A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe from the earliest texts to the present day. Volume 2 (of 3)_ From the Renaissance to the decline of eighteenth century orthodoxy

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Title: A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe from the
earliest texts to the present day. Volume 2 (of 3), From the
Renaissance to the decline of eighteenth century orthodoxy

Author: George Saintsbury

Release date: March 9, 2024 [eBook #73128]

Language: English

Original publication: Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF
CRITICISM AND LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE FROM THE
EARLIEST TEXTS TO THE PRESENT DAY. VOLUME 2 (OF 3), FROM

THE RENAISSANCE TO THE DECLINE OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
ORTHODOXY ***

Transcriber’s Note:
Footnotes have been collected at the end of each chapter,
and are linked for ease of reference. Internal references in the
text and index are also linked.
The marginal notes follow the topics enumerated in the table
of contents, and appeared several lines after the paragraph
topic opening. Here, they usually appear mid-paragraph.
phrase
On occasion, where the opening sentence is
inordinately lengthy or the paragraph short, the note will
appear adjacent to the opening line.
There are a number of issues in the Index regarding
misnumbered or missing references. These explanatory notes
are linked from the name of the entry.
Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected.
Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for
details regarding the handling of any textual issues
encountered during its preparation.
Any corrections are indicated as hyperlinks, which will
navigate the reader to the corresponding entry in the
corrections table in the note at the end of the text.

A HISTORY OF CRITICISM

AND LITERARY TASTE
Ignorantium temeraria plerumque sunt judicia.
—Polycarp Leyser.

A History of Criticism
AND

LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE
FROM THE EARLIEST TEXTS TO THE PRESENT DAY

BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY
M.A. Oxon.; Hon. LL.D. Aberd.

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. II.

FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE DECLINE OF
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ORTHODOXY

SECOND EDITION

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MCMV

PREFACE.

In presenting the second volume of this attempt, I feel no compunction,
and offer no apology, for what may seem to some the surprisingly large
space given to English critics. That the book itself is intended primarily for
English readers would be but a poor-spirited plea; and the greatness of
English literature as a whole, though a worthier, is still an unnecessary
argument. For the fact is, that the positive value and importance of English
criticism itself are far greater than has been usually allowed. Owing very
mainly to the not unintelligible or inexcusable, but unfortunate, initiative of
Mr Matthew Arnold, it has become a fashion to speak of this branch of our
national literature, if not even of the function of the national genius which it
expresses, with bated breath, and with humble acknowledgment of the
superiority of German, and still more of French, critics. This superiority, I
say without the slightest fear, is a fond thing vainly invented. English
criticism was rather late, and for a long time rather intermittent; nor did it
fail, after the manner of the nation, to derive fresh impulses and new
departures in the sixteenth century from Italian, in the seventeenth and
again in the nineteenth century from French, and at the end of the
eighteenth from German. But it is not true that in so much as one of these
cases it was contented slavishly to imitate; and it is not true that, with the
doubtful exception of Sainte-Beuve, foreign countries have had any critics
greater than our own, while they have, even put together, hardly so many
great ones. In everything but mere superficial consistency Dryden is a head
and shoulders above Boileau as a critic; Coleridge a head, shoulders, and
body above the Schlegels, whom he followed. Long before Sainte-Beuve,
Hazlitt had shown a genius for real criticism, as distinguished from barren
formula-making, which no critic has surpassed. And Mr Arnold himself,
with less range, equity, and sureness than Sainte-Beuve, has a finer literary
taste and touch. As for that general superiority of French criticism of which
we have heard so much, the unerring voice of actual history will tell us that

it never existed at all, except, perhaps, for a generation before 1660, and a
generation before 1860, the latter being the period which called forth, but
misled, Mr Arnold’s admiration. With this last we do not here deal; nor with
the Romantic revolt, in dealing with which it will be pertinent to appraise
the relative excellence of Lessing and Goethe as compared with Coleridge
and Hazlitt. But we have within our present range an almost better field of
comparison, in that “neo-classic” period from Boileau to La Harpe, and
from Dryden to Johnson, in which, on the whole, and taking recognised
orthodoxy only, the critics of France and of England worshipped the same
idols, subscribed the same confessions of faith, and to no small extent even
applied their principles to the same texts and subjects. I am, after careful
examination, certain myself, and I hope that the results of that examination
may make it clear to others, that they did not “order these things better in
France,” that they did not order them nearly so well.
The subject of this volume has more unity than that of the last; and I have
thought it permissible to avail myself of this fact in the arrangement of the
Interchapters. The whole of so-called Classical or Neo-classic Criticism is
so intimately connected that almost any of its characteristic documents from
Vida to La Harpe might be made the text of a sermon on the entire
phenomenon in its complete development. And in the same way, though
with an opposite effect, all general comment might, without any grave
historical or logical impropriety, have been postponed to the end of the
volume. But this would, in the first place, have broken the uniformity of the
book; in the second, it would have necessitated a final Interchapter (or
“inter-conclusion”) of portentous and disproportionate length; and in the
third, it would have too long withheld from the reader those resting-places
and intermediate views, as from various stations on Pisgah, which seem to
me to be the great advantages and conveniences of the arrangement. I have
therefore, while keeping the historical character and distribution of the
summaries of the three centuries which happen pretty accurately to coincide
with the three stages of the whole phase, made the logical gist of the first to
concern chiefly the rise of the classical-critical attitude; of the second that
constituted creed or code which was explicitly assented to, or implicitly
accepted, by the entire period except in the case of rebels; while in the third
I have concentrated criticism of this criticism as a whole. The three
Interchapters are thus in manner consecutive and interdependent; but they
will, I hope, serve not less to connect and illuminate the contents of the

several books and of the whole volume than to conduct the story and the
argument of the entire work duly from the beginning to the end of the
appointed stage. They are perhaps specially important here because of the
mass and number of minor figures with whom I have had to deal. I know
that some excellent judges dislike this numerus and would have attention
concentrated on the chiefs. But that is not my conception of literary history.
After full consideration of the matter, I have thought it better not to
attempt any comment on criticisms of the first volume of this History of
Criticism. I am much indebted to many of my critics, and perhaps I may be
permitted to say that I was not a little surprised, and, to speak as a fool, very
much pleased, by the generally favourable reception given to, rather than
deserved by, an undoubtedly audacious undertaking. In cases where those
critics obliged me with a substantive correction (as, for instance, in that
relating to Trissino’s version of the De Vulgari Eloquio, v. infra, p. 40), I
have taken opportunity, wherever it was possible, to acknowledge the
obligation, and I subjoin some corrigenda and addenda in a flyleaf. But
beyond this I do not think it desirable to go. In the case of merely snarling
or carping censure, the conduct of Johnson as regards Kenrick gives the
absolute precedent, even for those who have to acknowledge how far nearer
their censors have come to Kenrick than they themselves can ever hope to
come to Johnson. To those who pronounce a task impossible the best
answer is to go and do it; to those who object to style and manner one may
once more plead those disabilities of la plus belle fille de France which
attach also to those who are neither French, nor girls, nor beautiful; for
those who hate jokes and literary allusions one can only pray, “God help
them!” And in the case of bona fide misunderstanding the wisest thing for
an author to do is to make his meaning plainer, if he can, in the rest of his
book.
It would probably be still more idle to attempt to anticipate strictures on
the present volume. That its subject might advantageously have been dealt
with in twice or thrice the space is obvious, and perhaps I may say without
impropriety that the writer could have so treated it with no additional labour
except the mere writing—for the preparation necessitated would have
sufficed for half-a-dozen volumes. But to keep proportion, and observe the
plan, is one of those critical warnings to which Classic and Romantic alike
had much better attend. In the division which I have adopted of eighteenth-
century writers into those who, as adherents of Neo-Classicism, are to be

treated here, and those who, as forerunners or actual exponents of Modern
Criticism, are to be reserved for our next, there must necessarily be much
which invites cavil, and not a little which excuses objection. I shall only say
that the distribution has not been made hastily; and that it may be possible
to make its principle clearer when the reserved writers have been treated.
The advantage of keeping the subject of the volume as homogeneous as
possible seemed paramount.
In writing Vol. I. it was possible, with rare exceptions, to rely upon texts
in my own possession. This has, of course, here been impossible: though I
possess a fair collection of the Italians of the Renaissance, while I have long
had many of the French and English writers of the whole time. For the
supply of deficiencies I have not only to make the usual acknowledgment to
the authorities of the British Museum—than which surely no institution
ever better deserved the patronage of its name-giving goddesses—but also
to thank those of the libraries belonging to the Faculty of Advocates and the
Society of Writers to the Signet in Edinburgh, which bodies admit others
besides their own members with remarkable liberality. In the library of the
University of Edinburgh I suppose I may consider myself at home; but I
owe cordial thanks to Bodley’s Librarian, to the University Librarian at
Cambridge, and to the librarian of the John Rylands collection at
Manchester, for information about books which I have been unable to find
elsewhere. There are one or two mentioned in the notes which I have not
been able to get hold of yet; and I shall be extremely obliged to any reader
of this history who may happen to know their whereabouts, and will take
the trouble to tell me of it.
I am only the Satan of this journey across Chaos, and I daresay I have
been driven out of the best course by the impact of more than one nitrous
cloud. In other words, I not merely daresay, but am pretty sure, that I have
made some blunders, especially in summary of readings not always
controllable by reference to the actual books when the matter came before
me again in print. And I daresay, further, that these will be obvious enough
to specialists. I have found some such blunders even in the first volume,
where the literature of the subject was far less extensive and, even in
proportion to its extent, far more accessible; and I have thought it best to
include corrections of some of these in the present volume, in order that
those who already possess the first may not be in an inferior position to
those who acquire the new edition of it which is, or will shortly be, ready.

When the work reaches its close (if it ever does so) will be the proper time
to digest and incorporate these alterations as Fortune may allow. The
kindness of Professor Elton, King Alfred Professor of English in University
College, Liverpool, of Professor Ker iterum, and of my colleague Mr
Gregory Smith, has beyond all doubt enabled me to forestall some part of
these corrections in regard to the present volume. These friends were
obliging enough to undertake between them the reading of the whole; others
have assisted me on particular points, in regard to most of which I have, I
think, made due acknowledgment in the notes. As before, I have taken some
trouble with the Index, and I hope it may be found useful.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
Edinburgh, September 1902.

ADDENDA AND CORRIGENDA TO VOLUME II.

P. 23 sq. A reference of Hallam’s (Literature of Europe, iii. 5, 76, 77) to
the Miscellanies of Politian has led some critics, who apparently do not
know the book itself, and have not even read Hallam carefully, to object to
its omission here. Their authority might have saved them; for he very
correctly describes these Miscellanies as “sometimes grammatical, but more
frequently relating to obscure customs and mythological allusions.” In other
words, the book—which I have read—is hardly, in my sense, critical at all.
P. 80, note. When I wrote on Castelvetro I was not aware that the
Commentary on Dante (at least that on Inf., Cantos i.-xxix.) had been
recovered and published by Signor Giovanni Franciosi (Modena, 1886) in a
stately royal 4to (which I have now read, and possess), with the owl and the
pitcher, but without the Kekrika, and without the proper resolution in the
owl’s countenance. This may be metaphysically connected with the fact that
the editor is rather unhappy about his author, and tells us that he was long in
two minds about sending him out at last to the world. He admires
Castelvetro’s boldness, scholarship, intellect; but thinks him sadly destitute
of reverence for Dante, and deplores his “lack of lively and cheerful sense
of the Beautiful.” If it were not that my gratitude to the man who gives me a
text seals my mouth as to everything else, I should be a little inclined to cry
“Fudge!” at this. Nobody would expect from any Renaissance scholar, and
least of all from Castelvetro, “unction,” mysticism, rapture at the things that
give us rapture in Dante. All the more honour to him that, as in the case of
Petrarch, he thought it worth while to bestow on that vernacular, which too
many Renaissance scholars despised, the same intense desire to understand,
the same pains, the same “taking seriously,” which he showed towards the
ancients. This is the true reverence: the rest is but “leather and prunella.”
P. 107. Some time after vol. ii. was published I came across (in the
catalogues of Mr Voynich, who might really inscribe on these documents
for motto

“Das Unzulängliche

Hier wird’s Ereignis”)

quite a nest of Zinanos, mostly written about that year 1590, which seems to
have been this curious writer’s most active time; and I bought two of them
as specially appurtenant to our subject. One is a Discorso della Tragedia,
appended (though separately paged and dedicated) to the author’s tragedy
of Almerigo; the other Le Due Giornate della Ninfa overo del Diletto e delle
Muse, all printed by Bartholi, at Reggio, and the two prose books or
booklets dated 1590. The Discorso is chiefly occupied with an attack on the
position that Tragedy (especially according to Aristotle) ought to be busied
with true subjects only. The Giornate (which contain another reference to
Patrizzi) deal—more or less fancifully, but in a manner following Boethius,
which is interesting at so late a date—with philosophy and things in
general, rather than with literature.
P. 322, bk. IV. chap. i. I ought, perhaps, to have noticed in this context a
book rather widely spread—Sorel’s De La Connaissance des Bons Livres,
Paris, 1671. It contains some not uninteresting things on literature in
general, on novels, poetry, comedy, &c., on the laws of good speaking and
writing, on the “new language of French.” But it is, on the whole, as
anybody acquainted with any part of the voluminous work of the author of
Francion would expect, mainly not disagreeable nor ignorant chat—
newspaper work before the newspaper.
P. 350. The opposition of the two “doctors” is perhaps too sharply put.
P. 436. I should like to add as a special “place” for Dennis’s criticism, his
comparatively early Remarks on Prince Arthur and Virgil (title abbreviated),
London, 1696. It is, as it stands, of some elaboration; but its author tells us
that he “meant” to do things which would have made it an almost complete
Poetic from his point of view. It is pervaded with that refrain of “this ought
to be” and “that must have been” to which I have referred in the text; and
bristles with purely arbitrary preceptist statements, such as that Criticism
cannot be ill-natured because Good Nature in man cannot be contrary to
Justice and Reason; that a man must not like what he ought not to like—a
doctrine underlying, of course, the whole Neo-classic teaching, and not that
only; almost literally cropping up in Wordsworth; and the very formulation,
in categorical-imperative, of La Harpe’s “monstrous beauty.” The book (in
which poet and critic are very comfortably and equally yoked together) is
full of agreeable things; and may possibly have suggested one of Swift’s

most exquisite pieces of irony in its contention that Mr Blackmore’s
Celestial Machines are directly contrary to the Doctrine of the Church of
England.
P. 546. Denina. This author is a good instance of the things which the
reader sometimes rather reproachfully demands, when the writer would
only too fain have supplied them. I could write more than a page with
satisfaction on Denina’s Discorso sopra le Vicende della Litteratura, which,
rather surprisingly, underwent its second edition in Glasgow at the Foulis
press (1763), and which not only deals at large with the subject in an
interesting manner, but accepts the religio loci by dealing specially with
Scottish literature. But, once more, this is for a fourth volume—or even a
fifth—things belonging to the Thinkable-Unthinkable.
P. 554, l. 3. For the Paragone see vol. iii. under Conti, Antonio.

CONTENTS.

BOOK IV.

RENAISSANCE CRITICISM.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY—ERASMUS.
PAGE PAGE
The Critical starting-point of the 3 Not necessarily anti-mediæval 8
Renaissance. But classical 9
Influences at work: General 4 And anti-Puritan 9
Particular 5 Erasmus 10
Weakness of Vernaculars 6 The Ciceronianus 11
Recovery of Ancient Criticism 6 The Colloquies 13
Necessity of defence against 7 The Letters 15
Puritanism
Distribution of the Book 17
The line of criticism resultant 7

CHAPTER II.

EARLY ITALIAN CRITICS.

The beginnings 19 Theorists: Daniello 42
Savonarola 20 Fracastoro 44
Pico, &c. 22 Formalists: Mutio. Tolomei and 46
Politian 23 classical metres
The Manto 24 Others: Tomitano, Lionardi, B. 47
Tasso, Capriano
The Ambra and Rusticus 25
Il Lasca 48
The Nutricia 25
Bembo 49
Their merits 26
Caro 49
And danger 26
Varchi 49
Petrus Crinitus: his De Poetis 27
Latinis Minturno 51
Augustinus Olmucensis: his 27 The De Poeta 52
Defence of Poetry The Arte Poetica 55
Paradoxical attacks on it by 28 Their value 57
Cornelius Agrippa, Landi, Berni Giraldi Cinthio’s Discorsi 58
Vida 29 On Romance 58
Importance of the Poetics 30 On Drama 59
Analysis of the piece 30 Some points in both 59
Essential poverty of its theory 34 On Satire 61
Historical and symptomatic 34 Pigna 62
significance
Lilius Giraldus: his De Poetis 63
The alleged appeal to reason and 35 Nostrorum Temporum
Nature
Its width of range 64
The main stream started 37
But narrowness of view 64
Trissino 38
Horror at preference of vernacular 64
Division of his Poetic 39 to Latin
His critical value 40 Yet a real critic in both kinds 65
Editors, &c., of the Poetics 41 Short précis of the dialogues 66
Pazzi 41 Their great historic value 68
Robortello, Segni, Maggi, Vettori 42

CHAPTER III.

SCALIGER, CASTELVETRO, AND THE LATER ITALIAN CRITICS OF
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Julius Cæsar Scaliger 69 His exceptional interest and 88
The Poetic 70 importance
Book I.: Historicus 71 Tasso and the controversies over 89
the Gerusalemme
Book II.: Hyle 72
Tasso’s Critical writings 92
Books III. and IV.: Idea and 73
Parasceve And position 93
Books V. and VI.: Criticus and 73 Patrizzi: his Poetica 94
Hypercriticus The Deca Istoriale 95
Book VII.: Epinomis 75 The Deca Disputata 96
General ideas on Unity and the like 76 The Trimerone on Tasso 100
His Virgil-worship 77 Remarkable position of Patrizzi 101
His solid merits 78 Sed contra mundum 101
Castelvetro 80 The latest group of sixteenth- 102
The Opere Varie 81 century Critics
The Poetica 82 Partenio 102
On Dramatic conditions 83 Viperano 103
On the Three Unities 83 Piccolomini 103
On the freedom of Epic 84 Gilio 104
His eccentric acuteness 84 Mazzoni 105
Examples: Homer’s nodding, prose 86 Denores 106
in tragedy, Virgil, minor poetry Zinano 107
The medium and end of Poetry 86 Mazzone da Miglionico, &c. 107
Uncompromising championship of 87 Summo 108
Delight

CHAPTER IV.

THE CRITICISM OF THE PLÉIADE.

The Rhetorics of the Transition 109 Vauquelin de la Fresnaye 128
Sibilet 111 Analysis of his Art Poétique 129
Du Bellay 112 The First Book 130
The Défense et Illustration de la 113 The Second 130
Langue Française The Third 132
Its positive gospel and the value 114 His exposition of Pléiade criticism 133
thereof
Outliers: Tory, Fauchet, &c. 134
The Quintil Horatien 116
Pasquier: The Recherches 135
Pelletier’s Art Poétique 117
His knowledge of older French 136
Ronsard: his general importance 119 literature
The Abrégé de l’Art Poétique 120 And criticism of contemporary 137
The Prefaces to the Franciade 122 French poetry
His critical gospel 125 Montaigne: his references to 138
Some minors 127 literature
Pierre de Laudun 127 The Essay On Books 140

CHAPTER V.

ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.

Backwardness of English Criticism 144 Its minor shortcomings 174
not implying inferiority And major heresies 175
Its cause 145 The excuses of both 175
The influence of Rhetoric and other 146 And their ample compensation 176
matters
King James’s Reulis and Cautelis 176
Hawes 146
Webbe’s Discourse 178
The first Tudor critics 147
Slight in knowledge 179
Wilson: his Art of Rhetoric 149
But enthusiastic 180
His attack on “Inkhorn terms” 149
If uncritical 180
His dealing with Figures 150
In appreciation 182
Cheke: his resolute Anglicism and 151
Puttenham’s (?) Art of English 182
anti-preciosity
Poesie
His criticism of Sallust 152
Its erudition 183
Ascham 153
Systematic arrangement 184
His patriotism 154
And exuberant indulgence in 185
His horror of Romance 154 Figures
And of the Morte d’Arthur 155 Minors: Harington, Meres, 186
His general critical attitude to Prose 156 Webster, Bolton, &c.
And to Poetry 156 Campion and his Observations 187
The craze for Classical Metres 157 Daniel and his Defence of Rhyme 189
Special wants of English Prosody 157 Bacon 191
Its kinds— The Essays 192
(1) Chaucerian 158 The Advancement of Learning 192
(2) Alliterative 158 Its denunciation of mere word- 193
(3) Italianated 159 study
Deficiencies of all three 159 Its view of Poetry 194
The temptations of Criticism in this 160 Some obiter dicta 194
respect The whole of very slight 195
Its adventurers: Ascham himself 160 importance
Watson and Drant 161 Stirling’s Anacrisis 196
Gascoigne 162 Ben Jonson: his equipment 197
His Notes of Instruction 163 His Prefaces, &c. 198
Their capital value 164 The Drummond Conversations 199
Spenser and Harvey 165 The Discoveries 200
The Puritan attack on Poetry 169 Form of the book 203
Gosson 169 Its date 204
The School of Abuse 170 Mosaic of old and new 204
Lodge’s Reply 170 The fling at Montaigne 205
Sidney’s Apology for Poetry 171 At Tamerlane 206
Abstract of it 172 The Shakespeare Passage 206
And that on Bacon 206
General character of the book 208

INTERCHAPTER IV. 211

BOOK V.

THE CRYSTALLISING OF THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED.

CHAPTER I.

FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU.

The supplanting of Italy by France 240 The history of Boileau’s reputation 280
Brilliancy of the French 241 The Art Poétique 281
representatives Its false literary history 281
Malherbe 242 Abstract of it 282
The Commentary on Desportes 244 Critical examination of it 286
What can be said for his criticism 246 Want of originality 287
Its defects stigmatised at once by 247 Faults of method 287
Regnier
Obsession of good sense 288
His Ninth Satire 247
Arbitrary proscriptions 289
The contrast of the two a lasting 249
Boileau’s other works 290
one
The Satires 290
The diffusion of seventeenth 250
century criticism The Epigrams and Epistles 292
Vaugelas 251 Prose—The Héros de Roman; the 292
Réflexions sur Longin
Balzac 252
The “Dissertation on Joconde” 293
His Letters 252
A “Solifidian of Good Sense” 295
His critical Dissertations 253
The plea for his practical services 296
Ogier and the Preface to Tyr et 254
Sidon Historical examination of this 296
Chapelain: the hopelessness of his 257 Concluding remarks on him 299
verse La Bruyère and Fénelon 300
The interest of his criticism 257 The “Des Ouvrages de l’Esprit” 301
The Sentiments de l’Académie sur 258 General observations 302
le Cid Judgments of authors 303
Prefaces 259 Fénelon. The Dialogues sur 305
Sur les Vieux Romans 260 l’Eloquence
Letters, &c. 261 Sur les Occupations de l’Académie 306
Corneille 261 Française
The Three Discourses 263 And its challenge to correctness 307
The Examens 263 The Abbé D’Aubignac 309
La Mesnardière—Sarrasin— 264 His Pratique du Théâtre 309
Scudéry Rapin 310
Mambrun 266 His method partly good 311
Saint-Evremond 268 His particular absurdities as to 311
His critical quality and 269 Homer in blame
accomplishment As to Virgil in praise 312
His views on Corneille 270 As to others 313
On Christian subjects, &c. 270 The reading of his riddle 313
On Ancients and Moderns 270 Le Bossu and the Abstract Epic 314
Gui Patin—his judgment of 272 Bouhours 315
Browne Encyclopædias and Newspapers 316
Tallemant, Pellisson, Ménage, 273 Bayle 316
Madame de Sévigné Baillet 317

The Ana other than Ménage’s, 274 The ethos of a Critical Pedant 318
especially
Gibert 319
The Huetiana 275
The Ancient and Modern Quarrel 320
Valesiana 275
Its small critical value 321
Scaligerana 276
And Parrhasiana 276
Patru, Desmarets, and others 277
Malebranche 279
CHAPTER II.

THE ITALIAN DECADENCE AND THE SPANIARDS.
Decadence of Italian Criticism 323 Poetics: Rengifo 337
Paolo Beni 324 Pinciano 338
Possevino: his Bibliotheca Selecta 325 La Cueva 341
Tassoni: his Pensieri Diversi 326 Carvallo 341
Aromatari 328 Gonzales de Salas 341
His Degli Autori del Ben Parlare 329 The Cigarrales of Tirso de Molina 343
Boccalini and Minors 329 Lope’s Arte Nuevo, &c. 344
Influence of the Ragguagli 330 His assailants and defenders 346
The set of Seicentist taste 331 The fight over the Spanish drama 347
Spanish criticism: highly ranked by 331 Cervantes and Calderon 347
Dryden? Gongorism, Culteranism, &c. 349
The Origins—Villena 333 Quevedo 349
Santillana 333 Gracián 349
Encina 335 The limitations of Spanish criticism 350
Valdés 335
The beginning of regular Criticism. 336
Humanist Rhetoricians

CHAPTER III.

GERMAN AND DUTCH CRITICISM.
The hindmost of all 352 Heinsius: the De Tragœdiæ 356
Origins 353 Constitutione
Sturm 353 Voss 357
Fabricius 354 His Rhetoric 358
Version A. 354 His Poetics 359
Version B. 354 Opitz 360
Jac. Pontanus 355 The Buch der Deutschen Poeterei 361

CHAPTER IV.

DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Dead water in English Criticism 365 The Essay on Satire and the 385
Milton 365 Dedication of the Æneis
Cowley 366 The Parallel of Poetry and Painting 386
The Prefatory matter of Gondibert 367 The Preface to the Fables 386
The “Heroic Poem” 368 Dryden’s general critical position 386
Davenant’s Examen 369 His special critical method 387
Hobbes’s Answer 370 Dryden and Boileau 389
Dryden 371 Rymer 391
His advantages 372 The Preface to Rapin 392
The early Prefaces 373 The Tragedies of the Last Age 394
The Essay of Dramatic Poesy 376 The Short View of Tragedy 395
Its setting and overture 376 The Rule of Tom the Second 397
Crites for the Ancients 377 Sprat 398
Eugenius for the “last age” 378 Edward Phillips 398
Lisideius for the French 378 His Theatrum Poetarum 399
Dryden for England and Liberty 379 Winstanley’s Lives 400
Coda on rhymed plays, and 380 Langbaine’s Dramatic Poets 400
conclusion Temple 401
Conspicuous merits of the piece 381 Bentley 401
The Middle Prefaces 382 Collier’s Short View 402
Sir T. P. Blount 404
Periodicals: The Athenian Mercury, 406
&c.
INTERCHAPTER V. 407

BOOK VI.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ORTHODOXY.

CHAPTER I.

FROM ADDISON TO JOHNSON.

Criticism at Dryden’s death 426 Trapp 462
Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry 426 Blair 462
Gildon 429 The Lectures on Rhetoric 463
Welsted 430 The Dissertation on Ossian 464
Dennis 431 Kames 465
On Rymer 432 The Elements of Criticism 466
On Shakespeare 434 Campbell 470
On “Machines” 435 The Philosophy of Rhetoric 470
His general theory of Poetry 435 Harris 473
Addison 437 The Philological Enquiries 474
The Account of the Best known 438 “Estimate” Brown: his History of 476
English Poets Poetry
The Spectator criticisms 440 Johnson: his preparation for 477
On True and False Wit 441 criticism
On Tragedy 441 The Rambler on Milton 480
On Milton 443 On Spenser 482
The “Pleasures of the Imagination” 444 On History and Letter-writing 483
His general critical value 447 On Tragi-comedy 483
Steele 448 “Dick Minim” 484
Atterbury 449 Rasselas 484
Swift 450 The Shakespeare Preface 485
The Battle of the Books 450 The Lives of the Poets 486
The Tale of a Tub 451 Their general merits 487
Minor works 451 The Cowley 489
Pope 452 The Milton 489
The Letters 453 The Dryden and Pope 490
The Shakespeare Preface 454 The Collins and Gray 491
Spence’s Anecdotes 454 The critical greatness of the Lives 493
and of Johnson
The Essay on Criticism 455
Minor Criticism: Periodical and 496
The Epistle to Augustus 457
other
Remarks on Pope as a critic 457
Goldsmith 498
And the critical attitude of his 460
Vicesimus Knox 499
group
Scott of Amwell 500
Philosophical and Professional 461
Critics

CHAPTER II.

