[39] Ibid. p. 87.
[40] Bibl. vich. p. 86: cf. Autob. in Opp. iv. p. 416.
[41] Autob. in Opp. iv. p. 416.
VI
The indifference of the public and the insincerity or malignity of critics could not for Vico be compensated by the friends and appreciative readers of whom Vico had a certain number. How indeed could it have been otherwise, when he cultivated them artificially with such care and anxiety? Consider for instance the way in which he cultivated the friendship of Giacchi the Capucin. He praised his "admirable works," his "most divine talents," the "rare sublimity" of his "marvellous and divine ideas." He tells him that he has given to the scholars of the city the eulogistic letter sent to him by Giacchi and that they all admire "the sublime workmanship of the conception"; and yet he himself used to rewrite in scholar's Latin the inscriptions Giacchi composed in monk's Latin![42] On another occasion he wrote that the praises of a Giacchi had excited envy and had in certain quarters been described as flatteries. He took no less pains to propitiate the Archbishop of Bari, Muzio di Gaeta, a conceited creature full of his own merits and incapable of speaking except about himself. Muzio wrote a panegyric on Pope Benedict XIII., a work of which, though Vico praised it again and again, he had never heard enough, and was always covertly or openly demanding new praises. So Vico used to besprinkle him patiently with the desired fluid: "the marvellous work of Your Excellency"; his "lordly diction"; his "demosthenic digressions"; his eloquence, that philosophic speech employed in Greece by the Academic school, in Rome by Cicero, and "among the Italians by none but Your Excellency!" To the advocate Francesco Solla, who had been his pupil and had subsequently retired into the country, he hinted that the Scienza Nuova looked towards him as one of the few men in the world possessed of a mind penetrating enough to receive it unhampered by any prejudices concerning the origin of mankind.[43] Such were the guileless artifices and the pitiful little schemes by which he contrived to give an illusory satisfaction to his thirst for recognition and praise, and a narcotic to his overwrought nerves. But the final results were miserable enough. Giacchi's letters contain not a word to show that he had ever grasped one of Vico's doctrines or even that he had examined them with any serious interest. Monsignor di Gaeta, after a labyrinth of circumlocutions, admits that he "admired more than he understood" of Vico's works;[44] and possibly he was so much occupied in admiring his own prose that he never read them at all. Solla, in whom Vico placed such hopes, thought the discourse on the death of Angela Cimini superior to all the author's other works, including the Scienza Nuova itself. Vico received a no less incautious compliment from another admirer; though a warm and affectionate one,—Esteban.[45] Compliments of a vague and unintelligent kind sometimes reached him in return for the copies of his works which he sent not only to Neapolitan scholars but to those of Rome, Pisa, Padua and even Germany, Holland and England: he sent a copy to Isaac Newton.[46] Generally, however, these gifts were received in contemptuous silence. At most, Vico acquired the reputation of a scholar among hundreds of scholars, a man of letters among thousands of similar men; a learned man, but nothing more.
Among the modest, the insignificant, and the young, Vico no doubt had strong admirers. Among these were the poet, later a sacred orator, Gherardo de Angelis, Solla and Esteban whom we have mentioned, the monk Nicola Concina of Padua, and some more. But though their affection was strong their intelligence was weak. Even Concina admitted while rhapsodising his enthusiasm that he did not very clearly comprehend his master: "Oh, what fruitful and sublime lights are here! If only I had the talent to make use of them, to comprehend their depth and the wonderful art of which I seem to catch a glimpse!"[47] The best service that these friends could do him was to soothe with kindly words Vico's embittered spirit, if they could not do so by following his inmost thoughts. This is what Esteban does at the close of the letter in which he excuses himself for his foolish remark on the funeral speech of Angela Cimini in phrases he must have gathered from the master's lips: "Be confident, Sir, that Providence, through channels unimagined by yourself, will cause to spring up for you a perennial fountain of immortal glory!"[48] The Jesuit Father Domenico Lodovico, who wrote the couplet inscribed beneath Vico's portrait, on receiving the Scienza Nuova sent to the author with much sound sense a little wine from the cellar and a little bread from the oven of the Jesuit house of the Nunziatella, together with a graceful letter begging the author to accept "these trifles, simple as they are, since the infant Jesus himself did not refuse the rude offerings of pastoral peasants." He suggested too that at the side of the alphabet in the symbolic frontispiece to the work a little dwarf should be added in the posture of one dumb with astonishment like Dante's mountaineer, and that beneath him should be written, "with a significant diaeresis," the name Lodo-vico![49] Among the young men of his school there were some who, nourished upon his doctrines, were ready to defend their master with their swords;[50] but we all know the value of these youthful enthusiasms. If these scholars had really assimilated Vico's doctrines or any part of them, we should have found traces of it in the literature or culture of the next generation after Vico; but such traces are entirely absent. Hardly a single one of his formulae, his historical statements, or conceptions even superficially understood is to be found in Conti at Venice, Concina at Padua, Ignazio Luzan in Spain—though the last named was living at Naples when the Scienza Nuova was published;[51] or even, within the author's own neighbourhood, in Genovesi or Galiani.
Envy, insincerity, gossip, calumny and stupidity provoked violent outbursts of anger on Vico's part. He confesses this fault in his autobiography where he says that he inveighed in too severe a manner against the errors of conception or doctrine or the incivility of his literary rivals, when in Christian charity and as a true philosopher he ought to have ignored or pardoned them.[52] But as a matter of fact this fault did not greatly distress him: he thought it rather an ornament. The funeral speech for Angela Cimini contained a kind of hymn to anger, the "heroic wrath which in noble spirits disturbs and shakes to the depths by its boiling all those evil thoughts of the mind, which beget the vile swarm of fraud, deceit and falsehood, and renders the hero frank, truthful and loyal; and thus making him a partisan of truth, arms him as the valiant knight of reason to do battle with wrong and offence."[53]
Although in his writings he guards "with all his power" against falling into this passion[54] we feel a scarcely repressed torrent of wrath in his private letters whenever he denounces the "miserable pedants" who "love learning more than truth," or the common tendency of man to be "all memory and imagination," and so forth. In conversation also, it seems, he could be very violent. When in 1736 Damiano Romano published a work controverting his theory of the Twelve Tables, Vico, although according to Romano himself he had been spoken of as "most learned" and "most famous," together with other titles of respect, "tore the book to pieces with his teeth in a way that made every one present tremble with horror," rinding a sign of the deepest malignity in the fact that "a lad like myself should join issue with him."[55] But his outbursts of wrath were succeeded by fits of the deepest dejection. In a sonnet he speaks of himself as over-whelmed by that fate "which the unjust hate of others often creates," and says that for this reason he has separated himself from human society to live with himself alone. Sometimes he shakes off this torpor for a moment: then, he says:
I draw within myself again, and pressed
By heavy cares, return to where I stood:[56]
My fate and not my fault I do lament.