light, there are yet dark nooks in his mind; corners that remain in
shadow. By not maintaining a rigid distinction between concrete history
and the philosophy of the spirit, Vico allowed himself to suggest
historical periods which do not correspond with the real periods, but
are rather allegories, the mythological expression of his philosophy
of the spirit. From the same source arises the multiplicity of those
periods (usually three in number) which Vico finds in the history of
civilization in general, in poetry and language and practically every
subject. "The first peoples, who were the children of the human race,
founded first the world of the arts: next, after a long interval, the
philosophers, who were therefore the aged among nations, founded the
world of the sciences: with which humanity attained completion."[44]
Historically, understood in an approximate sense, this scheme of
evolution has some truth; but only an approximate truth. In consequence
of the same confusion of history and philosophy he denied primitive
peoples any kind of intellectual logic, and conceived not only their
physics, cosmology, astronomy and geography as poetic in character, but
their morals, their economy and their politics as well. But not only
has there never been a period in concrete human history entirely poetic
and ignorant of all abstraction or power of reasoning, but such a state
cannot even be conceived. Morals, politics, physics, all presuppose
intellectual work, however imperfect they may be. The ideal priority of
poetry cannot be materialized into a historical period of civilization.
Linked with this error is another into which Vico often falls when
he asserts that "the chief aim of poetry" is to "teach the ignorant
vulgar to act virtuously" and to "invent fables adapted with the
popular understanding capable of producing strong emotion."[45]
Having regard to the clear explanations he himself gave of the
inessentiality of abstractions and intellectual artifice in poetry;
when we remember that for him poetry makes her own rules for herself
without consulting anybody, and that he clearly established the
peculiar theoretical nature of the imagination, such a proposition
cannot be taken as a return to the pedagogic and heteronomous theory
of poetry which in substance he had left far behind: therefore,
without doubt, it follows from his historical hypothesis of a wholly
poetical epoch of civilization, in which education, science and
morality were administered by poets. Another consequence is that
"imaginative universals" are apparently sometimes understood by him as
imperfect universals (empirical or representative concepts as they were
subsequently called); although, on the other hand, individualization
is so marked in them and their unphilosophical nature so accentuated
that their interpretation as purely imaginative forms may be taken
as normal. In conclusion, we remark that fundamental terms are not
always used by Vico in the same sense: it is not always clear how
far "sensation," "memory," "imagination," "wit" are synonymous
or different. Sometimes "sensation" seems outside the spirit, at
others one of its chief moments; poets are sometimes the organ of
"imagination," sometimes the "sensation" of humanity; and imagination
is described as "dilated memory." These are the aberrations of a
thought so virgin and original that it was not easy to regulate.
[Sidenote: _Progress still to be achieved._]
To sever the Philosophy of the Spirit from History, the modifications
of the human mind from the historic vicissitudes of peoples, and
Æsthetic from Homeric civilization, and by continuing Vico's analyses
to determine more clearly the truths he uttered, the distinctions he
drew and the identities he divined; in short, to purge Æsthetic of the
remains of ancient Rhetoric and Poetics as well as from some over-hasty
schematisms imposed upon her by the author of her being: such is the
field of labour, such the progress still to be achieved after the
discovery of the autonomy of the æsthetic world due to the genius of
Giambattista Vico.
[1] _Scienza nuova prima,_ bk. iii. ch. 5 (_Opere di G. B. Vico,_
edited by G. Ferrari, 2nd ed., Milan, 1852-1854).
[2] _Scienza nuova seconda, Elementi,_ liii.
[3] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii. ch. 26.
[4] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii. introd.
[5] _Op. cit. Elem._ xxxvi.
[6] _Op. cit._ bk. ii.; _Sentenze eroiche._
[7] Letter to De Angelis of December 25, 1725.
[8] Letter to De Angelis, _cit._
[9] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. iii.; Letter to De Angelis, _cit._;
_Giudizio su Dante._
[10] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii.; _Logica poetica._
[11] _Republica,_ x.
[12] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. iii. _ad init._
[13] Letter to De Angelis, _cit._
[14] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. iii. _passim._
[15] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii. ch. 4.
[16] Letter to Solla, January 12, 1729; cf. _Scienza nuova sec. Elem._
xliii.
[17] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. iii.
