[37] _Orator ad Brutum,_ ch. 2.

[38] For example, Seneca, _Epist._ 65.

[39] Pliny, _Nat. Hist._ xxxiv. ch. 19.

[40] Gorgias in _De Xenoph., Zen. et Gorg._ (in Aristot., ed. Didot),
chs. 5-6.

[41] _Rhet._ bk. iii. ch. 1.

[42] _Rhet._ bk. iii. ch. 2.

[43] _De interp._ ch. 4.

[44] Diog. Lært. bk. x. § 75.

[45] Steinthal, _Gesch. d. Sprachw.,_ 2nd ed., i. pp. 288, 293,
296-297.

II

ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

[Sidenote: _Middle Ages, Mysticism, Ideas on the beautiful._]

Almost all the developments of ancient Æsthetic were continued by
tradition or reappeared by spontaneous generation in the course of the
Middle Ages. Neo-Platonic mysticism continued, entrusted to the care
of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (_De cœlesti hierarchia,
De ecclesiastica hierarchia, De divinis nominibus,_ etc.), to the
translations of these works made by John Scotus Eriugena, and to the
divulgations of the Spanish Jews (Avicebron). The Christian God took
the place of the Summum Bonum or Idea: God, wisdom, goodness, supreme
beauty, source of beautiful things in nature, which are a ladder to
the contemplation of the Creator. But these speculations continued to
recede further and further from the consideration of art, with which
Plotinus had connected them; and the empty definitions of the beautiful
by Cicero and other ancient writers were often repeated. Saint
Augustine defined beauty in general as unity (_omnis pulchritudinis
forma unitas est,_) and that of the body as _congruentia partium cum
quadam colons suavitate,_ and the old distinction between something
that is beautiful in itself and relative beauty reappeared in a book
of his, which has been lost, entitled _De pulchro et apto;_ the very
name shows that he reasserted the old distinction between the beautiful
in itself and the relatively beautiful, _quoniam apte accommodaretur
alicui._ Elsewhere he notes that an image is called beautiful _si
perfecte implei illud cujus imago est, et coaequatur ei._[1]

Thomas Aquinas varied but little from him in positing three requisites
for beauty: integrity or perfection, due proportion, and clearness;
following Aristotle, he distinguished the beautiful from the good,
defining the first as that which pleases in the mere contemplation of
it (_pulcrum ... id cujus ipsa apprehensio placet_); he referred to
the beauty that even base things possess if well imitated, and applied
the doctrine of imitation to the beauty of the Second Person of the
Trinity (_in quantum est imago expressa Patris_).[2] If it were wished
to discover references to the hedonistic conception of art, it would
be possible to do this, with a little goodwill, in some of the sayings
of jongleurs and troubadours. Æsthetic rigorism, the total negation
of art for religion or for divine and human science, shows itself in
Tertullian and among certain Fathers of the Church, at the entrance to
the Middle Ages; at their conclusion, in a certain crude scholastic
spirit, for example in Cecco d' Ascoli, who proclaimed against Dante:
"I leave trifles behind me and return to the _true_; fables are always
unpleasing to me," and later, in the reactionary Savonarola. But the
narcotic theory of pedagogic or moralistic art prevailed over every
other. It had contributed to send to sleep the æsthetic doubts and
inquiries of the ancients, and was well suited to a period of relative
decadence of culture. This was all the more the case, seeing that it
accorded well with the moral and religious ideas of the Middle Ages,
and afforded a justification not only for the new art of Christian
inspiration, but also for the surviving works of classical and pagan
art.

[Sidenote: _The pedagogic theory of art in the Middle Ages._]

The allegorical interpretation was again a means of salvation for these
last. The _De continentia Virgiliana_ of Fulgentius (sixth century)
is a curious monument to this fact. This work made Virgil compatible
with the Middle Ages and opened his way to that great reputation which
he was destined to attain, as the "gentle sage who knew all things."
Even John of Salisbury says of the Roman poet, that "_sub imagine
fabularum totius philosophiae exprimit veritatem._"[3] The process of
interpretation became fixed in the doctrine of the _four meanings,_
literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic, which Dante afterwards
transferred to vernacular poetry. It would be easy to accumulate
quotations from mediæval writers, repeating in all keys the theory
that art inculcates the truths of morality and of faith and constrains
hearts to Christian piety, beginning with those well-known verses of
Theodulf: "_In quorum dictis_ (that is to say, in the utterances of the
poets) _quamquam sint frivola multa, Plurima sub falso tegmine vera
latent,_" and so on, until we reach the doctrines and opinions of our
own great men, Dante and Boccaccio. For Dante, poetry "_nihil aliud est
quam fictio rhethorica in musicaque posita._"[4] The poet should have
a "reasoning" in his verses "under a cloak of figure or of rhetorical
colour"; and it would be a shameful thing for him, if, "when asked,
he were not able to divest his words of such a garment, in such a way
as to show that they possessed a true meaning."[5] Readers sometimes
stop at the external vesture alone, and this indeed suffices for
those who, like the vulgar, do not succeed in penetrating the hidden
meaning. Poetry will say to the vulgar, which does not understand "its
argument," what a song of Dante's says at its conclusion, "At least
behold how _beautiful_ I am": if you are not able to obtain instruction
from me, at least enjoy me as a pleasing thing. Many, indeed, "their
beauty more than their goodness will delight," in poems, unless they
are assisted by commentaries in the nature of the _Convivio,_ "a light
which will allow every shade of meaning to reach them."[6] Poetry was
the "gay science," "_un fingimiento_" (as the Spanish poet the Marquis
of Santillana wrote) "_de cosas utiles, cubiertas ó veladas con muy
fermosa cobertura, compuestas, distinguidas é scandidas, por cierto
cuento, pessoé medida._"[7]

It would not then be correct to say that the Middle Ages simply
identified art with theology and with philosophy. Indeed it sharply
distinguished the one from the other, defining art and poetry, like
Dante, with the words _fictio rhethorica_, "figure" and "rhetorical
colour," "cloak," "beauty," or like Santillana with those of
_fingimiento_ or _fermosa cobertura._ This pleasing falsity was
justified from the practical point of view, very much in the same way
as sexual union and love were justified and sanctified in matrimony.
This did not exclude, indeed it implied, that the perfect state was
certainly celibacy--that is to say, pure science, free from admixture
of art.

[Sidenote: _Hints of an Æsthetic in scholastic philosophy._]

The only tendency that had no true and proper representatives was
the sound scientific tendency. The _Poetics_ of Aristotle itself was
hardly known or rather it was ill-known, from the Latin translation
that a German of the name of Hermann made, not earlier than 1256, of
the paraphrase or commentary of Averroes. Perhaps the best of the
mediæval investigations into language is that supplied by Dante's _De
vulgari eloquentia,_ where the word is, however, still looked upon as
a sign ("_rationale signum et sensuale ... natura sensuale quidem,
in quantum sonus est, rationale vero in quantum aliquid significare
videtur ad piacitum_").[8] The study of the expressive, æsthetic,
linguistic faculty would, however, have found an appropriate occasion
and a point of departure in the secular debate between nominalism and
realism, which could not avoid touching to some extent the relations
between the word and the flesh, thought and language. Duns Scotus wrote
a treatise _De modis significandi seu_ (the addition is due perhaps to
the editors) _grammatica speculativa_.[9] Abelard had defined sensation
as _confusa conceptio,_ and _imaginatio_ as a faculty that preserved
sensations; the intellect renders discursive what is intuitive in the
preceding stage, and we have finally the perfection of knowledge in
the intuitive knowledge of the discursive. We find the same importance
attached to intuitive knowledge, perception, of the individual or
_species specialissima,_ in Duns Scotus, together with the progressive
denominations of the different sorts of knowledge as _confusæ,
indistinctæ_ and _distinctæ._ We shall see this terminology reappear,
big with consequences, at the very commencement of modern Æsthetic.[10]

[Sidenote: _Renaissance. Philography and philosophical and empirical
inquiries concerning the beautiful._]

It may be said that the literary and artistic doctrines and opinions
of the Middle Ages have, with few exceptions, a value rather for the
history of culture than for the general history of science. The like
observation holds good of the Renaissance, for here, too, the circle of
the ideas of antiquity was not overstepped. Culture increases; original
sources are studied; the ancient writers are translated and commented
upon; many treatises are written and henceforth printed upon poetry
and the arts, grammars, rhetorics, dialogues, and dissertations upon
the beautiful: the proportions have increased, the world has become
bigger; but truly original ideas do not yet show themselves in the
domain of æsthetic science. The mystical tradition is refreshed and
strengthened by the renewed cult of Plato: Marsilio Ficino, Pico della
Mirandola, Cattani, Leon Battista Alberti, in the fifteenth century,
and Pietro Bembo, Mario Equicola, Castiglione, Nobili, Betussi, and
very many others in the following century, wrote upon the Beautiful
and upon Love. Among the most noteworthy productions of the sort, a
crossing of the mediæval and classical currents, is the book of the
_Dialogues of Love_ (1535), composed in Italian by the Spanish Jew
Leo, and translated into all the cultured languages of the time.[11]
The three parts into which it is divided treat of the nature and
essence, of the universality, and of the origin of love; and it is
demonstrated that every beautiful thing is good, but not every good
thing is beautiful; that beauty is a grace which dilates the soul and
moves it to love, and that knowledge of lesser beauties leads to that
of higher spiritual beauties. The author gave the name of "Philography"
to these and similar affirmations and effusions of which the book is
composed. Equicola's[12] work is also interesting, because it contains
historical accounts of those who wrote upon the subject before he did
so himself. The same intuition was versified and sighed forth by the
Petrarchists in their sonnets and ballads, while others, rebellious and
mocking, derided it in comedies, verses in _terza rima_ and parodies of
all sorts. Some mathematicians, reincarnations of Pythagoras, set to
work to determine beauty by exact relations: for instance Leonardo's
friend, Luca Paciolo, in the _De divina proportione_ (1509), in which
he laid down the pretended æsthetic law of the golden section.[13] And
side by side with these new Pythagoreans were those who revived the
canon of Polycletus as to the beauty of the human body, especially
of the female body, such as Firenzuola, Franco, Luigini, and Dolce.
Michæl Angelo fixed an empirical canon for painting in general, when
he stated that the means of giving movement and grace to figures[14]
consisted in the observance of a certain arithmetical relation. Others,
such as Fulvio Pellegrino Morato, investigated the symbolism or meaning
of colours. The Platonists generally placed beauty in the soul, the
Aristotelians rather in the physical qualities. The Averroist, Agostino
Nifo, amid much chatter and many inconclusive remarks, demonstrated
the existence of the beautiful in nature by describing the supremely
beautiful body of Joan of Aragon, Princess of Tagliacozzo, to whom the
book is dedicated.[15] Torquato Tasso, in the "Mintumo,"[16] imitated
the uncertainties of the _Hippias_ of Plato, not without making a free
use of the speculations of Plotinus. A chapter of the _Poetica_ of
Campanella possesses greater importance, where he describes the good as
_signum boni_ and the ugly as _signum mali,_ understanding by good the
three prime forces of Power, Wisdom and Love. Although Campanella was
still tied to the Platonic idea of the beautiful, the conception of a
sign or symbol, here introduced by him, represents progress. By this
means he succeeded in perceiving that material things or external facts
are neither beautiful nor ugly in themselves. "Mandricard called the
wounds in the bodies of his friends the Moors beautiful, for they were
large and gave evidence of the great strength of Roland who dealt them;
Saint Augustine called the gashes and the dislocations in the body of
Saint Vincent beautiful, because they were evidence of his endurance,
but they were on the other hand ugly in so far as they were signs of
the cruelty of the tyrant Dacianus and of his executioners. It is
beautiful to die fighting, said Virgil, for it is the sign of a strong
soul. The pet dog of his mistress will seem beautiful to the lover, and
doctors call even urine and fæces beautiful, when they indicate health.
Everything is both beautiful and ugly" (_quapropter nihil est quod non
sit pulcrum simul et turpe_).[17] In such observations as these we have
not a mere state of mystical exaltation, but to some extent a movement
in the direction of analysis.

