Chapter XV: Conclusion (4)

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._]

Among so many luminous points, or rather in such a general blaze of 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._]

Students of the new science flocked to Halle University to hear Meier lecture on Æsthetic whose "chief author" or "inventor" (_Haupturheber, Erfinder_), as Meier never tired of repeating, was "Herr Professor Baumgarten"; at the same time warning them that his own _Anfangsgründe_ were no mere transcription of Baumgarten's lectures.[31] Still, while recognizing the great gifts of Meier as publicity-agent, the facility, clarity and wealth of his eloquence, and his shrewdness in polemic, one cannot altogether deny the justice of the remark upon "Professor Baumgarten of Frankfort and his ape (_Affe)_ Professor Meier of Halle."[32] Every defect of Baumgarten's Æsthetic reappears accentuated in Meier; the limits of the inferior cognitive faculties, alleged as the domain of poetry and the arts, are laid down by him most strangely. It is curious to note how, for example, he interprets the difference between the confused (æsthetical) and the distinct (logical), and the proposition that beauty disappears when made the object of distinct thought. "The cheeks of a beautiful girl whereon bloom the roses of youth are lovely so long as they are looked at with the naked eye. But let them be examined with a magnifying glass. Where is their beauty? One can hardly believe that such a disgusting surface, scaly, all mounts and hollows, the pores full of dirt, with hairs sprouting here and there, can be the seat of that amorous attraction which subdues the heart."[33] That is described as "æsthetically false" whose truth the inferior faculty is unable to grasp: for example, the theory that bodies are composed of monads.[34] Once they have become intelligible to these faculties, general concepts possess great æsthetic richness, since they include infinite consequences and particular cases.[35] Æsthetic also comprehends those things which cannot be thought distinctly or, if so thought, might be capable of upsetting philosophic gravity: a kiss may be an excellent subject for a poet; but whatever would be thought of a philosopher who sought to demonstrate its necessity by the mathematical method?[36] Moreover, Meier includes the whole theory of observation and experiment in Æsthetic, to which this theory belongs, he says, by right of its connexion with the senses,[37] and also the whole theory of the appetitive faculties, because "æsthetic requires not only a fine wit but a noble heart as well."[38] He comes near truth sometimes, when, for example, he observes that the logical form presupposes the æsthetic and that our first concepts are sensitive, later becoming distinct by the help of logic;[39] and when he condemns allegory as "among the most decadent forms of beautiful thinking."[40] But, on the other hand, he thinks that logical distinctions and definitions, although not necessarily sought after by genius, are very useful in poetry; they are even indispensable as regulators of beautiful thinking and make up, as it were, the skeleton of the body poetic: great care, however, must be taken not to judge æsthetical general concepts, _notiones æstheticæ universales,_ with the rigorous exactitude demanded by philosophical. And since such concepts, taken singly, may be likened to unstrung jewels, they must be connected by the string of æsthetic judgement and syllogism, the theory of which is identical with that presented by Logic, setting aside that part which is of little or no use to genius, but belongs exclusively to the philosopher.[41] In his _Considerations_ of 1757 Meier, having combated the principle of imitation (which appeared to him at once too broad, since science and morals are also imitations of nature, and too narrow, since art does not imitate natural objects solely nor should it imitate them all, for the immoral must be excluded), reaffirmed the thesis that the æsthetic principle consists in the "greatest possible beauty of sense-perception."[42] He upheld this by condemning as erroneous the belief that this sense-perception is wholly sensuous and confused, without any gleam of distinctness or rationality. The perception of sweet, bitter, red, etc., is wholly sensuous; but there is another perception which is both sensuous and intellectual, confused and distinct, in which both faculties, the higher and the lower, collaborate. When intellectuality prevails in this consciousness, then we have science: when sensibility, then we have poetry. "From our explanation it will be gathered that the inferior cognitive faculties must collect all the material of a poem, and all its parts. Intellect and judgement, on the other hand, watch and ensure that these materials are placed side by side in such a way that in their connexion distinction and order may be observed."[43] Here a plunge into sensationalism, there a fugitive glimpse of truth: most often, and in conclusion, an adherence to the old mechanical, ornamental, pedagogic theory of poetry: this is the impression left on us by the æsthetic writings of Meier.

