III FERMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY and new INTEREST in æsthetic investigation increased rapidly in New words the early years of the following century, owing either to observations the popularity acquired by certain new words or to the in the sevennovel meanings given to words already familiar, which teenth century emphasized new aspects of artistic production and criticism, complicating the problem and rendering it thereby more puzzling and attractive. For example: wit, taste, imagination or fancy, feeling, and several others, which must be examined rather closely. Wit (ingegno) differed somewhat from intellect. Free use of the word arose, if we mistake not, from its convenience in Rhetoric as conceived by antiquity; that is to say, a suave and facile mode of knowledge, as opposed to the severity of Dialectic; an "Antistrophe to Dialectic," which substituted for reasons of actual fact those of probability or fancy; enthymemes for syllogisms, examples for inductions; so much so that Zeno the Stoic figured Dialectic with her fist clenched and Rhetoric with her hand open. The empty style of the decadent Italian authors in the seventeenth century found its complete justification in this theory of rhetoric; their prose and verse, Marinesque and Achillinesque, professed to exhibit not the true but the striking, subtly conceited, curious or nice. The word wit, ingegno, was now repeated much more frequently than in the preceding century; wit was hailed as presiding genius of Rhetoric; its" vivacities "were lauded to the skies; "belli ingegni 1 was a phrase seized upon by the French, who rendered it as "esprit" or "beaux esprits." " One of the most noteworthy commentators on these matters (although opposed to the literary excesses of the times), Matteo Pellegrini of Bologna (1650), defines wit as "that part of the soul which in a certain way practises, aims, and seeks to find and create the beautiful and the efficacious": 2 he considers the work of "wit" to be the "conceits" and "subtleties" noted by him in a previous pamphlet (1639). Emmanuele Tesauro also descants at considerable length in his Cannochiale Aristotelico (1654) upon wit and subtleties, not alone" verbal" and "lapidary conceits, but also "symbolic " and " figurative" (statues, stories, devices, satires, hieroglyphs, mosaics, emblems, insignia, sceptres), and even " animated agents (pantomimes, play-scenes, masques and dances): all things which may be grouped under " polite quibbling" or rhetoric as distinct from " dialectic." Amongst such treatises, product of their age, one written by the Spaniard Baltasar Gracian (1642) became celebrated throughout Europe. Wit became in his hands the strictly inventive or artistic faculty, "genius "; génie, "genius" were now used as synonyms of wit, ingegno and esprit. In the following century Mario Pagano 5 wrote: "Wit may be taken as equivalent to the génie of the French, a word now commonly used in Italy." To return to the seventeenth century, Bouhours, a Jesuit writer of dialogues on the Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit (1687), says that "heart' and 'wit' are greatly in fashion just now, nothing else is spoken of in polite conversation, and all discourse is at last brought round to l'esprit et le cœur." 6 1 E.g. Molière, Préc. ridic. SC. I, IO. I fonti dell' ingegno ridotti ad arte, Bologna, 1650. 3 Delle acutezze che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze e concetti volgarmenti si appellano, Genova-Bologna, 1639. Agudeza y arte de ingenio, Madrid, 1642; enlarged, Huesca, 1649. • Ital. trans. in Orsi, Considerazioni, etc. (Modena, 1735), vol. i. dial. I. The word taste or good taste was equally widespread Taste. and fashionable, signifying the faculty of judgement brought to bear on the beautiful, distinct to some extent from intellectual power, and sometimes divided into active and passive, so that it was usual to speak of one kind of taste as "productive " or " fertile " (thus coinciding with "wit "), and of another as “sterile." the word taste. From the rough notes which we possess as to the Various history of the concept of taste, several meanings of the meanings of word, not all of equal importance as indications of the development of ideas, detach themselves in a somewhat confused manner. Taste," meaning "pleasure" or "delight," was an old-established word in Italy and Spain, as is shown in such phrases as "to have a taste for, to be to one's taste"; when Lope di Vega and other Spaniards speak continually of the drama of their country as seeking to please the popular taste (“ deleita el gusto”; para darle gusto ") they mean only the "pleasure" of the populace. In Italy there was a very ancient use of the word in the metaphorical sense of "judgement," either literary, scientific, or artistic; numberless examples of this use occur in writers of the sixteenth century (Ariosto, Varchi, Michael Angelo, Tasso). To take but one of these the lines in Orlando Furioso where it is said of the Emperor Augustus, "L' aver avuto in poesia buon gusto La proscrizione iniqua gli perdona," "For having had good taste in poetry he shall be forgiven his iniquitous proscriptions"; or the remark of Ludovico Dolce that some person "had such exquisite taste, he sang no verses save those of Catullus and Calvus." 