[Sidenote: _The pedagogic theory of art and the Poetics of Aristotle._]

Nothing better serves to demonstrate that the Renaissance did not pass
beyond the confines of ancient æsthetic thought than the fact that
notwithstanding the renewed acquaintance with the thought of Aristotle,
the pedagogic theory of art not only persisted and triumphed, but was
transplanted bodily into the text of Aristotle, where its interpreters
read it with a certainty that we have to make efforts to achieve.
Certainly, a Robortelli (1548) or a Castelvetro (1570) stopped short
at the simple, purely hedonistic solution, giving simple pleasure as
the end of art: poetry, says Castelvetro, "was discovered solely
for the purpose of delighting and of recreating ... the souls of the
rude multitude and of the common people."[18] And here and there
some were able to free themselves from both the pleasure theory and
that of the didactic end; but the majority, such as Segni, Maggi,
Vettori,[19] were for the _docere delectando._ Scaliger (1561) declared
that mimesis or imitation was "_finis medius ad illum ultimum qui est
docendi cum delectatione,_" and believing himself to be altogether in
agreement with Aristotle as to this, he continued, "_docet affectus
poeta per actiones, ut bonos amplectamur atque imitemur ad agendum,
malos aspernemur ad abstinendum._"[20] Piccolomini (1575) observed
that "It must not be thought that so many excellent poets and artists,
ancient and modern, would have devoted such care and diligence to this
most noble study, had they not known and believed that in so doing
they were aiding human life," and if "they had not thought that we
were to be instructed, directed, and well established by it."[21] The
"truth preserved in soft verses, which attracts and persuades the most
reluctant" (Tasso),[22] with the comparison from Lucretius attached,
is the conception that even Campanella repeats. Poetry is for him
"_Rhetorica quaedam figurata, quasi magica, quae exempla ministrat ad
suadendum bonum et dissuadendum malum delectabiliter iis qui simplici
verum et bonum audire nolunt, aut non possunt aut nesciunt._"[23] Thus
returned the comparison of poetry with oratory; according to Segni
they only differ because the first occupies a more lofty situation:
"for since imitation representing itself in act by means of poetry, in
mighty, chosen words, in metaphors, images, and indeed the whole of
figured speech, which is to be found more in poetry than in the art
of oratory, the metrical qualities that are also required in verse,
the subjects of which it treats, which have something of the great and
delightful, make it appear most beautiful and worthy of being held all
the greater marvel."[24] "Three most noble arts" (wrote Tassoni in
1620, and he repeated common opinion), "History, Poetics, and Oratory,
come under the heading of Politics and depend upon it; the first of
these has reference to the instruction of princes and gentlemen, the
second of the people, the third of those who give counsel in public
trials or defend private ones that come up for judgment."[25]

According to these views, the tragical catharsis was regarded as
designed in general to demonstrate the instability of fortune, or to
terrify by example, or to proclaim the triumph of justice, or to render
the spectators insensible to the strokes of fortune, owing to their
familiarity with suffering. The pedagogic theory, thus renewed and
sustained by the authority of the ancients, was popularized in France,
Spain, England and Germany, together with all the Italian poetic
doctrines of the Renaissance. The French writers of the period of Louis
XIV. are altogether penetrated with it. "_Cette science agréable qui
mêle la gravité des préceptes avec la douceur du langage_," is what La
Ménardière calls poetry (1640), in the same way as Le Bossu (1675), for
whom "_le premier but du poète est d'instruire_,"[26] as Homer taught,
when he wrote two interesting didactic manuals relating to military and
political events: the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey._

[Sidenote: _The "Poetics of the Renaissance."_]

This pedagogic theory has therefore been reasonably described by all
the modern critics in concert, as if by antonomasia, as the _Poetics
of the Renaissance._ It must, however, always be understood that it
did not appear for the first time in the fifteenth or sixteenth
century, but that it was prevalent and generally accepted at that
time. It may even be remarked, as has already been acutely done,[27]
that the Renaissance naturally did not distinguish the didactic kind
of poetry from the other kinds, since for it every kind of poetry was
didactic. But the Renaissance was not a real Renaissance, save when
and where it continued the interrupted spiritual work of antiquity,
and in this sense it would perhaps be more just to describe as its
Poetics, or rather, as the important element in its Poetics, not the
repetition of the pedagogic theory of antiquity and of the Middle Ages,
but the resumption, which also took place, of the discussions upon
the possible, the probable (_verisimile_, εικός) of Aristotle, on the
reasons of Plato's condemnation and on the procedure of the artist who
creates by imagining.

[Sidenote: _Dispute concerning the universal and the probable in art._]

It is in such discussions that is to be found the true contribution of
that epoch, not to learning, but to the formation of the science of
Æsthetic. The ground was prepared and enriched through the work of the
interpreters and commentators of Aristotle and of the new writers on
Poetics, especially the Italians, and it was also enriched with some
seed that was destined to sprout and to become a vigorous plant in
the future. The study of Plato also contributed not a little to call
attention to the function of the idea, or of the universal, in poetry.
What meaning was to be attached to the statement that poetry should aim
at the universal and history at the particular? What was the meaning of
the proposition that poetry should proceed according to _probability_?
What could that _certain idea_ consist of, which Raphæl said that he
followed in his painting?

[Sidenote: _Fracastoro._]

Girolamo Fracastoro was among the first to ask himself this question
seriously, in the dialogue _Naugerius, sive De poetica_ (1555). He
disdainfully rejected the thesis that the end of poetry is pleasure:
far be from us, he exclaimed, so bad an opinion of the poets, who the
ancients said were the inventors of all the good arts. Nor did the
end of instruction seem to him to be acceptable, which is the task,
not of poetry, but of other faculties, such as geography, history,
agronomy, philosophy. The poet's task is to represent or to imitate,
and he differs from the historian, not in the matter, but in the manner
of representation. The others imitate the particular, the poet the
universal: the others are like the painters of portraits, the poet
produces things as he contemplates the universal and most beautiful
idea of them: the others say only what they need to say for their
purposes, the poet that he may say everything beautifully and fully.

But the beauty of a poem must always be understood as relative to
the class of subject of which it treats; it is the most beautiful
in this class, not the supremely beautiful: one must be careful to
guard against the equivocal or double meaning of this word "beauty"
(_æquivocatio illius verbi_). A poet never utters what is false or
expresses what does not exist, for his words inevitably harmonize in
appearance or signification either with the opinions of men or with the
universal. Nor can we accept the Platonic axiom that the poet has no
knowledge of the things of which he treats; he does know them, but in
his own poet's manner.[28]

[Sidenote: _L. Castelvetro._]

While Fracastoro strives to elaborate the important passage in
Aristotle touching the universal of poetry, and though somewhat
vague in his treatment, keeps fairly close to the mark; Castelvetro,
on the contrary, judges the Aristotelian fragment with the freedom
and superior knowledge of the true critic. He recognizes that the
_Poetics_ is merely a notebook recording certain principles and
methods of compiling the art, not the art fully compiled. He remarks,
moreover, not without logical acumen, that Aristotle having adopted
the criterion of probability or of that "which presents an appearance
of historic truth," should have applied his theory in the first
case to history, not to poetry; for history being a "narrative
according to truth of memorable human actions," and poetry a narrative
according to probability of events which might possibly occur, the
second cannot receive "all its radiance" from the first. Nor does it
escape him that Aristotle describes two different things by the one
word "imitation": (_a_) "following the example of another," which is
"acting in exactly the same way as another without knowing the reason
of such action": and (_b_) the imitation "demanded by poetry," which
"does things in a manner totally different from that in which they
have been done hitherto and proposes a new example for imitation."
Nevertheless Castelvetro cannot extricate himself from the confusion
between the imaginary and the historical; for he himself says "the
realm of the former is generally that of certainty," but "the field
of certainty is often crossed with bars of uncertainty just as the
field of uncertainty is often crossed with bars of certainty." Also
what can be said of this curious interpretation of the Aristotelian
theory of pleasure experienced in the imitation of ugly models, that
such pleasure is based on the fact that since an imitation is always
imperfect, it is incapable of exciting the disgust and fear which would
arise from the contemplation of real ugliness? And what of his remark
that the characteristics of painting and poetry are so diverse as to
be in opposition one to the other; imitation of objects giving rise
to great pleasure in the former art and as great displeasure in the
latter? And so on in numberless cases of bold but scarcely felicitous
subtleties.[29]

[Sidenote: _Piccolomini and Pinciano._]

In opposition to Robortelli, who asserted the identity of the probable
and the false, Piccolomini held that the probable (_verisimile_) is
inherently neither false nor true, only by accident becoming one or
other.[30] Of the same mind is the Spaniard Alfonso Lopez Pinciano
(1596), who says the scope of poetry "_no es la mentira, que seria
coincider con la sophística, ni la historia que seria tomar la materia
al histórico; y no siendo historia porque toca fabúlas ni mentira
porque toca historia, tiene por objeto el verisimil, que todo lo
abraza. De aqui resulta que es un arte superior á la metaphysica,
porqué comprende mucho mas, y se extiende a lo que es y á lo que no
es._"[31] What may lie behind this notion of probability is still
indefinite and impenetrable.