[Sidenote: _M. Mendelssohn and other followers of Baumgarten. Vogue of Æsthetic._]

Another disciple of Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, conceiving beauty as "indistinct image of a perfection," deduced that God can have no perception of beauty, as this is merely a phenomenon of human imperfection. According to him a primary form of pleasure is that of the senses, arising from "the bettered state of our bodily constitution"; a secondary form is the æsthetic fact of sensible beauty, that is to say, unity in variety; a third form is perfection, or harmony in variety.[44] He too repudiates Hutcheson's _deus ex machina,_ the sense of beauty. Sensible beauty, perfection such as can be apprehended by the senses, is independent of the fact that the object represented is beautiful or ugly, good or bad by nature; it suffices that it leaves us not indifferent: whence Mendelssohn agrees with Baumgarten's definition, "a poem is a discourse sensibly perfect."[45] Elias Schlegel (1742) conceived art as imitation, not so servile as to seem a copy, but having similarity rather than identity with nature: he considered the duty of poetry was first to please and only afterwards to instruct.[46] Treatises on Æsthetic, university lectures or slender volumes for use of the public, _Theories of the Fine Arts and Letters, Manuals, Sketches, Texts, Principles, Introductions, Lectures, Essays,_ and _Considerations on Taste_ poured down thick and fast on Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. There are at least thirty full or complete treatises and many dozens of minor tracts or fragments. After the Protestant universities, the Catholic took up the new science, which was taught by Riedel at Vienna, Herwigh at Würzburg, Ladrone at Mainz, Jacobi at Freiburg, and by others at Ingolstadt after the expulsion of the Jesuits.[47] A pretty little volume on the _First Principles of the Fine Arts_[48] was written (1790) for Catholic schools by the notorious Franciscan friar Eulogius Schneider, who, after being unfrocked, terrorised Strasburg in the days of the Convention, and met his end under the guillotine. The frenzied output of these German _Æsthetics_ resembles that of _Poetics_ in Italy in the sixteenth century, after the rise to popularity of Aristotle's treatise. Between 1771 and 1774 the Swiss Sulzer brought out his great æsthetic encyclopædia, _The General Theory of the Fine Arts,_ in alphabetical order, with historical notes upon each article, which were greatly enlarged in the second edition of 1792, edited by a retired Prussian captain, von Blankenburg.[49] In 1799, one J. Roller published a first _Sketch of the History of Æsthetic,_[50] in which he observes not unjustly, "Patriotic youth will be pleased to recognize that Germany has produced more literature on this subject than any other country."[51]

[Sidenote: _Eberhard and Eschenburg._]

Confining ourselves to bare mention of the works of Riedel (1767), Faber (1767), Schütz (1776-1778), Schubart (1777-1781), Westenrieder (1777), Szerdahel (1779), König (1784), Gang (1785), Meiners (1787), Schott (1789), Moritz (1788),[52] we will select from the crowd the _Theory of Fine Arts and Letters_ (1783) of Johann August Eberhard, successor to Meier in the Chair at Halle,[53] and the _Sketch of a Theory and Literature of Letters_ (1783) by Johann Joachim Eschenburg, one of the most popular books of the day for students.[54] Both these authors are followers of Baumgarten, with inclinations towards sensationalism; amongst other things Eberhard considered the beautiful as "that which pleases the most distinct senses," that is to say, of sight and hearing.

[Sidenote: _J. G. Sulzer._]

A word must be accorded to Sulzer, in whom we find the most curious alternation of new and old, the romantic influence of the new Swiss school and the utilitarianism and intellectualism of his day. He asserts that beauty exists wherever unity, variety and order are found: the work of an artist is strictly in the form, in lively expression (_lebhafte Darstellung_): the material is irrelevant to art, but the duty of every reasonable and sensible man is to make judicious selection. The beauty which is used to clothe the good as well as the bad is not the ineffable, celestial Beauty, offspring of the alliance between the beautiful, the good and the perfect, which awakens more than mere pleasure, a veritable joy which ravishes and beatifies our soul. Such is the human face when, by filling the eye of the beholder with the pleasure of form arising from the variety, proportion and order of the features, it proceeds to arouse the imagination and intellect by its suggestion of interior perfection; of the same nature is the statue of a great man carved by Phidias, or a patriotic oration by Cicero. If truth lie outside art and belong to philosophy, the most noble use to which art may be put is to make us feel the important truths which lend her strength and energy, not to mention that truth itself enters into art in the shape of truthful imitation or representation. Sulzer also repeats (and he is not the last) that orators, historians and poets are intermediaries between speculative philosophy and the people.[55]

[Sidenote: _K. H. Heydenreich._]