[18] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii. ch. 6.
[19] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii., _Corollari d' intorno all' origine
della locuzion poetica,_ etc.
[20] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii. ch. 22.
[21] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii., _Corollari d' intorno all' origini
delle lingue_, etc.
[22] _Op. cit._ bk. ii., _Corollari d' intorno a' tropi,_ etc., § 4.
[23] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii. ch. 22.
[24] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. iii., _Pruove filosofiche._
[25] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii.-ch. 22.
[26] _Op. cit._ bk. iii. chs. 27-33.
[27] Letter to De Angelis, _cit._
[28] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii. introd.
[29] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii., _Ultimi corollari,_ § vi.
[30] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii. ch. 2.
[31] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii., _Della metafisica poetica,_ etc.
[32] _Vita scritta da sè medesimo,_ in _Opere, ed. cit._ iv. p. 365.
[33] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii. ch. 37.
[34] _Note all' Arte poetica di Orazio,_ in _Opere, ed. cit._ vi. pp.
52-79.
[35] Letter to De Angelis, _cit._
[36] _Scienza nuova pr._ bk. iii. ch. 22; cf. the review of Clerico (Le
Clerc) in _Opere,_ iv. p. 382.
[37] _Giudizio intorno alia gram. d' Antonio d' Aronne,_ in _Opere,_
vi. pp. 149-150.
[38] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii., _Corollari d' intorno all' origini
delle lingue,_ etc.
[39] _Vita, cit._ p. 343.
[40] _Instituzioni oratorie e scritti inediti,_ Naples, 1865, pp. 90
_seqq._: _De senteniiis, vulgo del ben parlare in concetti._
[41] Letter to the Duke of Laurenzana, March 1, 1732; and cf. letter to
Muzio Gæta.
[42] Cf. p. 190.
[43] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. i., _Del metodo._
[44] _Scienza nuova sec., Ultimi corollari,_ § 5.
[45] _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. iii. ch. 3; _Scienza nuova sec._ bk. ii.,
_Della metafisica poetica_; and bk. iii. _ad init._
VI
MINOR ÆSTHETIC DOCTRINES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: _The influence of Vico._]
This step in advance had no immediate effect. The pages in the _Scienza
nuova_ devoted to æsthetic doctrine were actually the least read of any
in that marvellous book. Not that Vico exercised no influence at all;
we shall see that several Italian authors both of his own time and of
the generation immediately following show traces of his æsthetic ideas;
but these traces are all external and material and therefore sterile.
Outside Italy the _Scienza nuova_ (already announced by a compatriot
in 1726 in the _Acta_ of Leipzig with the graceful comment that _magis
indulget ingenio quam veritati_ and the pleasing information that _ab
ipsis Italis taedio magis quam applausu excipitur_)[1] was mentioned
toward the end of the century, as is well known, by Herder, Goethe,
and some few others.[2] In connection with poetry, especially with the
Homeric question, Vico's book was quoted by Friedrich August Wolf, to
whom it had been recommended by Cesarotti[3] after the publication of
the _Prolegomena ad Homerum_ (1795), but without any suspicion of the
importance of its general doctrine of poetry, of which the Homeric
hypothesis was a mere application. Wolf (1807) imagined himself in the
presence of a talented forerunner in an isolated problem, instead of
a man of intellectual stature towering above any philologist, however
great.
[Sidenote: _Italian writers: Conti._]
Neither by reliance on the works of Vico, who founded no real school,
nor, it must be added, by any independent effort along new lines,
did thought succeed in maintaining or improving upon the position
already attained. A notable attempt to establish a philosophical
theory of poetry and the arts was made by the Venetian A. Conti, who
left numerous sketches for essays on imagination, the faculties of the
soul, poetic imitation and similar subjects, designed for inclusion
in a large treatise on the Beautiful and Art. Conti had started by
professing ideas very like those of Du Bos, affirming that the poet
must "put everything in images"; that taste is as indefinable as
feeling, and that there are persons without taste just as there are
blind and deaf persons; he also wrote polemical tracts against the
Cartesians. Later he abandoned his sensationalistic or sentimentalist
theories,[4] and, inquiring into the nature of poetry, declared
himself ill-satisfied with Castelvetro, Patrizzi, and even Gravina.