[Sidenote: _Fr. Patrizzi_ (_Patricius_).]

Moved by a wish to place poetry on a foundation other than the
probable, Francesco Patrizzi, the anti-Aristotelian, composed his
_Poetica_ between 1555 and 1586 in refutation of all Aristotle's main
doctrines. Patrizzi notes that the word "imitation" is given many
meanings by the Greek philosopher, who uses it now to denote a single
word, now to describe a tragedy; at times it stands for a figure of
speech, at others for a fiction: whence he draws the logical conclusion
(from which, however, he shrinks alarmed) "that all philosophic and
other kinds of writing and speaking are poetry, since they are made
of words which themselves are imitations." He observes further that,
according to Aristotle, it is impossible to distinguish between poetry
and history (since both are imitations), or to prove that verse is not
essential to poetry, or that history, science and art are unsuitable
material for it; since Aristotle in several passages says that poetry
may comprise "fable, actual occurrences, belief of others, duty,
the best, necessity, the possible, the probable, the credible, the
incredible, the suitable" as well as "all things worldly." After these
objections, some sound, others sophistical, Patrizzi comes to the
conclusion that "there is no truth in the dogma that poetry is wholly
imitation; and even if it be imitation at all, it belongs not to poets
alone, nor is it mere imitation of any kind, but something else not
mentioned by Aristotle nor pointed out by any one else, nor yet borne
into the mind of man. The discovery may possibly be made in course of
time, or some one may hit upon the truth and bring it to light"; but
up to the present "such discovery has not been made."[32]

Yet these confessions of ignorance, these endeavours, though vain, to
escape from the Aristotelian circle of ideas, and the great literary
controversies of the sixteenth century concerning the concept of poetic
truth and the probable had their use in that they stimulated interest
by directing attention to a mystery still unsolved. Thought had once
more begun to move upon the æsthetic problem, and this time it was not
destined to be broken off or to lose itself.

[1] _Confess,_ iv. x. ch. 13; _De Trinitate,_ vi. ch. 10; _Epist._
3, 18; _De civitate Dei,_ xxii. ch. 19 (in _Opera,_ ed. dei Maurini,
Paris, 1679-1690, vols. i. ii. vii. viii.).

[2] _Summa theol._ I. 1. xxxix. 8; I. 11. xxvii. I (ed. Migne, i. cols.
794-795; ii. col. 219).

[3] Comparetti, _Virg. nel medio evo,_ vol. i. _passim._

[4] _De vulg. eloq._ (ed. Rajna), bk. ii. ch. 4.

[5] _Vita nuova,_ ch. 25.

[6] _Convivio,_ i. 1.

[7] _Prohemio al Condestable de Portugal,_ 1445-1449 (in _Obras,_ ed.
Amador de los Rios, 1852), § 3.

[8] _De vulg. eloq._ bk. i. ch. 3.

[9] Lately reprinted under the editorship of padre M. Fernandez Garcia,
Ad claras Aquas (Quarracchi), 1902.

[10] Windelband, _Gesch. d. Phil._ ii. pp. 251-270; De Wulf, _Philos,
médiév.,_ Louvain, 1900, pp. 317-320.

[11] _Dialogi di amore, composti per Leone, medico ...,_ Rome, 1535.

[12] _Libro di natura e d' amore,_ Venice, 1525 (Ven. 1563).

[13] _De divina proportione,_ Venice, 1509.

[14] G. P. Lomazzo, _Trattato dell' arte della pittura, scultura ed
architettura,_ Milan, 1585, i. I, pp. 22-23.

[15] Aug. Niphi, _De pulcro el amore,_ Rome, 1529.

[16] _Il Minturno o vero de la belleza_ (in _Dialoghi,_ ed. Guasti,
vol. iii.).

[17] _Ration. philos._ part iv.; _Poeticor._ (Paris, 1638), art. vii.

[18] Fr. Robortelli, _In librum Arts, de arte poet, explicationes,_
Florence, 1548; Lud. Castelvetro, _Poetica d' Aristotele vulgarizzata
ed esposta,_ 1570 (Basle, 1576), part i. particella iv. pp. 29-30.

[19] Bern. Segni, _Rettor. e poet. trad._ Florence, 1549; Vinc. Madii,
_In Arist.... explanationes,_ 1550; Petri Victorii, _Commentarii,_
etc., Florence, 1560.

[20] _Poetica,_ 1561 (ed. 3, 1586), i. I; vii. 3.

[21] _Annotationi net libro della Poetica,_ Venice, 1575, preface.

[22] _Gerus. lib._ i. 3.

[23] _Poetic,_ ch. I, art. 1.

[24] _Poetica trad_. preface.

[25] _Pensieri diversi_, bk. x. ch. 18.

[26] La Ménardière, _Poétique_, Paris, 1640; Le Bossu, _Traité du poème
épique_, Paris, 1675.

[27] Borinski, _Poet. d. Renaiss._ p. 26.

[28] Hyeron. Frascatorii _Opera,_ Venetian edition, Giunti, 1574, pp.
112-120.

[29] _Poet., ed. cit._ i. 1; ii. 1; iii. 7; v. I (pp. 64, 66, 71-72,
208, 580).

[30] _Annotationi,_ preface.

[31] _Philosophia antiqua poetica,_ Madrid, 1596 (reprinted Valladolid
1894).

[32] Francesco Patrici, _Della poetica, la Deca disputata,_ "in
which by history, by reason, by authority of the greatest worthies
of antiquity, is shown the falsity of the most received opinions
concerning Poetry down to our own day." Ferrara, 1586.

FERMENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

[Sidenote: _New words and new observations in the seventeenth century_]

Interest in æsthetic investigation increased rapidly in the early years
of the following century, owing either to the popularity acquired by
certain new words or to the novel meanings given to words already
familiar, which 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_" was a phrase seized upon by
the French, who rendered it as "_esprit_" or "_beaux esprits_."[1]
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).[3] 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.[4] 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]

[Sidenote: _Taste._]

The word _taste_ or _good taste_ was equally widespread 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."

[Sidenote: _Various meanings of the word taste._]

From the rough notes which we possess as to the history of the concept
of taste, several meanings of the 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, Michæl 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."[7] 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,[8]
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 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,[9] who gave the word the sense of
"practical wit," enabling one to perceive the "true signification" of
things; his "man of good taste" becomes in our language "a man of tact"
in the affairs of life.[10]

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[11] (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;[12] 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_.[13] 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 the beginning of Muratori's[14] 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,[15] and finally
it gives its name to the Academy of Good Taste founded at Palermo in
1718.[16] 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 "_indicium_" which
"_nec magis arte traditur quam gustus aut odor_" of Quintilian.[17]
More particularly Montfaucon de Villars (1671)[18] 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);[19] Orsi made it the subject of his _Considerazioni_ written
in reply to Bouhours' book.

[Sidenote: _Fancy or Imagination._]

In Italy in the seventeenth century we find imagination 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 that the scenes acted on the stage are not real; although he has
no belief in them yet they please him greatly. For "if poetry desired
to be mistaken for truth, the end she had in view would be a he, by
the laws of nature and of God doomed inevitably to perish: for a lie
is nothing but an untruth uttered in the hope that it may be mistaken
for truth. How then should an art so tainted be allowed to flourish in
the best-regulated republics? How should it be commended and used by
the very writers of Holy Scripture?" _Ut pictura poësis_: poetry is
like painting, which is a "diligent imitation" aiming at a close copy
of the features, colours, acts, nay, even the hidden motives, of the
objects it represents: and it "does not pretend that fiction is truth."
The sole aim of poetic tales is "to adorn our understanding with
imagery, that is to say, with sumptuous, novel, marvellous and splendid
appearances. And this is known to diffuse so useful an influence on
mankind that humanity insists on rewarding poets with praise more
glorious than is bestowed on any other men; their books are protected
from the ravages of time with greater solicitude than is shown to
scientific treatises or productions of any other art; in the end the
names of poets are crowned with adoring veneration. See how the world
thirsts for beautiful first apprehensions, although these are neither
laden with science nor are they vehicles of truth."[20]

Sixty years later these ideas, although expressed by a Cardinal, seemed
all too daring to Muratori, who could not bring himself to allow poets
so much latitude, or to enfranchize them from their obligations to the
probable. Nevertheless Muratori allows a large space to imagination,
"an inferior apprehensive faculty" which, without caring whether
things be false or true, confines itself to apprehending them, and
"represents" the truth merely, leaving the task of "cognition" to the
"superior apprehensive faculty" or intellect.[21] Even the stony heart
of Gravina yields to the charm of imagination: he admits it occupies
a considerable place in the realm of poetry and suffers his own arid
prose to describe it as "a sorceress, but beneficent," "a delirium
which cures madness."[22]

Earlier than either of these, Ettori commended it to the good
rhetorician, "who in order that he may awaken images" must "familiarize
himself with whatever is subject to bodily feeling" and "encounter
the genius of imagination, which is a sensuous faculty," to these
ends using "species rather than genera (since the latter, being more
universal than the former, are less sensible), individuals rather than
species, effects than causes, the number of the greater rather than the
number of the less."[23]

As far back as 1578 the Spaniard Huarte had maintained that eloquence
is the product of imagination rather than of intellect or reason.[24]
In England Bacon (1605) ascribed science to intellect, history to
memory and poetry to imagination or fancy:[25] Hobbes inquired into
the procedure of poetry:[26] Addison (1712) devoted several numbers
of his _Spectator_ to analysis of the "pleasures of imagination."[27]
Somewhat later, the importance of imagination was felt in Germany,
where it found advocates in Bodmer, Breitinger and other writers of the
Swiss school, who owed much to the influence of the Italians (Muratori,
Gravina, Calepio) and the English: acting in their turn as teachers of
Klopstock and the new German critical school.[28]

