic
moments (though on these too he throws much fight), but precisely the
imaginative or poetic. The larger portion of the second _Scienza nuova_
hinges on the discovery of the creative imagination, including the "new
principles of Poetry," the observations on the nature of language,
mythology, writing, symbolic figures and so forth. All his "system
of civilization, of the Republic, of laws, of poetry, of history, in
a word, of humanity at large" is founded upon this discovery, which
constitutes the novel point of view at which Vico places himself. The
author himself observes that his second book, dedicated to Poetic
Wisdom, "wherein is made a discovery totally opposed to Verulam's,"
forms "nearly the whole body of the work"; but the first and third
books also deal almost exclusively with works of the imagination. It
might be maintained, therefore, that Vico's "New Science" was really
just Æsthetic; or at least the Philosophy of the Spirit with special
emphasis upon the Philosophy of the Æsthetic Spirit.
[Sidenote: _Vico's mistakes._]