"Had Castelvetro," he observes, "who writes so subtly of Aristotle's
_Poetics,_ given two or three chapters to a philosophical explanation
of the idea of imitation, he would have solved many questions raised
but not clearly answered by himself concerning poetic theories. In his
_Poetica_ and in his controversy against Torquato Tasso, Patrizzi never
succeeded in clearly defining the philosophical idea of imitation; he
collected much useful information about the history of poetry, but
wilfully lost the Platonic doctrine by allowing it to mingle with the
historical detail instead of gathering it up without sophistry into a
single point, when it would have appeared in a very different guise.
The _Ragion poetica_ of Gravina shadows forth a sort of philosophical
idea of imitation; but so wholly engrossed is he in deducing therefrom
rules for lyrical, dramatical and epic poetry, and illustrating each
with examples from the most celebrated poets, Greek, Latin and Italian,
that he is too busy to question the sufficiency of the fertile idea he
has propounded."[5] A close follower of contemporary European thought,
Conti was familiar with Hutcheson, whose theories he vigorously
repudiated, observing, "Why this multiplication of faculties?" The
soul is one, and for scholastic convenience only has been divided into
three faculties: sense, imagination, intellect; the first "concerns
herself with objects present before her; imagination with those afar
into which memory gradually merges: but the object of sense and
imagination is always particular; it is only the mind, the intellect,
the spirit, that by comparing particulars apprehends the universal."
"Before introducing a new sense for the pleasure of beauty" Hutcheson
should have "assigned limits to these three faculties of cognition and
demonstrated that the pleasure occasioned by beauty does not arise from
the three pleasures of these three faculties, or from intellectual
pleasure alone, to which they all reduce, if the functions of the
soul be carefully analysed." Thus it would appear that the mistake
of the Scotchman[6] arose from his habit of separating pleasure from
the cognitive faculties, placing the former apart in a special empty
"sense of beauty."[7] On the other hand, when rewriting the history of
the opinions of various critics upon the Aristotelian doctrine of the
universal in poetry, Conti gave much weight to the dialogue _Naugerius
seu De poëtica_ of Fracastoro;[8] for an instant he seems on the
point of grasping the essence of the poetic universal and identifying
it with the characteristic, which makes us call even horrible things
wholly beautiful. "In all his journeys Balzac never saw a beautiful
old woman: in the poetic or picturesque sense an old woman is highly
beautiful, if depicted as having suffered all the dilapidations of
age": immediately after, however, he identifies the characteristic with
Wolff's concept of perfection: "It does not differ from being, nor does
being differ from the truth which the schoolmen call transcendental
and which is the object of all arts and all sciences; we call it the
object of poetry when by means of imaginary presentations it ravishes
the intellect and moves the wall, transporting both these faculties
into the ideal and archetypal world of which, following S. Augustine,
Father Malebranche discourses at length in his _Recherche de la
vérité_."[9] In the same way Fracastoro's universal gives place to the
universal of science: "Owing to the infinity of their determinations
all we can know of particulars is their common properties, which
is merely another manner of saying that we have no science save of
universal. Thus it is precisely the same if we say the object of
poetry is science or the universal; which is the doctrine of Navagero,
following Aristotle."[10] The "imaginative universals of Signor Vico"
(with whom he had interchanged some letters) opened no new views for
him: he notes that Signor Vico "talks a great deal about them" and
"holds that the most uncivilized men, having framed them not from any
wish to please or serve others, but from the necessity of expressing
their feelings as nature taught them, spoke in poetical language the
elements of a theology, a physics, and an ethics wholly poetical."
Conti excuses himself from immediate examination of "this critical
question" and only opines that "it can be shown in many ways that
these imaginative universals are the material or object of poetry,
in so far as they contain within them sciences or things considered
in themselves"[11]--a conclusion diametrically opposed to that which
"Signor Vico" meant to express. Conti is next obliged to ask himself
how it is possible that poetry's object should be not the true but the
probable, when the universal of poetry is the same as that of science.