THE CONTEMPORARIES OF VOLTAIRE.

Close connection of French 501 Examples of it 515
seventeenth and eighteenth Causes of his failure 518
century Criticism: Fontenelle
Others: Buffon 519
Exceptional character of his 502
“Style and the man” 520
criticism
Vauvenargues 521
His attitude to the “Ancient and 503
Modern” Quarrel Batteux 522
The Dialogues des Morts 503 His adjustment of Rules and Taste 523
Other critical work 504 His incompleteness 524
La Motte 507 Marmontel 525
His “Unity of Interest” 508 Oddities and qualities of his 526
criticism
Rollin 509
Others 529
Brumoy 509
Thomas, Suard, &c. 529
Rémond de Saint-Mard 510
La Harpe 530
L. Racine 511
His Cours de Littérature 530
Du Bos 511
His critical position as ultimus 531
Stimulating but desultory character 512
suorum
of his Réflexions
The Academic Essay 533
Montesquieu 514
Rivarol 534
Voltaire: disappointment of his 515
criticism

CHAPTER III.

CLASSICISM IN THE OTHER NATIONS.
Preliminary remarks 537 Neo-classicism triumphs in Spain 546
Temporary revival of Italian 538 The absurdities of Artiga 547
Criticism Luzán 548
Gravina 538 The rest uninteresting 549
Muratori: his Della Perfetta Poesia 541 Feyjóo, Isla, and others 549
Crescimbeni 542 Rise at last of German Criticism 550
Quadrio 542 Its school time 551
The emergence of literary history 545 Classicism at bay almost from the 552
Further decadence of Italian 545 first—Gottsched
criticism The Versuch einer Critischen 553
Metastasio 546 Dichtkunst
Its chief idea 553
Specimen details 555
Gellert: he transacts 557

INTERCHAPTER VI.
§ I. THE NEMESIS OF CORRECTNESS 559

§ II. THE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSIC CRITICISM 566

INDEX 579

BOOK IV

RENAISSANCE CRITICISM

“Le materie da scienza, o da arte, o da istoria
comprese, possano esser convenevoli soggetti a
poesia, e a poemi, pure che poeticamente sieno
trattate.”—Patrizzi.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY—ERASMUS.
THE CRITICAL STARTING-POINT OF THE RENAISSANCE—INFLUENCES AT WORK:
GENERAL—PARTICULAR—WEAKNESS OF VERNACULARS—RECOVERY OF
ANCIENT CRITICISM—NECESSITY OF DEFENCE AGAINST PURITANISM—THE
LINE OF CRITICISM RESULTANT—NOT NECESSARILY ANTI-MEDIÆVAL, BUT
CLASSICAL AND ANTI-PURITAN—ERASMUS—THE ‘CICERONIANUS'—THE
‘COLLOQUIES’—THE ‘LETTERS’—DISTRIBUTION OF THE BOOK.

We saw, in the second section of the Interchapter which served as
Conclusion to the first volume of this work, to what a point the Middle
The Critical starting-point of Ages had brought the materials and the methods
the Renaissance.
of Literary Criticism, and what the new age with
its combined opportunities might have done. We also endeavoured to
indicate generally, and so to speak, proleptically, what it did not do. It is
now time to examine what it did: and in the course of the examination to
develop the reasons, the character, and the consequences, both of its
commission and of its abstention.[1]
If no period has ever been more guilty of that too usual injustice to
predecessors which we noted, it is fair to acknowledge that none had greater
temptations to such injustice. The breach between the Classical and the
Dark Ages had been almost astonishingly gradual—so gradual that it has
needed no great hardiness of paradox to enable men to deny that there was
any breach at all. On the other hand, though the breach at the Renaissance[2]
is capable of being, and has sometimes been, much exaggerated; though it
was preceded by a considerable transition period, and though mediæval
characteristics survived it long and far, yet the turning over of the new leaf
is again incontestable, and was as necessary in the order of thought as it is
certain in the sequence of fact.
It is not much more than a hundred years since the French Revolution, a
Influences at single event in one department only of things actual, was
work: General.
sufficient to precipitate a change which is only less—which

some would hold likely to be not less—than the change at the beginning of
the Dark Ages, and the change at the end of the Middle. At the Renaissance,
not one but three or four such events, in as many different departments,
brought their shock to bear upon the life and mind of Europe. The final
disappearance of the Eastern Empire, and the apparent—perhaps, indeed, a
little more than apparent—danger of a wide and considerable barbarian
invasion of even Western Europe, with the balancing of this after a sort a
little later by the extinction of the Moorish power in Spain, coincided, as
regards politics, with a general tendency throughout Europe towards the
change of feudal into centralised monarchy. The determination (resulting no
doubt from no single cause, and taking effect after long preparation) of
direct, practical, and extensive study to the Classics, especially to Greek,
affected not merely literature, but almost everything of which literature
treats. The invention of printing enormously facilitated, not merely the
study but, the diffusion and propagation of ideas and patterns. The
discovery of America, and of the sea-route to the East, excited that spirit of
exploration and adventure which, once aroused, is sure not to limit itself to
the material world. And, lastly, the long-threatened and at last realised
protest against the corruptions of the Christian Church, and the domination
of the Pope, unsettled, directly or indirectly, every convention, every
compromise, every accepted doctrine. In fact, to use the words of one of the
greatest of English writers,[3] in what is perhaps his most brilliant passage,
“in the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for themselves,
men could remain no longer.”
Their critical habits, as we have seen sufficiently in the last Book, had
been mainly negative; and for this reason, if for no other, a considerable
critical development would have been certain to spring up. But there were
other reasons, and powerful ones. In the first place, the atmosphere of revolt
which was abroad necessarily breeds, or rather necessarily implies,
criticism. A few, whom the equal Jove has loved, may be able to criticise
while acquiescing, approving, even loving and strenuously championing;
but this equity is not exceedingly common, and the general tendency of
acceptance, and even of acquiescence, is distinctly uncritical. On the other
hand, the rebel is driven either to his rebellion by the exercise of his critical
faculty, or to the exercise of his critical faculty in order to justify his
rebellion. I do not myself hold that the Devil was the first critic. I have not
the slightest desire to serve myself and my subject heirs to that spirit

unfortunate; but I recognise the necessity of some argument to rebut the
filiation.
And that these generalities should become particular in reference to
Literary Criticism more especially, there were additional and momentous
Particular. inducements of two different kinds. In the first place, the
malcontents with the immediate past must in any case have been drawn to
attack the literary side of its battlements, because of their extreme
weakness. Everywhere but in the two extremities of the West, Italy and
Scotland (the latter, owing to the very small bulk of its literary production,
and the rudimentary condition of its language, being hardly an exception at
all), the fifteenth century, even with a generous eking from the earliest
sixteenth, had been a time of literary torpor and literary decadence, relieved
only by a few—a very few—brilliant individual performances. In England
the successors of Chaucer, not content with carrying his method and his
choice of subject no further, had almost incomprehensibly lost command of
both. In France the rhétoriqueur school of poets had degenerated less in
form, but had been almost equally unable to show any progress, or even any
Weakness of maintained command, of matter. Germany was far worse
Vernaculars.
than either. If Chaucer himself could criticise, indirectly but
openly, the faults of the still vigorous and beautiful romance—of the
romance which in his own country was yet to boast Chester in verse and
Malory in prose—how much more must any one with sharp sense and
sound taste, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have been tempted to
apply some similar process to the fossilised formalism of rondeau and
ballade; to the lifeless and lumbering allegory of the latest “Rose”
imitations; to the “aureate,” or rather tinselled, bombast of Chastellain and
Robertet?
But, as it happened, no inconsiderable part of the newly disinterred
Recovery of classics dealt with this very subject of Literary Criticism,
Ancient
Criticism.
and, having been most neglected, was certain to be most
attended to. Later mediæval practice had provided the
examples of disease: earlier classical theory was to provide the remedy.
Plato, the most cherished of the recovered treasures, had—in his own
peculiar way, no doubt—criticised very largely; the Poetics and the
Rhetoric were quickly set afresh before the new age in the originals; Horace
had always been known; Quintilian was, since Rhetoric had not yet fallen
into disfavour, studied direct;[4] and, before the sixteenth century was half

over, Longinus himself had been unearthed and presented to a world which
(if it had chosen to attend thereto) was also for the first time furnished with
Dante’s critical performance.[5] With such an arsenal; with such a
disposition of mind abroad; and with such real or imagined enemies to
attack, it would have been odd if the forces of criticism, so long
disorganised, and indeed disembodied, had not taken formidable shape.
There was, however, yet another influence which is not very easy to
estimate, and which has sometimes perhaps been not quite rightly
estimated, but which undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the matter.
Necessity of Almost as soon as—almost before indeed—the main battle
defence against
Puritanism.
of the Renaissance engaged itself, certain phenomena, not
unusual in similar cases, made their appearance. Men of
letters, humanists, students, were necessarily the protagonists of revolt or
reform. There had always, as we have seen, been a certain jealousy of
Letters on the part of the Church; and this was not likely to be lessened in
the new arrangement of circumstance. But the jealousy was by no means
confined to the party of order and of the defence. It had been necessary, or it
would have had no rank-and-file, for the attack to enlist the descendants of
the old Lollards and other opponents of the Romish Church in different
countries. But in these, to no small extent, and in men like Calvin, when
they made their appearance, perhaps still more, the Puritan dislike of Art,
and of Literature as part of Art, was even more rampant than in the
obscurest of obscuri viri on the Catholic and Conservative side. And so men
of letters had not merely to attack what they thought unworthy and obsolete
foes of literature, but to defend literature itself from their own political and
ecclesiastical allies.
The line which they took had been taken before, and was no doubt partly
suggested to them by Boccaccio in the remarkable book already referred
to[6]—the De Genealogia Deorum—which was repeatedly printed in the
The line of early days of the press. There can be very little question
criticism
resultant.
that this anticipates the peculiar tone of what we may call
anti-Platonic Platonism, which is so noticeable in the
Italian critics of the Renaissance, and which was caught from them by
Englishmen of great note and worth, from Sidney to Milton. The excellent
historian of the subject—whom I have already quoted, and my indebtedness
to whom must not be supposed to be repudiated because I cannot agree with
him on some important points—is, I think, entirely wrong in speaking of

mediæval “distrust of literature,” while the statement with which he
supports this, that “popular literature had fallen into decay, and, in its
contemporary form, was beneath serious consideration,”[7] is so astonishing,
that I fear we must class it with those judicia ignorantium of which our
general motto speaks. In his context Mr Spingarn mentions, as examples of
mediæval treatment of literature, Fulgentius, Isidore, John of Salisbury,
Dante, Boccaccio. What “popular” (by which I presume is meant
vernacular) literature was there in the times of Fulgentius or of Isidore? Is
not the statement that “popular literature had fallen into decay” in the time
of Dante self-exploded? And the same may be said of Boccaccio. As for
John of Salisbury, he certainly, as we have seen,[8] was not much of a critic
himself; but that popular literature was decaying in his time is a statement
which no one who knows the Chansons de Gestes and the Arthurian Legend
can accept for one moment; while the documents also quoted supra, the
Labyrinthus, the Nova Poetria, and the rest—entirely disprove any
“distrust” of letters.
The truth is, with submission to Mr Spingarn, that there never was any
such, except from the Puritan-religious side, and that this was by no means
Not necessarily specially conspicuous in the Middle Ages. The “Defence of
anti-mediæval,
Poesy,” and of literature generally, which animates men so
different as Boccaccio and Milton, as Scaliger and Sidney, is no direct
revolt against the Middle Ages at all, but, as has been said, a discourse Pro
Domo, in the first place, against the severer and more obscurantist partisans
of Catholicism, who were disposed to dislike men of letters as Reformers,
and literature as the instrument of Reformation; secondly, and much more
urgently, against the Puritan and Philistine variety of Protestantism itself,
which so soon turned against its literary leaders and allies. And the special
form which this defence took was in turn mainly conditioned, not by anti-
mediæval animus, but in part by the circumstances of the case, in part by
the character of the critical weapons which men found in their new arsenal
of the Classics.
Classical Criticism, as we have seen in the preceding volume, had
invariably in theory, and almost as invariably in practice, confined itself
but classical wholly or mainly to the consideration of “the subject.”
Although Aristotle himself had not denied the special pleasure of art and the
various kinds of art, although Plato, in distrusting and denouncing, had
admitted the psychagogic faculties thereof; yet nobody except Longinus had

boldly identified the chief end of it with “transport,” not with persuasion,
with edification, or anything of the kind. Accordingly, those who looked to
the ancients to help them against the Obscuri Viri on the one hand, and
against good Puritan folk like our own Ascham on the other, were almost
bound to keep the pleasure of poetry and literature generally in the
background; or, if they brought it to the front at all, to extol it and defend it
on ethical and philosophical, not on æsthetic grounds. Taking a hint from
their “sweet enemy” Plato, from Plutarch, and from such neo-Platonic
utterances as that tractate of Plotinus, which has been discussed in its place,
[9]
they set themselves to prove that poetry was not a sweet pleasant deceit
or corrupting influence in the republic, but a stronghold and rampart of
and anti- religious and philosophical truth. Calling in turn Aristotle
Puritan.
to their assistance, and working him in with his master and
rival, they dwelt with redoubled and at length altogether misleading and
misled energy on “Action,” “Unity,” and the like. And when they did
consider form it was, always or too often, from the belittling point of view
of the ancients themselves in spirit, and from the meticulous point of view
of Horace (who had always been known) in detail. Here and there in such a
man as Erasmus (v. infra), who was nothing if not sensible, we find the
Gellian and Macrobian particularisms taken up with a really progressive
twist towards inquiry as to the bearing of these particularities on the
pleasure of the reader. But Erasmus was writing in the “false dawn”; the
Puritan tyranny of Protestantism on the one side, and of the Catholic revival
on the other, had not brought back a partial night as yet; and some of the
best as well as some of the worst characteristics of the new age inclined
those of his immediate successors rather than contemporaries, who adopted
criticism directly, to quite different ways.
It would, however, be a glaring omission if the critical position of
Erasmus. Erasmus himself were not set forth at some length.[10]
Standing as he does, the most eminent literary figure of Europe on the
bridge of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nothing if not critical as he is
in his general temperament, and on the textual and exegetical, if not on the
strictly literary sides of the Art, one of its great historical figures—his
absence from this gallery would be justly regarded as inexcusable. And if
his voluminous work does not yield us very much within the more special
and fully enfranchising lines of our system, it might be regarded as a
sufficient answer to say that the imperfection of the vernaculars, his own

concentration on particular forms of Biblical and patristic text-criticism,
and that peculiar cosmopolitanism which made him practically of no
country at all, served to draw him away from a practice in which he would,
but for these circumstances and conditions, have certainly indulged.
It may, however, be doubted whether Erasmus would ever have made a
capital figure as a purely literary critic. Very great man of letters as he was,
and almost wholly literary as were his interests, those interests were
suspiciously directed towards the applied rather than the pure aspects of
literature—were, in short, per se rather scientific than literary proper. It is at
least noteworthy that the Ciceronianus (though Erasmus was undoubtedly
on the right side in it) was directed against a purely literary folly, against an
exaggeration of one of the tastes and appetites which spur on the critic. And
it is almost enough to read the Adagia and Apophthegmata—books much
forgotten now, but written with enormous zest and pains by him, and
received with corresponding attention and respect by two whole centuries at
least—to see how much is there left out which a literary critic pur sang
could not but have said.
The Ciceronianus, however, must receive a little fuller treatment, both
because of its intimate connection with our subject, and because hardly any
work of Erasmus, except the Colloquies, so definitely estates him in the
new position of critical man of letters, as distinguished from that of
The philosophical or rhetorical teacher. The piece[11] (which has
Ciceronianus.
for its second title De Optimo Dicendi Genere) did not
appear, and could not have appeared, very early in his career. He might
even, in the earlier part of that career, have been slow to recognise the
popular exaggeration which, as in the other matter of the Reformation itself,
struck his maturer intelligence. He glances at its genesis in divers of his
letters, to Budæus, to Alciatus, and others, from 1527 onwards, and the
chief “begetter” of it seems to have been the Flemish scholar, Longolius
(Christophe de Longueil), who during the latter part of his short life was
actually very much such a fanatic as the Nosoponus of the dialogue. This
person is described by his friends Bulephorus and Hypologus as olim
rubicundulus, obesulus, Veneribus et gratiis undique scatens, but now an
austere shadow, who has no aspiration in life but to be “Ciceronian.” In
order to achieve this distinction, he has given his days and nights wholly to
the study of Cicero. The “copy” of his Ciceronian lexicon would already
overload two stout porters. He has noted the differing sense of every word,

whether alone or in context; and by the actual occurrence, not merely of the
word itself, but of its form and case, he will be absolutely governed. Thus,
if you are to be a true Ciceronian, you may say ornatus and ornatissimus,
but not ornatior; while, though nasutus is permitted to you, both
comparative and superlative are barred. In the same way, he will only pass
the actual cases and numbers found in the Arpinate; though every one but,
let us say, the dative plural occurs, the faithful must not presume to usurp
that dative. Further, he intends to reduce the whole of Cicero to quantitative
rhythm, fully specified; and in his own writing he thinks he has done well if
he accomplishes one short period in a winter night. The piece begins with
the characteristic Erasmian banter,—Nosoponus is a bachelor, and
Bulephorus observes that it is just as well, for his wife would in the
circumstances either make an irruption into the study, and turn it topsy-
turvy, or console herself with somebody else in some other place,—but by
degrees becomes more serious, and ends with a sort of adjustment of most
ancient and many modern Latin writers to the Ciceronian point of view.
That Erasmus, with his usual shrewdness, hits the great blot of the time—
the merely literal and “Capernaite” interpretation of the classics—is perhaps
less surprising than that he should hit such much later crazes as the
Flaubertian devotion of a night to a clause, and the still prevalent reluctance
of many really literary persons to allow a reasonable analogy and extension
from the actual practice of authority. It was inevitable that he should offend
the pedants (from Scaliger downwards), and be attacked by them with the
usual scurrility; and it is not quite certain that any but very few of his
readers thoroughly sympathised with him. In this as in other matters he was
not so much before his time (for the time of the wise is a nunc stans), as
outside of the time of his contemporaries. But even here we see that he was
still of that time as well. He has no real sympathy with the vernaculars, nor
any comprehension of the fact that they are on equal literary terms with the
classical tongues; and even in regard to this—even when he is vindicating
the freedom of the letter—his thoughts are fixed on the letter mainly.
That it was better so, there can be no doubt. Literary criticism proper
could wait: correction of the mediæval habit of indiscriminate acceptance of
texts could not. And still, as it is, we have from Erasmus not a little
agreeable material of that kind which we have sedulously gathered in the
preceding volume; which, from men like him, we shall not neglect in this;

but for which there will be decreasingly little and less room, both here and
still more in the “not impossible” third.
Considering the very wide range in subject of the Colloquies,[12] it is not
quite insignificant that literary matters have but a small place in them; there
is perhaps more significance still in the nature of the treatment where it
The Colloquies. does occur. The chief locus is inevitably the Convivium
Poeticum, where, except the account of the feast itself, and the excellent by-
play with the termagant gouvernante Margaret, the whole piece is literary,
and in a manner critical. But the manner is wholly verbal; or else concerned
with the very mint and anise of form. A various reading in Terence from a
codex of Linacre’s; the possibility of eliding or slurring the consonantal v;
whether Exilis in the Palinode to Canidia is a noun or a verb; whether the
Ambrosian rhymes are to be scanned on strict metrical principles; the
mistakes made by Latin translators of Aristotle,—this is the farrago
libelluli. I must particularly beg to be understood as not in the least
slighting these discussions. They had to be done; it is our great debt on this
side to the Renaissance that it got over the doing of them for us in so many
cases; they are the necessary preliminary to all criticism—nay, they are an
important part of criticism itself. But they are only the rudiments.
The Concio, sive Merdardus, after an explanation of the offensive sub-
title (which has less of good-humoured superiority, and more of the
snappish Humanist temper, than is usual with Erasmus), declines into
similar matters of reading and rendering—here in reference not to profane
but to sacred literature. And the curious Conflictus Thaliæ et Barbariei,
which is more dramatically arranged than most of the Colloquies, and may
even have taken a hint from the French Morality of Science et Asnerye,[13]
loses, as it may seem to us, an opportunity of being critical in the best and
real kind. The antagonists exchange a good deal of abuse, which on Thalia’s
part extends to some mediæval writers cited by Barbaries (among whom
our poor old friend John of Garlandia rather unfairly figures), and the piece,
which is short, ends with a contest in actual citation of verse—Leonine and
scholastic enough on the part of Barbaries, gracefully enough pastiched
from the classics on the part of Thalia. But Erasmus either deliberately
declines, or simply does not perceive, the opening given for a critical
indication of the charms of purity and the deformities of barbarism.
To thread the mighty maze of the Letters[14] completely, for the critical
utterances to be picked up there, were more tempting than strictly

incumbent on the present adventurer, who has, however, not neglected a
reasonable essay at the adventure. The adroit and good-humoured attempt
to soothe the poetic discontent of Eobanus Hessus, who thought Erasmus
had not paid him proper attention,[15] contains, for instance, a little matter of
the kind, and several references to contemporary Latin poets. The most
important thing, perhaps, is the opinion—sensible as usual with the writer
—that, as the knowledge of Greek becomes more and more extended,
translation of it into Latin is more and more lost labour. But Erasmus, as we
should expect, evidently has more at heart the questions of “reading and
rendering” which fill his correspondence with Budæus and others. To take
the matter in order, a curious glimpse of the literary manners, as well as the
literary judgments, of the time is afforded by an enclosure in a letter to John
Watson of Cambridge. Watson wanted to know what Erasmus had been
doing, and Erasmus, answering indirectly, sends him a letter on the subject
The Letters. by one Adrian Barland of Louvain to his brother. Some
incidental expressions here about Euripides as nobilissimus poeta, and
Apuleius as producing pestilentissimas facetias, are more valuable to us
than the copious laudations of Barland on Erasmus’ own work, which pass
without any “Spare my blushes!” from the recipient and transmitter. We
note that the moral point of view is still uppermost, though the observations
are taken from a different angle. Aristophanes would have regarded
Euripides as much more “pestilent,” morally speaking, than Apuleius. The
long and necessarily complimentary letter (ii. 1) to Leo the Tenth contains
some praise of Politian and much of Jerome, on whom Erasmus was then
engaged; and while the language of this correspondence naturally abounds
in Ciceronian hyperbole, it is not insignificant that Erasmus describes the
Father with the Lion as omni in genere litterarum absolutissimus, which,
assuming any real meaning in it, is not quite critical, though Jerome was
certainly no small man of letters. The letter to Henry Bovill (ii. 10), which
contains the famous story of “mumpsimus” and “sumpsimus,” as well as
the almost equally famous account of the studies of the University of
Cambridge in the ninth decade of the fifteenth century, contains also a
notable division of his own critics of the unfavourable kind. They are aut
adeo morosi ut nihil omnino probent nisi quod ipsi faciunt; aut adeo stolidi
ut nihil sentiant; aut adeo stupidi ut nec legant quod carpunt; aut adeo
indocti ut nihil judicent; aut adeo gloriæ jejuni avidique ut carpendis

aliorum laboribus sibi laudem parent. And their children are alive with us
unto this day.
There is a very curious, half modest and severe, half confident criticism
of his own verses in ii. 22. He admits that there is nothing “tumultuous” in
them, “no torrent overflowing its banks,” no deinosis: but claims elegance
and Atticism. It would be perhaps unfair to attach the character of deliberate
critical utterance to his effusive laudation of the style of Colet in an early
letter (v. 4, dated 1498, but Mr Seebohm has thrown doubt on these dates,
and Mr Nichols appears to be completely redistributing them), as placidus
sedatus inaffectatus, fontis limpidissimi in morem ditissimo e pectore
scatens, æqualis, sui undique similis, apertus, simplex, modestiæ plenus,
nihil usquam habens scabri contorti conturbati. But it is interesting, and
significant of his own performances, as is the comparison (v. 19) of Jerome
and Cicero as masters of rhetoric. The somewhat intemperate and
promiscuous contempt of mediæval writing which appears in the Conflictus
(vide supra) reappears, with the very same names mentioned, in an epistle
(vii. 3), Cornelio Suo, of 1490, which, if it be rightly dated, must be long
anterior to the Colloquy. But a much more important expression of critical
opinion than any of these appears in v. 20 to Ammonius, where Erasmus
gives his views on poetry at large. They are much what we should suspect
or expect beforehand. Some folk, he says, think that a poem is not a poem
unless you poke in all the gods from heaven, and from earth, and from
under the earth. He has always liked poetry which is at no great distance
from prose—but the best prose.[16] He likes rhetorical poetry and poetical
rhetoric. He does not care for far-fetched thoughts; let the poet stick to his
subject, but give fair attention to smoothness of versification. “Prose and
sense,” in short: with a little rhetoric and versification added.
But on such matters he always touches lightly, and with little elaboration;
and to see where his real interest lay we have but to turn to the above-
quoted verbal discussions with Budæus on the one hand, to the minute and
well-known account of More’s life and conversation given to Hutten in x.
30 on the other. Nor do I think that it is worth while to extend to the
remaining two-thirds of the letters the more exact examination which has
here been given to the first third or thereabouts.[17]
Once more, far be it from any reasonable person to blame Erasmus, or
any of his immediate contemporaries, for not doing what it was not their
chief business to do. That chief business, in the direction of criticism, was

to shake off the critical promiscuousness of the Middle Ages, to insist on
the importance of accurate texts and exact renderings, to stigmatise the
actual barbarism, the mere mumpsimus, which had no doubt too often taken
the place not only of pure classical Latinity, not only of the fine if not
classical Latin of Tertullian and Augustine and Jerome, but of that exquisite
“sport” the Latin of the early Middle Age hymns, to hammer Greek into
men’s heads (or elsewhere), to clear up the confusion of dates and times and
values, which had put the false Callisthenes on a level with Arrian, and
exalted Dares above Homer. Even the literary beauty of the classics
themselves was not their main affair;—they had to inculcate school-work
rather than University work, University work rather than the maturer study
of literature. Of the vernaculars it was best that they should say nothing: for
except Italian none was in a very good state, and Humanists were much
more likely to speak unadvisedly with their lips if they did speak on the
subject. They worked their work: well were it for all if others did the same.
For the reasons given, then, Erasmus and those whom he represents[18]
Distribution of could do little for criticism proper; and for the same (or yet
the Book.
others closely connected) the northern nations, of whom
Erasmus is the most distinguished literary representative, could for a long
time do as little: while some of them for a much longer did nothing at all.
Of the others, the criticism of Spain, the criticism of France, and the
criticism of England were all borrowed directly from that of Italy. The
Spaniards did not begin till so late that their results, like those of Opitz and
other Germans, cannot be properly treated till the next Book. France was
stirred about the middle of the century, and England a very little later. These
two countries, therefore, will properly have each its chapter in the present
book. But two of much more importance must first be given to those Italian
developments, in our Art or Study, on which both French and English
criticism are based. The first will deal with those who write, roundly
speaking, before Scaliger; the second with the work of that redoubted
Aristarch, with the equally—perhaps the more—important name of
Castelvetro, with the weary wrangle over the Gerusalemme Liberata
(which, weary as it is, is the first great critical debate over a contemporary
vernacular work of importance, and therefore within measure not to be
missed by us), and with certain of the later Italian critical theorists, of the
sixteenth and earliest seventeenth century, who are valuable, some as

continuing, some as more or less ineffectually fighting against, the neo-
classic domination.

1. At the beginning of Book III. I had practically no obligations to any
general guide to confess; at the beginning of Book II. not very many. Here,
as in the case of M. Egger in regard to Book I., I have cheerfully to
acknowledge the forerunnership and help of Mr Joel Elias Spingarn, whose
History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance appeared (New York and
London) in 1899. I shall have occasion to differ with Mr Spingarn here and
there; and his conception of a History of Criticism is not mine, just as, no
doubt, mine is not his. But the obligations of the second treader of a
previously untrodden path to the first are perhaps the greatest that fall to be
acknowledged in any literary task; and I acknowledge them in Mr
Spingarn’s case to the fullest extent possible.

2. The complaints sometimes made as to the ambiguity and want of
authority of this term may have some justification; but convenience and (by
this time) usage must be allowed their way.