[Sidenote: _Feeling._]

It was at this same period that opposition became clearly marked
between those accustomed "_à juger par le sentiment_" and those used
to "_raisonner par principes_."[29] The Frenchman, Du Bos, author of
_Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture_ (1719), upholds the
theory of feeling; according to him art is simply a self-abandonment
"_aux impressions que les objets étrangers font sur nous,_" setting
aside all reflective labour. He laughs at those philosophers who
deny the force of imagination, and Malebranche's eloquent discourse
founded on this denial draws from Du Bos the remark, "_c'est à notre
imagination qu'il parle contre l'abus de l'imagination._" He refuses
to see any intellectual nucleus in the productions of the arts, saying
that art consists not in instruction but in style: nor is he too
respectful towards the probable: he says he finds himself unable to
set limits between it and the marvellous, and leaves to "born poets"
the task of thus miraculously uniting opposites. For Du Bos there is
no criterion of art save feeling, which he calls a "_sixième sens,_"
against which dispute is vain since in such matters popular opinion
invariably wins the day over the dogmatic pronouncements of artists
and men of letters: all the ingenious conceits of the greatest
metaphysicians, though unimpeachable in themselves, will not in the
slightest degree diminish the lustre of poetry or despoil it of one
single attraction. Attempts to discredit Ariosto and Tasso in the eyes
of Italians were as vain as those made against the _Cid_ in France.
Other people's arguments can never persuade us of the contrary of
what we feel.[29] These notions were adopted by many French writers:
for example Cartaut de la Villate[30] observes, "_Le grand talent
d'un écrivain qui veut plaire, est de tourner ses réflexions en
sentiments_;" and Trublet, "_C'est un principe sûr, que la poésie doit
être une expression de sentiment._"[30] Nor were the English slow in
emphasizing the concept of "emotion" in their theories of literature.

[Sidenote: _Tendency to unite these terms._]

In the writings of this period _imagination_ was often identified with
_wit, wit_ with _taste, taste_ with _feeling,_ and _feeling_ with
first apprehensions or _imagination_;[31] we have already noted that
taste is sometimes critical and sometimes productive: this fusion,
identification and subordination of terms apparently distinct shows how
they gravitate round one single concept.

[Sidenote: _Difficulties and contradictions in their definition._]

A German critic, one of the very few who have sought to penetrate
the darkness surrounding the origins of modern Æsthetic, considers
the concept of taste (which we owe, he thinks, to Gracian) "the
most important æsthetic doctrine which remained for modern times to
discover."[32] But without going so far as to say that taste is the
chief doctrine of the science, and the foundation of all the rest,
instead of only a particular doctrine, and without recapitulating what
we have already said of Gracian's relation to the theory of taste,
it is well to repeat that taste, wit, imagination, feeling, and so
on, instead of new concepts scientifically grasped, were simply new
words corresponding to vague impressions: at most they were problems,
not concepts: apprehensions of ground still to be conquered, not yet
annexed and brought into subjection. It must not be forgotten that the
very men who made use of these terms could scarcely grope after the
ideas they suggested without falling back into the old traditions, the
only ones on which they had an intellectual grasp. To them the new
words were shades, not bodies: when they tried to embrace them their
arms returned empty to their own breasts.

[Sidenote: _Wit and intellect._]

Certainly wit differs to a certain extent from intellect. Yet
Pellegrini and Tesauro, with other writers of treatises, never fail to
point out that intellectual truth lies at the root of wit. Trevisano
defines it as "an internal virtue of the soul which invents methods
for expressing and executing its own concepts: it is recognizable now
in the arrangement of things we invent, now in the clear expression
of them: sometimes in cunning reconciliations of matters seemingly
opposed, sometimes in tracing analogies but faintly discernible." To
sum up, one must not "allow the actions of wit to go unaccompanied
by those of intellect," or even by those of practical morality.[33]
More ingenuously Muratori says, "Wit is that virtue and active force
with which the intellect is able to assemble, unite and discover the
similarities, relations and reasons of things."[34] In this manner wit,
after having been distinguished from intellect, eventually becomes a
part or a manifestation of it. By a somewhat different path the same
conclusion is reached by Alexander Pope when he counsels that wit be
reined in like a mettlesome horse, and observes:

    For wit and judgement often are at strife,
    Though meant each other's aid like man and wife.[35]

[Sidenote: _Taste and intellectual judgement._]

Similar vicissitudes befell the word "taste," outcome of a metaphor
(as was noted by Kant) whose effect was to stand in opposition
to intellectualistic principles, as if to say that the judgement
governing the choice of food destined solely for the delectation
of the palate is of the same nature as that which decides opinions
in matters of art.[36] Nevertheless, the very definition of this
anti-intellectualistic concept contained a reference to intellect and
reason; the implicit comparison with the palate was ultimately taken
as signifying an anticipation of reflexion: as Voltaire wrote in the
following century: "_De même que la sensation du palais anticipe
la réflexion._"[37] Intellect and reason glimmer through all the
definitions of taste belonging to this period. Mme. Dacier wrote in
1684, "_Une harmonie, un accord de l'esprit et de la raison._"[38]
"_Une raison éclairée qui, d'intelligence avec le cœur, fait
toujours un juste choix parmi des choses opposées ou semblables,_"
wrote the author of _Entretiens galants._[39] According to another
writer quoted by Bonhours, "taste" is "a natural feeling implanted in
the soul, independent of any science that can possibly be acquired"; it
is practically "an instinct of right reason."[40] The same Bouhours,
whilst deprecating this interpretation of one metaphor by another,
says, "Taste is more nearly allied to judgement than wit."[41] The
Italian Ettori thinks that it may generally be described as "judgement
regulated by art,"[42] and Baruffaldi (1710) identifies it with
"discernment" reduced from theory to practice.[43] De Crousaz (1715)
observes: "_Le bon goût nous fait d'abord estimer par sentiment ce que
la raison aurait approuvé, après qu'elle se serait donné le temps de
l'examiner assez pour en juger par des justes idées._"[44] And somewhat
prior to him Trevisano considered it "a sentiment always willing to
conform to whatsoever reason accepts," and in conjunction with divine
grace, a powerful help to man in revealing the true and good, no longer
able to circulate freely among mankind owing to original sin. For
König (1727) in Germany taste was "a power of the intellect, product
of a healthy mind and acute judgement which makes one able to feel
the true, good and beautiful"; and for Bodmer in 1736 (after lengthy
correspondence on the subject with his Italian friend Calepio) "a
practised reflexion, prompt and penetrating into the smallest details,
by which intellect is able to distinguish the true from the false, the
perfect from the imperfect." Calepio and Bodmer were opponents of pure
feeling, and made a distinction between "taste" and "good taste."[45]
Traversing the same intellectualistic path, Muratori speaks of "good
taste" in "erudition" and others of "good taste in philosophy."

[Sidenote: _The "je ne sais quoi."_]

Perhaps those authors were wise who preferred to remain vague and to
identify taste with an indefinable Something, a _je ne sais quoi_; a
_nescio quid_: a new expression which expressed nothing new, but at
least called attention to the problem. Bouhours (1671) discusses it at
length: "_Les Italiens, qui font mystère de tout, emploient en toutes
rencontres leur_ non so che: _on ne voit rien de plus commune dans
leurs poètes,_" and quotes Tasso and others in confirmation.[45] A
note upon it is found in Salvini: "This 'good taste' has but recently
come to the front; it seems a vague term applicable to nothing
particular, and is equivalent to the _non so che,_ to a happy or
successful turn of wit."[46] Father Feijóo, who wrote on the _Razón
del gusto_ and on _El no se qué_ (1733), says very wisely: "_En muchas
producciones no solo de la naturaleza, sino del arte, y aun mas del
arte que de la naturaleza, encuentran los hombres, fuera di aquellas
perfecciones sujetes á su comprehension racional, otro genero de primor
misterioso que, lisonjeando el gusto, atormenta el entendemento. Los
sentidos le palpan, pero no le puede dissipar la razon, y así, al
querer explicarle, no se encuentran voces ni conceptos que cuadren
á su idea, y salimos del paso con decir que hay un non se qué, que
agrada, que enamora que hechiza, sin que pueda encontrarse revelacion
mas clara da este natural misterio._"[47] And President Montesquieu:
"_Il y a quelquefois dans les personnes ou dans les choses un charme
invisible, une grâce naturelle, qu'on n'a pu définir, et qu'on a été
forcé d'appeler le je ne sais quoi. Il me semble que c'est un effet
principalement fondé sur la surprise._"[48] Some writers rebelled
against the subterfuge of the _je ne sais quoi,_ saying, rightly
enough, that it was a confession of ignorance: but they knew not how to
escape that ignorance without falling into confusion between taste and
intellectual judgement.

