Progress still to be achieved.

times the "sensation" of humanity; and imagination
is described as "dilated memory.'
memory." These are the aberra-
tions of a thought so virgin and original that it was not
easy to regulate.

To sever the Philosophy of the Spirit from History, the modifications of the human mind from the historic vicissitudes of peoples, and Esthetic 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 Esthetic 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 aesthetic world due to the genius of Giambattista Vico.

VI

MINOR ÆSTHETIC DOCTRINES OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THIS step in advance had no immediate effect. The The influence pages in the Scienza nuova devoted to æsthetic doctrine of Vico. 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 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 1 Vico, Opere, ed. cit. iv. p. 305.

2 Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, 1793-1797, Letter 59; Goethe, Italien. Reise, Mar. 5, 1787.

3 Letters from Wolf to Cesarotti, June 5, 1802; in Cesarotti, Opere, vol. xxxviii. pp. 108-112; cf. ibid. PP. 43-44, and vol. xxxvii. pp. 281, 284, 324; cf. on the question of the relations between Wolf and Vico, Croce, Bibliografia vichiana, pp. 51, 56-58, and Supplem. pp. 12-14.

Italian writers: A. Conti.

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.

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,1 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

1 Letter in French to Mme. Ferrant (1719), and to the Marquis Maffei in Prose e poesie, vol. ii. (1756), pp. lxxxv.-civ., cviii.-cix.

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."1 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 2 arose from his habit of separating pleasure from the cognitive faculties, placing the former apart in a special empty "sense of beauty." 3 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; 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

4

1 Prose e poesie, vol. i., 1739, pref.

2 Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) was an Irishman. Croce's mistake is probably due to the fact that he studied and taught at Glasgow, or that his family was ultimately of Scottish origin.—TR.

3 Prose e poesie, vol. ii. pp. clxxi.-clxxvii.

4 See above, pp. 184-185.

1

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 will, 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." 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 universals. 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." 2 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 " 3-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 1 Prose e poesie, vol. ii. pp. 242-246. 2 Op. cit. ii. p. 249.

3 Op. cit. ii. pp. 252-253.