3. Mr Froude in the opening of his History.

4. The complete text was, as is well known, not discovered (by Poggio at
St Gallen) till the fifteenth century had nearly filled its second decade, but
the book had been studied long before.

5. Very great influence on sixteenth, and even on seventeenth, century
criticism has also been frequently, and perhaps correctly, assigned to the
grammatical works and Terentian Scholia of Donatus.

6. Vol. i. p. 457 sq.

7. Spingarn, op. cit., p. 2. On the previous page there is the equally
surprising statement that in the Middle Ages “Poetry was disregarded or
contemned, or was valued, if at all, for qualities that least belong to it.”
What were these “qualities”?

8. Vol. i. p. 414 note

9. Vol. i. pp. 67, 68.

10. Erasmus is still only readable as a whole, or in combination of his
really important literary work, in the folios of Beatus Rhenanus (8 vols.,
Basle, 1540-1) or Le Clerc (10 vols., Lyons, 1703-6). It is a thousand pities
that this more important literary work, at least, has not been re-edited
together accessibly and cheaply.

11. First printed at Basle, 1528. Besides the general editions, there are
some separate reprints (e.g., Oxford, 1693). But it ought to have shared the
popular diffusion of the Colloquies.

12. I use the Tauchnitz ed. (with the Encomium Moriæ) in 2 vols.
(Leipsic: 1829).

13. V. E. Fournier, Théâtre Français avant la Renaissance (Paris, n. d.),
p. 334 sq. It is not at all impossible that the indebtedness may be the other
way. The dates of these pieces are very uncertain.

14. I use the London folio of 1642, where the letter to Hessus, the Fifth
of the Twenty-sixth book, will be found at col. 1407-10. I wish Mr Nichols’
excellent rearrangement had been available. But even its first volume only
appeared when this book was in the printer’s hands.

15. Hessus, it may be not superfluous to say, was one of the authors of
the Epistolæ Obscurorum, and in verse one of the very best Humanists of
Germany.

16. Mihi semper placuit carmen quod a prosa, sed optima, non longe
recederet.—Op. cit., col. 420.

17. Those who would like to continue this may look, among many other
places, at xii. 7 (praise of Politian); xv. 17 (jubilation over the confusion of
Humanism); xvii. 11 (ditto to Vives); xxi. 4 (a good deal on writers both
ancient and modern), and especially xxvi. 5 (above noticed).

18. See infra (pp. 27-29) on Augustinus Olmucensis (Käsenbrot) and
Cornelius Agrippa.

CHAPTER II.

EARLY ITALIAN CRITICS.
THE BEGINNINGS—SAVONAROLA—PICO, ETC.—POLITIAN—THE ‘MANTO’—THE
‘AMBRA’ AND ‘RUSTICUS’—THE ‘NUTRICIA’—THEIR MERITS AND DANGER—
PETRUS CRINITUS: HIS ‘DE POETIS LATINIS’—AUGUSTINUS OLMUCENSIS: HIS
‘DEFENCE OF POETRY’—PARADOXICAL ATTACKS ON IT BY CORNELIUS AGRIPPA,
LANDI, BERNI—VIDA—IMPORTANCE OF THE ‘POETICS’—ANALYSIS OF THE
PIECE—ESSENTIAL POVERTY OF ITS THEORY—HISTORICAL AND SYMPTOMATIC
SIGNIFICANCE—THE ALLEGED APPEAL TO REASON AND NATURE—THE MAIN
STREAM STARTED—TRISSINO—DIVISION OF HIS ‘POETIC’—HIS CRITICAL VALUE
—EDITORS, ETC., OF THE ‘POETICS’—PAZZI—ROBORTELLO, SEGNI, MAGGI,
VETTORI—THEORISTS: DANIELLO—FRACASTORO—FORMALISTS: MUTIO.
TOLOMEI AND CLASSICAL METRES—OTHERS: TOMITANO, LIONARDI, B. TASSO,
CAPRIANO—IL LASCA—BEMBO—CARO—VARCHI—MINTURNO—THE ‘DE
POETA’—THE ‘ARTE POETICA’—THEIR VALUE—GIRALDI CINTHIO’S ‘DISCORSI’—
ON ROMANCE—ON DRAMA—SOME POINTS IN BOTH—ON SATIRE—PIGNA—
LILIUS GIRALDUS: HIS ‘DE POETIS NOSTRORUM TEMPORUM’—ITS WIDTH OF
RANGE—BUT NARROWNESS OF VIEW—HORROR AT PREFERENCE OF
VERNACULAR TO LATIN—YET A REAL CRITIC IN BOTH KINDS—SHORT ‘PRÉCIS’
OF THE DIALOGUES—THEIR GREAT HISTORIC VALUE.

It is not necessary to discuss, or even to expose at any length, the causes
of the relative precocity of Italian Criticism in the Renaissance. They are
The beginnings. practically all contained in, and can by the very slightest
expense of learning and intelligence be extracted from, the fact that Italy
was at once the cradle of Humanist study of the Classics, and the only
country in Europe which possessed a fully developed vernacular. But for
the greater part of the fifteenth century attention was diverted from actual
criticism—except of the validating or invalidating kind—by the prior and
eagerer appetite for the discovery, study, and popularising, by translation
and otherwise, of the actual authors and texts. For a long time, indeed, this
appetite showed the usual promiscuity of such affections; and it was
scarcely till the time of Vittorino da Feltre that much critical discrimination
of styles was introduced. But these and other kindred things came surely,
and brought criticism with them, though criticism still generally of the

moral and educational kind. The Boccaccian defence was taken up by
various writers of note—Bruni,[19] Guarino, Æneas Sylvius—and before the
close of the fifteenth century two of the greatest of Florentines had
indicated in different ways the main lines which Italian criticism was to
take. These two were Savonarola and Politian.
The tendency of each could be anticipated by any one who, though
actually ignorant of it, knew the characteristics of the two men in other
Savonarola. ways. Fra Girolamo’s, of course, is wholly ethical-
religious, mainly neo-Platonic, but already presenting the effect of
Aristotelian details on the general Platonic attitude to Poetry. Yet he is still
scholastic in his general treatment of the subject, and still adopts that close
subordination of poetry to Logic which is as old as Averroes and Aquinas,
and which, odd as it may seem to merely modern readers, is a very simple
matter when examined.[20] He disclaims, as usual, any attack on poetry
itself, urging only the abuse of poetry; but he follows Plato in looking more
than askance at it, and Aristotle in denying its necessary association with
verse. The Scriptures are the noblest poetry; all ancient poetry is doubtfully
profitable. In fact, he regards poetry altogether as specially liable to abuse,
and dubiously admissible into, or certainly to be expelled from, a perfect
community, such as that on which the fancy of the Renaissance was so
much fixed.
Savonarola’s remarks, which are contained in his four-book tractate, De
Scientiis,[21] are more curious than really important. Yet they derive some
importance from the great name and influence of their propounder, from his
position at the very watershed, so to speak, of time in Europe, if not in Italy,
dividing Middle Age from Renaissance, and from the fact that they
undoubtedly summarise that dubitative, if not utterly hostile, view of
literature in general, and of poetry in particular, which, as we have seen,[22]
was borrowed by the Fathers from the ancients, and very much intensified
by the borrowers. Fra Girolamo’s attitude is a rigidly scholastic one; and to
those who omit to take account of this, or do not understand it, his view
must seem wholly out of focus, if not wholly obscure. Poetry is a part of
Rational Philosophy; and therefore its object must be pars entis rationis. It
differs from Rhetoric in working purely by Example, not Enthymeme. Its
end is to induce men to live virtuously by decent representations; and as the
soul loves harmony, it uses harmonic forms. But a poet who merely knows
how to play gracefully with feet only deserves the name as an old woman

deserves that of a pretty girl.[23] Still more preposterous is the habit of
calling poetry “divine.” Cosmos becomes chaos, if you admit that. Scientia
autem divina est cujus objectum Deus: non illa cujus objectum exemplum.
The making of verses is only poetry per accidens; and as for the Heathen
poets, magnus diaboli laqueus absconditus est in them. He does not, he
says, actually “damn” poetry; but the gist of his tractatule is that poets as a
rule quite misunderstand their function, and that poetry had better keep its
place, and abstain from silly, not to say blasphemous, airs.
Such a point of view was, of course, liable to be taken by persons alike
unlikely to assume the “know-nothing” attitude of the more ignorant
Catholics, the Philistine-Puritan attitude of Protestantism, or the merely
Platonic and non-Christian theory of some free-thinkers. It might well seem
to thoughtful lovers of literature that its very existence was in danger when
it was attacked from so many sides, and that it was necessary to intrench it
as strongly as possible. Nor were the materials and the plan of the
fortification far to seek. The suggestion has been rather oddly discovered in
the Geographer Strabo;[24] but authorities much more germane to the matter
were at hand. Boccaccio himself had, as we have seen, both taken note of
the danger and indicated the means of defence: Maximus Tyrius and
Plutarch, the one in a manner more, the other in a manner less, favourable
to poetry, had in effect long before traced out the whole Camp of Refuge on
lines suitable either to the bolder or to the more timid defender of Poesy.
The latter could represent it as the philosophy of the young, as a sort of
Kindergarten-keeper in the vestibule of the higher mysteries, as not
necessarily bad at all, and possibly very good. The former could argue for
its equality with philosophy itself, as pursuing the same ends by different
means, and appealing, not in the least in forma pauperis, to its own part of
human nature.
It seems by no means improbable that this view was partly brought about
by that remarkable influencer both of early mediæval and of early
Pico, &c. Renaissance thought, Dionysius the Areopagite. Readers of
Mr Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers[25] will remember the curious and
interesting extracts there given from Colet’s correspondence with
Radulphus, and the explanation of the Mosaic cosmogony as intended to
present the Divine proceedings “after the manner of a poet.” This view
Colet seems to have extracted partly from Dionysius himself, partly from
Pico della Mirandola, the most remarkable of Savonarola’s converts, while

time and place are not inconsistent with the belief that the future Dean of St
Paul’s may have come into contact with Fra Girolamo himself. Now, this
kind of envisagement of poetry, certain to turn to spiritual account in
spiritually minded persons like Colet and Savonarola, and in mystically, if
not spiritually, minded ones like Pico, would, in the general temper of the
Renaissance, of which all three were early illustrations, as certainly turn to
more or less spiritualised philosophy—ethical, metaphysical, or purely
æsthetic, as the case might be. And we can see in it a vera causa of that
certainly excessive, if not altogether mistaken, devotion to the abstract
questions, “What is a poet?” “What is poetry?” “What is drama?” and so
forth, which we perceive in almost all the Italian critics of the mid-sixteenth
century, and which is almost equally, if less originally, present in their
Elizabethan pupils and followers. If Colet himself had paid more attention
to literature, we cannot doubt that this is the line which his own literary
criticism would have taken; and as his influence, direct or through Erasmus
and More, was very great on English thought, both at Oxford and
Cambridge, it is not impossible that it may have been exerted in this very
way.
The other line (the line which, according to the definitions of the present
work, we must call the line of criticism proper), though it was perhaps
hardly in this instance traced with boldness and without deflection, started
Politian. under yet more distinguished auspices. The Sylvæ of
Politian consist, in the main, of a direct critical survey of classical poetry
couched in the, as we may think, somewhat awkward form of verse, decked
with all the ornament that could suggest itself to the author’s rich, varied,
and not seldom really poetical fancy, and arranged with a view to actual
recitation in the lecture-room for the delight and encouragement of actual
students.[26]
Neither purpose nor method can be regarded as wholly favourable to
criticism. The popular conférencier (for this term best expresses Politian’s
position) is sure to be rather more of a panegyrist or a detractor, as the case
may be, than of a critic; and the lecturer in verse is sure to be thinking
rather of showing his own rhetorical and poetical gifts than of the strict
merits and defects of his subject. But if we take the Nutricia or the Rusticus,
the Ambra or the Manto, and compare any of them with the well-
intentioned summary of the Labyrinthus,[27] we shall see without the least
unfairness, and fully admitting the difference of ability and of opportunity

in the two men, the difference, from the critical point of view, of the two
stand-points.
In the “Manto,” the first of the Sylvæ, the most important characteristic of
sixteenth-century Italian criticism proper, the exaltation of Virgil, is already
The Manto. prominent. Politian, indeed, was too much of a wit, and too
much of a poet himself, to let his Virgil-worship take the gross and prosaic
form which it assumed a little later in Vida. But he has proceeded a long
way from the comparatively uncritical (and yet so more critical) standpoint
of Dante. He comes to details. Cicero had won the palms of sweetness from
Nestor and of tempestuous eloquence from Ulysses (a little vague this), but
Greece consoled herself in poetry. Ennius was too rude to give Latium the
glory of that. Then came Virgil. Even with the Syracusan reed (i.e., in his
Eclogues) he crushes Hesiod and contends with Homer. Calliope took him
in her arms as an infant, and kissed him thrice. Manto, the guardian nymph
of his native place, hailed his advent, and summarised in prophetic detail
his achievements in verse. Her town shall enter the lists—secure of victory
—with the seven competitors for Homer’s origin. And then a whirlwind of
magniloquent peroration (charged with epanaphora,[28] that favourite figure
of the sixteenth century) extols the poet above all poets and all wonders of
the world, past, present, and to come.
But Politian would have been faithful neither to those individual qualities
which have been noted in him, nor to that sworn service of Greek which
was the chivalry of the true Humanist, if he had thought of depreciating
The Ambra and Homer. The “Ambra,” a poem longer than the “Manto,”
Rusticus.
and not much less enthusiastic, is mainly devoted to a
fanciful description of the youth of the poet, and a verse-summary of the
poems. Indeed the peroration (till it is turned into a panegyric of Ambra, a
favourite villa of Lorenzo) is a brilliant, forcible, and true indication of the
enormous debt of all ancient literature, science, and in fact life, to Homer,
of the universality of his influence, and of the consensus of testimony in his
favour. The “Rusticus” is rather an independent description and panegyric
of country life, as a preface to the reading of Virgil, Hesiod, and other
bucolic and georgic writers, than a criticism or comparison of them. But the
The Nutricia. “Nutricia” is again ours in the fullest sense. Its avowed
argument is De poetica et poetis, and, in handling this vast and congenial
theme, Politian gives the fullest possible scope at once to his genius, to his
learning, and to that intense love for literature without which learning is but

as the Carlylian “marine-stores.” In nearly eight hundred exultant
hexameters,[29] the vigour and fulness of which enable them to carry off
without difficulty the frippery of their occasional trappings, he traces the
origin of poetry, the transition from mere stupid wonder and the miseries of
barbarism to sacred and profane verse, the elaboration of its laws in Judea
by David and Solomon, in Greece by Orpheus, the succession of the Greek
and Latin poets in the various forms (it is noteworthy that Politian is not at
all copious on the drama) through the exploits of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio to the patronage of poetry by Lorenzo himself.
This is criticism leaning dangerously on the one side to panegyric, and
likely to be (though it is not actually) dragged to the other still more
Their merits dangerously by partisanship; but it is still criticism. The
liker does not “like grossly,” or in accordance with mere tradition. He loves,
as the American poet says, “not by allowance but with personal love”; and
he can give reasons for the love that is in him. He seeks the poetic pleasure
from the Muse; he obtains it from her; and he savours it, not merely with
eagerness, but with acutely sensitive taste. Though he might not at some
moments be averse to refining on the character of poetry generally, as well
as on the character of this poetic pleasure, it is this itself that he seeks,
finds, and rejoices in. Part at least of the spirit of Longinus is on him; he is
transported, and he knows the power that transports.
At the same time, it must be difficult, for all but the extremest Virgilians,
to think that he does not err by way of excess in his estimate of that poet;
and it must be still more difficult, even for them, not to perceive that the
pitch, even if excusable in the individual, is dangerous as an example.
and danger. Followers will make-believe; they will give inept reasons
to support their made belief; and worst of all, by that fatal catachresis of
“imitation” which is always waiting upon the critic, they will begin to think,
and to say, that by simply copying and borrowing from Virgil and other
great ones you may go near to be thought not entirely destitute of their so-
much-praised charm. The danger very soon ceased to be a danger only, and
we find a victim to it in Vida; but before coming to him we may divagate a
little.
The furor poeticus of Politian put him much beyond other Humanists in
Petrus Crinitus: critical respects. His contemporary and friend, Petrus
his De Poetis
Latinis.
Crinitus,[30] was, if not quite of the same caste as Politian,
by no means of the mere ordinary Humanist type. His

kissing-verses, Dum te Neæra savior, are among the best of their kind
between Petronius and Johannes Secundus; and his curious pot-pourri, De
Honesta Sapientia, is quite worth reading, though one may know most of its
constituents well enough beforehand. Yet the literary inquiries here are
surprisingly few, and treated in no critical spirit whatsoever, so that there is
no disappointment in one sense, though there may be in another, with his
three books, De Poetis Latinis. These consist of a large number of separate
articles in more or less chronological order, by no means ill-written in the
classical-dictionary fashion: Genitus est here; obiisse traditur there, and in
such a year; totum se dicavit poeticæ facultati, and the rest. The taste as
expressed by preferences is not bad, and the approaches (they are hardly
more) to critical estimate, though very obvious and mostly traditional, are
sound enough and fairly supported by quotation. But of original attempt to
grasp and to render the character of Latin poetry generally, or of any one
Latin poet by himself, there is hardly a vestige.
It is not at all improbable that Poetics in one form or another, both Italian
Augustinus and “Tedescan,” may exist in MSS. of this period: there is
Olmucensis: his
Defence of
certainly work, even in print, of which very little notice has
Poetry. been taken hitherto. For instance, a few months ago my
friend Mr Gregory Smith saw in a catalogue, bought, and
very kindly lent to me, a Dialogus in Defensionem Poetices, printed at
Venice in 1493, and written by a certain Augustinus Moravus Olmucensis.
[31]
This writer’s family name in vernacular appears to have been Käsenbrot;
and he was one of the early German Humanists whose most famous chiefs
were Reuchlin earlier, Conrad Celtes and Eobanus Hessus later, who
achieved much tolerable verse, and in the Epistolæ Obscurorum one
immortal piece of prose, but who were whelmed in the deluge of the
Reformation struggles, and accomplished little of the good which they
might have done to Germany. The Dialogus—which has the perhaps not
quite accidental interest of having appeared in the year between the writing
of Savonarola’s somewhat dubious backing of Poetry, and the first printing
of Boccaccio’s uncompromising and generous championship thereof—
cannot be said to be of much intrinsic importance. The author gives, or
rather adopts, the definition of Poetry as “a metrical structure of true or
feigned narration, composed in suitable rhythm or feet, and adjusted to
utility and pleasure.” But his text is rather rambling. A parallel with
Medicine (the piece seems to have been written at Padua, which helps it to

its place here) is not very well worked out, and the latter part is chiefly
occupied with rather dull-fantastic allegorisings of the stories of Tiresias,
the Gorgons, the geography of Hades, and so forth. Still it is a sign, and
welcome as such.
Another Transalpine may be admitted here, for reasons of time rather
Paradoxical than of place, to introduce two undoubted Italians. It is
attacks on it by
Cornelius
customary to mention the name at least of Cornelius
Agrippa, Landi, Agrippa,[32] if not exactly as a critic, at any rate as being a
Berni. denouncer, though no mean practitioner, of literature. It is
perhaps a just punishment for his blasphemy that no one who only knew
this would dream that the adept of Nettesheim was as good a man of letters
as he is. It constitutes the fourth chapter of the De Vanitate Scientiarum
(1527), and is a mere piece of hackneyed railing at the art which aures
stultorum demulcet, which is architectrix mendaciorum et cultrix
perversorum dogmatum, which is pertenuis et nuda, insulsa, esuriens,
famelica. Alas! if some tales are true, Cornelius (who really was a clever
man) found that Occultism could starve its votaries as well as Poetry. His
attack is, in fact, nothing but an instance of that measles of the Renaissance
(nor of the Renaissance only) paradox-quackery; and it has no solid
foundation whatever. The later (1543) Paradossi of Ortensio Landi[33]
exhibit more frankly the same spirit, but in regard to individuals, especially
Aristotle, rather than to poetry and literature generally. And it is probably
not absent from Berni’s Dialogo contra i Poeti[34] (1537, but written earlier),
in which Poetry is dismissed by this agreeable poet as suitable enough
pastime for a gentleman, but out of the question as a regular vocation or
serious business.
But we must return to serious persons. Of the critical texts to which we
pay chief attention in this book, there are not a few which are of far higher
Vida. critical value than Vida’s Poetics.[35] But it may be doubted
whether even the similarly named treatises of Aristotle and of Horace have
had a greater actual influence; and I at least am nearly certain that no
modern treatise has had, or has yet had a chance of having, anything like so
much. In the recently renewed study of Renaissance Criticism there has
been, naturally enough, a repetition of a phenomenon familiar on such
occasions—that is to say, the deflection of attention from pretty well-known
if half-forgotten material to material which had been still more forgotten,
and was hardly known at all. Daniello, Minturno, and the rest had, since the

seventeenth century, rested almost undisturbed; even Castelvetro and
Scaliger had more or less shrunk to the position of authorities, of some
importance, in regard to ancient criticism. But Vida, owing to the
unmistakable though unacknowledged borrowing of Boileau, the franker
discipleship of Pope, and the inclusion of a very characteristic translation
by Pitt among the usual collections of “British Poets,” had taken rank once
for all. It is true that it was a rank somewhat of the museum order, but it
existed. Now, the critics who followed him and refined upon him have been
disinterred, and are enjoying their modest second vogue; and he is
comparatively neglected, though a judicious American[36] has put him in
modern dress once more between his master Horace and his pupil Boileau.
Of three things, however, the one is absolutely incontestable as a fact,
and the other two are not easily, I think, to be gainsaid by competent
Importance of authority. The first is, that Vida anticipates in time even the
the Poetics.
earliest of the prose critics of the new Italian school by
some couple of years, while he anticipates the main group of these critics
by more than twenty. The second is, that though no doubt he took some
impulse from Politian and other Humanists, he is practically the first to
codify that extravagant Virgil-worship which reigned throughout the Neo-
Classical dispensation. The third is that, not merely in this point but in
others, he seems, by a sort of intuition, to have anticipated, at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, almost the whole critical orthodoxy of the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth. It is this which makes the translation
of him by Pitt so interesting; because the translator is, for once, no traitor,
but plus royaliste que le roi—fanatically imbued with the principles, and
equipped to the finger-tips with the practice, of his original. But for the
purposes of the scholar that original itself must of course be taken.
The temper and the faith in which Vida writes are made manifest by the
very beginning of his poem—an invocation to the Muses woven of
unexceptionable gradus-tags, and deftly dovetailed into a dedication to the
luckless Dauphin Francis, who had then taken his father’s place as Charles
the Fifth’s prisoner at Madrid, and to whose captivity the poem is modestly
Analysis of the offered as a solace or pastime. These invocations
piece.
accomplished more majorum, Vida proceeds to occupy his
First Book with a sort of general clearing of the ground. He is ready to
teach the secret of all kinds of poetry; but the poet must very carefully
inquire what are the kinds to which he himself is best adapted and best

inclined. Commissioned work is dubious, unless under a king’s command.
But there is more than this: the poetic child must be carefully nursed in the
arts suitable to his great calling. He must be as carefully guarded from the
taint of vulgar and incorrect speech; and must be regularly initiated into
Poetry—Latin first, especially Virgil, and then Greek, especially Homer. A
short historical sketch of poetry follows; but it, like everything else, is
brought round to the deification of the Mantuan. Hence Vida (who must be
pronounced rather long in weighing anchor) diverges to a good-natured
intercession with parents and teachers not to have the boys whipped too
much, telling a moving legend of an extremely pretty[37] boy who was
actually whipped to death, or at least died of fear. Emulation, however, is
quite a good stimulus; and by degrees work will be loved for itself. But
original poetical production must not be attempted too young; there must be
time for play; the rudiments of metre and so forth must be thoroughly
learnt; and, above all, non omnes omnia must be constantly kept in mind. It
is better to begin with pastorals and minor subjects; solitude and country
life are very desirable circumstances. And so Book I. closes with a fresh
invocation of the spirit of poetry and a fresh celebration of its power.
After this rather ample prelude the author somewhat unreasonably
(seeing that the delay has been his own doing), but in coachmanlike
fashion, says Pergite! Pierides, and proposes to unfold the whole of
Helicon to coming ages. The first disclosure is scarcely novel. You must
invoke Jove and the Muses; nor will one Invocation do. When in doubt
always invoke.[38] Next you should, without holding out bombastic
promises, allure your reader by a modest but sufficient description of the
subject of your poem. So far the method of turning the practice of the
ancients into a principle is impartially adjusted to Homer and Virgil alike;
but after a few score verses the partisan appears. The beginnings of the Iliad
and the Odyssey, the plunging into the midst of things with the wrath of
Achilles, and the sojourn with Calypso, instead of the rape of Helen (why
not of Hesione?) or the launching from Troy, are duly praised. But the
elaborate Homeric descriptions—as that of the car—are boggled at; the
introduction of Thersites shocks Vida (Drances seems a far nobler figure),
and the pettiness of the subjects of some of the Homeric similes would
never suit the magniloquence of the Latian Muse.[39] In Virgil, on the other
hand, he can see no fault; even the demand of Venus for arms to clothe her
bastard son, which had given qualms to admirers of old, does not disturb

Vida at all; and his poem seems to be slipping by degrees into a mere précis
of the Æneid, that each trait actually found in Virgil may be registered as a
pattern to poets generally. He wrenches himself free for a moment to
inculcate the following of nature; but presently lapses into an elaborate
demonstration of the beautiful way in which the Mantuan does follow
nature. In short, though now and then to “save his face” an illustration is
drawn honoris causa from Homer, this Second Book on the ordonnance of
the poem is, till it ceases with a panegyric of Leo X., little more than a
descant On the Imitation of Virgil.
It cannot be said that the Third Book offers much difference in this
respect—though the idolatry of Virgil is in parts a little more disguised. It
is, again more majorum, devoted to Diction, and, the Muses having been
invited to cross the stage once more, our Mentor first reprobates Obscurity.
But though you must not be obscure, you may and should be Figurative,
and not a few of the best known of our ancient acquaintances the Figures—
Metaphor, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, and so forth—are introduced and
commended, or sometimes discommended. It is extremely noteworthy that
the warnings-off include one far from ugly conceit—

“Aut crines Magnæ Genetricis gramina dicat.”