He answers by coming down to the commonplace level of a Baumgarten:
"When sciences receive a particular colouring, we pass from the true to
the probable." Imitation means giving the impression of truth; that is
done by selecting a few of its features only; and this is the procedure
in which the probable just consists. If you wish to describe the
rainbow poetically, a great part of the Newtonian optics must be thrown
overboard; thus "many circumstances of mathematical demonstration" will
be neglected in poetical descriptions, and the rest, which is utilized,
will form the probable or that particular "which awakens the universal
idea, slumbering in the minds of the learned." The great art of poetry
consists "in selection of the image containing the greatest number of
points of universal doctrine which, by being inserted in the example,
may so colour the precept that I may find it without seeking it, or
recognize it through its connexion with events described."[12] Hence
poetry cannot be content with imitation; allegory too is needed: "in
ancient poetry one thing is read and another is meant." Here follows
the inevitable instance of the Homeric poems, in which Conti certainly
finds elements which cannot be reduced to instruction and allegory and
therefore to some extent deserve the Platonic condemnation.[13] He
recognizes a species of imagination differing from passive sensibility,
"which Father Malebranche calls active imagination, and Plato the art
of imagery; it comprises all that is meant by wit, sagacity, judgement
and good taste, which teach a poet to use or not to use at a given time
or place the rules and licences of art, and to control the extravagance
of his imagery."[14] On the question of literary taste he follows
the opinion of Trevisano and decides that it consists in "setting in
mutual harmony, that is to say restraining within limits, the soul's
cognitive faculties, memory, imagination and intellect, allowing none
to overwhelm another."[15]
[Sidenote: _Quadrio and Zanotti._]
By assiduous travail of thought and perpetual search for the best,
Conti kept himself at the highest level of æsthetic speculation in
contemporary Europe (Vico always excepted); at the same level as
Baumgarten in Germany. We pass rapidly over other Italian writers
such as Quadrio (1739), author of the first great encyclopædia of
universal literature, in which he defines poetry as "the science of
things human and divine, presented in pictures to the populace, and
written in words connected by measure";[16] and Francesco Maria Zanotti
(1768), who describes poetry as "the art of versification in order to
give pleasure":[17] the first is worthy of a mediæval anthologist,
the second of a no less mediæval composer of handbooks on rhythm and
methods of composition. The only serious student of æsthetic was
Melchior Cesarotti.
[Sidenote: _Cesarotti_]
Cesarotti called attention to popular and primitive poetry: he
translated Ossian and illustrated the text with dissertations; he
unearthed antique Spanish poems and even the folk-songs of Mexico and
Lapland; he studied Hebrew poetry; he dedicated the greater part of
his life to the Homeric poems, examining all the theories of critics
past and present, encountering Vico in this connexion and discussing
his views. Besides this, he debated the origin of poetry, the pleasure
given by tragedy, taste, the beautiful, eloquence, style, in short
every problem belonging to æsthetics which had been raised up to his
time.[18] One seems to catch an echo of Vico as one listens to his
words on La Motte: "He had logic, but knew not that the logic of
poetry differs somewhat from ordinary logic: he was a man of great
talent, but he recognized talent only, and was incapable of feeling the
immeasurable distance between judicious prose and poetry: the real
Homer with his attractive faults will always be more beloved than his
reformed Homer with his cold, affected virtue."[19] Cesarotti purposed
(1762) bringing out a great theoretico-historical book in whose first
part "we shall suppose the non-existence of poetry and poetic art and
try to trace by what path a man of illuminated reason can have reached
the idea of the possibility of such an art and how he can have attained
perfection by these means: every one will be able to see poetry growing
up under his eyes, so to speak, and attest the truth of theory by
the testimony of his own personal feelings."[20] Although celebrated
throughout Italy in his day as one who "with the most pure torch of
philosophy has thrown beams of light into the darkest recesses of
poetry and eloquence,"[21] it does not appear that the distinguished
scholar, the pleasing and desultory philosopher, offered any profound
or original solutions. In 1797 he defined poetry as "the art of
representing and perfecting nature by means of picturesque, animated,
imaginative and harmonious discourse."[22]
[Sidenote: _Bettinelli and Pagano._]
The fashion of the day in philosophy made men impatient of the ideas
found in writers of treatises of former times. Arteaga praises
Cesarotti for "that fine tact, that impartial criticism, that
