Chapter 8

[1]Since the preceding portions of this work are strictly confined to the analysis of Vico's philosophy and give no information as to his life and personal character, the reader will not be displeased to find in this appendix a lecture delivered by myself upon the latter subject before the NeapolitanSocietà di storia patriaon April 14, 1909, and later written down and published in the FlorenceVoce(1st year, No. 43, October 7, 1909). I add for convenience of memory that Vico was born at Naples on June 23, 1668 (not 1670 as he says in his autobiography), and died on January 23 (not 20 as all his biographers say), 1744: the new edition of theAutobiografia, carteggio e poesie varie(Bari, Laterza, 1911), pp. 101, 123, 124.

[2]See for the whole question Croce,Bibliografia vichiana,pp. 91-5.

[3]In theGiornaliof Confuorto (MSS. in the library of the Neapolitan Historical Soc. xx. c. 22, vol. iii. f. 111) under August 1692, we find "certain civil persons were imprisoned in the prisons of St. Dominic by the tribunal of the Holy Office; among them the doctor Giacinto de Cristofaro, son of the doctor Bernardo; many others escaped, members of the Epicurean or Atheist sect, who believe the soul to perish with the body." This De Cristofaro is the famous Neapolitan mathematician and jurisconsult, for whom see F. Amodeo,Vita matematica napoletana,part iii. (Naples, Giannini, 1905), pp. 31-44; he was Vico's friend. For other notices of the "Epicureans" at Naples at this time see Carducci,Opere,vol. ii. pp. 235-6.

[4]Letter of October 12, 1720.

[5]Ibid.

[6]Autobiografia,inOpere,ed. Ferrari, 2nd ed. iv. p. 367.

[7]The "subject" is therefore not the religious objections, which he regarded as a personal insult (Riposta al Giornale dei letterati,inOpp.ii. p. 160).

Vico's attitude towards social and political life resembles in more than one respect his attitude towards religion. There is in him no trace of the missionary, the propagandist, the agitator or the conspirator as there was in some of the Renaissance philosophers, notably Giordano Bruno and Campanella, whom although—perhaps because—a Neapolitan, Vico never mentions. Certainly, his age and his country were not the time or place for heroes; there was none of that rapid social change and revolution from which heroes spring. Political parties however were active in favour of Austria and France, and men were arising who devoted their labours and their lives to one or other of these parties, or were persecuted and fled into exile: and above all this was the period in whichculminated the struggle between Church and State, between Naples and Rome, in the person of Pietro Giannone, a man of whom Vico never speaks, just as he never mentions and in fact seems to ignore the entire movement. Political life rolled past over his head, like the sky and its stars, and he never wasted his strength in a vain attempt to reach it. Political and social controversy, like religious, was outside the sphere of his activity. He was indeed a non-political person. We cannot describe it as a fault or a weakness, for every one has his limitations; one struggle excludes another, and one labour makes others impossible.

Not that he avoided all contact with political life and its representatives. Only too often he was compelled to pay his respects to both, in the form of histories, speeches, verses and epigrams in Latin and Italian; and these alone would be sufficient material for the reconstruction of Neapolitan history in all its vicissitudes from the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth: the Spanish viceregency, the conspiracy and revolution attempted by the partisans of Austria, the reaction and re-establishment of the Spanish viceregency, the Austrian conquest, the Austrian viceregency, the Spanish reconquest and the reign of Charles Bourbon. But Vico, "very pliant because of his necessity"[8]and as professor of eloquence in the royal university, was compelled to supply the literary compositions required by the solemnities of the day, just as the draper supplied hangings and the plasterer volutes and arabesques. And what hangings and arabesques he produced! The Spanish style of the seventeenth century was still predominant in literature; and this fact is alone almost enough to explain the extravagance and ornateness, as it seems to us, of Vico's flood of panegyrics. The indifference and innocence of his own attitude may be illustrated by the passage in his autobiography where after mentioning thePanegyricus Philippo V inscriptuscomposed by himself to the order of the Spanish viceroy, the Duke of Ascalona, he goes on as if it was a mere nothing, with no connexion but a simple "soon after": "soon after, this kingdom having passed under the rule of Austria, the lord Count Wirrigo of Daun, at that time governor of the imperial armies in this country,ordered me" to compose inscriptions for the expiatory monuments to Guiseppe Capece and Carlo di Sangro,[9]the two rebels against Philip V. executed by theprevious government some years before in the suppression of the conspiracy of Macchia described by Vico from the Bourbon point of view in hisDe Parthenopea coniuratione.