This, of course, is quite in accordance with the horror of a daring metaphor
—of one which runs the risk of seeming “frigid”—which we find prevailing
from Aristotle to Longinus, and even in both these great men. To us, most
assuredly, the likening of the grass to the tresses of Mother Earth is not in
the least absurd, but a very beautiful and poetical phrase, awaking, and
adjusting itself aptly to, a train of equally poetical suggestion. But before
very long the advice as to the choice of language takes the plain and simple
form, “Strip the Ancients!” The poet is bidden to fit

“exuvias veterumque insignia”

to himself; he is to gird himself up to the “theft,” and drive the spoil on
every occasion. He who trusts to his own wit and invention is unhesitatingly
condemned and pitied. If you want to live, to have your works escape
decay, you must “steal.” Vida repeats the very word over and over again,
and without the slightest bashfulness or compunction. He is, however, good
enough to admit that, if a new word is absolutely wanted to express

something not in the ancients, it may be invented or borrowed—say from
Greek—as the older Latins had themselves done. When one word is
difficult to find or awkward if found, you must employ Periphrasis.
Compounds are permitted to a certain extent (the weakness of Latin and its
brood in this respect is well known), but never to a greater than that of two
words. Perterricrepas is stigmatised by innuendo, though the word itself is
Lucretian, and though there is absolutely no principle in the restriction. You
are to tone down ill-sounding proper names, as Sicharbas into Sichæus. But
in all cases your words are to be entirely subservient to the sense, though
they may and should be suited to it—a doctrine which lends itself of course
to extensive Virgilian illustration. And so the poem concludes with a
peroration of some length, drawing ever and ever closer to, and at last
ending in, the laudation of the unrivalled Maro.
Had it not been for the astonishing accuracy with which, as has been said,
Vida actually anticipated the dominant critical taste of something like three
hundred years, and the creative taste of about half that period, not many
Essential more lines than we have given pages might have been
poverty of its
theory.
devoted to him. That the poem as a composition is a
sufficiently elegant piece of patchwork may of course be
freely granted; and it deserves perhaps less grudging praise for the extreme
fidelity and ingenuity with which it illustrates its own doctrines. But those
doctrines themselves are, whether we look at them in gross or in detail,
some of the poorest and most beggarly things to be found in the whole
range of criticism. That the prescriptions are practically limited to those
necessary for turning out the epic or “heroic” poem does not so much
matter—though it is not entirely without significance. Vida’s idea of poetry
is simply and literally shoddy.[40] That fabric—the fact is perhaps not
invariably known to those who use the word—differs from others, not as
pinchbeck differs from gold, or cotton from silk, but in being exclusively
composed of already manufactured and worn textures which are torn up and
passed afresh through mill and loom. And this is the process—and
practically the sole process—which Vida enjoins on the poet, going so far
as to pronounce anathema on any one who dares to pursue any other.
When it is examined in detail the proceeding may excite even more
astonishment, which will be wisely directed not more to the original
Historical and symptomatic conception of it than to the extent to which, from
significance.
what followed, it seems to have hit certain

peculiarities in the æsthetic sense of mankind as regards poetry. We may
easily go wrong by devoting too much attention to the fact of Vida’s
individual selection of the poet to whom all other poets are bound jurare in
verba. It is certain that, from his own day to this, Virgil has appealed to
many tastes—and to some of the greatest—secure of his result of being
pronounced altissimo poeta. Those who like him least cannot but admit that
Dante and Tennyson among poets, that Quintilian and Scaliger—nay, that
even Boileau—among critics, are not precisely negligible quantities. But
the real subject—not merely of astonishment but of reasonable and
deliberate determination to adopt a position of “No Surrender” in the denial
of Vida’s position—is this selection of any poet, no matter who it may be,
as not only a positive pattern of all poetic excellence, but a negative index
expurgatorius of all poetic delinquency. Not Homer, not Dante, not
Shakespeare himself, can be allowed the first position; and the main
principle and axiom of all sound Criticism is, that not merely no actual poet,
but no possible one, can be allowed the second. This kind of poetical
predestination—this fixing of a hard-and-fast type, within which lies all
salvation and without which lies none—is utter blasphemy against the
poetical spirit. Not only will simple imitation of the means whereby one
poet has achieved poetry not suffice to enable another to achieve it, but this
suggestion is by far the least dangerous part of the doctrine. It will probably
lead to the composition of much bad poetry, but it will not necessarily cause
the abortion, or the mistaking when born, of any that is good. The
damnatory clauses of the creed must have, and did have, this fatal effect.
Vida and those who followed him excused themselves, were accepted by
their disciples, and have recently been eulogised by our newest Neo-
The alleged Classics, as following Nature and Reason. That they said—
appeal to
Reason and
perhaps that they thought—they followed both is
Nature. unquestionable.[41] But as a matter of fact their Law of
Nature—like the Articles of War in Marryat’s novel—was a
dead letter, owing to the proviso, from the first more or less clearly hinted at
and latterly avowed, that all of Nature that was worth imitating had already
been imitated by the ancients. As for the appeal to Reason, it is a mere
juggle with words; and it is astonishing that at this time of day any one
should be deluded by it. What Reason prescribes Invocations to the Muses?
What Reason insists upon beginning at the middle instead of at the
beginning? What Reason is there in the preference of the pale académie of

Drances to the Rembrandt sketch of the demagogue whom Ulysses
cudgelled? of the shield of Æneas to the car of Achilles? of Sichæus to
Sicharbas? What has Reason to say (more than she has to say against poetic
transports altogether) against the exquisite and endlessly suggestive
metaphor of “the tresses of the Mighty Mother” for the grass, with its wave,
and its light, and its shadow, and the outline of the everlasting hills and
vales as of the sleeping body beneath it? In all these cases, and in a hundred
others, we may boldly answer “None and Nothing!” The true Reason—the
Mind of the World—has not a word to say against any of these forbidden
things, or in favour of any of those preferred ones.
But there is, let it be freely enough granted, a false Reason which has, no
doubt, very much to say against the one and in favour of the other. The
warped and stunted common-sense, the pedestrian and prosaic matter-of-
factness, which is no doubt natural enough in a certain way to mankind, had
made little appearance during the Middle Ages. These Ages may be called,
if any one chooses, childish, they may be still more justly called fantastic;
but they were never prosaic. It might be said of their Time-Spirit as of the
albatross, that

“Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.”

But there was no doubt about the wings. With the Renaissance, prose, in the
good sense no doubt as well as in the bad, returned; and as if to revenge
itself for the universal employment of poetry during the Middle Ages
themselves, it proceeded to lay hands even upon the poet. He might
“transport”; with Longinus before them (if Vida had him not, his followers
had), they could not very well deny this. But his methods of transporting
must be previously submitted to a kind of inspectorship; and anything
dangerous or unusual was strictly forbidden. His bolt was not to be “shot
too soon nor beyond the moon”: he was most particularly not to be “of
imagination all compact.” On the contrary, his imagination was to be
alloyed with doses of the commonest common-sense. He might not even
imp his wings save with registered feathers, and these feathers were to be
neither too long nor too gay.
Such are the principles that we find in Vida, and such their inevitable
result. Only let us once more repeat, not merely that he may well, in the
admirable words of Lord Foppington, “be proud to belong to so prevailing a

party” as the Neo-Classics of the following three centuries, but that he
actually led and almost made that party himself.
A considerable time—more than a quarter of a century—had elapsed
between Politian and Vida; but from the appearance of the latter’s book to
the end of the century not more than three years on the average[42] passed
without the appearance of a critical treatise of some importance. Every now
The main stream and then a short lull would occur; but this was always made
started.
up by a greater crowd of writers after the interval. Such
“rallies” of criticism (which occurred particularly during the fourth
decade[43] of the century, about its very centre,[44] throughout the seventh,[45]
eighth,[46] and ninth[47] decades, and just at the end[48]) were no doubt to
some extent determined by the academic habits of the Italians, and the
readiness with which members of the same academy, or different
academies, took up the cudgels against each other. The individual exercises
took various forms. A very large part of the work consists of commentaries
on Aristotle’s Poetics; another, closely connected, of set “Arts Poetic,”
more ostensibly original; some deal with vulgar and some with “regular”
poetry, while the concrete and comparative method is by no means
neglected, though the abstract and theoretic is on the whole preferred. To
attempt classification by kind would be a sacrifice of real to apparent
method; and to trace the development of the same ideas in different writers
would lead to inextricable confusion and criss-cross reference. We shall
probably find it best to follow the rule which has been observed with rare
exceptions throughout this History—that of giving the gist of particular
books and the opinions of particular authors together, and leaving bird’s-eye
views to the Interchapters.
Only two years after the appearance of Vida’s poem appeared the next
critical Italian book of importance, the first instalment of Trissino’s Poetica.
Trissino. The first instalment—for a singular interval took place
between the beginning and the completion of this work. The first four parts
were, as has just been said, published in 1529, when the main stream of
Italian criticism had hardly begun to flow; the two last not till 1563, two
years after the publication of Scaliger’s great work, and after a full
generation (in the ordinary count) of active discussion of the matters.[49]
Such conditions cannot fail to affect the homogeneity of a book. But still
Trissino put it forth as one book in different parts, not, as he might very
well have done, and as others actually did, as two books; and we are

therefore entitled, and indeed bound, with the caution just given, to treat it
as a whole. The handsome quartos,[50] well printed and beautifully
frontispieced and vignetted, of the standard edition of Trissino’s Opere, are
perhaps, taking them together, rather an ornament to the shelf than a
plentiful provision of furniture for the mind. The disadvantages of versi
sciolti have not often been shown more conspicuously than in the Italia
Liberata, and the Sofonisba has little but its earliness and regularity to plead
as a set-off to the general shortcomings of the modern classical Drama. The
better repute of Italian comedy would hardly have arisen from such pieces
as I Simillimi; and the Rime are most ordinary things. In our own division
he is of some historical account; for it is impossible not to be grateful to the
first publisher of the De Vulgari Eloquio, and that praise of earliness, which
he has earned in more than one respect, must be extended to the first four
parts of the Poetica. He boasts justly enough that nobody, save Dante and
Antonio da Tempo, was before him, and that both of these had written in
Latin.
Trissino does not, in his first instalment, busy himself with those abstract
discussions which were soon to furnish the staple of Italian criticism. He
Division of his adopts Aristotle’s “Imitation” briefly without cavil or
Poetic.
qualification; and then passes, in his First Part or
“Division,” to the question of choosing your language, in which he
generally follows Dante, but with an adaptation to the time. It is not with
him a question of making an “Illustrious Vulgar Tongue,” an “Italian,” but
of calling by that name one already adopted. In his further remarks on
Diction he sometimes borrows, and often expands or supplements, the very
words of Dante at first, and then passes to elaborate discussion, with
examples, of the qualities of speech—Clearness, Grandeur, Beauty,
Swiftness. Next he deals with what he calls the costume—character, ethos,
suiting of style to person—with truth, artifice, and what he calls the
“fashions”—that is to say, the alterations of quantity, &c., by dwelling,
slurring, syncope, and the like. The arrangement of this First Division is not
very logical; but, as we have seen, cross-division has been the curse of
rhetorical-formal discussion of the kind from a very early period to the
present day. The Second Division deals with pure prosody, the division of
feet, shortening (rimozione), as in ciel for cielo, elision, cæsura, &c.; the
Third with arrangement of verses and stanzas; the Fourth with the complete

forms of Sonnet, Ballata, and Canzone, the sub-varieties of which were
detailed with great care and plentiful examples.
Here what might more properly be called the First Part, consisting of
these four divisions, ends; the long subsequent Second Part (made up of the
Fifth and Sixth Divisions) has a separate Preface-dedication referring to the
gap. These parts are not, like the others, divided into sections with
headings; and, doubtless on the pattern if not of any one particular treatise,
of the spirit of many which had gone between, they deal with general
questions. The Imitation theory is handled at some length, and with citation
of Plato as well as of Aristotle; the kinds of poetry are treated on a more
general standard, and not with mere reference to the rules of constructing
each. The larger part of the Fifth Division is given entirely to Tragedy: the
Sixth begins with that Heroic Poem which was so much on the mind of the
country and the century. But it ends chiefly on Figures—the formal heart of
Trissino, long-travelled as it has been, fondly turning to its old loves at the
last.
The contents of the treatise or treatises, especially if we take them with
Trissino’s attempts to introduce the Greek Omega and the Greek Epsilon
into Italian spelling, his grammatical “Doubts,” and his later “Introduction
to Grammar,” his dialogue Il Castellano, and so forth,[51] will show his
His critical standpoint with sufficient clearness. It is almost purely
value.
formal in the minor, not to say the minim, kinds of form.
He is indeed credited by some with a position of importance, in the history
of the Unities. He is, they say, the first to refer to the observance of the
Unity of Time as a distinction from “ignorant poets,”[52] giving therewith a
disparaging glance at mediæval drama.[53] But this overlooks the fact that he
is simply repeating what Aristotle says, with an addition much more
likely[54] to refer to non-Humanist contemporaries than to the almost
forgotten “mystery.” His theory of the Heroic Poem, like his practice in the
Italia Liberata, is slavishly Aristotelian. The chief evidence of real
development that I can find is in his treatment of Comedy, where the
extremely rapid and contemptuous dismissal of the Master called
imperatively for some supplement, considering the popularity of the kind in
the writer’s own time and country. Possibly reinforcing Aristotle here with
Cicero, and certainly using the famous Suave mari magno of Lucretius, he
succeeds in putting together a theory of the ludicrous to which, or to some
subsequent developments of it in Italy, Hobbes’s “passion of sudden glory”

has been[55] not unjustly traced. The “sudden” seems indeed to be directly
due to Maggi, a critic who will be presently mentioned with other
commentators on the Poetics. And Maggi had published long before
Trissino’s later Divisions appeared, though, it may be, not before they were
written.[56]
The growth during the interval had been of three kinds, sometimes
Editors, &c., of blended, sometimes kept apart. The first kind consisted of
the Poetics.
translations, editions, and commentaries of and on the
Poetics; the second, of abstract discussions of Poetry; the third, of more or
less formal “Arts” not very different from Trissino’s own. The first class
produced later, in the work of Castelvetro, a contribution of almost the first
importance to the History and to the Art of Criticism; and it could not but
exercise a powerful influence. It belongs, however, in all but its most
prominent examples (such as that just referred to, which will be fully
discussed in the next chapter), rather to monographers on Aristotle than to
general historians of Criticism, inasmuch as it is mainly parasitic. Before
Pazzi. any book of original critical importance later than
Trissino’s had been issued, in 1536,[57] Alessandro de’ Pazzi published a
Latin translation of the Poetics, which for some time held the position of
standard, and a dozen years later came three important works on the book—
Robortello’s edition of 1548, Segni’s Italian translation of 1549, and
Maggi’s edition of 1550—all showing the attention and interest which the
subject was exciting, while, still before the later “Divisions” of Trissino
appeared, Vettori in 1560 added his edition, of greater importance than any
earlier one. Long before this the book had become a regular subject of
lectures. Of these writers Robortello, and still more Vettori (“Victorius”),
were of the greatest service to the text; Maggi, who was assisted by
Lombardi, to the discussion of the matter.[58]
In the critical handling of these editors and commentators we find, as we
Robortello, Segni, Maggi, should expect, much of the old rhetorical trifling.
Vettori.
For all their scorn, expressed or implied, of the
Middle Ages, they repeat the distinctions of poetica, poesis, poeta, and
poema[59] as docilely as Martianus, or a student of Martianus, could have
done a thousand or five hundred years before, and they hand it on too as a
sort of charmed catchword to Scaliger[60] and Jonson.[61] But brought face to
face as they are with the always weighty, though by no means always
transparently clear, doctrines of Aristotle, and self-charged with the duty of

explaining and commenting them, they cannot, if they would, escape the
necessity of grappling with the more abstract and less merely technological
questions. Robortello,[62] like Maggi, though less elaborately, has a theory of
the ludicrous. Both, and others, necessarily grapple with that crux of the
katharsis which has not yet ceased to be crucial. Both, with Segni, discuss
the Unity of Time and differ about it; though none of the three has yet
discovered (as indeed it is not discoverable in Aristotle or Aristotle’s literary
documents) the yet more malignant Unity of Place. Vettori would extend the
cramp in time (not of course with the twenty-four hours’ limit) from tragedy
to epic. Most of them have arrived at that besotment as to “verisimilitude”
which is responsible for the worst parts of the Neo-Classic theory, and
which, in the pleasant irony common to all entanglements with Duessas of
the kind, makes the unfortunate lovers guilty of the wildest excesses of
artificial improbability. And in all, whether they project their reflections on
their text into more general forms or not, we can see the gradual
crystallising of a theory of poetry, heroic, or dramatic, or general.
Nor was such theory left without direct and independent exposition
Theorists: during the period which we are considering. The first
Daniello.
author of one is generally taken to be Daniello, whose
Poetica appeared in 1536; and I have not discovered any earlier claimant. I
do not quite understand how Mr Spingarn has arrived at the conclusion that
“in Daniello’s theory of tragedy there is no single Aristotelian element,”
especially as he himself elsewhere acknowledges the close—almost verbal
—adherence of this early writer to the Stagirite. But it is probably true that
Daniello was thinking more of the Platonic objections and of following out
the Boccaccian defence, than of merely treading in the footprints of
Aristotle. He is the first, since Boccaccio himself, to undertake that
generous, if rather wide and vague as well as superfluous, “defence of
poesy” which many Italians repeated after him, and which was repeated
after them by our Elizabethans, notably by Sir Philip Sidney.
As his little book is somewhat rare, and as it has such good claims to be
among the very earliest vernacular disputations of a general character on
poetry in Italy, if not also in Europe, it may be well to give some account of
it. My copy has no title-page, but dates itself by a colophon on the recto of
the errata-leaf at the end, with a veto-privilege, by concession of the Pope,
the seignory of Venice, and all the other princes and lords of Italy,
advertised by Giovan Antonio di Nicolini da Sabio, Venice, 1536. It fills

136 small pages of italic type, and is in dialogue form, rather rhetorically
but not inelegantly written, and dedicated by Bernardo Daniello of Lucca to
Andrea Cornelio, Bishop-Elect of Brescia. Daniello does refer to Aristotle,
and borrows (not perhaps quite intelligently) from him; but his chief
sources are the Latins, and he sets or resets, with no small interest for us,
that note of apology for the Poets against Plato which was to dominate
Italian criticism, and after exercising some, but less, effect on French, to be
strenuously echoed in England. There are some rather striking things in
Daniello. He is sound enough on the mission of the poet as being to delight
(though he is to teach too) and also to persuade—the ancient union of
Poetics and limited Rhetoric evidently working in him. On the relations of
poetry and philosophy he might be echoing Maximus Tyrius and Boccaccio,
and very likely is thinking of the latter. But he strikes a certain cold into us
by remarking that Dante (whom he nevertheless admires very much) was
perhaps greater and more perfect as a philosopher than as a poet; and it does
not seem likely that he was aware of the far-reaching import of his own
words when he lays it down (p. 26) that Invention, Disposition, and
Elocution being the three important things, the poet is not, as some think,
limited to any special matter. If he had meant this, of course he would have
come to one of those arcana of criticism which are even yet revealed, as
matter of serene conviction, to very few critics. But he pretty certainly did
not fully understand his own assertion; and indeed slurs it off immediately
afterwards. After taking some examples from Dante and more from
Petrarch, Daniello adopts (again prophetically) the doctrine that the Poet
must practically know all arts and sciences, in order that he may properly
deal with his universal subject. He is specially to study what is called in
Latin Decorum and in Italian Convenevolezza. Tragedy and Comedy are to
be rigidly distinguished. And so this curious First Blast of the Trumpet of
sixteenth-century vernacular criticism is emphatic against the confusion
which was to bring about the mightiest glories of sixteenth-century
literature. A large part of the small treatise is taken up with examples, in the
old rhetorical manner of qualities, “colours,” figures, &c. The whole of the
latter part of the First Book consists of these, as does almost the whole of
the Second, with an extension into verbal criticism of the passages cited as
illustrating kinds, technical terms, and the like. Indeed the general
considerations are chiefly to be found in the first forty or fifty pages; and it
is really remarkable how much there is in this short space which practically

anticipates in summary the ideas of most of the much more voluminous
writers who follow.[63]
Fracastoro, physician, logician, and not ungraceful poet of the graceless
subject of Syphilis, deals with both Plato and Aristotle in his dialogue
Naugerius, and discourses deeply on the doctrine of Imitation, the Theory
of Beauty, the Aristotelian conception of the poet as more universal and
philosophical than the historian, and the Platonic objection to the intervals
Fracastoro. between poetry and truth. This dialogue,[64] however (the
full title is Naugerius sive de Poetica, its chief interlocutor being Andrea
Navagero, the best follower of Catullus in Renaissance Latin[65]), tells a
certain tale by its coupling with another, Turrius sive de Intellectione. It is
wholly philosophical in intent and drift: it is perhaps the very “farthest”—
comparatively early (1555) as is its date—of those Italian excursions, in the
direction of making Criticism an almost wholly abstract and a priori
subject, which balance the unblushing “Convey—do nothing but convey,”
of Vida and his followers. One of its very earliest axioms (p. 324 ed. cit.
infra) is that “qui recte dicere de hac re velit, prius sciat necesse est,
quænam poetæ natura est, quidque ipsa poetica, tum et quis philosophi
genius,” &c. It must be admitted that Fracastoro is among the very ablest
and most thoroughgoing explorers of these altitudes. No one has more
clearly grasped, or put more forcibly, than he has that compromise between
Plato and Aristotle which has been and will be mentioned so often as
characteristic of the Italian thinkers in this kind. Indeed, the fifty pages of
his Dialogue are almost a locus classicus for the first drawing up of the
creed which converted Sidney, and to which Milton, indocile to creeds as he
was, gave scarcely grudging allegiance. It is full, too, of interest in
deliverances on minor points—the difference between the orator and the
rhetor (p. 343), the shaping of a particular kind of “orator” into a poet, his
universality and his usefulness, the limits of his permitted fiction and the
character of his charm. But Fracastoro is wholly in these generals: it is
much if he permits himself a rare illustration from an actual poet.
And always in these writers we find the old deviations, the old red
herrings drawn across the scent. Fracastoro himself, reasonable as he is in
many ways, falls into the foolish old fallacy that a good poet must be a
good man, and the less obviously ridiculous but still mischievous demand
from him of the all-accomplished acquirements once asked of the
rhetorician.

Putting aside, for the moment, such rather later and much more important
works as the Discorsi of Giraldi Cinthio, the De Poetis Nostrorum
Temporum of his half-namesake Lilius Giraldus, and the two capital
treatises of Minturno, one of which appeared after Trissino’s book, we may
give a few words to two Italian tractates, the Versi e Regole della Nuova
Poesia Toscanaof Claudio Tolomei (1539) and Muzio’s or Mutio’s Italian
verse Arte Poetica, which was published with some other work in 1551.[66]
Formalists: The last is noteworthy as an early example of the
Mutio. Tolomei
and classical
vernacular critical poem—a kind suggested by Horace, and
metres. illustrated later by Boileau and Pope, but certainly more
honoured by its practitioners than in itself. Yet it would not
be just to deny Mutio a high if rather vague conception of poetry, and, in
particular, a most salutary conviction that the poet must disrealise his
subjects. Tolomei’s book, on the other hand, challenges attention as
probably the beginning of that pestilent heresy of “classical metres” which,
arising in Italy, and tainting France but slightly (as was natural considering
the almost unquantified character of the modern French language), fastened
with virulence upon England, affected some of our best wits, and was
within measurable distance of doing serious harm. The plague was so much
at its worst with us that the chapter on Elizabethan Criticism will be the
proper place for its discussion. But though Ascham himself thought it no
plague at all, it was certainly one of the very worst of these “Italianations”
to which he objected so violently; and Tolomei was its first prophet in the
country of its origin.
Not a few names, some famous in European literature for other
performances of their bearers, some almost unknown except to the student
of this subject, fall into one or other of these classes, or, as very commonly
Others: happens, qualify in a undecided manner for two, or for all.
Tomitano,
Lionardi, B.
As early as 1545 Tomitano[67] had dwelt on the above-
Tasso, Capriano. mentioned fallacy of the necessary learning of poets:
Lionardi,[68] nine years later, in a pair of Dialogues
expressly devoted to Poetic Invention, extended this in the widest and
wildest manner, so that the poet becomes a perfect good-man-of-the-Stoics
—an all-round and impeccable Grandison-Aristotle. The same idea and
others were emitted by Bernardo Tasso, good father of a great son, who not
only practised poetry to the vast extent of the Amadigi, but discussed it in a
formal Ragionamento of the subject.[69] Later, Capriano[70] gave the more

elaborate exaltation of poetry as a sort of Art of Arts, combining and
subduing to its own purpose all forms of Imitation, and following up Vida’s
superfine objections to Homer as trivial and undignified, and his rapturous
exaltation of the “decency” of Virgil. This book, very short, is also rather
important—more so than might be judged from some accounts of it. It is
neither paged, nor numbered in folio, but does not extend beyond signature
F ii. of a small quarto, with a brief appendix of Italian verse. There are eight
chapters—the first discussing what things are imitable and what imitation
is; the second vindicating for poetry the portion of supreme imitative art;
the third dividing it into “natural” and “moral”; the fourth arguing that Epic
or Heroic (not, as Aristotle thinks, drama) is the highest kind of “moral”
poetry; the fifth containing, among other things, an interesting revolt
against Greek; the sixth discoursing on number and sound; the seventh
exalting the good poem above everything; and the eighth rapidly discussing
the origin, rank, necessity, parts, force, end, &c., of Poetry. Capriano does
not give himself much room, and fails, like most of these critics, in the all-
important connection of his theories with actual work; but he must have
been a man of no common independence and force of thought.[71]
More important than these to us, though less technically critical, and
therefore in some cases commending themselves less to students of the
subject from some points of view, are some poets and men of letters of the
earlier and middle parts of the century who have touched critical subjects. I
Il Lasca. should myself regard the Prologues[72] of Grazzini (“Il
Lasca”)—in which he repeatedly and unweariedly protests against the
practice of moulding Italian comedy upon Plautus and Terence, regardless
of the utter change in manners, and so forth—as worth shelves full of “in-
the-air” treatises. For this application of the speculum vitæ[73] notion, the
idea of The Muses’ Looking-glass, which was obtained from Cicero through
Donatus, was the salvation of the time, keeping Comedy at least free from
the fossilising influences of the false Imitation. Although the unwary might
reasonably take the author of the famous caution not to read St Paul for fear
of spoiling style (there are at least half-a-dozen of the greatest pieces of
style in the world to be found in the two Epistles to the Corinthians alone)
as either a silly practitioner of undergraduate paradox or a serious dolt, yet
the Della Volgar Lingua of Bembo[74] is by no possibility to be neglected in
Bembo. taking account of the critical attitude of Italy at the time. It
is of course too purist and “precious”; it “sticks in the letter” to a perilous

extent; but there is real appreciation in it of what the writer can appreciate,
and among the things that he can appreciate are good and great things.
Caro. Annibale Caro has (and deserves) a bad name, not merely
for the unfair manner in which he carried on his controversy with
Castelvetro (see next chapter), but for the tedious logomachy of the
controversy itself, which on his side, besides filling a regular Apologia and
Varchi. other pieces, overflows constantly into his letters.[75] But
this very controversy testifies to the zest and the undoubted sincerity with
which literary matters were dealt with by the Italians, and it served further
as a starting-point for the elaborate Ercolano[76] of Varchi, who in divers
lectures, &c., also dealt with the more abstract questions of the nature of
poetry, the status of the poet, and the like. In short, the documents on the
subject have already reached the condition referred to by the warning given
in the introductory chapter to the first volume of this book, that while in that
volume we had to search for and discuss every scrap bearing on the subject,
here large classes of document would have to be treated by summary and
representation only.
Moreover, great as are the volume and the intensity of Italian attention to
criticism in the years between 1535 and 1560, the Devil’s Advocate may,
without mere cavilling, cast disparagement upon most of its expressions.
The dealings of the scholars with the subject are no doubt to a certain extent
accidental or obligatory; they might have bestowed, and in fact actually did
bestow,[77] at least equal pains on texts not directly, or not at all, concerning
criticism. The work of Tolomei is merely an example of those Puckish
tricks which something sometimes plays on the human intellect; that of
Muzio a dilettante exercise mainly. The treatises of the others from Daniello
to Varchi hover between abstract discussion, which sometimes approaches
twaddle, dilettante trifling which makes the same approach on another side,
and an estimable, but for literature at large comparatively unimportant,
guerilla about the virtues and qualities, the vices and defects, of the Italian
language—a language which had already seen its very best days, and was
settling down to days very far from its best. The three authors to whom we
shall now come, and who will occupy us to the end of this chapter, escape,
in one way or another, the brunt of all these grudgements. Minturno
supplies us with the most wide-ranging and systematic handlings of poetry
in its general, and of “regular” and “vulgar” poetry in their particular,
aspects that had yet been produced, Giraldi Cinthio with some of the most

original critical essays, Lilius Giraldus with a survey of the poetical, and to
some extent the literary, state of Europe in his time, for the like of which we
may look in vain before and not too successfully since.
Antonio Sebastiano, called Minturno (which is stated—I know not with
what correctness—in a MS. note in my copy of the Arte Poetica to be
merely an “academic” surname), is a good example of that combination of
scholastic thoroughness and diligence with wider range of study which
honourably distinguishes the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but
which, save in rare instances, went out in the later years of the last-named
Minturno. age, and has too seldom been recovered since. In 1559 he
produced a De Poeta and in 1563 an Arte Poetica, one of which, as the
respective titles imply, is written in Latin and the other in Italian, but which
are by no means replicas of each other with the language changed. Both
were printed at Venice; and though they came from different presses, they
range very well together, both being in a smallish quarto, but with very
close type, so that the 560 odd pages of the De Poeta and the 450 odd of the
Arte contain between them a vast amount of matter. The plans of the two
treatises—which are allotted naturally according to their language, the Latin
to poetry in general and to classical verse, the Italian to its own kind—are
not strikingly but slightly different. The De Poeta, which is addressed to
Ettore Pignatelli, Duke of Bivona, takes the time-honoured form of a
symposium or dialogue, the persons being the poet Sannazar (who is always
introduced by his Latin names of Actius Syncerus) and his friends, and the
scene the famous Villa Mergellina. Indeed, Minturno seems to have written
the book at Naples, whence he dates it a year before that of its appearance.
In the later work he himself is the principal speaker, his antagonists or
interlocutors being Vespasiano Gonzaga in the First book, Angelo Costanzo
in the Second, Bernardino Rota in the Third, and Ferrante Carafa in the
Fourth. The dialogue-form, it may also be mentioned, is less, and that of the
formal treatise more, prominent in the Arte.
Both volumes have the invaluable accompaniment of side-notes—an
accompaniment which not only makes the writer’s point more easily
intelligible to the reader, but prevents the writer himself from straying. But
The De Poeta. the De Poeta is not furnished with either Contents or Index,
while the Arte is liberally provided with both. This, in the first case, is to be
regretted, not merely because the book is much the longer of the two, but
because the indulgences of the dialogic form are more fully taken in it.