logical spirit derived not from the trickling streamlets of Sperone,
Castelvetro, Casa and Bembo, but from the profound and inexhaustible
springs of Montesquieu, Hume, Voltaire, d'Alembert, Sulzer, and
writers of like temper."[23] Writing to Saverio Bettinelli, who was
preparing a work on _Enthusiasm,_ Paradisi hoped it would prove "a
metaphysical history of enthusiasm which shall outweigh all those
Poetics which are only fit to be burned," and would "make waste paper
of Castelvetro, the 'Mintumo,' and that stupid creature, Quadrio."[24]
In spite of these aspirations Bettinelli's book (1769) contains little
beyond vivacious and eloquent empirical observations concerning the
psychology of poets, "poetic enthusiasm," to which he assigns six
degrees, namely, elevation, vision, rapidity, novelty and surprise,
passion and transfusion. Equally empirical was Mario Pagano in his two
fragments, _Gusto e le belle arti_ and _Origine e natura della poesia_
(1783-1785), in which he grotesquely combines some ideas from Vico with
the current sensationalism. Theoretico-imaginative form and sensuous
pleasure are presented by him as two historical periods of art. "In
their cradle the fine arts are directed towards making a true imitation
of nature rather than towards loveliness. Their first steps are towards
expression rather than charm.... In the most ancient poetry, even in
the ballads of barbarous ages, there lives a most compelling pathos:
passions are expressed naturally, even the sound of the words is
alive with the expression of the things described." But "the period
of perfection is reached at the moment when exact imitation of nature
is coupled with complete beauty, accord and harmony," when "the taste
is refined and society reaches its most complete form of culture."
Fine arts "precede by a short time the dawn of philosophy, that is
to say, the time of the most intense perfection of society"; indeed,
certain modes of art, such as tragedy, must necessarily come later
than philosophy whose aid must be invoked to further "the purgation of
manners."[25]
[Sidenote: _German disciples of Baumgarten. G. F. Meier._]
The compatriots and successors of Baumgarten, like those of Vico,
did little by way of understanding or improving upon his work. An
enthusiastic admirer and disciple of Baumgarten who had attended his
lectures at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, Georg Friedrich Meier, came forward
in 1746 to defend the _Meditationes_ against the attacks of Quistorp to
whom the master had deigned no reply;[26] already in 1748, prior to
the publication of the _Æsthetic,_ he had published the first volume
of his _Principles of all the Beautiful Sciences_,[27] followed in
1749 and 1750 by the second and third volumes. This book, which is
a complete exposition of Baumgarten's theory, is divided, according
to the master's method, into three parts: invention of beautiful
thoughts (heuristic), æsthetic method (methodic), and the beautiful
signification of thoughts (semiotic); the first of these (occupying
two and a half volumes) is subdivided into three sections: beauty
of sense-apprehension (æsthetic richness, grandeur, verisimilitude,
vivacity, certainty, sensitive life and wit), sensitive faculties
(attention, abstraction, senses, imagination, subtlety, acumen,
memory, poetic power, taste, foresight, conjecture, signification and
the minor appetitive faculties), and the diverse kinds of beautiful
thought (æsthetic concepts, judgements, and syllogisms). Elsewhere
than in this book, which was reprinted many times (in 1757 an epitome
was issued[28]), Meier discusses Æsthetic in several of his numerous
works, especially in a little tract, _Considerations on the First
Principles of all Fine Arts and Sciences_.[29] Who was more tenderly
inclined than he towards the science so recently born and baptized? He
was ardent in her defence against those who denied both her possibility
and her utility, and against those who admitted these yet complained,
not unreasonably, that she was substantially the same as that which in
former days had been treated as Poetics and Rhetoric. He parried this
accusation, of which he recognized the partial truth, by asserting
that it was impossible for one writer to have perfect knowledge of all
the arts: another of his excuses was to the effect that Æsthetic was
a science too young to show the perfection reached by other sciences
after the cultivation of centuries; in one place he says he has no
intention of arguing "with those enemies of Æsthetic who will not or
cannot see the true nature and aim of this science, but have built for
themselves in its place a deformed and miserable image against which,
when they fight, they fight against themselves." With philosophic
resignation he concludes that the same fate is in store for Æsthetic as
for every science: "At first when almost unknown they encounter enemies
and detractors who ridicule them through ignorance and prejudice;
but later they meet persons of intellect who, by working at them
conjointly, carry them on to their proper perfection."[30]
[Sidenote: _Confusions of Meier._]