But this implies no baseness of character on Vico's part. It must be said that in these writings of his, orator and panegyrist though he is, he can never be called a flatterer. The flatterer, the man without a conscience, reviles and calumniates the enemies of the man he is praising, or even strikes the conquered: and this is servility. But Vico, who though he knew who the Italian or Neapolitan was that sent to theActa Lipsiensiathe note injurious to himself, and might easily have ruined him, since the note was anti-Catholic in tendency, generously refused to reveal his name,[10]gave no doubt his services as professor of eloquence but refrained from trafficking in the interests of the patrons whom he praised. Of theLife of Antonio Carafawhich he composed for a commission and married one of his daughters on the proceeds, he says that the work was "tempered by honour towards the subject, reverence towards princes and the just claims of truth."[11]And to return to the case of Capece and Sangro mentioned above, when he spoke in theDe Parthenopea coniurationeof the death of these two enemies to the triumphant party, he shows here too in various details the nobility of his spirit: of Capece, who refused to surrender to the Spanish soldiers, he writes "exposing his breast to death, and demanding death with his warlike arms, he fell unrepentant, a most valiant manner of death, were it only honoured in its cause" (ostentans pectus neci eamque infensis armis efflagitans, inexoratus occubuit, fortissimum mortis genus si causa cohonestasset). Of Sangro too, having reported the rumour that Louis XIV. sent him a reprieve which arrived too late, he adds: "whence the condemned man, who had already suffered the penalty, is the more to be pitied" (unde maior damnati qui iam poenas persolverat, miseratio).[12]

He must have known, and doubtless did know, that most of the persons whose praises he composed were of very little worth. To read his panegyrics, one would suppose that Naples was adorned with a nobility resplendent in its virtue, cultivation and learning: and yet, in giving Father De Vitry the information he desired upon the condition of studies inNaples, Vico did not conceal the facts: "the nobles slumber amid the enjoyments of a life of pleasure."[13]His pupil Antonio Genovesi has preserved to us one of his satirical expressions upon this nobility, often in extreme poverty but always proud and ready to go hungry at home in order to drive abroad in coaches sumptuously dressed.[14]With reference to the literary duke of Laurenzano, he formulated the theory that "noble" writers could not fail of excellence:[15]and yet I have discovered among his papers the manuscript of a book by this duke, rewritten from end to end by the same Vico.[16]Such are the contradictions and the transactions into which a poor man falls when the pressure of want has made him timid and cautious; so that it is not easy to determine how far his admiration was merely assumed at command or by complaisance, or how far his feeling of social inferiority developed into a real admiration for those above him in the scale, who possessed riches and dignity and everything he lacked and were the "seigneurs."

[8]Opp.vi. p. 20.

[9]Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 394.

[10]Letter of December 4, 1729: inOpp.vi. p. 32.

[11]Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 366.

[12]Opp.i. pp. 367, 368.

[13]Opp.vi. p. 9.

[14]He said that many of them "dragged their carriages with their own guts" (Suppl. alla Bibl. vich.p. 10).

[15]Opp.vi. p. 95.

[16]Bibl. vich.pp. 27-8.

For, as is well known, his financial state was always of the gloomiest. The son of a small Neapolitan bookseller, he was at first compelled to go as a private tutor to a wild town of the Cilento; later, returning to Naples, he tried in vain to obtain the position of secretary of the city, and having in 1699 been elected to the chair of rhetoric, he held that position for thirty-six years at an annual stipend of a hundred ducats (£17). His attempt to pass to a chair of greater importance in 1723 failed, whether owing to ill-luck or to inability—he recognised that he was a "man of little spirit in matters of utility,"[17]—he was compelled to give up hopes of academic advancement. He was therefore obliged to eke out his resources by literary work such as we have mentioned, and still more by private lessons; he not only kept school at his own house as well as at the university, but he went up and down other men's steps to teach grammar to youths or even to children. His family fife was not a happy one. His wife was illiterate, and had not the qualities with which her sexsometimes compensates the defect; she was incapable of any domestic employment whatever, so that her husband had to take her place. Of his children, one girl died after a long illness and the heavy expenses which embitter the diseases of the poor; one boy showed such strong vicious tendencies that the father was compelled to seek the intervention of the police and place him in a house of correction. So sublimely irrational was his fatherly affection that upon this occasion when he saw from the window the police officers he had called in, coming to take his miserable and beloved son away, he ran to him crying, "my son, flee!"[18]