[Sidenote: _Imagination and sensationalism. The corrective of
Imagination._]

If the attempt to define "wit" and "taste" usually resulted in
intellectualism, it was easy to transform imagination and feeling into
sensationalistic doctrines. We have seen how earnestly Pallavicino
insisted on the non-intellectuality of the fantasies and inventions
of the imagination. "Nothing presents itself to the admirer of the
beautiful (he writes) to enable him to verify his cognition and satisfy
himself that the object recognized is or is not that for which he takes
it; if either by vision or by strong apprehension he is led to think
it actually present by an act of judgement, his taste for beauty as
beauty does not arise from such act of judgement, but from the vision
or lively apprehension which might remain in ourselves even when the
deception of belief was corrected"; just as happens when we are drowsy
and know ourselves to be but half awake, yet are unwilling to tear
ourselves from sweet dreams. For Pallavicino imagination cannot err; he
assimilates it wholly to the sensations, which are incapable of truth
or falsity. And if imaginative knowledge pleases, it is not because
it holds a special truth (imaginative truth), but because it creates
objects which "though false are pleasing": the painter makes not
likenesses but images which, all resemblance apart, are pleasing to the
sight: the poet awakens apprehensions "sumptuous, novel, marvellous,
splendid."[49] His opinion coincides, if we mistake not, with Marino's
sensationalism: "The poet should aim only at the marvellous ... he who
cannot amaze his hearers is not worth a straw":[50] he applauds the
oft-repeated dictum of "Gabriel Chiabrera, that Pindar of Savona, that
poetry should cause the eyebrows to arch themselves."[51] But in the
_Treatise upon Style_ written later (1646) he repents of his youthful
achievement and appears willing to return to the pedagogic theory:
"And forasmuch as I theorized concerning poetry in the basest manner,
treating it solely as a minister of that delight which the mind enjoys
in the less noble operation of imagination or apprehension arising
from imagination; and, therefore, in consequence I somewhat relaxed the
strings which bind it to the probable: I now wish to demonstrate that
poetry has other functions more exalted and fruitful, while remaining
in strict servitude to the probable: which office is to guide our
minds in the noble exercise of judgement; thus it becomes the nurse of
philosophy which it nourishes with sweet milk."[52] The Jesuit Ettori,
while inculcating the use of imagination and recommending orators to go
to school with the "actors," points out that imagination should fulfil
the simple office of "interpreter" between intellect and truth, never
assuming dominion, otherwise the orator would be treating his audience
or readers "not as men, to whom intellect is proper, but as beasts whom
imagination satisfies."[53]

The conception of imagination as purely sensuous shows strongly in
Muratori, who is so convinced that the faculty, if left to itself,
would deteriorate into a riot of dreams and intoxication, that he links
it to intellect as to "an authoritative friend" who shall influence
the choice and combination of images.[54] The problem of the nature of
imagination had strong attraction for Muratori, and, while traducing
and vilifying, he returns to it again in his _Della forza della
fantasia umana_;[55] describing it as a material faculty essentially
different from the mental or spiritual, and denying it the validity of
knowledge. Although he had observed that the aim of poetry is distinct
from that of science, in that the latter seeks to "know," and the
former to "represent" truth,[56] he persisted in counting Poetry as an
"art of delectation" subordinate to Moral Philosophy, of whom she was
one of the three servants or ministers.[57] Very similarly Gravina held
that along with novelty and delight in the marvellous, poetry should
endow the mind of the vulgar with "truth and universal cognitions."[58]

Outside Italy the same movement was going on. Bacon, although he
assigned poetry to imagination, yet considered it as something
intermediary between history and science, approximating epic to
history and the most lofty style, the parabolic, to science: ("_poēsis
parabolica inter reliquas eminet"._) Elsewhere he calls poetry
_somnium_ or declares absolutely that "_scientias fere non parit,_" and
that "_pro lusu potius ingenii quam pro scientia est habenda_": music,
painting and sculpture are voluptuous arts.[59] Addison identified the
pleasures of the imagination with those produced by visible objects or
the ideas to which they give rise: such pleasures are not so strong as
those of the senses nor so refined as those of the intellect: he groups
together the pleasures experienced respectively in comparing imitations
with the objects imitated, and in sharpening by this means the faculty
of observation.[60]

[Sidenote _Feeling and Sensationalism._]

The sensationalism of Du Bos and other upholders of feeling appears
very clearly. For Du Bos art is a pastime whose pleasantness consists
in the fact that it occupies the mind without fatigue, and has
affinities with the pleasure provoked by gladiatorial contests,
bullfights and tourneys.[61]

For these reasons, whilst noting the importance, in the prehistory
of Æsthetic, of these new words and the new views they express; and
while recognizing their value as a ferment in the discussion of the
æsthetic problem, taken up by thinkers of the Renaissance at the point
at which it had been left by the ancients; we yet cannot discern in
their apparition the true origin of our science. By these words and the
discussions they aroused, the æsthetic fact clamoured even louder and
more insistently for its own philosophical justification; but this it
was not yet to attain either by this means or by any other.

[1] _E.g._ Molière, _Préc. ridic._ sc. i, 10.

[2] _I fonti dell' ingegno ridotti ad arte,_ Bologna, 1650.

[3] _Delle acutezze che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze e concetti
volgarmenti si appellano,_ Genova-Bologna, 1639.

[4] _Agudeza y arte de ingenio,_ Madrid, 1642; enlarged, Huesca, 1649.

[5] _Saggio del gusto e delle belle arti,_ 1783, ch. I, _note._

[6] Ital. trans. in Orsi, _Considerazioni,_ etc. (Modena, 1735), vol.
i. dial. 1.

[7] _Orl. Furioso_, xxxv. 26; L. Dolce, _Dial. del pittura_ (Venice,
1557); _ad init_.

[8] Borinski, _Poet. d. Renaiss._ p. 308 _seqq._; _B. Gracian_, pp.
39-54.

[9] _Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto_ (Venice, 1766), introd. pp. 72-84.

[10] Gracian, _Obras_ (Antwerp, 1669); _El héroe, El discreto,_ with
introd. by A. Farinelli, Madrid, 1900. Cf. Borinski, _Poet. d. Renais,
l.c._

[11] _Les Caractères, ou les mœurs du siècle,_ ch. I; _Des ouvrages de
l'esprit._

[12] In the programme: _Von der Nachahmung der Franzosen,_ Leipzig,
1687.

[13] _Opera ... nella quale con alcune certe considerazioni si mostra
in che consista il vero buon gusto ne' suddetti componimenti,_ etc.,
etc., Bologna, 1696.

[14] _Delle riflessioni sopra il buon gusto nelle scienze e nell'
arti,_ 1708 (Venice, 1766).

[15] Muratori, _Della perfetta poesia italiana,_ Modena, 1706, bk. ii.
ch. 5.

[16] Mazzuchelli, _Scrittori d' Italia,_ vol. ii. part iv. p. 2389.

[17] Cicero, _De oratore,_ iii. ch. 50; Quintilian, _Inst. Orator,_ vi.
ch. 5.

[18] _De la délicatesse,_ Paris, 1671.

[19] _Il buon gusto,_ ch. 39, p. 367.

[20] _Del bene_ (Naples, 1681), bk. i. part i. chs. 49-53. Cf. the same
writer's _Arte della perfezion cristiana,_ Rome, 1665, bk. i. ch. 3.

[21] _Perfetta poesia,_ bk. i. chs. 14, 21.

[22] _Ragion poetica,_ in _Prose italiane,_ ed. De Stefano, Naples,
1839, i. ch. 7. 2 _Il buon gusto,_ p. 10.

[23] _Esame degl' ingegni degl' huomini per apprender le scienze_
(Ital. trans. by C. Camilli, Venice, 1586), chs. 9-12.

[24] _De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum,_ bk. ii. ch. 13.

[25] _De homine_ (in _Opera phil.,_ ed. Molesworth, vol. iii.), ch. 2.

[26] _Spectator,_ Nos. 411-421 (_Works,_ London, 1721, pp. 486-519).

[27] _Die Discourse der Mahlern,_ 1721--1723; _Von dem Einflüss und
Gebrauche der Einbildungskraft,_ etc., 1727; and other writings of
Bodmer and Breitinger.

[28] Pascal, _Pensées sur l'éloquence et le style,_ § 15.

[29] _Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture,_ 1719 (ed. 7,
Paris, 1770) _passim._; see especially sections 1, 23, 26, 28, 33, 34.

[30] Cartaut de la Villate, _Essais historiques et philosophiques sur
le goût,_ Aix, 1737; Trublet, _Essais sur divers sujets de littérature
et de morale,_ Amsterdam, 1755.

[31] Cf. Du Bos, _op. cit._ § 33.

[32] Borinski, _B. Gracian_, p. 39.

[33] Trevisano, _op. cit._ pp. 82, 84.

[34] _Perfetta poesia,_ bk. ii. ch. I (_ed. cit._ i. p. 299).

[35] A. Pope, _An Essay on Criticism,_ 1709 (in _Poetical Works,_
London, 1827), lines 81, 82.

[36] _Kritik der Urtheilskraft_ (ed. Kirchmann), § 33.

[37] _Essai sur le goût_ (in appendix to A. Gérard, _Essai sur le
goût,_ Paris, 1766).

[38] _Ibid._

[39] Quoted in Sulzer, _Allg. Th. d. s. K._ ii. p. 377.

[40] _Manière de bien penser_ (Ital. trans. _cit._), dial. 4. 2 _Ibid._

[41] _Op. cit._ chs. 2-4.

[42] _Osservazioni critiche_ (in vol. ii. of Orsi's _Considerazioni)_,
ch. 8, p. 23.

[43] _Traité du beau_ (Amsterdam ed., 1724), i. p. 170.

[44] J. Ulr. König, _Untersuchung von dem guten Geschmack in der Dicht-
und Redekunst,_ Leipzig, 1727, and (Calepio-Bodmer) _Briefwechsel von
der Natur des poetischen Geschmackes,_ Zürich, 1736; cf. for both
Sulzer, ii. p. 380.

[45] _Les Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène,_ 1671 (Paris ed., 1734),
conversation v.; "_Le je ne sçai quoi_"; cf. Gracian, _Oraculo manual,_
No. 127, and _El héroe,_ ch. 13.

[46] In the notes to Muratori's _Perfetta poesia._

[47] Feijóo, _Theatro critico,_ vol. vi. Nos. 11-12.

[48] _Essai sur le goût dans les choses de la nature et de l'art._
Posthumous fragment (in appendix to A. Gérard, _op. cit._).

[49] _Del bene, cap. cit._

[50] Marino, in one of the sonnets in the _Murtoleide_ (1608).

[51] _Del bene,_ bk. i. part i. ch. 8.

[52] _Trattato dello stile_ (Rome, 1666), ch. 30.

[53] _Il buon gusto,_ pp. 12-13.

[54] _Perf. poesia,_ i. ch. 18, pp. 232-233.

[55] Venice, 1745.

[56] _Perf. poesia,_ i. ch. 6.

[57] _Op. cit._ i. ch. 4, p. 42.

[58] _Ragion poetica,_ i. ch. 7.

[59] _De dignitate,_ ii. ch. 13; iii. ch. I; iv. ch. 2; v. ch. 1.

[60] _Spectator, loc. cit._ esp. pp. 487, 503.

[61] _Op. cit._ § 2.

