The De Constantia Jurisprudentis.
De Constantia Jurisprudentis may seem a surprising title; but Vico was thoroughly of the opinion of a later jurist, Mr Counsellor Paulus Pleydell, about the necessity of “history and literature” to his profession, and the sub-title De Constantia Philologiæ takes away even the titular shock. Philology is here no mere charwoman, with the charwoman’s too frequent habit of doing even the mean work she does badly; but a mighty goddess of knowledge, presiding over not merely the history of words but the history of things. History was Vico’s real darling: and that view of poetry as the earliest attainable history, which, true enough in a way, was to lead him into heresy afterwards, distinctly appears here. It is only at the twelfth chapter of this section[[274]] that he comes to talk “De Linguæ Heroicæ sive de Poeseos Origine,” and handles his subject very much as we should expect from his text, that “Poetry is the first language of men.” Still, he goes into a good deal of detail, and his description[[275]] of the iamb as the “middleman” (tradux) between heroic verse and prose, though not likely to be historically correct, has a certain truth logically. And he appends to this, in a very long note, a discussion of Homer himself, which is not yet polytheist.
The first Scienza Nuova.
These earlier treatises take away almost all oddity from the appearance in the first Scienza of an entire Book,[[276]] the Third, occupied with New Principles of Poetry. Hotch-potch as this book may seem—ranging as it does from theogony to chronology, and from both to heraldry and the science of medals, from elaborate discussions of “fables” generally to a discovery of the Laws of War and Peace in poetry itself, from the greatness of Homer to the truth of the Christian Religion,—all these apparent oddities are waxed if not welded together by Vico’s general idea of the Poet as the earliest and truest historian, philosopher, and authority for the New Science of Humanity. Indeed he often reminds us of Shelley in the Defence of Poetry, and I daresay Shelley really knew him.[[277]]
The Second.
It is not, however, till the second Scienza that these sketches and studies take the form of an elaborate treatise, Della Sapienza Poetica, filling one whole book on the general subject, and another, Della Discoverta del Vero Omero, no less than three hundred pages.[[278]] Here Vico becomes more than ever “Thorough.” After preliminaries on science generally, on poetical science, and on the Deluge, we have a Metaphysic of Poetry, a Logic of Poetry, an Ethic, Economic, Politic, Physic (specified down as Cosmography, Astronomy, Chronology, and Geography)—all of Poetry!
In these bold speculations many striking and really critical sayings occur. That it is the first principle of poetry to give life, and its own life, to everything[[279]] nobody need deny; nor that poetry is at once “impossible and credible,”[[280]] a near coasting of the Coleridgean Land of Promise, the explorer starting of course, as Coleridge did, from the Aristotelian doctrine of the “plausible impossible” and the absurdity rendered imperceptible by poetic speech. That “too much reflection hurts poetry”[[281]] is less unmixedly true, though most certainly not unmixedly false.