1 The word “taste," in the sense of a special faculty or attitude of mind, appears to have been used for the first time in Spain in the middle of the seventeenth century by Gracian,2 the moralist and political writer already quoted. It is evidently to him that the Italian author Trevisano alludes in a preface to a book by Muratori (1708) when 1 Orl. Furioso, xxxv. 26; L. Dolce, Dial. del pittura (Venice, 1557); ad init. 2 Borinski, Poet. d. Renaiss. p. 308 seqq.; B. Gracian, pp. 39-54. he speaks of Spaniards, above all others cunning in metaphor," who express themselves in "that eloquent and laconic phrase, good taste"; touching further on taste and genius he quotes," that ingenious Spaniard," Gracian,1 who gave the word the sense of "practical wit," enabling one to perceive the "true signification" of things; his "man of good taste man of good taste " becomes in our language "a man of tact" in the affairs of life.2 The transference of the word to the domain of æsthetic seems to have taken place in France during the last quarter of the century. "Il y a dans l'art un point de perfection, comme de bonté ou de maturité dans la nature : celui qui le sent et qui l'aime a le goût parfait; celui qui ne le sent pas, et qui aime au deçà ou au delà, a le goût défectueux. Il y a donc un bon et un mauvais goût, et l'on dispute des goûts avec fondement," writes La Bruyère 3 (1688). As attributes or variants of taste it was usual to mention delicacy and variety or variability. Bearing its fresh critical - literary content, but not freed from the encumbrance of its earlier practical and moral significance, the word spread from France into other European countries. Thomasius introduced it into Germany in 1687;4 and in England it becomes "good taste." In Italy it appears as early as 1696 as title of a large book written by Camillo Ettori, the Jesuit, Il buon gusto ne' componimenti rettorici.5 The preface notes: "The expression good taste,' proper to those who rightly distinguish good from bad flavour in foods, is now in general use and claimed by every one as a title in connexion with literature and the humanities"; it reappears in 1708 at 1 Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto (Venice, 1766), introd. pp. 72-84. Gracian, Obras (Antwerp, 1669); El héroe, El discreto, with introd. by A. Farinelli, Madrid, 1900. Cf. Borinski, Poet. d. Renais. I.c. 3 Les Caractères, ou les mœurs du siècle, ch. 1; Des ouvrages de l'esprit. In the programme: Von der Nachahmung der Franzosen, Leipzig, 1687. • Opera . . . nella quale con alcune certe considerazioni si mostra in che consista il vero buon gusto ne' suddetti componimenti, etc., etc., Bologna, 1696. the beginning of Muratori's1 book already quoted: Trevisano treats of it philosophically: Salvini discusses it in his note upon the Perfetta Poesia of Muratori above mentioned, where the subject of good taste occupies several pages, and finally it gives its name to the Academy of Good Taste founded at Palermo in 1718.3 Scholars of the day who took up the discussion of the theme, recollecting some passages scattered throughout the ancient classics, placed the new concept in relation with the "tacitus quidam sensus sine ulla ratione et arte" of Cicero ; and with the “iudicium" which "nec magis arte traditur quam gustus aut odor" of Quintilian. More particularly Montfaucon de Villars (1671) 5 wrote a book on "Delicacy"; Ettori strove to find some definition more satisfactory than those current at the time (e.g. "it is the finest invention of wit, the flower of wit and extract of beauty's self,” and similar conceits); Orsi made it the subject of his Considerazioni written in reply to Bouhours' book. In Italy in the seventeenth century we find imagina- Fancy or Imagination. tion or fancy placed on a pinnacle. What do you mean by talking of probability and historical truth (asks Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino in 1644), of false or true in connexion with poetry; which deals not with fiction, fact or historical probability but with primary apprehensions which assert neither truth nor falsehood? Following this line of argument, imagination takes the place of that probable, neither true nor false, advocated by some commentators of Aristotle; a theory strongly criticized by Pallavicino, here agreeing with Piccolomini, whom however he does not name, and in opposition to Castelvetro whom he explicitly mentions. He who goes to the play (continues Pallavicino) knows quite well 1 Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto nelle scienze e nell' arti, 1708 (Venice, 1766). 2 Muratori, Della perfetta poesia italiana, Modena, 1706, bk. ii. ch. 5. 3 Mazzuchelli, Scrittori d' Italia, vol. ii. part iv. p. 2389. 4 Cicero, De oratore, iii. ch. 50; Quintilian, Inst. Orator. vi. ch. 5. 5 De la délicatesse, Paris, 1671. • Il buon gusto, ch. 39, p. 367. |