matter; the philosophical armour covers no muscular body. Our good Baumgarten, full of ardour and conviction, and often curiously brisk and vivacious in his scholastic Latinism, is a most sympathetic and attractive figure in the history of Esthetic of the science in formation, that is to say, not of the science brought to completion of Esthetic condenda not condita. Vico as inventor of æsthetic science. V GIAMBATTISTA VICO THE real revolutionary who by putting aside the concept of probability and conceiving imagination in a novel manner actually discovered the true nature of poetry and art and, so to speak, invented the science of Esthetic, was the Italian Giambattista Vico. Ten years prior to the publication in Germany of Baumgarten's first 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, 1 Scienza nuova prima, bk. iii. ch. 5 (Opere di G. B. Vico, edited by G. Ferrari, 2nd ed., Milan, 1852-1854). 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 v 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." 1 An imaginative phase of consciousness, but one possessed of positive value. The imaginative phase is altogether independent and Poetry and autonomous with respect to the intellectual, which is not Philosophy: imagination only incapable of endowing it with any fresh perfection and intellect. 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 1 Scienza nuova seconda, Elementi, liii. 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."1 Poets are the senses, philosophers the intellect, of mankind.2 Imagination is "stronger in proportion as reason is weaker." 3 6 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." Those poets "who sing of the beauty and virtue of ladies by reflexion. ... are philosophers arguing in verses or in loverhymes." 5 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." 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." 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.8 1 Scienza nuova pr. bk. iii. ch. 26. 3 Op. cit. Elem. xxxvi. 2 Scienza nuova sec. bk. ii. introd. Op. cit. bk. ii.; Sentenze eroiche. 5 Letter to De Angelis of December 25, 1725. 6 Letter to De Angelis, cit. 7 Scienza nuova sec. bk. iii.; Letter to De Angelis, cit.; Giudizio su Dante. 8 Scienza nuova sec. bk. ii.; Logica poetica. 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.1 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.” 2 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." 3 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.4 The dividing line between art and science, imagination Poetry and and intellect, is here very strongly drawn: the two dis- History. tinct 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 1 Republica, x. 3 Letter to De Angelis, cit. 2 Scienza nuova sec. bk. iii. ad init. |