IV
Thus we need not invent or demand a heroic Vico, looking for him in the life of religion, society or politics. The true hero is the Vico who stands before us, the hero of the philosophic life. Others beside ourselves have noticed his love for the word "hero" and all its derivatives, "heroism," "heroic," and so on: and the continual use and varied application he makes of it. Heroism was for him the mighty virgin force which appears in the beginning and reappears in the reflux of history. This force he must surely have felt in himself as he laboured for the truth and, overthrowing obstacles of every kind, opened up new paths of science. It was this force that enabled him to overcome the youthful uncertainties, fears and defeats which sometimes plunged him in a profound individual and cosmic pessimism, visible in the poem entitled "Feelings of One in Despair," to rise to the certainty of scientific method enunciated in the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione and his first attempt at philosophico-historical research represented by the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia; and from this point, abandoning in part his own thought and weaving a new tissue of what remained, led him to the De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno and to the Scienza Nuova "after twenty-five years," as he says of the discoveries contained in that work, "of unremitting and toilsome thought."
The work completed by this poor teacher of grammar and rhetoric, by this pedagogue whom a contemporary satirist saw "lean, with a rolling eye, ferule in hand,"[22] by this unhappy paterfamilias, is amazing and almost terrifying; such is the mass of mental power compressed into it. It is a work at once reactionary and revolutionary: reactionary in relation to the present, by its attachment to the traditions of the ancient world and the Renaissance; revolutionary as against the present and the past in laying the foundations of that future later to be known as the Nineteenth century.
Within the domain of science, this humble man of the people became an aristocrat: and the "lordly style"[23] which he falsely ascribed to the wretched writings of the proud nobles and pompous prelates of his day was in reality his own. He loathed the polite and social literature which was gradually spreading in France and Italy and other European countries, the "ladies' books."[24] But he avoided no less that other class of treatise which we nowadays call "handbooks," which explain in detail elementary definitions and facts ascertained by others; books useless except to the young.[25] Vico, who suffered quite enough from the young within the circle of his school, saw no need to sacrifice to them any part of his own inviolable life of science. The public towards which he looked was not composed of boys, lords and ladies. When he wrote, his first practical thought was, "what would a Plato, a Varro or a Quintus Mucius Scaevola think of the fruits of his thought?" and secondly, "what will posterity think?"[26] Among his contemporaries he looked only at the republic of letters, the brotherhood of scholars, the Academies of Europe: a public which did not require him to repeat what had been already discovered and stated in the course of the history of science, and was perfectly familiar to him, but only demanded the exposition of such thoughts as constituted a real advance of knowledge: not voluminous works, but "little books, all full of original things."[27] His public was an ideal one, which sometimes in his simplicity he confused with the actual professional scholars and the critics of literary reviews: and the mistake often caused him surprise. Short books on metaphysical subjects seemed to him to have a peculiar power, as in fact they have; he compares them very justly with religious meditations "which briefly set forth a small number of points" and are more valuable for the development of the Christian spirit than "the most eloquent and lucid sermons of the most gifted preachers."[28] This love of brevity inspires his refusal to burden with many books the republic of letters, which, he says, is already sinking beneath the weight. He left his discourses unpublished, only printed his De ratione out of a sense of duty, and often expressed a desire that the Scienza Nuova alone should survive him, as the work which summed up in itself the concentrated and perfected fruits of all his earlier efforts.
His aristocratic ideal was accompanied by the loftiest dignity and the profoundest loyalty in his conception of the life of science. From his polemics we might compile a whole catechism on the right method of conducting literary controversy. We must aim at victory, he says, not in the controversy but in the truth; hence he desires that it should be conducted "in the calmest manner of reasoning," because "he who is strong does not threaten, and he who is right does not use insults"; the dispute must at any rate be interspersed with peaceful words "showing that the minds of the disputants are placid and tranquil, not excited and perturbed." To opponents whose objections are vague he replies, "the judgment is in too general terms: and serious men never deign to reply except to particular and determinate criticisms made upon them." When these same opponents appeal to the "refined taste of the age, which has banished," etc., etc., he replies contemptuously, "a grave criticism this, in truth: it is no criticism at all. In thus taking refuge from one's opponents before the tribunal of one's own judgment, by saying that what they say is a thing of which one has no idea, from an opponent one becomes the judge." He refused to rely upon his authorities, but yet did not undervalue them; authority ought to "make us attentive to seek the causes which could have induced authors, especially the most weighty, to adopt such and such opinions." Again, accused of attributing errors to philosophers so as to be able to refute them with ease, like Aristotle, he protests with dignity: "I would rather enjoy my own small and simple stock of knowledge than be compared in bad faith with a great philosopher." His moderation may be illustrated by his splendid eulogy of Descartes, though he spent the best part of his mental powers in opposing him. His loyalty is shown by his prompt recognition of his own errors: "I admit," he says at one point to the critics of the Giornale dei letterati, "that my distinction is faulty."[29] "The reader must not think it ostentatious in us" (he writes in the second Scienza Nuova), "that not satisfied with the favourable judgments of such men as these upon our works, we yet disapprove and reject these works. On the contrary, it is a proof of the high veneration and respect in which we hold these men. For rude and haughty writers uphold their works even against the just accusations and reasonable corrections of others: some, who by chance are of a small spirit, sate themselves with the favourable judgments they receive and because of these go no further towards perfection: but in our case the praise of great minds has increased our courage to amend, to complete, and even to recast in a better form this work of ours."[30]
His scientific life was upright, worthy of a serious searcher after truth; his emotional life disturbed and restless, worthy of one who sees face to face the truth he has long sought and desired, and rejoices in the power of laying it before mankind. Hence his lofty poetry, expressed not in verse but in prose, and especially in the Scienza Nuova. "Vico is a poet," writes Tommaseo: "he brings fire from smoke, and lively images from metaphysical abstractions: he reasons as he narrates and depicts while he reasons: over the mountain-tops of thought he does not walk, he flies; and in one sentence he often compresses more lyrical feeling than may be found in many an ode."[31] De Sanctis saw in the Scienza Nuova the progress of a poem, almost a new Divina commedia. Sublime like Dante, he was more severe than Dante himself; if the lips of the Ghibelline show at times the flicker of "a passing smile," Vico looks at history with a face "that never smiles." Moreover, the man whose style has been so often criticised is not a commonplace writer; he was as careful a student of pure Tuscan[32] as he was a fine connoisseur, according to Capasso, of Latin phraseology.[33] But he was faulty in the arrangement of his books, because his mind did not master all the philosophical and historical material it had accumulated; he wrote carelessly because wildly and as if possessed by a demon: and hence arise the lack of proportion and the confusion in the various parts of his work, within single pages and single paragraphs. He often gives the impression of a bottle of water quickly inverted, in which the liquid trying to issue forth so presses against the narrow opening "that it comes out painfully, drop by drop." Painfully, by fragments, and disjointedly. One idea while he is expressing it recalls another, that a fact, and that another fact: he tries to say everything at once, and parenthesis branches off into parenthesis in a manner to make one's brain reel. But these chaotic periods, weighted as they are with original thoughts, are no less woven of striking phrases, statuesque words, phrases full of emotion, and picturesque images. A bad writer, if you will, but his is the kind of bad writing of which only great writers possess the secret.
[22] Bill. vich. p. 82.
[23] Opp. vi. p. 93.
[24] Ibid. vi. p. 5.