IV

ÆSTHETIC IDEAS IN THE CARTESIAN AND LEIBNITIAN SCHOOLS, AND THE
"ÆSTHETIC" OF BAUMGARTEN

[Sidenote: _Cartesianism and imagination._]

The obscure world of wit, taste, imagination, feeling and the _je ne
sais quoi_ was not selected for examination or even, so to speak,
included in the picture of Cartesian philosophy. The French philosopher
abhorred imagination, the outcome, according to him, of the agitation
of the animal spirits: and though not utterly condemning poetry, he
allowed it to exist only in so far as it was guided by intellect, that
being the sole faculty able to save men from the caprices of the _folle
du logis._ He tolerated it, but that was all; and went so far as not to
deny it anything "_qu'un philosophe lui puisse permettre sans offenser
sa conscience._"[1] It has been observed that the æsthetic parallel
with Cartesian intellectualism is to be found in Boileau,[2] slave to
rigid _raison_ ("_Mais nous que la raison à ses règles engage ..._")
and enthusiastic partisan of allegory. We have already had occasion
to draw attention to the diatribe of Malebranche against imagination.
The mathematical spirit fostered in France by Descartes forbade all
possibility of a serious consideration of poetry and art. The Italian
Antonio Conti, living in that country and witness of the literary
disputes raging around him, thus describes the French critics (La
Motte, Fontenelle and their followers): "_Ils ont introduit dans les
belles lettres l'esprit et la méthode de M. Descartes; et ils jugent
de la poésie et de l'éloquence indépendamment des qualités sensibles.
De là vient aussi qu'ils confondent le progrès de la philosophie avec
celui des arts. Les modernes, dit l'Abbé Terrasson, sont plus grands
géomètres que les anciens: donc ils sont plus grands orateurs et plus
grands poètes._"[3] The fight against this mathematical spirit in the
matters of art and feeling was still going on in France in the day of
the encyclopædists; the din of the battle was heard in Italy, as is
shown by the writings of Bettinelli and others. At the time when Du Bos
published his daring book there was a counsellor in the parliament of
Bordeaux, Jean-Jacques Bel by name, who composed a dissertation (1726)
against the doctrine that feeling should be the judge of art.[4]

[Sidenote: _Crousaz and André._]

Cartesianism was incapable of an Æsthetic of imagination. The _Traité
du beau_ by the eclectic Cartesian J. P. de Crousaz (1715), maintained
the dependence of beauty not upon pleasure or feeling, matters about
which there can be no difference of opinion, but upon that which can
be _approved_ and therefore reduced to ideas. He enumerates five such
ideas: variety, unity, regularity, order and proportion, observing,
"_La variété tempérée par l'unité, la régularité, l'ordre et la
proportion, ne sont pas assurément des chimères; elles ne sont pas
du ressort de la fantaisie, ce n'est pas le caprice qui en décide_":
for him, that is to say, they were real qualities of the beautiful
founded in nature and truth. He discovered similar characteristics of
the beautiful in the individual beauties of the sciences (geometry,
algebra, astronomy, physics, history), of virtue, eloquence and
religion, finding in each the qualities laid down above.[5] Another
Cartesian, the Jesuit André (1742),[6] distinguished between an
_essential_ beauty, independent of every institution, human and even
divine; a _natural_ beauty, independent of the opinions of mankind;
and, lastly, a beauty to a certain extent _arbitrary_ and of human
invention: the first composed of regularity, order, proportion and
symmetry (here André relied upon Plato and also as an afterthought
brought in St. Augustine's definition): the second having its principal
measure in the light which generates colours (as a good Cartesian,
he took full advantage of Newton's discoveries): the third belonging
to fashion and convention, but never at liberty to violate essential
beauty. Each of these three forms of beauty was subdivided into
_sensible_ beauty pertaining to bodies, and _intelligible_ beauty of
soul.

[Sidenote: _The English: Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and the
Scottish School._]

Like Descartes in France, Locke in England (1690) is an
intellectualist, and recognizes no form of spiritual elaboration save
reflexion on the senses. None the less he takes over from contemporary
literature the distinction between wit and judgement; according to him
the former combines ideas with pleasing variety, discovering their
similarities and relations and thus grouping them into beautiful
pictures which divert and strike the imagination: the latter (judgement
or intellect) seeks dissimilarities, guided by the criterion of truth.
"The mind, without looking any further, rests satisfied with the
agreeableness of the picture, and the gaiety of the fancy; and it is
a kind of an affront to go about to examine it by the severe rules of
truth and good reason; whereby it appears that it consists in something
that is not perfectly conformable to them."[7] England produced
philosophers who developed an abstract and transcendent Æsthetic,
but one more tinged with sensationalism than that of the French
Cartesians. Shaftesbury (1709) raises taste to a sense or instinct for
the beautiful; a sense of order and proportion identical with moral
sense and, with its preconceptions or presentations, anticipating the
recognition of reason. Bodies, spirits, God are the three degrees of
beauty.[8] Lineal descendant of Shaftesbury was Francis Hutcheson
(1723), who succeeded in popularizing the idea of an inward sense of
beauty as something intermediate between sense and reason, and adapted
to distinguish unity in variety, concord in the manifold, the true,
the beautiful and the good in their substantial identity. Hutcheson
maintains that from this sense springs the pleasure we take in art,
in imitation and in the likeness between copy and original: the last
a relative, as distinct from an absolute, beauty.[9] This view on the
whole predominated in England during the eighteenth century and was
adopted by Adam Smith as well as by Reid, head of the Scottish school.

[Sidenote: _Leibniz. Petites perceptions and confused knowledge._]

Much more thoroughly and with much greater philosophical vigour Leibniz
opened the door to that crowd of psychic facts from which Cartesianism
recoiled in horror. In his conception of the real, governed by the law
of continuity (_natura non facit saltus_), presenting an uninterrupted
scale of existence from the lowest beings to God, imagination, taste,
wit and the like found ample room for shelter. The facts now called
æsthetic were identified by Leibniz with Descartes' _confused_
cognition, which might be _clear_ without being _distinct_: scholastic
terms borrowed, it would appear, from Duns Scotus, whose works were
reprinted and widely read in the seventeenth century.[10]

In his _De cognitione, veritate et ideis_ (1684), after dividing
_cognitio_ into _obscura vel clara,_ the _clara_ into _confusa vel
distincta,_ and the _distincta_ into _adaequata vel inadaequata,_ Leibniz
remarks that while painters and other artists are able to judge works
of art very fairly they can give no reason for their decisions, and
if questioned as to the reason of their condemnation of any work
of art, they reply it lacks a _je ne sais quoi_: ("_at iudicii sui
rationem reddere saepe non posse, et quaerenti dicere, se in re, quae
displicet, desiderare nescio quid_").[11] They do possess, in fact,
clear cognition, but confused and not distinct; what we should call
to-day imaginative, not _ratiocinative,_ consciousness: and indeed the
latter does not exist in the case of art. There are things impossible
to define: "_on ne les fait connaître que par des exemples, et, au
reste, il faut dire que c'est un je ne sais quoi, jusqu'à ce qu'on
en déchiffre la contexture_."[12] But these _perceptions confuses
ou sentiments_ have "_plus grande efficacité que l'on ne pense: ce
sont elles qui forment ce je ne sais quoi, ces goûts, ces images
des qualités des sens._"[13] Whence it appears plainly that in his
discussion of these perceptions Leibniz reposes upon the æsthetic
theories we discussed in the preceding chapter; indeed at one point[14]
he mentions Bouhours' book.

[Sidenote: _Intellectualism of Leibniz_]

It might seem that by according _claritas_ and denying _distinctio_
to æsthetic facts Leibniz recognized that their peculiar character is
neither sensuous nor intellectual. He might seem to have distinguished
them by their "_claritas_" from pleasure or sense-motions, and from
intellect by their lack of "_distinctio._" But the "_lex continui_"
and the Leibnitian intellectualism forbid this interpretation. In this
case obscurity and clarity are quantitative degrees of one single
consciousness, distinct or intellectual, towards which both converge
and with which in the extreme case they unite.

To admit that artists judge with confused perceptions, clear but not
distinct, does not involve denying that these perceptions may be
capable of being connected and verified by intellectual consciousness.
The self-same object that is confusedly though clearly recognized by
imagination is recognized clearly and distinctly by the intellect;
which amounts to saying that a work of art may be perfected by being
determined by thought. In the very terminology adopted by Leibniz, who
represents sense and imagination as obscure and confused, there is a
tinge of contempt, as well as the suggestion of a single form of all
cognition. This will help us to understand Leibniz' definition of music
as "_exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi._"
Elsewhere he says: "_Le but principal de l'histoire, aussi bien que
de la poésie, doit être d'enseigner la prudence et la vertu par des
exemples, et puis de montrer le vice d'une manière qui en donne
l'aversion et qui porte ou serve à l'éviter._"[15]

The "_claritas_" attributed to æsthetic fact is not specifically
different from, but rather a partial anticipation of, the
"_distinctio_" of intellect. Undoubtedly this distinction of degree
marks a great advance: but careful analysis shows that Leibniz does
not differ fundamentally from those who, by inventing the new words
and empirical distinctions examined above, called attention to the
peculiarities of æsthetic facts.

[Sidenote: _Speculation on language._]

We find the same invincible intellectualism in the speculations on
language greatly in vogue at the time. When critics of the Renaissance
and sixteenth century tried to rise above merely empirical and
practical grammar and strove to reduce grammatical science to a
systematic form, they fell into logicism and described grammatical
forms by such terms as pleonastic, improper, metaphorical or elliptic.
Thus Julius Cæsar Scaliger (1540); thus, too, the most learned of
all, Francisco Sanchez (Sanctius or Sanzio), called Brocense, who, in
his _Minerva_ (1587), asserts that names are attached to things by
reason, exclusive of interjections which are not parts of speech but
merely sounds expressive of joy or sorrow; he denies the existence of
heterogeneous and heteroclitic words, and works out a system of syntax
by means of four figures of construction, proclaiming the principle
"_doctrinam supplendi esse valde necessarium,_" that is to say, that
grammatical diversities must be explained as ellipsis, abbreviation
or omission with reference to the typical logical form.[16] Gaspare
Scioppio follows him exactly, abusing the old grammar with his
accustomed violence and crying up the "Sanctian" method, at that time
still almost unknown, in his _Grammatica philosophica_ (1628).[17]
Amongst critics of the seventeenth century, Jacopo Perizonio must not
be forgotten; he wrote a commentary on Sanchez' book (1687). Amongst
recognized philosophers who studied the philosophy of grammar and
noted the merits and defects of various tongues, we find Bacon.[18] In
1660 Claude Lancelot and Arnauld brought out the _Grammaire générale
et raisonnée de Port-Royal,_ a work applying the intellectualism
of Descartes rigorously to grammatical forms, and dominated by the
doctrine of the artificial nature of language. Locke and Leibniz both
speculated about language,[19] but neither succeeded in creating a
fresh point of view, although the latter did much to provoke inquiry
into the historical origin of languages. All his life Leibniz cherished
the notion of a universal language and of an "_ars characteristica
universalis_" as a combination likely to result in great scientific
discoveries: prior to him, Wilkins had fostered the same hope, nor
indeed, in spite of its utter absurdity, is it even yet wholly extinct.

