Italy: Vico.
In Italy, the illustrious author[[268]] of the Scienza Nuova[[269]] had, before Baumgarten, before even Breitinger, and long before André, turned the powers of his profound and original thought to the question of sapienza poetica. He lays at least as much stress as Baumgarten himself upon the sensitiva: discerns natural and diametrical opposition between Metaphysics and Poetry; but still admits a Science, “new” in this as in other respects, of Poetry, or at least a logica poetica which compares curiously with Breitinger’s “Logic of Imagination” and other things. There does not appear to be any suspicion or any likelihood of indebtedness: it is only one of the innumerable instances of things being “in the air” and of the birds of the air carrying them to different places and persons. With him, poetry, like everything else, is an item or factor in human history, though, following his strong metaphysical turn, he deals largely with the relations to soul and sense, &c.
His literary places.
In arranging, according to our usual fashion, the actual deliverances of Vico as actually presented, we find them in four successive places presenting as many stages of his thought—the De Studiorum Ratione (1708), the Constantia Jurisprudentis (1721), the first Scienza (1725), and the second (1730).
The De Studiorum Ratione.
The first named is early, and it presents the author’s thought in a somewhat embryonic condition, but as true to the future development as an embryo ought to be. Its importance for us consists first in the starting[[270]] from Bacon, which of itself will give us something of an inkling of Vico’s attitude to literature, though the Italian fortunately discarded whatever was contemptuous or hostile in the Englishman’s position. More important still is the erection[[271]] of a “Nova Critica” which is opposed and preferred to “Topica” in relation to literature itself. “Critica est ars veræ orationis; Topica [here evidently used in one of the full senses of ‘Rhetoric’] autem copiosæ.”[[272]] And most, the paragraph[[273]] on Poetry itself, where Vico, deserting Bacon, proclaims it not a vinum dæmonum but a “gift of the Most Highest,” declares the great characteristic of the Poet to be Imagination, but (true to his own line) insists on Truth being still most necessary to him. That the new Physic will be very convenient to Poetry by supplying it with fresh and accurate images may raise a smile: but after all it has not proved quite vain.