After a suitable beginning (with a fons and a platanus and other properties),
the subject is opened with a panegyric of poetry. The origins of literature
were in verse; all nations practised it. A more sensible line is taken (it will
be understood that the interlocutors of course take different views, and one
judges by the general drift) on the subject of the all-accomplishment of the
poets, than is the case with some of the writers above mentioned; but
Minturno points out (which is no doubt true enough) that poetry in a
manner “holds all the Arts in fee,” can draw upon and dignify all. On the
connection of verse with poetry he holds a middle position, close to that of
Aristotle himself, and not very different from that long after taken up by
Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria. He will not pronounce verse
essential to poetry, but evidently thinks that poetry would be extremely
foolish to dispense with its practically inseparable companion. The
consecrated procession of poets from Amphion and Orpheus to Homer and
even Virgil is set a-going as usual. Then the discussion, after a little
skirmishing, settles down at p. 22 to the question of Imitation; and, amid
much scholastic subdivision of its kinds and manners, the delight produced
by this is very strongly insisted on. Next, the Platonic onslaught is
discussed, and urged or repelled by turns; the defence being clearly the
author’s side, and maintained with considerable vigour, and with plentiful
examples from Homer and Virgil both. The line taken, however, leads
Minturno to lay stress on the instructive power of poetry. The poet’s
purpose will, he holds, govern his imitation, and direct it so as to excite
admiration in the reader or hearer. This is possibly the source of the next-
century endeavour to elevate Admiration to the level of Pity and Terror
themselves.[78] Hence Minturno is constrained to share the idea of the
necessarily virtuous character of the poet: and, except that he never
separates the delectare from the prodesse altogether, he hugs the dangerous
shore of the hérésie de l’enseignement too closely in his endeavour to
escape the Platonic privateers. By degrees the discussion glides into the
comparison of Epic and Tragedy, and the question whether Poetry is a
matter of Art or of Inspiration—and decides that it is both. And the First
Book ends with the pronouncement that a good poet must be a good man,
but that he may sometimes deal with not-good things.
The Second begins with one of the demonstrations (which to us seem
otiose, but which were very important, not merely to the ideas of the age,
but as bulwarks against the Puritan and Utilitarian objections of all times)

that the poets, especially Homer and Virgil, are masters, whether necessarily
or not, of all the liberal arts and of philosophy as well. When we remember
the Philistine anti-poetics of Locke much more than a century after
Minturno’s time—nay, the still existing, if lurking, idea that “great poet”
must be (as somebody asserts that it is or was in Irish slang) synonym for
“utter fool”[79]—we shall not bear too hardly on our author. But this
discussion, in its turn, is bid to “come up higher.” What is to be the
Institutio Poetæ? What is he to do and learn that he may in turn (p. 102)
“delight, teach, transport.”[80]
In all cases the admiration of the reader or hearer (p. 104) must follow.
But it will be obtained not quite in the same way as by the orator, and with a
difference in the different kinds of poetry. The parts of a poem, too, are
dealt with in a more or less Aristotelian manner, but with large additions
and substitutions, in view of the greater range of literature that Minturno
has before him, and of the desire specially to bring in Virgil, of whom our
critic, though not quite such a fanatical partisan as Vida and Scaliger, is a
hearty admirer (see for instance p. 135). All the “parts” have more or less
attention in this book, both with reference to the different “kinds,”
especially epic and “heroic,” and also with regard to those general
principles of poetry which Minturno never forgets. The Third Book of
nearly 100 pages is directly devoted to tragedy; and Minturno pursues in
reference to this the same plan of following, but with a certain
independence and a great deal of expatiation, in Aristotelian footsteps. He
still lays great stress on Admiration; and it is really curious that in thus
forestalling, no doubt, Corneille’s teaching, he has by anticipation hit at
Racine and the doucereux in a phrase[81] which has been fairly guessed to
have supplied Milton with a famous one[82] of his own. He does not pay so
much attention to the crux of the katharsis (on which most of these critics
necessarily dwell more or less) in this treatise as in the Arte (v. infra).
The Fourth Book, even longer than the Third, is, like it, entirely devoted
to one subject; and the change of modern as compared with ancient view is
shown strongly by the fact that this subject is Comedy. The admirers of
Plautus and Terence, the countrymen of Ariosto and Machiavelli, could not,
indeed, be expected to turn from Comedy with the disdainful shoulder of
Aristotle; but such elaborate treatment as this shows the hold which the
subject had obtained. Yet it is ominous that Minturno devotes especial
attention to the subject of types; though, in accordance with his usual

practice, he gives much space to a general treatment of the Ludicrous and
its sources. There is also a good deal of curious detail in this Book as to
costume and theatrical arrangements generally. The Fifth turns to Lyric, and
sets forth its different kinds, including Satire among them. And the Sixth
deals with Diction and Prosody, the section allotted to the latter being
comparatively short and interspersed between two on Style, proceeding of
course a good deal by Figures, though not in the most cut-and-dried
manner, and illustrated (as indeed are all the later Books) by abundant and
unceasing quotation. It may be observed that, as perhaps might be expected,
the dialogue-character disappears in them more and more, and the book
takes the form of a simple exposition by one or other of the personages.
This change prepares us for the arrangement of the Arte.
This book, as dates given and to be given show, was published
subsequently to the appearance of Scaliger’s Poetic, and may have been to
some extent influenced by it; but I do not think that Minturno, who
mentions Trissino and Bembo and Tolomei, ever refers to it, and he does
The Arte not give one the idea of a man who would conceal debts. In
Poetica.
fact, his work upon the same subject had been completed
earlier. In this he has necessarily to go over some of the same ground; but,
as noted above, he repeats very little. He starts with a general definition of
poetry as an imitation of various manners and persons in various modes,
either with words or with harmonies or with “times” separately, or with all
these things together, or with part of them. Other ternaries follow, as matter,
instrument, and mode; manners, affections, and deeds; suprahuman, human,
and infrahuman; personages; words, music, and “times”; epic, scenic, and
melic; prose, verse, and mixed narrative. These distinctions are put forth in
an orderly manner, but succinctly and without the discussion which is a
feature of the general parts of the De Poeta, Minturno evidently thinking
that he has sufficiently cleared the ground in that work. After some further
exposition of forms, &c., the handling is more specially directed to Epic
(i.e., narrative generally), and its parts and conditions are expounded, still
with a certain swiftness, but at greater length than before. And once more
the treatment concentrates itself—this time upon Romance. The origin of
the name and thing is lightly touched, and then the great question is
broached,[83] “Is Romance poetry?” Minturno will not refuse it the name;
but he cannot admit that it is the same kind of poetry as that of which
Aristotle and Horace have spoken. The contrarieties of Romance and

Heroic poetry are then carefully examined; and while much praise is given
to Ariosto, some fault is found with him, and the mantle of the Odyssey is
especially refused him. In fact, Minturno holds generally that the Romance
is a defective form of poetry, ennobled by the excellence of some of its
writers—a sort of middle position which is very noteworthy. But he hardens
his heart against the irresistible historical and inductive argument which the
defenders of the Romance had already discovered, and will have it that the
laws of poetry are antecedent to poetic production (p. 32). And for his main
style of narrative poetry he returns to Epic or “Heroic” proper, and
discusses it on the old lines of Plot, Character, Manners, Passions or
Affections, &c., always with modern examples from the great Italian poets.
He also makes the very important, but very disastrous, suggestion that the
Christian religion provides all the necessary “machinery” of Heroic,—a
suggestion which was elaborately followed out by Tasso and by Milton and
by many a lesser man, and which Dryden had thought of following, though
he luckily did not.[84]
The Second Book takes up Drama in the same manner, but—as was
always made legitimate by the parasitic character of at least Italian Tragedy
—with much more reference to ancient and less to modern writers. The
Third Book deals with Lyric, the same inclusion of Satire which we have
noticed in the De Poeta being made; and the Fourth with Poetic Diction,
Prosody, &c., still on the lines of the earlier treatise, but with entire
adaptation to the Italian subject. The latter books, as is natural, are much
more meticulous in their arrangement, descending, with complete propriety,
to the minutest details of rhyme and metre, as well as, where necessary, of
grammar. But Minturno never loses an opportunity of ascending to the
higher and more general considerations—the nature of harmony, the origin
and quality of rhyme, &c., the characters of kinds, and even, to some extent,
of authors. It is characteristic of him to give an elaborate discussion of the
Italian alphabet letter by letter from the poetical point of view, and to strike
off from this to a consideration of the relations of Italian, Latin, and foreign
modern languages, the general methods of elevating style, and the question
whether there ought to be completely separate diction for poetry and prose.
It is the presence of this contrast, or combination, in him which, as much
as anything else, has determined more attention in this place to Minturno
Their value. than to some other authors before noticed. In combination
of thoroughness and range he seems to me to hold a position both high and

rather solitary. He has not quite the elaborate system of Scaliger, but then he
is much less one-eyed; he is less original—has less diable au corps—than
Castelvetro, but he is far less eccentric and incalculable. His unfeigned
belief in the noble and general theories of poetry and the poet is set off by
his sedulous attention to particulars, as his attention to particulars is by his
escapes of relief into the region of generalisation, and by his all-important
addition of “transport” to “teach” and “delight.” He has not reached—he
has in fact declined—the historical antinomianism of Patrizzi (v. next
chap.); but that was inevitable, since this view was in part a reaction from
the movement which he represented, in part a development of theories
contemporary with himself. And his attitude in regard to the Romanzi is a
significant sign of the turn of the tide. Earlier, and in the neo-classics quand
même later, the fact that a thing differs in kind from the accepted forms of
poetry is proof that it is not poetry at all. Minturno cannot go this length. It
is poetry inferior in kind, he still insists; but the excellence of those who
have adopted it saves it, no matter to what extent. The concession is fatal. If
Balbus builds a wall contrary to the laws of nature and architecture, it will
not be an inferior wall; it will tumble down, and not be a wall at all. If he
works a sum on the principle that two and two make five, his answer will be
hopelessly wrong. But if the wall stands, if the sum comes right, the laws,
the principles, cannot be wrong, though they may be different from others.
The infallible and exclusive Kind-rules of the ancients are doomed to be
swept away through the little gap in the dam that Minturno has opened.
The Discorsi[85] of Giraldi Cinthio—famous author of Novelle, and now
much less famous, but perhaps not much less remarkable, producer of the
chief Italian horror-tragedy, the Orbecche—supply a very interesting
supplement-contrast to Minturno, whose earlier work they preceded by but
a few years, and whom they provided with a theory of Romance to protest
Giraldi Cinthio’s against. The exact date of the most interesting of them, and
Discorsi.
the question of property or plagiarism in their contents,
have been the subject of one of those tedious “quarrels of authors” which
are thickening upon us, but which we shall avoid as far as possible. Cinthio
On Romance. and a certain pupil of his, Giovanbattista Pigna, published
in the same year (1554) books on the “Romances”—i.e., poems like
Ariosto’s. Authorities decide in favour of the novelist, who asserts that his
book was written in 1549, while each asserted that he had furnished the
other with ideas; but it really does not matter. The point is, that on one of

the two, and very probably on both, there had dawned the critical truth,
which nobody had seen earlier, and on which Minturno himself would have
pulled down “the blanket of the dark” once more if he could. Cinthio, it
seems, first struck out the true line, and Pigna later developed it in still
greater detail. Aristotle did not know Romance, and therefore his rules do
not and cannot apply to it; while Italian literature generally is so different in
circumstances from Greek that it must follow its own laws. Then Cinthio
takes Ariosto and Boiardo, as Aristotle himself had taken the poets that
were before him, and formulates laws from them. He does not ostracise the
single-action and single-hero poem, the Aristotelian epic. But he adds the
many-actioned and many-heroed poem like Ariosto’s, and the chronicle-
poem of successive actions by one party, of which there are examples from
Statius downward (and of which, we may add, the Odyssey itself is really an
example). For these two latter, which he rightly regards as both Romantic,
he and Pigna (who is more specially Ariostian) gave rules accordingly, and
Cinthio even illustrated his by a poem on Hercules. Both, but especially
Pigna, despite their revolutionary tendencies in certain ways, cling to the
ethical point of view, and maintain, perhaps a little hardily, that the modern
romantic writers actually surpass the ancients in this respect.
In their main contention Cinthio and Pigna were no doubt right, and
On Drama. much in advance of their time. The reply of Minturno that
Poetry may adapt itself to the times, but cannot depart from its own
fundamental laws, is clearly a petitio principii. In his less important
Discorso on the Drama Cinthio is hardly at all rebel to Aristotle—indeed it
is very important to observe that even in the Romance Essay he has none of
the partisan and somewhat illiberal anti-Peripateticism which we find later
in Bruno and others. There he goes on the solid ground that Aristotle did not
know the Kind for which he does not account—that he was no more
blamable than, as we may say, supposing that he had given a definition of
mammalia which excluded the kangaroo. In the Drama Cinthio had not
been brought face to face with any similarly new facts. Italian tragedy, his
own included, was scrupulously Senecan, if not quite scrupulously
Aristotelian, in general lines. Italian comedy followed Plautus and Terence
only too closely; and though Cinthio’s lines of criticism (strengthened by
the Ciceronian-Donatist theory of the speculum vitæ) led him, like Il Lasca
and others, to insist on the different circumstances of Italian literature here
also, they necessitated no new lawmaking as in the case of the Romanzi.

Both Discorsi are full of ingenious aperçus, sometimes followed out—
Some points in sometimes not. For instance, when Cinthio (i. 24) cites his
both.
three examples of writers who have treated their heroes
from childhood upwards contrary to the Aristotelian principles, he instances
Xenophon in the Cyropædia as well as Statius and Silius Italicus. The
instance does not in his expressed remarks, but it might very well in his
own or others’ thoughts, lead to the consideration that whether verse is or is
not essential to poetry, it is certainly not essential to Romance—with all the
momentous and far-reaching consequences of that discovery. Again he
seems (i. 82) to have appreciated, with a taste and sense rare in his age, the
impropriety of mixing up Christian and Pagan mythology. And the same
taste and sense appear, as a rule, in the minuter remarks (p. 100 sq.) on
verse and phrase, and even on those minutest points not merely of verbal
but of literal criticism which the Italians, more sensible than some modern
critics, never despised, though they may sometimes have gone to the other
extreme. In fact, the last half, and rather more, of the Discorso is not so
much concerned with the Romances as with poetic diction and arrangement
in general, or even with these matters as concerns literature both in prose
and in verse.
The dramatic Discorso, or rather Discorsi (for we may throw in a third
piece on Satiric Composition), is much shorter than that on the Romances,
being necessarily less controversial, and therefore, as has been said, less
original. But Cinthio’s independence of mind does not desert him even here.
He is said to have been the first Italian who dared, in the Orbecche before
mentioned, to disregard the Senecan practice[86] (so tedious in all modern
imitations of it, and so crushingly exhibited in our own earliest tragic
attempts) of beginning with an entire scene, or even act, of monologue. But,
as often happens, his licences in some directions invite condonation by a
tighter drawing of the reins elsewhere. He is credited (or debited) with the
first reference in modern literature to the Unity of Time: and though it is
well always to accept these assertions of priority with a certain suspension
of judgment, it may be so. It is at any rate certain that he does out-Aristotle
Aristotle in regard to this Unity, upon which, as is well known, the Stagirite
lays very little stress. But he makes some amends by relaxing the
proscription of the happy ending, so long as the proper purging effects of
pity and terror are achieved. He also to some extent relaxes the extremest
stringency of the old rule about trucidations coram populo. There may be

death on the stage: but generally the bienséances of domestic life should be
preserved there. On one point, in which Cinthio has had assigned to him the
position of anti-Aristotelian origin, I venture to differ as to the interpretation
of the Poetics themselves, not merely from Mr Spingarn but from Professor
Butcher.[87] The later Neo-Classics, and especially the French, may have
made rank too absolute a qualification of the tragic Hero. But I must say
that I think they had their justification from Aristotle himself, and that
Cinthio is at worst but dotting the i's of the Stagirite as to σπουδαῖοι and
χρηστοί. His extreme admiration of the choruses of Seneca (in justification
whereof he cites Erasmus) is not wholly unwarranted. Few modern readers,
unfortunately, know the stately beauty of these artful odes: though of course
his preference (p. 81) of them to “all the Greeks” is wrong, and was
probably occasioned by the very small attention which most Renaissance
writers paid to Æschylus. The elaborate distinctions which he, like others,
seeks to draw between Tragedy and Comedy from artificial points of view
are to some extent justified by the very absence of such distinctions in
Aristotle. They thought it their duty to supply what they did not find.
The Discourse, or rather Letter (for it bears both titles, and in scale and
character rather deserves the latter name) on Satire is confessedly
supplementary to the other Discorsi, and may be at least connected with the
fact that the indefatigable author had himself attempted a satiric piece, Egle.
On Satire. He lays stress on the special connection of the Satire with
the cult of Bacchus, takes into consideration the poetical as well as the
scenic form, mentions the mixed or Varronian variety, and even extends his
view to the Bucolic or Pastoral proper. But there are only some five-and-
twenty pages, and the thing seems to have been really composed at “request
of friends.”
From a critic who did so much it would be somewhat unreasonable to
demand more. In fact, though Cinthio did not go so far along the high
historic path of truth as did Patrizzi thirty years later, he set on that path a
firm foot. For the moment, and in Italy, the romanzi were the true battle-
ground; just as in England, for instance, that battle-ground was to be found
a little later in the drama. At a period so early as this, and so close to the
actual revolution of the Renaissance, it could hardly be expected that any
one should reach the vantage-ground of a comprehensive survey of all
literature, so as to deduce from it the positive and enfranchising, and not
even from it the negative and disfranchising, laws of poetry. Not only had

the vernaculars, with the exception of Italian itself, hardly furnished, at the
time when Cinthio wrote, any modern literature fit to rank with the ancient
—not only was it far too late, or far too early, to expect any one to give
mediæval literature a fair chance with both—but men were still actually
disputing whether the vernaculars had a right to exist. They were, like his
namesake and clansman, to whom we come next, hinting surprise that any
man of genius and culture should employ these vernaculars when he might
write Latin, or, like one of his antagonists, Celio Calcagnini, aspiring to the
disuse of vernacular for literary purposes altogether. In an atmosphere still
so far from clear, with such heats and mists about, it is no small credit to
Cinthio that, whether moved by mere parochial patriotism or by the secret
feeling that sua res as a novelist was at question, or by anything else, he
heard and caught at the dominant of the tune of criticism proper.
Pigna’s I Romanzi,[88] whatever we may think of the quarrel between him
and Cinthio, is a book not to be mentioned without considerable respect, or
dismissed with mention so merely incidental as that given to it above. It is
Pigna. mainly, but not solely, a defence of Ariosto, and has not a
few merits,—a just conception of the essentially Romantic nature of the
Odyssey, a very careful and in the main sensible discussion of Prosody, and
a widish comparison of instances. The main defect of it is the besetting sin
of the whole three centuries with which this volume deals—the Obsession
of the Kind. Instead of being satisfied with the demonstration (which he and
Cinthio had reached) that Romance is not Epic, and is not bound by Epic
laws, Pigna torments himself to show that Romance is Epic in this
particular, not-Epic in that, and is alternately subject to and free from
bondage: while some of his detailed investigations may raise smile, or sigh,
or shrug, according to mood or temperament. Thus for instance he inquires
(after a fashion which we shall find echoed in Ronsard) into the character of
the objects—Lance, Horn, Ring—with which fatura (fairy agency) is
usually associated, till we feel inclined to say, “O learned and excellent
signor, the poet may put fatura in a warming-pan—if he pleases, and can do
it poeticamente!” But the book is, on the whole, a good book: and Pigna
deserves to rank with Cinthio and Patrizzi as one of the Three who, alone in
this first modern stage, saw, if but afar-off and by glimpses, the Promised
Land from which the ship of criticism was to be once more driven by
adverse winds for centuries to come.

A document of exceptional importance for us is provided by the two
curious dialogues De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum[89] of Lilius Gregorius
Giraldus, written about 1548-50, and dedicated partly to Renée of Ferrara,
the French Princess who for a time protected Marot and others, partly to
Lilius Giraldus: Cardinal Rangoni. Lilius, who was now in a good old age
his De Poetis
Nostrorum
(he had been born in 1478), a Humanist of the better class,
Temporum. and a sincere Catholic possessed of sufficient independence
of current ill-fashions to speak with severity of the verses
of Beccadelli, would seem also to have been, at first- or second-hand, a man
of very wide literary knowledge. His acquaintance with More[90] might be
partly (as his very high estimate is certainly) conditioned by ecclesiastical
partisanship; but he speaks of Wyatt long before Tottel’s Miscellany made
that poet’s works publicly known, even in his own country, and, what is still
Its width of more remarkable, of Chaucer.[91] Neither France nor
range.
Germany is excluded with the usual Italian uppishness,[92]
though Giraldus cannot help slipping the word barbarus more than once off
his tongue. And though Italy herself has, as we should expect, the lion’s
share, yet the process of sharing is not pursued to that extreme of ridiculous
arrogance which has been shown by the Greeks in their decadence, by the
French in their Augustanism, and by the Italians themselves more than
once.
But this real knowledge on Giraldus’ part, and the fairness of his spirit,
only serve to accentuate the drift in the course and direction of this, the
most important general summary of its kind that we meet between the
But narrowness Labyrinthus and the seventeenth century. Giraldus, though
of view.
he does not absolutely exclude the vernaculars, is perfectly
convinced that poetry, and indeed literature generally, means—first of all,
and as far as its aristocracy goes exclusively—writing in Latin; nay, with
him even translation from the classical languages is a more important thing
Horror at preference of than original composition in the vulgar tongue.
vernacular to Latin.
His contempt of this latter is thinly though
decently veiled in the passage on drama (ed. cit., p. 40), where, speaking of
the writers of comedy, and rightly preferring Ariosto to Bibbiena, he says,
“sed enim vernaculo sermone id plerique opus aggressi pauci mea sententia
assecuti sunt;” speaks (with a sort of visible shake of the head, as over a
good man lost) of Ariosto himself as one who “Latino carmine aliquando
ludit, sed nunc totum se vernaculis tradidit, atque inter cetera furentem

Orlandum dare curat in publicum;”[93] patronisingly remarks of Trissino’s
projected Sophonisba, that if the whole of it is as good as the acts that the
author recites, “erit, licet vernacula ipsa, Latinorum tamen non indigna
lectione,” wonders at this George who “est ipse et Græce et Latine bene
doctus, at nunc fere in vernaculis conquiescit,” and ends with an impatient
“Verum de vernaculis jam satis,” and a mutter about tonsores sellulariique.
He speaks still less ambiguously later (ibid., p. 85), where cobblers and
other dregs of the people are added to barbers and mechanics in general (as
a tail to a list headed by Boiardo, Pulci, Politian, and Lorenzo de' Medici!),
and at last liberates his real feeling in a sentence, which many very
excellent men in all European countries would have indorsed till nearly the
end of the eighteenth century, “Ex quo nescioqui viri alioqui docti in eam
hæresim incidere ut non modo vernaculas velint Latinis litteris æquare
verum etiam anteponere, quin et id etiam litteris prodidere.” “Whence some
persons, in other respects learned, have fallen into such a heresy that they
not only choose to make the vernaculars equal with Latin, but even to set
them above it—nay, they have actually given literary expression to the
doctrine.” A terrible thing to Humanists, and, alas! one to which they have
since had to make up their minds! Unfortunately, the two great classical
languages now pay, and for some time to come are likely to continue
paying, the penalty of this idle miscalculation and outrecuidance on the part
of their mistaken partisans; and it is the first duty of all lovers of letters now
to fight for their maintenance in due place.
But still the almost invincible equity of the man displays itself even in his
judgment of these unhappy schismatics; and he seems to make some
difference between the vernacular dialects and the Sermo Etruscus. On
Berni, Alamanni, the two “gentlewomen-poetesses,” as the Italians call
them, Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, Speroni, La Casa, Aonio
Paleario, Molza, he has things amiable and acute at once to say.
But his heart is not here, nor in the mention of the poor barbarous
foreigners who may perhaps have some better excuse than “Latins” for not
Yet a real critic writing in the Latin tongue. It is of those who do so write—
in both kinds.
Italians first of all but also others—that he really thinks as
“the poets of his time.” He can find room for a mere grammarian (though a
very excellent grammarian) like William Lilly: he speaks of him
magnificentissime, and if this notice contrasts rather comically with the
brief and cold reference to Erasmus, it is fair to remember not merely that

Erasmus was by no means persona grata to the Roman orthodox, but that
his poetical work is really nothing as compared with his exquisite prose.
He begins with the two Mirandolas, Pontanus, Marullus, and Sannazar,
and is copious though not uncritical on them all: non numquam nimis
Short précis of lascivire et vagari videtur, he says of Pontanus. Recalled
the dialogues.
by his interlocutor to still earlier writers, he has the
judgment of “the Panormitan”[94] (Beccadelli), which has been noticed, and
a by no means unremarkable one, dwelling ominously on the “facility” of
Mapheus Vegius, the egregious person who took upon himself to write a
thirteenth Æneid. Many forgotten worthies (among whom Filelfo and the
better Aretines, Charles and Leonard, are the least forgotten) lead us (for
Bembo and Sadolet have had their position earlier, and will have it again) to
a famous pair, Mantuan and Politian. Giraldus is decisive and refreshing on
Mantuan. This loudly over-praised poet is extemporalis magis quam poeta
maturus, and as to his being alter Maro, why “Bone Deus! quam dispar
ingenium!”[95] He is much more favourable to the author of the Nutricia and
the Manto, but does not forget his swashing blow even here. Politian seems
to him to have written calore potius quam arte, and to have used little
diligence either in choosing his subjects or correcting his work. The Strozzi
and Urceus Codrus follow, with many minor lights, from the notices of
whom the judgment on Ludovicus Bigus Pictorius of Ferrara stands out as
applicable, unfortunately, to some greater men and many as small or
smaller. “Cum pius deflexit ad religionem, ut vita melior ita carmine
deterior visus est.” Then one of the regulation pieces of flattery as to the
Augustan character of the rule of Leo Maximus conducts us to notices of
Naugerius and Vida, where the moderate and deserved praise of the first
would contrast oddly (if we did not know how the pseudo-classical tradition
for two hundred years and more said vehement “ditto” to Giraldus) with the
extravagant eulogies on the polished emptiness of the latter. And then a
great turba comes, among which the two Beroalds, Acciauoli and, among
blind poets, Bello, the author of the Mambriano, chiefly take the eye.
We have noted the condescension to such poor vernacular creatures as
Ariosto, Bibbiena, and (with a long interval certainly) Trissino and the
author of the first Rosmunda. It is succeeded by another review of persons
long relinquished to dusty shelves and memories, with a few better known
names like Molza and Longolius. The praise of the great Fracastorius is
much more moderate than we might have expected—probably Giraldus did

not like his subject—and then there is a curious passage on “fancy” verses,
leonine, serpentine, and others, leading to yet another, in which the worse
side of the Renaissance—its contempt for the Middle Ages—is shown by a
scornful reference to Architrenios et Anti-claudianos, which finishes the
first dialogue. The second is of a wider cast, but needs less minute account
here, though it is at least as well worth reading. It begins with the Greeks,
who did so much for Italy, from Gemistus Pletho and Chrysoloras
downwards, then takes the Spaniards and Portuguese, then our own
countrymen, then the Germans and French. Here comes the description of
Erasmus as inter Germanos Latinus inter Latinos aliquando Germanus; and
here Giraldus frankly confesses that he is not going to say anything about
persons like Œcolampadius, Bucer, Sturm, and Melanchthon, since they
were not contented to confine themselves to good literature, and would
know too much, and trouble Israel with Luther. But a good word is spared,
justly, for the author of the Basia, with a reversion to still younger men,
among whom Palingenius, Julius Cæsar Scaliger, and Castelvetro are the
best known, and with the final fling at the vernaculars above given.
Such a book, with its wonderful width of range[96] and its sometimes
equally wonderful contraction of view, is worth, to the historian of real
criticism, a dozen long-winded tractates hunting the old red-herrings of
Their great critical theory. The De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum gives
historic value.
us one of those veritable and inestimable rallying-points of
which our History should be little more than a reasoned catalogue,
connected by summary of less important phenomena. Referring duly to it,
we find ourselves at the standpoint of a man who has really wide
knowledge, and who, when his general assumptions do not interfere, has a
real critical grasp. But the chief of these assumptions is not merely that the
vernaculars have not attained equality with the classics—this, allowing for
inevitable defects of perspective and other things, would not be fatal—but
that they cannot attain such equality, much less any superiority. The point of
view—to us plain common-sense—that if Sannazar and others wrote in
Latin about Christian subjects, they should use Christian Latin, seems to
Giraldus the point of view of a kind of maniac. Without the details and
developments of Vida, he is apparently in exact accordance with that
excellent Bishop. Cicero and Virgil, not to mention others, have achieved
for literature a medium which cannot be improved upon, and all those who
adopt any other are, if not exactly wicked, hopelessly deceived and deluded.