He was indeed of an extremely affectionate disposition; a fact which may be gathered for instance from the noble and touching speech he composed on the death of his friend Donna Angela Cimini, from the tone of pity and indignation with which in theScienza Nuovahe spoke of the oppressed plebeians whose history he is investigating or of the tragic figures of Priam and Polyxena, the romance of which he feels keenly; and finally, from certain stylistic details scattered here and there, such as the aphorism (no. xl.) where he says that witches in order to solemnise their rites "slay without pity and cut in pieces most lovely and innocent children," quite upset, in the most inopportune but significant fashion, by the fate of these little persons, whom his excited imagination adorns with a superlative loveliness. His greatest domestic happiness came from his daughter Luisa, a cultured and poetical soul, and his son Gennaro, who shared with him and ultimately succeeded to his chair. When, in his panegyric on the Countess of Althann, he calls ironically upon the philosophers who dispute as they walk in pleasant gardens or beneath painted porticoes, free from the agony and weariness of "wives in travail" and "children wasting away with disease,"[19]we feel that he is speaking from his own experience and smarting under the memory of domestic troubles.

We often meet, especially in these days, with men of some talent who consider themselves freed from this or that humble duty: and we ought the more to admire this man of genius who on the contrary accepted them every one, and (to use a phrase of Flaubert's) while thinking the thought of a demigod lived the life of a townsman or even that of a man of the people. He had acquired the habit of reading, writing, thinking andcomposing his works "while discussing matters with his friends amid the uproar of his children."[20]

His health was never very good: his friends called him "Mastro Tisicuzzo":[21]very weak in youth, he was in his old age afflicted with ulcers in the throat and pains in his thighs and legs. In a word, the repose, the peace, the tranquillity which other philosophers enjoy all their life or for long periods together was always lacking to Vico. He was forced to play both Martha and Mary: working at every moment for his own and his family's practical needs and working at the same time to fulfil the mission to which he was devoted from his birth and to give concrete form to the spiritual world that moved within him.

[17]Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 349.

[18]Villarosa in the additions to theAutobiography (Opp.iv. p. 420).

[19]Opp.vi. p. 235.

[20]Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 366.

[21]"Mr. Skin-and-bones": cf.Bibl. vich.p. 87.

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 theDe nostri temporis studiorum rationeand his first attempt at philosophico-historical research represented by theDe antiquissima Italorum sapientia; and from this point, abandoning in part his own thought and weaving a new tissue of what remained, led him to theDe uno universi iuris principio et fine unoand to theScienza 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 satiristsaw "lean, with a rolling eye, ferule in hand,"[22]by this unhappypaterfamilias,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 theChristian 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 hisDe rationeout of a sense of duty, and often expressed a desire that theScienza Nuovaalone 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 recognitionof his own errors: "I admit," he says at one point to the critics of theGiornale dei letterati, "that my distinction is faulty."[29]"The reader must not think it ostentatious in us" (he writes in the secondScienza 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 theScienza 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 theScienza Nuovathe progress of a poem, almost a newDivina 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.

[25]Ibid.v. p. 50 (note).

[26]Ibid.ii. p. 123.

[27]Ibid.ii. p. 148.

[28]For instance in his letter to Saliani, November 18, 1725, published inBibl. vich.pp. 97-8, the autograph being in my possession.

[29]See theRiposteinOpp.ii.passim.

[30]Opp.v. p. 10.

[31]G. B. Vico e il suo secoloin the volumeLa Storia civile nella letteratura(Turin, Loescher, 1872), p. 104: cf. a judgment on Vico as a writer,ibid.pp. 9-10.

[32]Opp.iv. pp. 333-4; vi. pp. 41, 140.

[33]Bibl. vich.p. 87.

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 fullyconscious 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 theScienza 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. HisDiritto universalehad 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]TheScienza Nuovawas 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 theScienza Nuova?" insisted Finetti. "Oh, bythen," 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.inOpp.iv. p. 385.

[35]Letter to Giacchi, November 25, 1725, inOpp.vi. p. 28.

[36]Bibl. vich.p. 40.

[37]Opp.vi. p. 20.

[38]Bibl. vich.p. 26.

[39]Ibid.p. 87.

[40]Bibl. vich.p. 86: cf.Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 416.

[41]Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 416.

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 hadsubsequently retired into the country, he hinted that theScienza Nuovalooked 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 theScienza Nuovaitself. 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 theScienza Nuovasent 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 theScienza Nuovawas 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 notgreatly 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 pressedBy heavy cares, return to where I stood:[56]My fate and not my fault I do lament.

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