[Sidenote: _C. Wolff._]

In order to correct the æsthetic ideas of Leibniz it was necessary
to alter the very foundations of his system, the Cartesianism upon
which it rested. This could not be undertaken by disciples of
his own personal school, in whom we notice rather an increase of
intellectualism. Giving scholastic form to the brilliant observations
of the master, Johann Christian Wolff's system began with the theory
of knowledge conceived as an "organon" or instrument, followed by
systems of natural law, ethics and politics, together constituting
the "organon" of practical activity: the remainder was theology
and metaphysics, or pneumatology and physics (doctrine of the soul
and doctrine of phenomenal nature). Although Wolff distinguishes a
productive imagination, ruled by the principle of sufficient reason,
from the merely associative and chaotic,[20] yet a science of
imagination considered as a new theoretical value could find no niche
in his schematism. Knowledge of a lower order, as such, belonged to
Pneumatology and was incapable of possessing its own "organon": at most
it could be brought under the organon already existing, which corrected
and transcended it by means of logical knowledge in the same way in
which Ethics treats the "_facilitas appetitiva inferior._" As in France
the poetics of Boileau corresponded with the philosophy of Descartes,
so in Germany the rationalistic poetics of Gottsched[21] reflect the
Cartesian-Leibnitian theories of Wolff (1729).

[Sidenote: _Demand for an organon of inferior knowledge._]

It was no doubt dimly seen that even in the inferior faculties some
distinction was operative between perfect and imperfect, value and
non-value. A passage in a book (1725) by the Leibnitian Bülffinger
has often been quoted where he says: "_Vellem existerent qui circa
facultatem sentiendi, imaginandi, attendendi, abstrahendi et memoriam
praestarent quod bonus ille Aristoteles, adeo hodie omnibus sordens,
praestitit circa intellectum: hoc est ut in artis formant redigerent
quicquid ad illas in suo usu dirigendas et iuvandas pertinet et
conducid, quem ad modum Aristoteles in Organo logicam sive facultatem
demonstrandi redegit in ordinem._"[22] But on reading the extract in
its context one recognizes at once that the desired organon would have
been merely a series of recipes for strengthening the memory, educating
the attention, and so forth: a technique, in a word, not an æsthetic.
Similar ideas had been spread in Italy by Trevisano (1708), who, by
declaring that the senses might be educated through the mind, asserted
the possibility of an _art of feeling_ which should "endow manners
with prudence and judgement with good taste."[23] We notice, moreover,
that in his day Bülffinger was counted a depreciator of poetry, so
much so that a tract against him was written in order to show that
"poetry does not diminish the faculty of clear conception."[24] Bodmer
and Breitinger were ready "to deduce all the parts of eloquence with
mathematical precision" (1727), and the latter sketched a Logic of
the Imagination (1740) to which he would have assigned the study of
similitudes and metaphors; even had he carried out his project, it
is difficult to see how it could have differed materially, from a
philosophic point of view, from the treatises on the subject written by
the Italian rhetoricians of the seventeenth century.

[Sidenote: _Alexander Baumgarten: his "Æsthetic."_]

These discussions and experiments filled the boyhood and helped to
form the intellect of young Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten of Berlin,
a follower of the philosophy of Wolff and, at the same time, student
and teacher of Latin rhetoric and poetry; these studies led him to
reconsider the problem and search for some method by which the precepts
of rhetoricians could be reduced to a rigorous philosophical system.
On taking his doctor's degree in September 1735, when twenty-one years
old, he published a thesis _Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad
poēma pertinentibus_:[25] in which the word "Æsthetic" appears for the
first time as name of a special science.[26] Baumgarten always remained
much attached to his youthful discovery, and in 1742 when called to
teach at the university of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and again in 1749,
he gave by request a course of lectures on Æsthetic (_quaedam consilia
dirigendarum facultatum inferiorum novam per acroasin exposuit_).[27]
In 1750 he printed a voluminous treatise wherein the word "Æsthetic"
attained the honours of a title-page;[28] in 1758 he published a more
slender second part: illness and finally death in 1762 prevented him
from completing the work.

[Sidenote: _Æsthetic as science of sensory consciousness._]

What was Æsthetic to Baumgarten? Its objects are sensible facts
(ασθητά), carefully distinguished by the ancients from mental objects
(νοητά);[29] hence it becomes _scientia cognitionis sensitivae, theoria
liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre cogitandi, ars
analogi rationis_[30] Rhetoric and Poetry constitute two special
and interdependent disciplines which are entrusted by Æsthetic with
the distinction between the various styles in literature and other
small differences,[31] for the laws she herself investigates are
diffused throughout all the arts like guiding-stars for these various
subsidiary arts (_quasi cynosura quaedam specialium_)[32] and must be
extracted not from isolated cases only, or from incomplete induction
empirically, but from the totality of facts (_falsa regula peior est
quant nulla._)[33] Nor must Æsthetic be confounded with Psychology,
which furnishes its presuppositions only; an independent science, it
gives the norm of sensitive cognition (_sensitive quid cognoscendi_)
and deals with "_perfectio cognitionis sensitivae, qua talis,_" which is
beauty (_pulcritudo)_, just as the opposite, imperfection, is ugliness
(_deformitas_)[34] From the beauty of sensitive cognition (_pulcritudo
cognitionis_) we must exclude the beauty of objects and matter
(_pulcritudo obiectorum et materiae_) with which it is often confused
owing to habits of language, since it is easy to show that ugly things
may be thought of in a beautiful manner and beautiful things in an
ugly manner (_quacum ob receptam rei significationem saepe sed male
confunditur; possunt turpia pulcre cogitare ut talia, et pulcriora
turpiter_).[35] Poetical representations are confused or imaginative:
distinctness, that is intellect, is not poetical. The greater the
determination, the greater the poetry; individuals "_omnimode
determinata_" are highly poetical; poetical also are images or
phantasms as well as all that appertains to the senses.[36] That which
judges sensible or imaginary presentations is taste, or "_indicium
sensuum._" These, in brief, are the truths displayed by Baumgarten in
his _Meditationes_ and, with many distinctions and examples, in his
_Æsthetic._[37]

[Sidenote: _Cricisism of judgements based on Baumgarten._]

Nearly all German critics[38] are of opinion that from his own
conception of Æsthetic as the science of sensitive cognition Baumgarten
should have evolved a species of inductive Logic. But he can be cleared
of this accusation: a better philosopher, perhaps, than his critics,
he held that an inductive Logic must always be intellectual, since
it leads to abstractions and the formation of concepts. The relation
existing between "_cognitio confusa_" and the poetical and artistic
facts which belong to the realm of taste had been shown before his
day, by Leibniz: neither he nor Wolff nor any other of their school
ever dreamed of transforming a treatment of the "_cognitio confusa_"
or "_petites perceptions_" into an inductive Logic. On the other hand,
as a kind of compensation, these critics attribute to Baumgarten
a merit he cannot claim, at least to the extent implied by their
praises. According to them, he effected a revolution by converting[39]
Leibniz' differences of degree or quantitative distinctions into a
specific difference, and turning confused knowledge into something no
longer negative but positive[40] by attributing a "_perfectio_" to
sensitive cognition _qua talis_; and by thus destroying the unity of
the Leibnitian monad and breaking up the law of continuity, founded
the science of Æsthetic. Had he really accomplished such a giant
stride, his claim to the title of "father of Æsthetic" would have
been placed beyond question. But, in order to win this appellation,
Baumgarten ought to have been successful in unravelling all those
contradictions in which he was involved no less than Leibniz and all
intellectualists. It is not enough to posit a "_perfectio_"; even
Leibniz did that when he attributed _claritas_ to confused cognition,
which, when devoid of clearness, remains obscure, that is to say,
imperfect. It was imperative that this perfection "_qua talis_" should
be upheld against the "_lex continui,_" and kept uncontaminated by any
intellectualistic admixture. Otherwise he was bound to fall back into
the pathless labyrinth of the "probable" which is and is not false,
of the wit which is and is not intellect, of the taste which is and
is not intellectual judgement, of the imagination and feeling which
are and are not sensibility and material pleasure. And in that case,
notwithstanding the new name: notwithstanding (as we freely admit) the
greater insistence than that of Leibniz upon the sensible nature of
poetry, Æsthetic, as a science, would not have been born.