This is the major premiss for practically every syllogism of our critic.
Where it does not come in—between vernacular and vernacular, between
Latin and Latin of the classical type—he can judge just judgment. Where it
comes in, the more perfect his logic, the more inevitably vitiated is his
conclusion.

19. Since I wrote this, an obliging correspondent, Mr P.G. Thomas of
Liverpool, has suggested actual quotation of a passage of Bruni’s on prose
style in his De Studiis et Literis. If I do not give this it is, first, because
indulgence in quotation here is as the letting out of waters; and, secondly,
because the tractate is translated in Mr W. H. Woodward’s well-known and
excellent book on Vittorino da Feltre (Cambridge, 1897), where other
matter of interest to us will also be found.

20. The connecting and explaining link, sometimes omitted, is to be
found in Rhetoric—the close connection of which with Logic and Grammar
is no puzzle, while the connection of poetry with it was then an accepted
fact. It is rather dangerous to say that Savonarola, in connecting poetry with
logic, was “tending towards the elimination of the Imagination in art.” The
extremely equivocal nature of the word “Imagination” (v. vol. i. pp. 120,
165) needs constantly to be pointed out. In the ancient sense, Imagination is
as much connected with Logic as anything else; in the modern, Savonarola
probably never even thought of it.

21. Otherwise, De Divisione et Utilitate Omnium Scientiarum. I have
read this in the Wittemberg ed. of his Philosophiæ Epitome (1596, 8vo).
The passages quoted and referred to will be found at p. 807 sq. of this.

22. Vol. i. p. 380 sq.

23. Or, “a pretty old woman that of a girl,” the position of the epithet
between the two nouns being ambiguous.

24. Geog. i. 11, 5, where he describes poetry as a rudimentary
philosophy, providing an introduction to life, and educating pleasantly. I do
not remember who first, or who successively, pointed this out before
Shaftesbury, Advice to an Author, Part I. sect. 3, note sub fin. But
Castelvetro (Op. Var., p. 83), and Opitz (v. inf., p. 361), among others, refer
to it.

25. More especially p. 46 sq. (2nd ed.) The influence of the Somnium
Scipionis of Macrobius may also have been considerable.

26. Politian’s critical faculty shows to more advantage here than in his
attribution of the Epistles of the Pseudo-Phalaris to Lucian (see Bentley’s
immortal Dissertation). He had almost better—from the literary point of
view—have believed them genuine.

27. V. vol. i. p. 408.

28.

Aut telo, Summane, tuo traxere ruinam,
Aut trucibus nimbis aut iræ obnoxia Cauri,
Aut tacitis lenti perierunt dentibus ævi.
Dum ver tristis hyems, autumnum proferet æstas,
Dumque fluet spirans refluetque reciproca Tethys,
Dum mixta alternas capient elementa figuras,
Semper erit magni decus immortale Maronis,
Semper inexhaustis ibunt hæc flumina venis,
Semper ab his docti ducentur fontibus haustus,
Semper odoratos fundent hæc gramina flores.
—Manto, 335-337, 342-348, p. 303, ed. cit. inf.

29. If anybody charges me with plagiarism from Mr Symonds’ “leaping,”
I had rather plead guilty than quibble. The metaphor is too obviously the
right and only one, for the peculiar motion of Politian’s verse, to any one
who has an ear. I keep, however, the order of the edition I use (that of
Signor Isidoro del Lugo, Florence, 1867), not the perhaps more logical one
of Nutricia—Rusticus—Manto—Ambra, which Mr Symonds followed and
which is that of Pope, op. cit. inf.

30. My copy is the edition of Gryphius (Lugduni, 1554). Crinitus (Ricci
or Riccio) had dedicated it nearly fifty years earlier, and just before his own
death, I believe, to Cosmo Pazzi, Bishop of Arezzo, on November 1, 1505.

31. A fellow-citizen and contemporary printer generally appears in
biographical dictionaries under the heading “Olmucensis.” The history of
Olmütz, by W. Müller (Vienna, 1882), has not come in my way, so I do not
know whether Augustinus appears there. The Dialogus is duly in Hain, but
has not, I think, been much noticed by literary historians.

32. I have used the Opera, 2 vols., Lugduni, 1531, 8vo. The passages
cited will be found at ii. 14 sq.

33. For Landi or Lando, see an interesting paper by Mr W. E. A. Axon, in
vol. xx. of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature.

34. This, which is very amusing, opens the ed. of Berni’s Opere in the
Sonzogno collection (Milan, 1888).

35. For the Latin I use Pope’s Selecta Poemata Italorum (2 vols.,
London, 1740), i. 131-189, and the anonymous Poemata Selecta Italorum
(Oxford, 1808), 207-266; for Pitt’s Englishing, Chalmers’s Poets, xix. 633-
651. The original is Rome, 1527, 4to.

36. Prof. A. S. Cook (Boston, 1892).

37. Insignis facie ante alios, ed. Oxon., p. 215.

38. For a very interesting and characteristic view of this “invoking” in the
next generation, see Castelvetro, Op. Var., ed. cit. inf., pp. 79-99.

39.

“Drances ... consiliis non futilis auctor,
Dives opum, pollens lingua et popularibus auris.
... Neque enim in Latio magno ore sonantem
Arma ducesque decet tam viles decidere in res.”
It is interesting to hear the watchword “Low!” so early.

40. Some would plead for “mosaic.” But the mosaic worker works his
tiny cubes himself—he does not steal them ready made and arranged.

41. Cf. Poet., ii. 162. Semper nutu rationis eant res.

42. Mr Spingarn’s useful chronological table gives twenty-five books by
nearly as many different authors for the seventy-three years. Nor does this
list pretend to be exhaustive; for instance, it omits Robortello’s Longinus
(1554), and the important De poetis nostrorum temporum of Lilius
Giraldus.

43. Dolce’s (1535) translation of Horace; Pazzi’s (1536) of Aristotle;
Daniello’s Poetica (1536), and Tolomei’s Versi e Regole (1539).

44. Robortello’s ed. of Poetics (1548), and Segni’s translation (1549);
Maggi’s ed. (1550); Muzio’s Arte Poetica (1551); Giraldi Cinthio’s
Discorsi (1554).

45. Minturno’s Latin De Poeta (1559); Victorius’ Aristotle’s Poetics
(1560); Scaliger’s own Poetics (1561); the completion of Trissino (1563);
Minturno’s Italian Arte Poetica (1564), and Castelvetro’s Poetics (1570).

46. The work of Piccolomini and Viperano.

47. That of Patrizzi, Tasso, and Denores.

48. That of Buonamici, Ingegneri, and Summo.

49. But most of this latter part had been written in 1548-49, and all must
have been before 1550, when Trissino died. Even this, however, leaves a
twenty years’ gap, which Trissino attributes to the composition of his great
(or at any rate large) poem on the Goths.

50. 2 vols., Verona, 1729.

51. All these, with the Poetica and the translation of Dante, will be found
in the second volume of the edition cited. I take the opportunity of
correcting an injustice to Trissino which I committed at i. 417, and which
was brought to my notice by a reviewer in the Athenæum. “Giovan- [or
Giam-] battista Doria” does say, in his dedication to the Cardinal de'
Medici, that Dante wrote it in Latin, adding, however, a clause of such
singular obscurity that at first sight one takes it as meaning that Dante
himself translated the book into Italian. For discussion of this see Rajna’s
ed. of the De V. E., p. li sq.

52. II. 95. Perhaps better “unlearned,” indotti Poeti.

53. Spingarn, p. 92.

54. Et ancor oggi si fa.

55. Spingarn, p. 102.

56. The discussion occupies nearly four quarto pages, ii. 127-130.
Trissino, of course, does not neglect Quintilian’s handling of the subject in
Inst., vi. 3, and he quotes modern as well as ancient examples.

57. Dolce had translated the Ars Poetica of Horace into Italian the year
before.

58. Mr Spingarn has extracted from MS., and published as an appendix to
his book, an interesting review of these commentators and others, by
Leonardo Salviati, a successor of theirs in 1586, and too famous in the
Tasso controversy.

59. Maggi in his commentary. See Spingarn, p. 27.

60. V. infra, p. 71.

61. Discoveries, sub fin. (iii. 419 of Cunningham’s 3 vol. ed.)

62. On him see also note infra, pp. 49, 50.

63. M. Breitinger (Les Unités d’Aristote avant Corneille, p. 7) says, “ce
livre n’est qu’un commentaire du Canzoniere de Pétrarque.” He can hardly
have read it; and most probably confused it with the Spositione by Daniello
which accompanies an edition of Petrarch (Venice, 1549), and had been
partially published eight years earlier. This is a full but rather wooden
commentary, chiefly interesting to contrast with Castelvetro’s, and as
showing the Italian tendency to expatiate rather than to appreciate.

64. Fracastorii Opera, 2 vols., Lyons, 1591. The Naugerius is at i. 319-
365.

65. A few of these poems of Navagero will be found in Pope’s Selecta
Poemata Italorum (Londoni, 1740); more in the Oxford Selection (1808);
most in Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum (Florence, 1552).

66. Rime Diverse (Venice, f. 68-94). The name on the title-page is Mutio,
and the spelling Muzio, which some books have, may lead to confusions;

for there appears to be another Rime Diverse of Muzio four years earlier,
which does not contain the Arte. This is in blank-verse, agreeably written,
with some general observations on Poets and Poetry, Ancient and Modern,
and practical enough. Says Mutio, e.g.,—

La catena
Di Dante non e leggiadra, se non
Fa punto con la terza sua rima.

67. Delia Lingua Toscana. The four Books of this are rather empty
things. The first goes to show that Philosophy is necessary to the perfect
orator; the second that it is equally necessary to the perfect poet; the third
that Rhetoric is useful for writing and speaking with eloquence; while the
fourth discusses oratorical diction and its ornaments. Few of the books cited
here better justify De Quincey’s too sweeping ban.

68. Due Dialogi dell' Inventione Poetica di Alessandro Lionardi (Venice,
1554). No one carries the ventosa loquacitas about the origin of laws, and
virtues, and opinions, and what not, farther than Lionardi; no one is more
set on defining “the Historian,” “the Orator,” “the Poet,” &c.; no one pays
more attention to all the abstractions. At p. 18 he has a curious catalogue,
occupying the greater part of a small quarto page, and capable of being
extended to a large folio, or many large folios, of “subjects” and “effects,”
in regard to history, enmity, discord, war, peace; in short, all the contents of
the dictionary. “Perdonatemi,,” says another interlocutor, “se interrompo i
vostri ragionamenti,” and indeed they might have gone on for ever. But the
new man has his catalogue ready, too.

69. Venice, 1562. It is very short and very general. There are some
literary touches in his Lettere (2 vols., Venice, 1562), especially a
correspondence with Cinthio on the Amadigi.

70. Della Vera Poetica, Venice, 1555.

71. His volume appears to be almost introuvable for sale; but the British
Museum has no less than three copies. I wish it would give me one of them.

72. Especially in those to La Strega and l’Arzigoglio (Commedie di A.
Grazzini, ed. Fanfani, Florence, 1897), pp. 173 and 435. Gelli and others do
much the same.

73. The proper quotation is imitatio vitæ, speculum consuetudinis, imago
veritatis. It is given as early as by Robortello (see note opposite). But with
that intelligent operation of the communis sensus which pedants dislike,
speculum vitæ was what took the general.

74. In Prose Scelte di P. Bembo, ed. Costero (Milan, 1880), pp. 141-278.

75. Ed. Costero, 2 vols. (Milan, 1879 and 1884).

76. Ed. Costero (Milan, 1888).

77. Robortello edited Ælian and Æschylus as well as Longinus and
Aristotle; Petrus Victorius was busied very widely with the classics. The
combined treatment of Aristotle and Horace by the former in his
Explicationes (Basle, 1555) is distinctly noteworthy. His dealings with the
Greek are almost pure commentary; those with the Roman, though called a
“Paraphrase,” are much freer. He begins with a sort of expository lecture on
the Epistola ad Pisones, introducing most of its matter and much
illustration from other authors. Then separate short essays follow on Satire,
Epigram, Comedy, Sales, and Elegy. The heading “Sales” is especially
worthy of attention as illustrating that tormenting preoccupation of the
classics on Wit, which transmitted itself to the Renaissance, and is found in
moderns as recent as Whately. Robortello exercised much authority, and is
shown by M. Morel-Fatio in his recent edition of Lope de Vega’s Arte
Nuevo (v. infra, p. 343) to have furnished the Spanish poet with much, if not
most, of the miscellaneous erudition which he displays to no great purpose.
Robortello’s earlier editio princeps of Longinus (ibid., 1554) is noteworthy
in a different way. He was by no means more modest than the average
Renaissance scholar; on the contrary, he is accused of special arrogance.
But this opus redivivum, antea ignotum, e tenebris in lucem editum, as he
calls it, seems to have puzzled, if not actually abashed, him. He has no
introduction, no regular commentary: only side-headings of the matter, from
which, he says, “all the method of the book, and the order of the questions
treated, and the whole rationale of the teaching,” and much else, can be

learnt. The spirit was too potent for him who had called it up. Of other
mainly classical commentators, Riccoboni (Compendium Artis Poeticæ,
1591) is again useful, because he combines Horace and Aristotle, and
practicalises the combination, identifying the Aristotelian or pseudo-
Aristotelian (see vol. i. p. 34) “Episode” with the first Four Acts, the
Exodus with the Fifth, &c. Maggi, Segni, Zabarella are even farther from
our sphere.

78. Let, however, the reader beware of being misled by the occurrence of
the word “Admiratio” in the side-notes of pp. 52, 53. It is used in quite a
different sense.

79. Perhaps, if this be true, the Irish got it from their French friends of the
seventeenth century, among whom, according to the Ménagiana, poeta
regius was the correct title of the King’s Fool.

80. Ut doceat, ut delectet, ut moveat. Suggested by Cicero on the orator.

81. P. 173. Amatorio mollique sermone effeminat. See Spingarn, p. 70. It
should, however, be observed that Minturno is here avowedly expressing
the censure of Aristophanes on Euripides rather than his own opinion.

82. “Vain and amatorious.”

83. Minturno mentions neither Cinthio (v. infra) nor Pigna—probably to
avoid the appearance of direct attack; but he must have been thinking of one
or the other or both. Something the same line was taken by Sperone
Speroni.

84. See next Book, p. 369.

85. Scritti Estetici di Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, 2 vols., Milan, 1864.
(In Daelli’s Biblioteca Rara.) This edition gives extracts from Pigna’s work,
and documents respecting the quarrel.

86. To speak correctly, Seneca prefers (Agamemnon, Hercules Furens, H.
Œtæus, Medea, Troades) to compose the First Act of a soliloquy and a
chorus. This, when the chorus is not present, becomes of course a

monologue. In the Hippolytus, Octavia, Thebais, and Thyestes, there is
dialogue in the first Act. But, even of these, the first two begin with a lyrical
monologue, which is in effect a first Scene.

87. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, p. 232.

88. Venice, 1554, 4to.

89. For the neat little edition of this by Karl Wotke (Berlin, 1894) one
must be thankful, and also for the careful bibliographical introduction on
recent work concerning Renaissance Literature.

90. Op. cit., pp. 62, 63, 70. Giraldus also knows Colet, Grocyn, and
others of the set.

91. “Fuere et in Britannorum idiomate et eorum vernaculo sermone aliqui
poetæ ab iis summo in pretio habiti, inter quos Galfridus Chaucerus qui
multa scripsit, et Thomas Viatus.” That he adds “ambo insignes equites” is
very pardonable.

92. Not merely northern Humanists like Reuchlin, Erasmus, Eobanus
Hessus, and Hutten, not merely Greeks from Gemistus Pletho to Musurus
and Lascaris, but foreign vernacular writers like Ressendi, Juan de la Mena,
Marot, Martial d’Auvergne receive notice.

93. The supposed date of the conversation is, as usual in such case,
thrown a good deal back.

94. He allows him (p. 18, ed. cit.) “sweetness and wit,” but says nescio
quare as to the contemporary praise of the Hermaphroditus, and adds
plumply, nec poeta bonus nec bonus orator. The simple fact is that, if the
subjects of this notorious book were decent, nobody would see anything but
quite ordinary merit in their treatment.

95. Ed. cit., p. 25.

96. As a rough but not misleading gauge of this it may be mentioned that
Herr Wotke’s Namenregister contains for less than 100 printed pages,

between four and five hundred entries, including, besides those noticed in
the text, names like those of Olympia Morata and Bilibald Pirkheimer,
Castiglione and Alciati, Conrad Celtes and Paulus Jovius, Cardinal Perotti
and Jacob Wimpheling. In fact, hardly any one in Europe who had to do
with belles lettres seems to have been outside the cognisance, in closer or
vaguer kind, of Giraldus.

CHAPTER III.

SCALIGER, CASTELVETRO, AND THE LATER ITALIAN
CRITICS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
JULIUS CÆSAR SCALIGER—THE ‘POETIC’—BOOK I.: ‘HISTORICUS’—BOOK II.:
‘HYLE’—BOOKS III. AND IV.: ‘IDEA’ AND ‘PARASCEVE’—BOOKS V. AND VI.:
‘CRITICUS’ AND ‘HYPERCRITICUS’—BOOK VII.: EPINOMIS—GENERAL IDEAS ON
UNITY AND THE LIKE—HIS VIRGIL-WORSHIP—HIS SOLID MERITS—
CASTELVETRO—THE OPERE VARIE—THE ‘POETICA’—ON DRAMATIC
CONDITIONS—ON THE THREE UNITIES—ON THE FREEDOM OF EPIC—HIS
ECCENTRIC ACUTENESS—EXAMPLES: HOMER’S NODDING, PROSE IN TRAGEDY,
VIRGIL, MINOR POETRY—THE MEDIUM AND END OF POETRY—
UNCOMPROMISING CHAMPIONSHIP OF DELIGHT—HIS EXCEPTIONAL INTEREST
AND IMPORTANCE—TASSO AND THE CONTROVERSIES OVER THE
‘GERUSALEMME’—TASSO’S CRITICAL WRITINGS AND POSITION—PATRIZZI: HIS
‘POETICA’—THE ‘DECA ISTORIALE’—THE ‘DECA DISPUTATA’—THE ‘TRIMERONE’
ON TASSO—REMARKABLE POSITION OF PATRIZZI—‘SED CONTRA MUNDUM’—
THE LATEST GROUP OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY CRITICS—PARTENIO—VIPERANO
—PICCOLOMINI—GILIO—MAZZONI—DENORES—ZINANO—MAZZONE DA
MIGLIONICO, ETC.—SUMMO.

In the remarkable little book, a notice of which concluded the last
chapter, Lilius Giraldus, as we observed, includes—for their verse-work
nominally, as became his title, but, with his usual acuteness, obviously
perceiving that their importance lay elsewhere—both of the most famous
and influential critics of the central sixteenth century in Italy. His reference
Julius Cæsar to Julius Cæsar Scaliger (who was, indeed, not more than
Scaliger.
six years younger than himself) contains some touches
(such as the mention of him by the name he took, but with the addition “qui
primus Bordonus cognomine fuit,” and the description of his book on
Comic Metres, as “arranged with such wonderful subtlety as not to be
intelligible save to a reader well versed in the subject”) which are of
doubtful friendliness, but allows the Veronese gladiator to be apprime
eruditus and capable of carmina elegantia. For us nothing of Scaliger’s
needs detailed notice except the once world-famous and still famous
Poetices Libri Septem,[97] which appeared in 1561 after the death of
Giraldus, and indeed after his own.

Scaliger was very much better qualified than Boileau to be législateur du
Parnasse in the sense in which both understood Parnassus: or perhaps it
would be better to say that without a Scaliger a Boileau would have been
The Poetic. impossible. He had immense learning; he had absolute
confidence in his own judgment; and within limits which, if they reduce his
positive value, make him an even more complete and direct exponent of his
own particular school and creed, he had great acuteness, an orderly and
logical spirit, and a thorough command of method. Nothing (certain
inevitable postulates being granted) can be more luminous and intelligible
than the book, in which the author, through all his thousand pages, never
loses sight, nor permits his reader to lose sight, of the subject, the process,
and the goal. That he stands forth in the preface to his son Sylvius with an
air of patronage at once paternal and pedagogic, announcing himself as the
pioneer of the subject, dismissing those who allege Varro, as with levity
ignoring the fact that neither Varro nor anybody else in antiquity did, or
could do, anything of the kind: that he blandly sweeps away the plebs
grammaticorum; that he labels the Ars Poetica itself as teaching adeo sine
ulla arte ut saturæ propius esse videatur, Aristotle as fragmentary, Vida as
optimus poeta in theatro, claudus magister in schola—is all of it agreeably
Scaligerian in manner. But it is far from being untrue in fact. And there is a
touch of sublimity in the Quare porro opera danda est nobis, “wherefore
we must put our shoulders to the wheel,” with which he concludes. “Let
others grub money, or canvass for office, or talk about the wars as parasite
guests at dinner: we will let them alone, and simply defend the nobility of
our studies, the magnanimity and simplicity of our purpose.” After this
magnificent pose and draping, and before commendatory verses (the main
copy being by no less a person than Etienne de La Boétie) comes a table of
contents of antique clearness and solidity, filling nearly a dozen pages, by
means of which, and of the more than sixty of index at the end, the study of
the text is not a little facilitated.
The First Book has the special title, Qui et Historicus, which it deserves,
Book I.: if not exactly or exclusively in our sense of History. The
Historicus.
critic begins, scholastically enough, with a distribution of
everything into necessary, useful, or delightful, and proceeds to apply the
classification in a beneficial manner to literary expression in general and
Poetry in particular, ending the chapter with a characteristic gibe (for
Scaliger is far from unhumorous) at the moderns who confine the

appellation “Makers” to candle-makers.[98] Then he follows the safe road by
discussing the causes (material, formal, &c.) of poetry; and indulges in a
free review (for Scaliger, to do him justice, is paratus nullius jurare in
verba) of ancient opinions. Hence he sets off to a full enumeration and
examination, not merely of the kinds of poetry, but (in connection more
especially with the drama) of the theatres and games of the ancients.
Nothing escapes the extensive view of his observation, neither palinodes
nor parodies, neither centos nor enigmas. And he is intensive as well as
extensive. He rebukes, in his usual magisterial manner, the Græculas nugas
of Plutarch, who explains the number of the Muses by that of the letters in
the name of their mother, Mnemosyne; and as for Plato’s blame of poetry,
respiceat ipse sese quot ineptas quot spurcas fabellas inserat.[99] The
distinction of Poesis, Poema, and Poeta, which follows (and which many
grave writers, including Ben, copy), we have often met in kind or in itself
before, nor is it quite so meticulous as it looks. For Scaliger utilises it to
stop the blunder of Plutarch and others, who make a distinction in kind
between great poems and smaller ones. It is tempting but impossible to
follow him through the multitudinous, though far from mazy, ramifications
of his plan. It must be enough to say that he leaves few items of the
dictionary of his subject untouched, and (however inclined one may be to
cry “Halt and fight!” at not a few of his definitions) formulates them with a
roundness and a touch of confident mastery which fully explain, and to
some extent justify, the practical dictatorship which he so long enjoyed. As
thus (at the opening of chap. vi. p. 27), “Tragedy, like Comedy established
in examples of human life, differs from it in three things—the condition of
the persons, the quality of the fortunes and actions, the end. Whence it is
necessary that it should also differ in style.” And this legislative calmness is
accompanied and fortified by a profusion of erudite example, which might
well awe the disciple.
The second book, Qui et Hyle, gives us an important point at once, in the
Book II.: Hyle. fact that this hyle—this “material” of poetry—is frankly
acknowledged to be verse.[100] The entire book is occupied, at the rate of a
chapter apiece, after the half-dozen general ones which open it, with almost
every classical metre, if not from pyrrhic to dochmiac, at least from iambic
to galliambic. A great number of interesting dicta might be extracted from
this book—as, for instance, Scaliger’s remarkable distinction of Rhythm

and Metre, as giving, the latter the more exact measure of the line, the
former its continuity and “temperament.”[101]
The third, Qui et Idea, is far longer than either of the preceding, and is
Books III. and less easily describable to modern readers. Those who have
IV.: Idea and
Parasceve.
read the first volume of this book with some care will
understand it without much difficulty, if we call it a
throwing of the traditional and technical treatment of Rhetoric into a form
suitable to Poetry. Prosopopœia and ethopœia; the bearings or “colours” of
time, place, race, sex, and the rest; the considerations of chance and
manners and fortune; lead us to our old friends the Figures. To these, giving
them the most liberal interpretation possible, so as to include fresh kinds of
poetry as well as actual turns of speech, Scaliger complacently allows
nearly a hundred out of the nearly hundred and thirty chapters of this
overgrown Book, comprising by itself nearly a full quarter of the volume.
Nor does even this devotion to Figures satisfy him, for the Fourth Book,
Qui et Parasceve (preparation), beginning with the characters or
distinctions of style, turns before long to more Figures, and is, in fact, a sort
of Part II. of the Third. Naturally, there is no part of the book more difficult
to analyse, but, as naturally, there is none in which analysis is less required.
Scaliger luxuriates in his opportunities of sub-division and sub-definition;
but he abounds ever more and more in those examples which we have
recognised as, from the time of Hermogenes downwards, the “solace of this
sin,” and the plentifulness of which in Scaliger himself would, even if they
stood alone, go some way to atone for the absence of a larger examination
of writers as wholes. And he does not allow us to lack even this.
Another pair of Books, the Fifth (Qui et Criticus) and the Sixth (Qui et
Hypercriticus), together constitute the pith and body of the book in spirit,
Books V. and and occupy more than a third of it in space. It is here that
VI.: Criticus
and
Scaliger lets himself and his learning loose. The Fifth Book
Hypercriticus. consists of a vast series of cross-comparisons, Homer with
Virgil, Greeks with Latins, Virgil with Greeks other than
Homer, Horace and Ovid with Greeks, Latins with other Latins, special
subject-passages of the same theme from different authors. Its sequel, the
Hypercriticus, undertakes, for the first time, an actual survey of belles
lettres as Scaliger understood them, beginning, after an odd discussion of
Plautus and Terence, with the Renaissance Humanists (many Italians and a
few Germans and French), and then receding through three Ages (the

