V
The philosophical heroism of Vico asserts itself not only in the internal struggle with himself for the elaboration of his science. It was exposed to other and sterner trials. The position reached by his thought, opposed as it was to the present, and while apparently reactionary turned in reality towards the future, inevitably prevented him from being understood. No doubt this is the fate of every man of genius: his inmost thought is never understood, even when social fortune seems to favour him, even when he arouses enthusiasm and finds a host of disciples and imitators. The words which Hegel is said to have uttered on his deathbed—"one only of my pupils understood me, and he misunderstood me"—admirably express this historical necessity: the man whom his age fully understands dies with his age. And yet the disproportion between the value of a man's thought and his contemporaries' failure to understand it has seldom if ever been greater than in Vico's case. If he had been free from other causes of discontent, this alone would have been sufficient. The "desire for praise," which in other than commonplace minds is a desire to see what they think true and good shared, approved and universalised among other minds, was always with him a "vain desire."
He was the more afflicted by this misunderstanding and indifference because, as we may well suppose, he was fully conscious of the importance of his own discoveries. He knew that Providence had entrusted to him a lofty mission: he knew himself to be "born for the glory of his country, and therefore in Italy; since, being born there and not in Morocco, he became a scholar."[34] When he published the Scienza Nuova, he believed that he had fired a mine whose loud explosion he expected every minute. Nothing happened: nobody mentioned it to him: so that he wrote some days later, to a friend: "In publishing my work in this city I seem to have launched it upon a desert. I avoid all public places, so as not to meet the persons to whom I have sent it, and if by chance I do meet them, I greet them without stopping; for when this happens, these people give me not the faintest sign that they have received my book, and so confirm my impression of having published it in a wilderness."[35] He had frankly expected a swift and immediate effect: he had hoped to find, among his contemporaries and acquaintances at Naples, minds ready and intellects open to receive and bear fruit of his thoughts: and he hoped this of monks engaged in composing and learning by rote wordy sermons, poetasters rhyming in sonnets and advocates compiling second-hand speeches!
Instead of this, he found many sceptical and indifferent, and several inclined to laugh. His Diritto universale had been as Metastasio informs us[36] generally "blamed for obscurity" on its publication; it was not widely read and was hastily criticised for the extravagances which an inattentive and superficial reading revealed at every point.[37] Father Paoli, to whom the author had given a copy, wrote in it a couplet making a joke of its unintelligibility.[38] The Scienza Nuova was in an even worse case. We know that Nicola Capasso, a scholar and well disposed towards Vico, on trying to read it fancied he had lost his wits, and by way of a joke hurried off to his doctor Cirillo, to have his pulse felt.[39] A Neapolitan nobleman when asked by Finetti at Venice what opinion was held of Vico at Naples, said that for a time he had passed for a really learned man, but that later his strange opinions had won him the reputation of an eccentric. "And when he published the Scienza Nuova?" insisted Finetti. "Oh, by then," replied the other, "he was quite mad!"[40] His detractors even attacked him in the modest profession by which he earned his living; they said he was "good at teaching youths who had completed their course, that is to say when they already knew all they needed," or again, more insidiously, that he was fitted less for teaching than for "giving good advice to the teachers themselves;"[41] so that they recognised his superiority only to use it in damaging his private interests.
[34] Autob. in Opp. iv. p. 385.
[35] Letter to Giacchi, November 25, 1725, in Opp. vi. p. 28.
[36] Bibl. vich. p. 40.
[37] Opp. vi. p. 20.
[38] Bibl. vich. p. 26.