[Sidenote: _Intellectualism of Baumgarten._]

Now Baumgarten overcame none of the obstacles above mentioned.
Unprejudiced and continued study of his works forces one to this
conclusion. Already in his _Meditationes_ he does not seem able to
distinguish clearly between imagination and intellect, confused and
distinct cognition. The law of continuity leads him to set up a scale
of more and less: amongst cognitions, the obscure are less poetical
than the confused; the distinct are not poetical, but even those
of the higher kinds (that is the distinct and intellectual) are to
a certain extent poetical in proportion as they are lower in their
nature; compound concepts are more poetical than simple; those of
larger comprehension are "_extensive clariores._"[41] In the _Æsthetic_
Baumgarten expounds his thought more fully and thereby exposes its
defects. If the introduction of the book leads one to believe that he
sees æsthetic truth to consist in consciousness of the individual,
the belief is shattered by the explanations which follow. As a good
objectivist he asserts that truth in the metaphysical sense has its
counterpart in the soul, namely, subjective truth, logical truth in a
wide sense, or æsthetico-logical.[42] And the complete truth lies not
in the genus or species, but in the individual. The genus is true,
the species more true, the individual most true.[43] Formal logical
truth is acquired "_cum iactura,_" by jettisoning much great material
perfection: "_quid enim est abstractio, si iactura non est?_"[44]
So much being granted, logical truth differs from æsthetic in this:
metaphysical or objective truth is presented now to the intellect,
when it is logical truth in a narrow sense; now to the analogy of
reason and the lower cognitive faculties, when it is æsthetic;[45]
a lesser truth in exchange for the greater which man is not always
able to attain, thanks to the "_malum metaphysicum._"[46] Thus moral
truths are comprehended in one fashion by a comic poet, in another
by a moral philosopher; an eclipse is described in one way by an
astronomer and in another by a shepherd speaking to his friends or
his sweetheart.[47] Universals even are accessible, in part at least,
to the inferior faculty.[48] Take the case of two philosophers, a
dogmatic and a sceptic, arguing, with an æsthete listening to them. If
the arguments of either party are so balanced that the hearer cannot
determine which is true and which false, this appearance is to him
æsthetic truth: if one adversary succeed in overbearing the other
so that one argument is shown clearly to be wrong, the error just
revealed is likewise æsthetic[49] falsity. Truths strictly æsthetic are
(and this is the decisive point) those which appear neither entirely
true nor entirely false: probable truths. "_Talia autem de quibus
non complete quidem certi sumus, neque tamen falsitatem aliquam in
iisdem appercipimus, sunt verisimilia. Est ergo veritas æsthetica,
a potiori dicta verisimilitudo, ille veritatis gradus, qui, etiamsi
non evectus sit ad completam certitudinem, tamen nihil contineat
falsitatis observabilis._"[50] And especially the immediate sequel:
"_Cujus habent spectator es auditor esve intra animum quum vident
audiuntve, quasdam anticipationes, quod plerumque fit, quod fieri
solet, quod in opinione positum est, quod habet ad haec in se quandam
similitudinem, sive id falsum (logice et latissime), sive verum
sit (logice et strictissime), quod non sit facile a nostris sensibus
abhorrens: hoc illud_ est εἰκός _et verisimile quod, Aristotele et
Cicerone assentiente, sectetur æstheticus._"[51] The probable embraces
that which is true and certain to the intellect and the senses, that
which is certain to the senses but not to the intellect, that which
is probable logically and æsthetically, or logically improbable but
æsthetically probable, or, finally, æsthetically improbable but on the
whole probable or that whose improbability is not evident.[52] So we
reach the admission of the impossible and absurd, the _αδύνατον_ and
_ἄτοπον_ of Aristotle.

If after reading these paragraphs, highly important as revealing the
true thought of Baumgarten, we turn once more to the Introduction to
his work, we notice at once his commonplace and erroneous conception of
the poetic faculty. To a friend who suggested that there was no need
for him to concern himself with confused or inferior consciousness both
because "_confusio mater erroris_" and because "_facilitate inferior
es, caro, debellandae potius sunt quam excitandae et confirmandae,_"
Baumgarten replied that confusion is a condition wherein to find truth:
that nature makes no sudden leap from obscurity to clarity: that
noonday light is reached from night time through the dawn (_ex node per
auroram meridies_): that in the case of the inferior faculties a guide,
not a tyrant, is needed (_imperium in facilitates inferiores poscitur,
non tyrannis_).[53] This is still the attitude of Leibniz, Trevisano
and Bülffinger. Baumgarten is terrified lest he should be accused of
treating subjects unworthy a philosopher. "_Quousque tandem_" (says he
to himself), "dost thou, professor of theoretic and moral philosophy,
dare to praise lies and mixtures of true and false as though they were
noble works?"[54] And if there is one thing above all others from
which he is anxious to guard himself it is sensualism, unbridled and
non-moralized. The sensitive perfection of Cartesianism and Wolffianism
was liable to be confused with simple pleasure, with the feeling of
the perfection of our organism:[55] but Baumgarten falls into no such
confusion. When in 1745 one Quistorp combated his æsthetic theory by
saying that if poetry consisted in sensuous perfection it was a thing
hurtful to men, Baumgarten answered disdainfully that he did not expect
he should ever find time to reply to a critic of such calibre as to
mistake his "_oratio perfecta sensitiva_" for an "_oratio perfecte_
(that is _omnino) sensitiva._"[56]

[Sidenote: _New names and old meanings._]

Save in its title and its first definitions Baumgarten's _Æsthetic_ is
covered with the mould of antiquity and commonplace. We have seen that
he refers back to Aristotle and Cicero for the first principles of his
science; in another instance he attaches his Æsthetic to the Rhetoric
of antiquity, quoting the truth enunciated by Zeno the Stoic, "_esse
duo cogitandi genera, alterum perpetuum et latius, quod Rhetorices sit,
alterum concisum et contractius, quod Dialectices,_" and identifying
the former with the æsthetic horizon, the latter with the logical.[57]
In his _Meditationes_ he rests upon Scaliger and Vossius;[58] of
modern writers beside the philosophers (Leibniz, Wolff, Bülffinger)
he quotes Gottsched, Arnold,[59] Werenfels, Breitinger[60]; by means
of these latter he is able to make acquaintance with discussions upon
taste and imagination, even without direct acquaintance with Addison
and Du Bos, as well as the Italians, whose writings had immense vogue
in Germany in his day, and with whom his resemblances leap to the
eye. Baumgarten always feels himself to be in perfect accord with his
predecessors; never at variance with them. He never felt himself to
be a revolutionary; and though some have been revolutionaries without
knowing it, Baumgarten was not one of them. Baumgarten's works are but
another presentation of the problem of Æsthetic still clamouring for
solution in a voice so much the stronger as it uttered a commonplace:
he proclaims a new science and presents it in conventional scholastic
form; the babe about to be born receives the name of Æsthetic by
premature baptism at his hands: and the name remains. But the new name
is devoid of new 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 Æsthetic: of the
science in formation, that is to say, not of the science brought to
completion: of Æsthetic _condenda_ not _condita._

[1] Letters to Balzac and the Princess Elizabeth.

[2] _Art poétique_ (1669-1674).

[3] Letters to Marquis Maffei, about 1720, in _Prose e poesie,_ Venice,
1756, ii. p. cxx.

[4] Sulzer, _op. cit._ i. p. 50.

[5] _Traité du beau_ (2nd ed., Amsterdam, 1724; Paris ed., 1810).

[6] _Essai sur le beau,_ Paris, 1741.

[7] _An Essay concerning Human Understanding_ (French trans. in
_Œuvres,_ Paris, 1854), bk. ii. ch. 11, § 2.

[8] _Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,_ 1709-1711.

[9] _Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,_
London, 1723.

[10] See above, p. 179.

[11] _Opera philosophica_ (ed. Erdmann), p. 78.

[12] _Ibid,_ preface.

[13] _Nouveaux Essais,_ ii. ch. 22.

[14] _Op. cit._ ii. ch. 11.

[15] _Essais de Théodicée,_ part. ii. § 148.

[16] Francisci Sanctii, _Minerva seu de causis linguæ latinæ
commentarius,_ 1587 (ed. with add. by Gaspare Scioppio, Padua, 1663);
cf. bk. i. chs. 2, 9, and bk. iv.

[17] Gasperis Sciopii, _Grammatica philosophica,_ Milan, 1628 (Venice,
1728).

[18] _De dignitate,_ etc., bk. vi. ch. i.

[19] Locke, _Essay,_ etc., bk. lii.; Leibniz, _Nouveaux Essais,_ bk.
iii.

[20] _Psychol. empirica_ (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1738), §§ 138-172.

[21] Joh. Chr. Gottsched, _Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst,_
Leipzig, 1729.

[22] _Dilucidationes philosophicæ de Deo, anima humana et mundo,_ 1725
(Tübingen, 1768), § 268.

[23] Preface to _Rifless. sul gusto, ed. cit._ p. 75.

[24] Borinski, _Poetik d. Renaiss._ p. 380 note.

[25] Halæ Magdeburgicæ, 1735 (reprinted, ed. B. Croce, Naples, 1900).

[26] _Med._ § 116.

[27] _Æsthetica,_ i. pref.

[28] _Æsthetica. Scripsit_ Alex. Gottlieb Baumgarten, _Prof.
Philosoph., Traiecti eis Viadrum, Impens. Ioannis Christiani Kleyb,_
1750; 2nd part, 1758.

[29] _Med._ § 116.

[30] _Æsth._ § i.

[31] _Med.%_ 117.

[32] _Æsth._ § 71.

[33] _Ibid._ § 53.

[34] _Med._ § 115.

[35] _Æsth._ § 14.

[36] _Ibid._ § 18.

[37] _Med._ § 92.

[38] Ritter, _Gesch. d. Philos._ (Fr. trans., _Hist, de la phil. mod._
iii. p. 365); Zimmermann, _Gesch. d. Æsth._ p. 168; J. Schmidt, _L. u.
B._ p. 48.

[39] Danzel, _Gottsched,_ p. 218; Meyer, _L. u. B._ pp. 35-38.

[40] Schmidt, _op. cit._ p. 44.

[41] _Med._ §§ 19, 20, 23.

[42] _Æsth._ § 424.

[43] _Op. cit._ § 441.

[44] _Op. cit._ § 560.

[45] _Æsth._ § 424.

[46] _Op. cit._ § 557.

[47] _Op. cit._ §§ 425, 429.

[48] _Op. cit._ § 443.

[49] _Op. cit._ § 448.

[50] _Op. cit._ § 483.

[51] _Op. cit._ § 484.

[52] _Æsth._ §§ 485, 486.

[53] _Op. cit._ §§ 7, 12.

[54] _Op. cit._ § 478.

[55] Cf. Wolff, Psych, empir. § 511, and the passage there quoted from
Descartes; also §§ 542, 550.

[56] Th. Joh. Quistorp, in _Neuen Bücher-Saal,_ 1745, fasc. 5; _Erweis
dass die Poesie schon für sie selbst ihre Liebhaber leichtlich
unglücklich machen könne_; and A. G. Baumgarten, _Metaphysica,_ 2nd
ed., 1748, preface; cf. Danzel, _Gottsched,_ pp. 215, 221.

[57] _Æsth._ § 122.

[58] _Med._ § 9.

[59] _Op. cit._ §§ 111, 113.

[60] _Æsth._ § 11.

V

GIAMBATTISTA VICO

[Sidenote: _Vico as inventor of æsthetic science._]

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
Æsthetic, 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, 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 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."[2] An imaginative phase of consciousness, but
one possessed of positive value.

[Sidenote: _Poetry and Philosophy: imagination and intellect._]

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