Middle disdainfully excluded), to Catullus and Horace. Here, of course, one
may, according to taste or temperament, most revel in, or most shudder
away from, “criticism of criticism.” Here the citation is most opulent and
useful. Here, above all, the most hostile judge must be forced to admire and
acknowledge the erudition which not merely for the first time attempts, but
for the first time completely meets the initial requirements of, a complete
examination of poetic literature on a definite and reasoned basis. But here,
inevitably, the weakness of Scaliger comes out most strongly, as well as his
strength. Not only was his judgment warped in more ways than one by
prejudice, but we are, with all the goodwill in the world, forced before long
to conclude[102] that his taste itself was radically defective. Nor does this
conclusion rest merely on his preference (anticipated by Vida and others,
and almost an article of national faith) of Virgil to Homer. His estimate of
Musæus also as far superior to Homer, as incomparable among Greeks, as
“worthy of Virgil,” speaks this taste only too well; and the fearless good
faith with which, disdaining the “guile that lurks in generals,” he quotes line
after line as specially beautiful, delivers him into our hands, a respectable
but self-convicted victim. After this the “coldness” and “childishness” and
“unsuitability” of the Homeric epithet, the “semper-august” character of
Virgil, and innumerable other things of the kind, disturb us not. Scaliger’s
idol has spoken Scaliger’s doom in Qui Bavium non odit—not, of course,
that Hero and Leander is itself by any means Bavian, but that it is so in
comparison with Homer. Nearly a hundred pages are given up to this main
comparison of Homer and Virgil. The others are shorter, but always result in
the same dogged maintenance of the superiority of Latins to Greeks—that is
to say, the same involuntary confession of Scaliger’s preference of Rhetoric
to Poetry. It is interesting, however, to find him conducting his comparisons
in a way in which, as in most other cases, posterity for two centuries
thronged to follow him—the assemblage, that is to say, of passages on the
same subject from different poets.
Still less can we abstract the curious and invaluable survey of the
Hypercriticus. Not a little of it is actual review of actual contemporaries or
very recent predecessors, and review of the ancients takes the same form,
reinforced constantly by discussed quotations. Sometimes, as in the case of
Juvenal, these are arranged into a little anthology of “jewels five words
long,” strung together with acute et hoc, illud valde festivum, and the like

appreciative interjections. His preference of Juvenal to Horace is seasoned
with a characteristic fling at Erasmus (p. 876).
Book VII.: Lastly comes an Epinomis or Codicil, which is divided
Epinomis.
into two parts, and takes up some of the special points of
poetical or dramatic criticism then most interesting—the relative
importance of action and character, the parts of tragedy, the Chorus, the
metres most appropriate to the stage, and the like, ending with a sort of
“gratillity” or bonus in the shape of an examination of a codex of Terence,
which we could spare, at least in this place. More piquant, at least, are the
diatribes de negligentia aut inscitia professorum, directed (with a show of
respect) against Erasmus once more; the occasional flights, such as “Variety
is the tirewoman of poetry”[103] (p. 906); the amusing references to mea
poemata, which in some parts of the book he has obligingly, and once more
with a fearlessness drawing nigh to rashness, exposed to the arrows; and
other things which are perhaps here all the more numerous because the
Book is an avowed Appendix, and, as it were, omnium gatherum. They are,
however, plentiful everywhere; and if it were possible to revive the old
periodical Literary Miscellanies of commonplace-book character—a thing
which will have to be done sooner or later, if the accumulations of the last
few centuries are not to became mere Nineveh-mounds, as yet unexplored
—I should like to compose a florilegium of memorabilia out of Scaliger.
For in this great space, occupied with equal method and erudition, it
could not be but that remarkable pronouncements on the more general
questions of literary criticism, whether given obiter or in definite reference
General ideas on to argued questions, should emerge. Scaliger is, indeed, less
Unity and the
like.
set than most of his predecessors in Italian criticism, and
than some at least of his successors, on these general
pronouncements. “The disinterested and philosophic treatment of æsthetic
problems wholly aside from all practical considerations,” as the tendency of
Italian criticism has been rather unguardedly characterised,[104] does not
seem to have had the first attraction for him. Yet he could not, in the wide
sweep of his net, have avoided such questions if he would; and, with his
fearless temper and eager literary interests, there is no reason to suppose
that he would have avoided them if he could. He did not explicitly enjoin
the Three Unities,[105] but he did more than any other man had done to
inculcate that unfortunate notion of “verisimilitude”[106] from which, much
more than from Aristotle, they were deduced. Not many words need be

wasted (especially as the point will recur only too often during the volume)
on the absurdity of this wresting of Incredulus odi. The whole arrangements
of the theatre are invraisemblables, no matter whether you have electric
light or cross-shaped laths with candles on them, marquises sitting on the
stage or millionaires in stage-boxes, elaborate scenery or directions to the
audience, “Here is Thebes.” You do not murder, or (if you can help it) make
love, in real life, before a miscellaneous audience who have paid to see you
do it; in real life you do not talk in any regular stage lingo that has hitherto
been invented, whether the outward form of it be senarii, or fourteeners, or
complicated rhymed stanzas, or doggerel, or couplet, or blank verse, or
stage prose. The sixteenth century Globe, and the twentieth century Lyceum,
are alike unlike any place in which one habitually performs any action of
life from birth, through marriage, to death. That there is a stage
verisimilitude, which it is dangerous or fatal to break, need not be denied.
But neither Scaliger nor any of his successors in purism has proved that we
are, or ought to be, any more shocked by Æschylus when he shifts from
Delphi to Athens than by Thackeray when he transports us from Flanders to
Chelsea.
We may venture indeed to suspect that Scaliger “had more wit than to be
here.” One may frequently differ with him; but he seldom runs mad on mere
theory. It is he, for instance, who, while, as we have seen, he lays down
uncompromisingly that the material of poetry is verse, instances the
Æthiopica as a perfect epic. Instead of confusing poetry and learning, as
some have done, he holds the much more sensible position that learning is
useful to a poet. He takes the hard-and-fast ethical view of the ends both of
tragedy and of all poetry, and he believes firmly in the type. But he does not
bemuse himself, as some had done and more were to do, in the explanation
of katharsis, and the definition of the tragic hero.
His greatest and also his most pervading critical fault is that “deification
of Virgil,” whereof, though by no means the inventor, he was the chief
His Virgil- prophet to the best part of three centuries. Let it be
worship.
admitted (with every possible emphasis on the fact that it is
no mere extorted admission but a genuine and spontaneous opinion) that
anybody is free to admire Virgil or any one else as much as he likes. “She
that is fair to him” is so, and there’s an end on’t. But if any one proceed, not
merely to intimate indifference to other fair ones, but to find positive fault
with them because they are not like her, then he becomes at once uncritical:

still more so if he erect her qualities, features, style, into abstract virtues and
positive truths, all opposites to which are sin and vileness. He may call
“Simula Silene, nervosa et lignea Dorcas,” to take two only out of the
famous list in the classic place of this matter. But he must not declare that a
girl who has a straight Grecian nose is therefore ugly, or that softness and
plumpness are not excellent things in woman. Scaliger does this. For him
Virgil is, at once, the standard of excellence and the infallible touchstone of
defect. Nay, he is actually a better Nature; a wiser but more perfect
Creation, whereby you may save yourself the trouble of outside imitation,
inasmuch as everything worth imitating is there better done than by Nature
herself. It is impossible to exaggerate or caricature Scaliger’s Maronolatry:
as the Highfliers did in the case of Defoe’s Shortest Way, he would
cheerfully accept and indorse the most outrageous statement of it.
Grave, however, as is this fault, and seriously as it vitiates Scaliger’s
attitude as a critic, there is no doubt that it served in itself as the backbone
of that attitude, and gave it the stiffness which enabled it to resist at once
argument and time. A cause of disquiet to some critics themselves, and a
rallying-cry to most enemies of criticism, has been constantly found in the
apparently floating and uncertain character of the completest critical
orthodoxy. Longinus himself, perhaps the best exponent of that orthodoxy,
has been and is charged with vagueness; and all those who follow him must
lay their account with the same accusation. In the last resort we often
cannot give a clear, definite, cut-and-dried reason for the faith that is in us,
and we still oftener had better not try to do so. Scaliger and Scaligerism are
in no such plight. Their Sortes Virgilianæ are ex hypothesi decisive, and of
universal application. What is found in Virgil is good, is the best; what is
different from Virgil is bad or mediocre; what is like Virgil is good in direct
proportion to the likeness. This of itself gives confidence both to the critic
and to his disciples.
Again, Scaliger, though he has no more right to arrogate Reason and
Nature as on his side than the rest of his school, possesses, like all of the
His solid merits. best of them, a certain sturdy prima facie common-sense. It
is this which dictates his theory of dramatic verisimilitude; this which
palliates some of his Homeric and other blasphemies. Though
uncompromisingly moral, and by no means illogical (when you have once
granted his bundle of postulates), he is not in the least metaphysical. The

wayfaring man, with tolerable intelligence and a very little trouble, can
understand him perfectly.
Still more unmixed praise can be given to him from other points of view.
To any scholar his scholarship is singularly refreshing in its thoroughness
and range; he really neglects nothing proper to his subject, though he may
define that subject with a somewhat arbitrary hand. Agree with him or differ
with him as we may, it is an infinite comfort to be brought thus in contact
and confrontation with the actual texts—to exchange the paper symbols of
“the poet,” “the dramatist,” “the satirist” in the abstract, for sound ringing
coin of actual poetry, drama, satire, told down on the counter, and tested by
file and acid if required. The literary atlas of the Hypercriticus is, as has
been said, the first attempt at a complete thing of the kind since Quintilian,
and of necessity far more complete than his. In fact, Scaliger taught the
school opposed to him—the school which after many a generation of
desultory fighting at last worsted his own—the way to conquer. History and
Comparison—the twin lights of criticism, the only road-makers across the
abyss—are resorted to by him fearlessly. That he loses the best of their
light, and twists the road in the wrong direction, by following Will-o'-the-
wisps like his Virgil-worship, matters in detail but not in principle. He has
practically come back to the safe way which Aristotle entered, but was
precluded from treading far enough, which Quintilian and Longinus trod,
but on which most of the ancients would not set foot. He has not found the
last secret—the secret of submitting to History and to Comparison; he still
looks upon both as instruments to be used merely under the direction of,
and in subordination to, the purposes of a priori theory. His neglect of the
vernaculars is not only wrong, but by his time absurd. His minor prejudices
(as against Erasmus) are sometimes contemptible. His actual taste, as has
been said, was probably neither delicate nor versatile. But he has learning,
logic, lucidity within his range, laborious industry, and love of literature.
The multitude which followed him followed him partly to do evil; but it
would have been a surprise, and almost a shame, had so bold and capable a
leader lacked a multitude of followers.
As has been said, Lilius Giraldus also refers to Lodovico Castelvetro,
who at least resembled Scaliger in the characteristic Ishmaelitism of the
Castelvetro. Renaissance critic. His quarrel with Caro, also already
referred to, was unluckily, we must not say distinguished, but marked, by
unfair play on the part of his adversary, who “delated” him to the

Inquisition for heresy; and Castelvetro had to fly the country. His most
important work appeared late, the famous edition and translation, with
commentary, of the Poetics[107] not being published till a year before his
death. “He was of his nature choleric,” says his biographer; and he
bestowed a good deal of this choler not merely upon Caro, but upon the
majestic Bembo and others. Yet Castelvetro was a very remarkable critic,
and perhaps deserved the ascription of actual critical genius better than any
man who has yet been mentioned in this volume. It is but for chequered
righteousness that his practically certain formulation of the Three Unities
can be counted to him; but, as we shall see, he has other claims, from which
it is not necessary to write off anything.
His impartial attachment to both classical and vulgar tongues ranks him,
of itself, in a higher sphere than that of Scaliger; and a certain impetuous,
incalculable, prime-sautier genius puts him higher still. Even
contemporaries seem to have recognised this in him, though they sometimes
shook their heads over its pronouncements.[108] It may, indeed, sometimes
seem that these pronouncements are, if not inconsistent, difficult to connect
by any central tie-beam of critical theory. But this is almost inevitable in the
case of a critic whose work takes the form, not of regular treatises on large
subjects, nor even of connected essays on separate authors and books, but
of commentaries and adversaria, where the passage immediately under
consideration is uppermost in the writer’s mind, and may—not
illegitimately in a fashion—induce him to display a facet of his thought
which does not seem logically connected with other facets. This peculiarity
is perhaps the only excuse for the depreciation of Dacier, who, reinforcing
his native dulness with the superciliousness of a Frenchman in the later
years of Louis XIV., accused Castelvetro of ignorance, and even of
contradiction of Aristotle. The fact is, that Castelvetro is first of all an
independent critic, and that, though there are few less common, there are no
more valuable critical qualities than independence, even when it is
sometimes pushed to the verge of eccentricity, providing only that it is
sincere, and not ill-informed. It seems to me uncharitable, if not flagrantly
unjust, to deny Castelvetro sincerity, and either impudent or ignorant to
deny him information.
But he had also acuteness and taste. I do not know a better example in
little of the latter quality at the time than his short and scornful
description[109] of a preposterous comparison by another critic,

Bartolommeo Riccio, between the “Sparrow” of Catullus and a pretty but
The Opere commonplace poem of Navagero on a dog. One may sigh
Varie.
over the ruling passion, not to say the original sin, of
critical man, on passing from this to a tangle of recrimination and “that’s my
thunder” which follows with reference to Riccio and Pigna and Cinthio. But
this passes again into a solid discussion on the material and form of poetry,
and on the office of the Muses. Many of these animadversions are, as we
should expect, purely verbal, sometimes not beyond the powers of the
grammaticuccio, of whom Castelvetro himself not unfrequently talks with
piquant scorn. But the comfort of finding annotations on Virgil alternating
with discourses on Dante, like that of placing a quarto on Petrarch side by
side with one on Aristotle, more than atones for any occasional hair-
splitting. We are at last in the Jerusalem of general Literature which is the
mother of us all, which is free and universal; not in this or that separatist
Samaria or exclusive Hebron. The Platonic annotations, which are
numerous, are important, because they show just the other side of
Castelvetro’s talent from the merely verbal one—almost the whole of them
being devoted to the exposition and illustration of meaning. It is a great pity
that he did not work his notes[110] on the Gorgias (which he regards
expressly as Plato’s Rhetoric) into a regular treatise of contrast and
comparison on this subject between Aristotle and Plato. But all these notes
show us the qualification of the commentator to deal with so difficult a
subject as the Poetics.
The stout post quarto, with its vignette of an exceedingly determined-
looking owl standing on a prostrate pitcher and hooting Kekrika, is
The Poetica. dedicated to Maximilian II. It is arranged on a system
equally simple and thorough. First comes a section of the Greek Text; then a
short Italian summary of its contents; then the Italian translation; and then
the spositione—the Commentary—which may be long or short as
circumstances require. Often, on a Greek text of a few lines, it will run to as
many quarto pages, full-packed with small print. Not the least advantageous
part of this quadripartite arrangement is that the summaries—being, though
very brief, to the point—are capable of being put together as a table of
contents. This, however, but partially applies to Castelvetro’s commentary,
which is often not a little discursive from the text. The defect was, however,
supplied in the second edition by an elaborate index specially devoted to the

Spositioni, and consisting, not of mere words or names with page
references, but of reasoned descriptions of the subjects, as thus—
"Allegrezza.

“Come nasca dalla tristitia, che si sente del male del giusto, e del bene
del malvagio.
oblica, che si prende dalla miseria, o dalla felicita altrui qual sia,” &c.
&c.

This is a great help in tackling Castelvetro’s text, the book containing some
seven hundred pages, of perhaps as many words each.
No analysis of a book of such a size, so necessarily parasitic or satellitic
on another in general run, and yet branching and winding with such a self-
On Dramatic willed originality of its own, is possible. One might easily
conditions.
write a folio on Castelvetro’s quarto. Here we can only, as
in most other cases now, except those of books or parts of books at once
epoch-making in character and moderate in bulk, give an idea of the
author’s most important views on general and particular points. It was
necessary, since Castelvetro is revolving round Aristotle, that the greater
part of his treatise should deal with the drama: and perhaps nowhere is that
originality which has been praised more visible than here, whether it lead
him wrong or right. He has undoubtedly made a step, from the
mathematical towards the æsthetic view of literature, in conditioning, as he
does, his view of the Drama by a consideration of the stage. To literary a-
priorists this is of course horrible; to those who take the facts of literature,
as they take the facts of life, it is a welcome and reconciling discovery. The
conditions of the Greek stage were admittedly such as can never be
naturally reproduced, and therefore, however great and perfect the Greek
Tragedy may be in its own way, it cannot usurp the position of “best in all
ways”; and can still less pretend to dictate to other kinds that they shall not
be good at all in ways different from its own.
If the details of Castelvetro’s theory do not always correspond in
excellence to the sense and novelty of the general view, this is because he
adulterates his notion of stage requirements with that unlucky
“verisimilitude” misunderstood, which is the curse of all the neo-classic
critics, and which comes from neglect of the Aristotelian preference of the
probable-impossible to the improbable-possible. The huge Mysteries of the

On the Three Middle Ages, which ranged from Heaven to Hell, which
Unities.
took weeks to act, and covered millennia in their action, did
at least this good to the English and some other theatres—that they
familiarised the mind with the neglect of this verisimilitude. But Castelvetro
would have none of such neglect. His play must be adjusted, not merely in
Action, but in Space and Time, as nearly as possible to the actual capacity
of the stage, the actual duration of the performance.[111] And so the Fatal
Three, the Weird Sisters of dramatic criticism, the vampires that sucked the
blood out of nearly all European tragedy, save in England and Spain, for
three centuries, make their appearance. They “enter the critical literature of
Europe,” as Mr Spingarn has very truly laid it down,[112] “from the time of
Castelvetro.”
But to balance this enslaving of the Drama (in which he far exceeds
Aristotle), Castelvetro frees the Epic from Aristotelian restrictions in an
On the freedom almost equally important manner. From his references in
of Epic.
the Opere Varie to Cinthio and Pigna, it would appear that
he claimed, if not priority, an even portion with them in the consideration of
the subject of Epic Poetry. And though not agreeing with them altogether,
he certainly agrees with them in enlarging the domains of the Epic. Poetry,
he says in effect,[113] may do anything that History can do; and, like the
latter, it may deal, not only with one action of one man, but with his life-
actions, or with many actions of many men.
With Castelvetro, however,—and it is probably the cause why pedants
like Dacier undervalue him,—both the character of his compositions, and
probably also the character of his mind, draw him much more to
independent, though by no means always or often isolated, critical aperçus
and judgments, than to theoretical discourses, with or without illustration.
His eccentric To put it differently, while there is usually a theory at the
acuteness.
back of his appreciations, the appreciation generally stands
in front of the theory. But however this may be, that quality of
“unexpectedness,” in which some æsthetic theorists have found such a
charm, belongs to him as it does to few critics. One might, for instance,
give half-a-dozen guesses to a tolerably ingenious person without his hitting
on Castelvetro’s objection to the story of Ricciardetto and Fiordispina in the
Orlando.[114] That objection is not moral: not on the ground of what is
ordinarily called decorum: not on that of digression, on that of
improbability generally, on any other that is likely to occur. It is, if you

please, that as Fiordispina was a Mahometan, and Ricciardetto a Christian,
and as Christians and Mahometans do not believe in the same kind of Fauns
and Fairies, as, further, Fauns do not eat ladies or goddesses, whether alive
or dead, Ricciardetto’s explanation of his alleged transformation of sex is
not credible. In a modern writer this would look like an absolute absence of
humour, or like a clumsy attempt at it; and I am not prepared to say that
humour was a strong point with these Italian critics as a rule. But
Castelvetro strikes me as being by no means exceptionally unprovided with
it: and such a glaring lapse as this is probably due to the intense seriousness
with which these critical questions, new as they were, presented themselves
to him and to his class.
They get, as was once said, “into logical coaches”; and are perfectly
content to be driven over no matter what minor precipices, and into no
matter what sloughs of despond, so long as they are not actually thrown out.
Yet Castelvetro at least is never dull. At one time[115] he compares the
“somnolent indecorum,” the sconvenevolezza sonnachiosa, of Homer to the
practice of German innkeepers (whether observed by himself in his exile, or
taken from Erasmus, one cannot say) in putting the worst wines and viands
on the table first, and the best later. Elsewhere[116] he gives a very curious
reason against that other sconvenevolezza (this sonorous word is a great
favourite with him) which he too saw in the use of prose for tragedy—
namely, that in reciting verse the speaker naturally raises his voice, and so
makes it more audible to the audience. He has been blamed for adopting the
notion of rank being necessary to tragic characters, but on this see ante (p.
61).
His irreverent independence in regard to Virgil is noticeable in a critic of
Examples: Homer’s his time, and of course especially so if one comes
nodding, prose in tragedy,
Virgil, minor poetry.
to him straight from Scaliger. It would not be fair
to represent him as a “Virgiliomastix,” but his
finer critical sense enables him to perceive the superiority of Homer, in
respect of whom he goes so far[117] as to say that Virgil “is not a poet.” But
this—per se, of course, excessive—had been provoked by the extravagance
of Maronolatry from Vida downwards: and Castelvetro does not scruple to
praise the Mantuan for his grasp, his variety of phrase, and other good
things. He has an extremely sensible passage—not novel to us, but by no
means a truism to his contemporaries or to a good many poets still—on
what he who publishes miscellaneous poetry has to expect. By the

publication, says this other Messer Lodovico, of a thing which nobody
asked him for (cosa non richiesta) without any necessity, he publishes at the
same time his confidence in himself, and affirms that the thing is good.
“Which thing,” goes on Castelvetro in his pitiless critical manner, “if it be
found to be faulty (rea) and blameworthy, it convicts him who publishes it
either of malice or of folly.” Alas! for the minor bard.
His attitude[118] to the everlastingly vexed question of the connection of
verse and poetry is very sensible, and practically anticipates, with less
reluctant circumlocution, that of Coleridge, who in more things than one
The medium and comes close to Castelvetro, and who probably knew him.
end of Poetry.
He does not here contradict Aristotle by denying that verse
is un-essential to poetry. But he insists—and points out the undoubted truth
that Aristotle’s practice, whatever his theory may do, admits this—that
Verse is a kind of inseparable accident of poetry,—that it is the appropriate
garb and uniform thereof, which cannot be abandoned without impropriety.
And he takes up this attitude still more emphatically in regard to the closely
connected, and still more important, question of the end of Poetry. Here, as
Uncompromisin we have seen, the great Master of Criticism temporised. He
g championship
of Delight.
did not doubt that this end was Delight: but in deference to
idols, partly of the Cavern, partly of the Market-place, he
yokes and hampers this end with moral improvement, with Imitation, itself
for itself, and so on. Castelvetro is much more uncompromising. One
shudders, almost as much as one rejoices, at the audacity of a critic who in
mid-sixteenth-century calmly says, “What do beginning, middle, and end
matter in a poem, provided it delights?”[119] Nay, Castelvetro has reached a
point of view which has since been attained by very few critics, and which
some who thought they had gained this peak in Darien first may be mildly
chagrined to find occupied by him—the view that there are different
qualities of poetry, suited to delight different qualities of persons and of
mind.
How seldom this view has been taken all critics ought to know, if they do
not. Even now he who climbs the peak must lay his account with stone-
throwing from the garrisons of other points. That Burns administers, and
has a right to administer, one delight to one class of mind, Shelley another
to another; that Béranger is not to be denied the wine of poetry because his
vintage is not the vintage of Hugo: that Longfellow, and Cowper, and
George Herbert are not to be sneered at because their delight is the delight

of cheering but not of intoxication; that Keble is not intrinsically the less a
poet because he is not Beddoes, or Charles Wesley because he is not
Charles Baudelaire—or vice versa in all the cases—these are propositions
which not every critic—which perhaps not very many critics—will admit
even in the abstract, and which in practice almost every critic falsifies and
renounces at some time or other.[120] But they are propositions which follow
fairly, and indeed inevitably, from Castelvetro’s theory of the necessary end,
Delight, and the varying adjustment of the delighting agent to the patient’s
faculty of being delighted.
He is perhaps less sound in his absolute condemnation of “knowledge” as
material for poetry. He is right in black-marking Fracastoro from this point
of view: but he is certainly not right in extending the black mark to
Lucretius. The fact is, that even he could not wrench himself sufficiently
free from the trammels of old time to see that in the treatment lies the
faculty of delighting, and that therefore, on his own scheme, the treatment is
the poetry.
There are few writers to be dealt with in this volume—none, I think,
already dealt with—to whom it would be more satisfactory to devote the
His exceptional minutest handling than to Castelvetro. He has been called
interest and
importance.
by Mr Spingarn “revolutionary.” The term, in an American
mouth, probably has no unfavourable connotation; but
waiving that connotation altogether, I should be inclined to demur to it.
Even the Vehmgericht (if one may rely on the leading case of Vgr. v.
Philipson, reported by Sir Walter Scott) acquitted of High Treason those
who had spoken evil of it in countries where its authority was not
acknowledged, and indeed its name hardly known. Now, Castelvetro was
dealing—as we must, for his honour as well as for our comprehension of
him, remember that he dealt—with modern as well as with ancient literature
at once, and instead of adopting the injudicious though natural separation of
Minturno, or the one-sided treatment of Scaliger, was constantly exploring,
and always more or less keeping in view, territories not merely in which
Aristotle’s writ did not run, but which in Aristotle’s time were No Man’s
Land and terra incognita. He can no more be regarded as a revolutionary or
a rebel, in framing new laws for the new facts, than a man could be
regarded in either light for disregarding the Curfew Law at the North Pole,
or for disobeying sumptuary regulations as to the use of woollen in the
tropics. His ethos is really that of the self-reliant, resourceful, and

adventurous explorer, as he has been called—of the experimenter in new
material and under new conditions. That the paths he strikes out sometimes
lead to culs-de-sac—that the experiments he makes sometimes fail, is
nothing more than is natural, than is inevitable in the circumstances.
More generally his value is great, and we may forgive him (especially
since he did us little or no harm) the binding of the Unities on the necks of
Frenchmen and Italians, in consideration of the inestimable service which
he did in standing up for Epic—that is, Romantic—Unity of a different
kind, and in formulating, in a “No Surrender” fashion, the doctrine of
Delight as the Poetic Criterion. By doing this he not merely fought for the
freedom of the long narrative poem (which, as it happens, has been a matter
of minor importance, save at rare intervals, since his time), but he
unknowingly safeguarded the freedom of the long narrative prose romance
or novel, which was to be the most important new contribution of modern
times to literature. Nor may it be amiss once more to draw attention to a
more general merit still, the inestimable indifference with which he
continually handles ancient and modern examples. Only by this—the wisest
“indifference of the wise”—can true criticism be reached. It is an
indifference which neglects no change of condition, which takes count of all
features and circumstances, but which, for that very reason, declines to
allow ancient literature to prescribe unconditionally to modern, or modern
to ancient, or either to mediæval. As to this last, Castelvetro has, and could
be expected to have, nothing to say: as to the others, he is more eloquent in
practice than in express theory. But his practice speaks his conviction, and it
is the practice by which, and by which alone, the serene temples of the
really Higher Criticism can be reached.
The last third of the century provides only one author who deserves
(though he has seldom received) at least equal attention with Scaliger and
Castelvetro: but it has, like the second, a crowd of minor critics who must
Tasso and the not be wholly passed over. Moreover, it boasts—if such a
controversies
over the
thing be a subject of boasting—one equally famous and
Gerusalemme. weary controversy, that over the Gerusalemme. This, which
expects the critical historian as its prey, and will test his
powers to the utmost if haply he may wrestle free of it at once without
inadequacy and without tedium, we may dare first: may take the interesting
single figure of Patrizzi or Patrici second, and then may sweep the rest into

a conclusion, which will itself leave not a little summarising to be done in
the Interchapter succeeding this Book.
Torquato Tasso was, in more ways than one, fated to the ordeal of
controversy. His work would, in the already unfolded state and temper of
Italian criticism on the subject of the “heroic poem,” have invited it in any
case; but he had, in a manner, inherited the adventure. His father, Bernardo,
as has been briefly recorded above, had himself taken much interest in
critical questions; and after being at first a classicist, had come round to the
position of Cinthio. It was Torquato’s object, by argument and example
alike, to reconcile the combatants. His Discorsi did not appear till late in
1587;[121] but they are said to have been written some twenty years earlier,
after the appearance of Minturno’s Italian book. His plan is as simply
obvious—shall we say as obviously defective?—as that of the immortal
contributor to the Eatanswill Gazette. He, too, “combined his information.”
Some kind of Unity is to be imposed on the Romantic Variety; and though
this Unity cannot possibly be the Aristotelian, it need not be quite such a
different kind as that of Castelvetro. It is to be organic, but may permit itself
the organs of a complex animal system.
Nor did Tasso stick to generalities; nor did he shrink from giving
hostages to fortune, and his enemies, by embodying his ideas in practice.
These ideas we have already seen floating in various critical minds from
Fracastorius to Castelvetro. The “heroic poem”—for his theory and his
example alike consecrated that word for use, instead of either “epic” or
“romance,” for nearly two centuries—must not be pure invention, but must
avail itself of the authority of history. It must be animated by religion, true
religion—that is to say, Christianity. It must have the supernatural. The hero
must be a pious and moral, if not necessarily faultless, character. It must not
be too dogmatic—that the poet may be free. It must deal with ancient or
modern history so as to be neither absolutely unfamiliar, nor too familiar in
its atmosphere and manners. The persons, things, and scenes must be noble
and stately. It will probably strike every one that this is an admirable receipt
for a historical novel; and thus do we constantly find blind strivings at
things that cannot yet get themselves born. But whether it is an equally
good receipt for a poem may be doubted. Some of us, at least, have no
doubt that the Gerusalemme, which is faithfully constructed in accordance
with it, is not nearly so good a poem as the Orlando, for the graceless

graces of which it was expressly devised to substitute something more
orderly and decent.
The extensive and execrable controversy which followed did not,
however, turn wholly, though it very largely turned, on the actual case of
Ariosto v. Tasso. But, as usually happens, the partisans of the latter
provoked it by unadvised laudations of him, and worse-advised attacks on
his great predecessor. The Florentines had not, as such, any special reason
for championing the “turnip-eating” Ariosto; but Tasso had offended the
coteries of the Della Crusca, and a Della Cruscan chief, the Salviati already
mentioned, took the field against the author of the Gerusalemme. He sallied
forth in turn; and the bickering became universal. Five mortal volumes of
the standard edition of Tasso appear to be occupied with an incomplete
collection of the documents on the subject—a collection which I have not
read and do not intend to read, but which whosoever rejoices in such things
may, if he likes, supplement with all the Histories of Italian Literature from
Tiraboschi downwards, and all the Lives of Tasso, especially those of
Serassi in the eighteenth century and Solerti in the nineteenth.
The most important upshot of the controversy is not itself in dispute. The
impregnable historical position of Cinthio was strangely neglected by both
sides (except by Ishmaelite outsiders like Bruno and Patrizzi); nor was even
the modified Aristotelianism and “Unitarianism” of Castelvetro, as a rule,
attempted. Both sides swore fealty to Aristotle, and all debated what
Aristotle meant—what Unity was. And, in spite of the exceptions, this was
the condition in which the question was left to the next century.
The controversy, like that between Caro and Castelvetro, and (I fear it
must be said) like literary controversies in general, did not pass off without
a muddying of the waters. Salviati, Tasso’s chief adversary, and author of
the dialogue L’Infarinato against him, had at first been a great admirer and
almost flatterer of the Gerusalemme, had offered the author his friendship,
had praised his scheme, and had actually proposed to celebrate it in that
very commentary on the Poetics which Mr Spingarn (who has read it in
MS.) describes as actually devoted to “undermining Tasso’s pretensions.”
Exactly by what personal, or cliquish, or patriotic offences he was induced
to take the opposite line, belongs to the obscure, dull, and disgusting history
of these literary squabbles generally, and we need not concern ourselves
with it. The points “for us” in the whole matter are, first, that the
controversy shows the strong hold which a certain conception of criticism

(whether the right one or not) had obtained of the Italian mind; and,
secondly, that the main question on which it turned—“What sort of Unity
heroic poems must have?”—“In what manner must the precepts of Aristotle
be interpreted and adjusted?”—shows more than the shadow of coming
Neo-Classicism. The path of safety and truth which Giraldi and Pigna had
opened up many years earlier, and which even Castelvetro, Unitarian as he
was, had been careful to leave open—the path starting, that is to say, from
the positions that Aristotle had not all literature before him, and that the
kinds of literature which he had not before him could not, therefore, be
subject to his dicta—was now ignored or barred. Apparent diræ facies, the
faces of the Unities, and there is nothing left to do, in the general opinion,
but to wrangle about their exact lineaments.
The critical work of Tasso is far from inconsiderable, and only a sense of
Tasso’s Critical duty prevents the consideration of it here at greater length.
writings
It consists[122] of the Discorsi which, as noted above,
appeared at Venice (with divers Lettere Poetiche) in one of the thin small
parchment-covered quartos for which the student of this literature begins,
after a time, to feel a distinct affection. The much longer and later Discorsi
del Poema Epico partly repeat, partly correct, partly expand, the earlier
work; and sometimes stand in a curious relation to it.[123] But this by no
means exhausts the tale. Tasso, nothing if not conscientious, appears to have
taken his art in general, and his work in particular, very seriously indeed.
He makes extracts from Castelvetro; writes on the Allegory of his own
Gerusalemme, an Apology for it in dialogue, a formal Reply to the
strictures of the Della Cruscans, a tractate in answer to Patrizzi’s defence of
Ariosto, another on Poetical Differences, a long “Judgment of the
Conquistata,” a discourse on the Art of the Dialogue. Also he has some
curious considerations on three Canzoni of Pigna’s entitled Le Tre Sorelle,
written in honour of Lucrezia Bendidio, and dealing with Sacred and
Profane Love. These considerations have the additional interest of being
addressed to Leonora d’Este, and of breathing a peculiar blend of that half-
sensual, half-Platonic Renaissance rapture of which the great locus is the
discourse assigned to Bembo at the end of Castiglione’s Courtier, with the
religiosity which we more specially think of in Tasso. He has an elaborate
lecture on a single sonnet of La Casa,—a great favourite of Tasso’s, and
deservedly so as far as his serious poetry goes,—and some minor matter of
the kind.

To the writing of this not inconsiderable corpus of criticism Tasso
brought, besides his own genius and the interesting association of his
creative power, really wide reading, and, as has been said, an indefatigable
and position. interest in the subject. He exercised a good deal of
influence in the time to come—both Milton and Dryden, for instance (the
latter again and again), refer to his critical work. Yet it may perhaps be said
without presumption that this criticism is rather more interesting to a
student of Tasso, or to one who wishes to obtain at famous hands some
knowledge of the Italian sixteenth century ethos in this kind without going
any further, than to the student of criticism itself. Tasso is very fairly
representative of it in its combination of Plato and Aristotle, in its anxiety to
get general notions of poetry and poetic kinds, in its respect for the ancients,
in its ethical turn. But he is rather more representative than original or
distinct; and his criticism is not perhaps improved by the very natural fact
that sometimes avowedly, and probably in most cases really, it is less a
disinterested consideration of Poetry in general than an apologetic of the
poetry of Torquato Tasso. And as that poetry itself, beautiful as it often is, is
notoriously something of a compromise between the Romantic and the
Classical, so the criticism which is connected with it is compromising and
compromised likewise. Tasso has many interesting observations, intelligent
aperçus, just remarks: he is a link, and a very early link, in the apostolic
succession of those who have held and taught the great doctrine that poetry
makes the familiar unfamiliar, the accustomed strange and new.[124] But he
has not shaken himself free enough to gain the standpoint of his friendly
antagonist Patrizzi, and to recognise, even imperfectly, that the secret of
poetry is treatment poeticamente, and that only the historic method
unfettered by rules will tell you what poeticamente has been and is, even
thus leaving unknown what it will be.
At about the same time, however, a last, and the most vigorous, if not
altogether the best informed, attempt was made to put the matter on this
Patrizzi: his true historical basis. A year (1586) before the publication of
Poetica.
Tasso’s Discorsi, and of his Apologia, though long after the
writing of the first, and not without reference to himself and the dispute
between his partisans and those of Ariosto, there had been printed at
Ferrara, in two parts, one of the most important and original of the
numerous treatises which appeared during this half-century or more, under
the title of Della Poetica. It was the work of Francesco Patrizzi (as he is

generally cited in books, though both in the title-pages of this work, and in
the signature of his Dedication, it is spelt Patrici). The inspiration of the
book was, at least partly, due to the violent anti-Peripateticism of which
Patrizzi was at this time the twin champion with Bruno;[125] and while we
must no doubt thank this party spirit for being in great part the cause of the
volume, there may be room for objecting that it somewhat obscures the pure
critical value of the treatises. That value, however, remains great, and would
be great even if there were nothing in the book but an ill-carried-out idea.
For its idea is the basing of the inquiry into poetry, not on a priori
discussion of the nature of the thing, and of its exponent the poet,—not on
previous authority as to these questions,—but on a historical examination of
extant poetical composition. It is, of course, true that an examination of the
kind was ready at hand in Scaliger’s book. But nothing was further from
Scaliger’s mind than to base his inquiry on this: on the contrary, it comes
late, and is merely intended to supply illustration and texts for verbal
criticism.
Patrizzi’s plan is quite different. His book consists of two parts or
“decades”—La Deca Istoriale and La Deca Disputata; and though in some
copies (my own is an instance) the cart is perversely put before the horse,
this is evidently a mere stupidity of the binder, due to the fact that both
books, which are separately paged and title-paged, are of the same year
(1586), and perhaps to the other fact that the Dedication of the Disputata to
Don Ferrando Gonzaga, Signor di Guastalla, is dated, while that of the
Istoriale to Lucrezia d’Este, Duchess of Urbino, is not. But the very first
line of the Disputata makes references to the other as already done.
That the “History of Poetry” of il gran Patricio, as his commendatory
sonneteers love to call him, should be either completely exhaustive or
The Deca impeccably methodical, it would be unreasonable to expect.
Istoriale.
There are indeed some surprising touches,[126] both of
knowledge and of liberality, in his admissions of the Architrenius and the
Anticlaudianus, of Marbod and Bede. But for the most part he confines
himself to classic and scriptural authors; and his notices are rather those of a
classical dictionary maker, or hand-list man, than of a critical historian in
the best sense. Still, all things must have beginnings; and it is a very great
beginning indeed to find the actual documents of the matter produced and
arranged in any orderly fashion, even if we do begin a little in the air with

Giubale and Giafeto, and end a little in the dark with Gaufredo and
Guntero.
Only when he has spent 150 pages on this arrangement does Patrizzi pass
to his Second Book, in which (once more in the true logical order) he
arranges the productions of his poets in kinds, of which he is a generous and
careful distributor. The much shorter Third deals with the kinds of verses;
and the Fourth with the festivals and spectacles at which poetry was
produced, the Fifth continuing this with special reference to Games and
Contests. The Sixth deals with the singing of ancient poetry; the Seventh
with its accompanying Music; the Eighth with Rhythm; the Ninth with the
Chorus; and the Tenth with the persons who produced ancient poetry—
rhapsodists, priests, actors, &c.
It is, of course, to be observed that all this is strictly limited to Ancient
Poetry; indeed Patrizzi repeats the very words religiously in the title of
The Deca every Book. To support his examination with a further one
Disputata.
of modern or even Italian “vulgar” poetry does not seem to
have occurred to him. Perhaps, indeed—since he refers, as has been said, in
the very first line of his second part to la lunga e faticosa istoria delle cose
a poeti, a poemi, e a poetica spettanti as “condetta a fine” with a sort of
sigh of relief—he may have thought that his readers would not stand it. But
it is noteworthy that in this Decade he constantly cites Italian writers, and
that the last forty pages of his Tenth Book consist of a Trimerone of
controversy with Tasso himself, amicable (they were actually friends), but
by no means unanimated.
The First Book of the Disputata is given up to the cause of poetry, which
Patrizzi, again in accordance with Bruno, decides to be Enthusiasm
(Furori[127]), relying much on Plato, especially on the Tynnichus passage (v.
supra, vol. i. p. 20), and even a little on Aristotle. The Second Book attacks,
with a good deal of acerbity, and some wire-drawing, but also with learning,
acuteness, and common-sense, the Aristotelian doctrine of Imitation, and
the philosopher’s order and distribution of poetic kinds. The Third follows
this up by an inquiry whether, in a general way, Poetry is Imitation at all;
the Fourth by one whether the poet is an imitator. And the conclusion of the
three, enforced with great dialectical skill, and with a real knowledge of
Greek criticism,—that of Plato, Longinus, and the Rhetoricians, as well as
Aristotle’s,—is that Poetry is not Imitation, or at any rate that Imitation is
not proper and peculiar to poets. In which point it will go hard but any

catholic student of literature, however great his respect for Aristotle, must
now “say ditto” to Patrizzi.
In his Fifth Book Patrizzi tackles a matter of far greater importance—for
after all the discussion, “Is Poetry Imitation, or is it not?” is very mainly a
logomachy. As Miss Edgeworth’s philosophic boy remarks, “You may call
your hat your cadwallader,” when you have once explained that by this term
you mean “a black thing that you wear on your head.” But the question of
this Fifth Book, “Whether Poetry can be in prose?” is of a very different
kind. It goes, not to words but to things, and to the very roots of them; it
involves—if it may not be said actually to be—the gravest, deepest, most
vital question of literary criticism itself; and on the answer given to it will
turn the further answer which must be given to a whole crowd of minor
questions.
On this point il gran Patricio has at least this quality of greatness, that he
knows his own mind with perfect clearness, and expounds it as clearly as he
knows it. His conclusion[128] is, “That verse is so proper and so essential to
every manner of poetry that, without verse, no composition either can or
ought to be Poetry.” This is refreshing, whether we consider that Patrizzi
has taken the best way of establishing his dogma or not. He proceeds as
usual by posing and examining the places—four in number—in which
Aristotle deals with the question; and discusses them with proper exactness
from the verbal point of view, dwelling specially, as we should expect, on
the term ψιλὸς for prose. Then, as we should expect also, he enters into a
still longer examination of the very obscure and difficult passage about the
Mimes and the Socratic Dialogues. To say that the argument is conducted in
a manner wholly free from quibbling and wire-drawing would perhaps be
too much. Patrizzi—and his logic is certainly not the worse for it—was still
in the habit of bringing things to directly syllogistic head now and then; and
of this modern readers are too often impatient. But he does succeed in
convicting Aristotle of using language by no means wholly consistent; and
he succeeds still better in getting and keeping fast hold of that really final
argument which made De Quincey so angry when Whately so forcibly put
it[129]—the argument that from time immemorial everybody, who has had no
special point to prove, when speaking of a poem has meant something in
verse, that everybody, with the same exception, has called things in verse
poems.

Our author’s acuteness is not less seen in the selection and treatment of
the subject of his Sixth Book, which is the intimately allied question—
indeed, the same question from another point of view—“Whether the Fable
rather than the verse makes the property of the poem?” He is equally
uncompromising on this point; and has of course no difficulty in showing—
against Plutarch rather than Aristotle—that “fable” in the sense of “made-up
subject” is not only not necessary to Poetry, but does not exist in any of the
most celebrated poems of the most celebrated poets.[130] But he is not even
yet satisfied in his onslaught on the Four Places. He devotes a special Book
(VII.—it is true that all the constituents of this group of books are short) to
Aristotle’s contrast of Empedocles and Homer, labelling the latter only as
poet, the former as rather Physiologist. And with this he takes the same
course, convicting Aristotle, partly out of his own mouth,[131] partly by
citing the “clatter” (schiamaccio) which even his own commentators had
made on this subject. And, indeed, at the time even the stoutest Aristotelians
must have been puzzled to uphold a judgment which, taken literally, would
have excluded from the name of poetry the adored Georgics of old, and the
admired Syphilis of recent, times.
But, indefatigable as he is, he is still not “satiate with his victory,” and in
the Eighth Book attacks yet another facet of the same great problem,
“Whether Poetry can be based upon, or formed from, History?” This was,
as we have seen, a question which had already interested the Italians much;
and Patrizzi in handling it draws nearer and nearer to his controversy with
Tasso, whom he here actually mentions. He has little difficulty in showing
that Aristotle’s contrast between Poetry and History itself by no means
denies historical subjects to the poet, and that Aristotle is not at all
responsible for, or in accordance with, Plutarch’s extravagant insistence on
“mendacity” as a poetic proprium. “All the materials comprised in Art, or
Science, or study,” says he[132] (in that manner of his which we have already
called refreshing, and which we shall meet again seldom in this volume),
“can be suitable subjects for poetry and poems, provided that they be
poetically treated.” Verily, a gran Patricio!
The subject of the Ninth Book is less important and more purely
antiquarian, but interesting enough. It discusses the question whether
ancient poetry necessarily involved “harmony” and “rhythm,” and what
these terms exactly mean—dancing and gestic accompaniment being
considered as well as music. Patrizzi decides, sensibly enough on the

historical comparison, that all these things, though old and not unsuitable
companions of poetry, are in no sense formative or constitutive parts of
Poetry itself.[133]
The title-question of the Tenth Book is, “Whether the modes of Imitation
are three?” He discusses this generally, and specially in regard to narrative
and dramatic delivery of the poetic matter, and then passes in an appendix
(which, however, he declares to be part of the book) to the Trimerone of
The Trimerone on reply to Tasso. This is a necessarily rather obscure
Tasso.
summary, with some quotations, of a fuller controversy
between the two, complicated by glances at the other literature of the
Gerusalemme quarrel, especially at the work of Camillo Pellegrino.[134] To
disentangle the spool, and wind it in expository form, is out of the question
here. Fortunately the piece concludes with a tabular statement[135] of forty-
three opposition theses to Pellegrino and Tasso. A good many of these turn
on rather “pot-and-kettle” recriminations between Homerists and
Ariostians; but the general principles of comparative criticism are fairly
observed in them, and there is no acerbity of language. In fact, although on
some of the points of the controversy Patrizzi took the Della Cruscan side,
it does not seem to have interrupted his friendship with Tasso, who attended
his lectures,[136] and whose funeral he attended.
The intrinsic importance of Patrizzi’s criticism may be matter of opinion;
but it will hardly be denied that both its system and its conclusions are
widely different from those of nearly all the Italian critics whom we have
yet considered, though there may be approaches to both in Cinthio on the
Remarkable one hand and in Castelvetro on the other. The bickering
position of
Patrizzi.
with Aristotle on particular points is of much less
importance than the constant implicit, and not rare explicit,
reliance on the historic method—on the poets and the poems that exist, the
ideas of poetry conveyed by common parlance, the body of the written
Word in short, and not the letter of the written Rule. I am not sure that
Patrizzi ever lays down the doctrine that “Rules follow practice, not
practice rules,” with quite the distinctness of Bruno in the passage cited
above.[137] But he makes a fight for it in a passage of the Trimerone,[138] and
his entire critical method involves it more or less. If he does not quote
modern literature much, it is obviously because the controversy in which he
was mixing took its documents and texts mainly from the ancients; but he is
so well acquainted with the modern literature, not merely of his own

language, that he actually cites[139] Claude Fauchet’s Origines de la Poésie
Française, which had appeared in 1581. That his interest in the whole
matter may have been philosophical rather than strictly, or at least
exclusively, literary is very possible—he was actually a Professor of
Philosophy; but however this may be, he has hit on the solid causeway
under the floods, and has held his way steadily along it for as far as he
chose to go. Nay, in the sentence which has been chosen for the epigraph of
this Book, he has kept it open for all to the end of Poetry and of Time.
There are, however, few propositions in literature truer than this—that it
Sed contra is of no present use to be wise for the future. If a man
mundum.
chooses the wisdom of the morrow, he must be content for
the morrow to appreciate him—which it does not always, though no one but
a poor creature will trouble himself much about that. Patrizzi had a really
considerable reputation, and deserved it; but in matters literary he was two
hundred years in front of his time, and his time avenged itself by taking
little practical notice of him.[140] The critical writers of the last fifteen or
twenty years of the century are fairly numerous; and though none of them
can pretend to great importance, the names of some have survived, and the
writings of some of these are worth examination, certainly by the historian
and perhaps by the student. But the general drift of them is usually anti-
Patrician and pro-Aristotelian, in that very decidedly sophisticated
interpretation of Aristotle which was settling itself down upon the world as
The latest group critical orthodoxy. Among them we may mention one or
of sixteenth-
century Critics.
two which, though actually earlier than Patrizzi, are later
than Castelvetro, and will help to complete, as far as we
can here attempt it, the conspectus of that remarkable flourishing time of
Italian critical inquiry which actually founded, and very nearly finished, the
edifice of European criticism generally for three centuries at least. The
authors to whom we return are Partenio, Viperano, Piccolomini, Gilio da
Fabriano, and Mazzoni; those to whom we proceed are Jason Denores,
Gabriele Zinano, and Faustino Summo. This latter, who, with an odd
coincidence of name, date, and purport, does really sum up the sixteenth
century for Aristotle, and so govern the decisions of the seventeenth and
eighteenth, had been immediately preceded in the same sense by
Buonamici,[141] Ingegneri,[142] and others.
Partenio, like Minturno and some others, gave his thoughts on the subject
Partenio. to the world in both “vulgar” and “regular”;[143] but the two

forms, while not identical, are closer together than is sometimes the case,
though there is in the Latin a curious appended anthology of translation and
parallel in the two languages. He is rather a formal person (as indeed may
be judged from his particular addiction to Hermogenes as an authority), but
he is not destitute of wits. Throughout he quotes Italian as well as Latin
examples, and refers to Italian critics such as Trissino; while in one place he
gives something like a regular survey of contemporary Latin poetry by
Italians from Pontanus to Cotta. He lays special stress on the importance of
poetic diction; he thinks that Art can and should improve nature; but he is as
classical as the stiffest perruque of the French anti-Romantic school in
believing Aristotle and Horace to contain everything necessary to poetical
salvation.
Viperano. Viperano[144] (who by a natural error is sometimes cited
as Vituperano) somewhere makes the half-admission, half-boast, scripsimus
autem varios libros de variis rebus, and is indeed a sort of rhetorical
bookmaker who oscillates between instruction and epideictic. This
character is sufficiently reflected in his De Arte Poetica. He had some
influence—even as far as Spain (v. inf.)
Piccolomini’s book,[145] which is a compact small quarto of 422 pages,
differs in arrangement from Castelvetro’s merely in not giving the Greek—
the particelle of the original in translation being followed by solid blocks of
Piccolomini. annotationi. The author was of that well-known type of
Renaissance scholar which aspired to a generous if perhaps impossible
universalism; and as he puts this encyclopædic information at the service of
his notes, they are naturally things not easily to be given account of in any
small space, or with definite reference to a particular subject. That
Piccolomini, however, was not destitute of acuteness or judgment to back
his learning, reference to test passages will very easily show. He has not
allowed the possible force of the μᾶλλον, for instance, to escape him in the
Homer-and-Empedocles passage referred to a little earlier—indeed Maggi
had put him in the right way here. But, in this and other cases, he is
somewhat too fond of “hedging.” “We must remember this; but we must not
forget that,” &c. The inspiriting downrightness of Scaliger on the one side,
and Patrizzi on the other, is not in him; and we see the approach, in this
subject also, of a time of mere piling up of authorities, and marshalling of
arguments pro and con, to the darkening rather than the illumination of
judgment.

The Topica Poetica of Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano[146] comes well
next to Piccolomini, because the pair are characteristic examples of the two
parallel lines in which, as we have seen throughout, Italian criticism
Gilio. proceeds during the century. In plan it presents no inconsiderable
resemblance to that work of our own Puttenham (v. infra) which followed it
at no great interval; but it is, as its special title will have indicated to the
expert, even more definitely rhetorical. In fact, it must be one of the very
latest treatises in which, on the partial precedent of antiquity, Poetics are
brought directly under Rhetoric. We actually start with accounts, illustrated
by poetical examples in the vernacular, of the Deliberative, Demonstrative,
and Judicial kinds; we pass thence to Invention, Imitation, and Style; and
thence again to Decorum, the Proper, and so forth, all still illustrated from
the vulgar tongue mainly, but with a Latin example here and there. And this
finishes the short First Book. The longer Second is the most strictly
“topical,” with its sections (at first sight bewildering to the modern non-
expert mind) on Definition and Etymology, on Genus and Species, on
Example and Induction, on Proceeding from Less to Greater and from
Greater to Less, on Amplification, Authority, Custom, and Love. The Third
is wholly on Figures of Speech, and the Fourth on Tropes or Figures of
“Conceit.” The poetical illustration is all-pervading, and there is an odd
appendix of sonnets from ladies of Petrarch’s time. The book is chiefly
worth notice here because, as has been said, it is one of the latest—perhaps,
with the exception of Puttenham’s own, the actually latest—of its special
subdivision that we shall have to notice,—the subdivision, that is to say, in
which the literature handled is absolutely subordinate to an artificial system
of classification, in which the stamped and registered ticket is everything,
so that, when the critic has tied it on, his task is done.
Giacomo Mazzoni is perhaps better known[147] than at least some of the
Mazzoni. subjects of this chapter, owing to his connection with Dante. He
first, in 1573, published at Cesena a brief Difesa di Dante of some fifty
folios, in fairly large print, and followed it up fourteen years later with an
immense Della Difesa, containing 750 pages of very small print without the
index. The points of the actual Difesa are not uncurious—such as an
argument that discourses on Poetry are not improper for the philosopher,
and that Dante is a particularly philosophical poet, in fact encyclopædic.
From the Imitation point of view the Comedy can be easily defended, as it
is a real following of action, and not the mere relation of a dream: and as

dealing with costume (manners) it is a comedy, not a tragedy or heroic
poem. The Della Difesa, on the other hand, is a wilderness of erudition and
controversy, arranged under abstract heads (“how the poets have conducted
themselves towards the predicaments of Time and Place,” &c.), and
diverging into inquiries and sub-inquiries of the most intricate character—
the trustworthiness of dreams,[148] the opinions held of them in antiquity, the
nature and kinds of allegory, Dante’s orthodoxy—in short, all things
Dantean, and very many others. If I cannot with Mr Spingarn[149] discover “a
whole new theory of poetry” in the Difesa itself, I am ready to admit that
almost anything might be discovered in the Della Difesa.
The Poetica of Jason Denores[150] is remarkable from one point of view
for its thoroughgoing and “charcoal-burner” Aristotelianism, from another
for the extraordinary and meticulous precision of its typographical
arrangements. How many sizes and kinds of type there are in Jason’s book I
Denores. am not enough of an expert in printing to attempt to say exactly:
and the arrangement of his page is as precious as the selection of his type.
Sometimes his text overflows the opened sheet, with decent margins indeed
but according to ordinary proportions; at others (and by no means always
because he requires side-notes) it is contracted to a canal down the centre,
with banks broader than itself. It is, however, when Denores comes to the
tabular arrangement and subdivision of statement and argument, in which
nearly all these writers delight, that he becomes most eccentric. As many
divisions, so many parallel columns; under no circumstances will his rigid
equity give one section the advantage of appearing on the recto of a leaf
while the others are banished to the verso. This is all very well when the
divisions are two or three or even four. But when, as sometimes happens,
there are six or even eight, the cross-reading of the parallel columns is at
once tempting and conducive to madness. As each column is but some half-
inch broad, almost every word longer than a monosyllable has to be broken
into, and as only a single em of space is allowed between the columns, there
is a strong temptation to “follow the line.” By doing this you get such
bewilderments as

“gue do-diEdip-di Laio, ttappas-menosia ra il Poe mu tio lipo, per,” &c.,

a moderate dose of which should suffice to drive a person of some
imagination, and excessive nerves, to Bedlam. Read straight, however,

Denores is much more sedative, not to say soporific, than exciting: and his
dealings with Tragedy, the Heroic Poem, and Comedy have scarcely any
other interest than as symptoms of that determination towards unqualified,
if not wholly unadulterated, Aristotelianism which has been remarked upon.
Il Sogno, overo della Poesia, by Gabriele Zinano,[151] dedicated at Reggio
on the 15th October 1590 to the above-mentioned Ferrando Gonzaga of
Zinano. Guastalla, is a very tiny treatise, written with much pomp of
style, but apparently unnoticed by most of the authorities on the subject.
The author had studied Patrizzi (or Patrici, as he, too, calls him), and was
troubled in his mind about Imitation, and about the equivocal position of
Empedocles. He comforts himself as he goes on, and at last comes to a sort
of eclectic opportunism, which extols the instruction and delight of poetry,
admits that it can practically take in all arts and sciences, but will not admit
fable as making it without verse, or verse without fable, and denies that
both, even together, make it necessarily good. The little piece may deserve
mention for its rarity, and yet once more, as symptomatic of the hold which
critical discussion had got of the Italian mind, Zinano is evidently full of the
Deca Istoriale and the Deca Disputata, but alarmed at their heresies.
Paolo Beni, the antagonist of Summo, the champion of prose for tragedy
as well as for comedy, and a combatant in the controversy over the Pastor
Fido, which succeeded in time, and almost equalled in tedium, that over the
Gerusalemme, will come best in the next Book; and though I have not
neglected, I find little to say about, Correa[152] and others.[153] A sign of the
Mazzone da times is the somewhat earlier I Fiori della Poesia[154] of
Miglionico, &c.
Mazzone da Miglionico (not to be confounded with the
above-mentioned Mazzoni), a tightly packed quarto of five hundred pages,
plus an elaborate index. This is a sort of “Bysshe” ante Bysshium—a huge
gradus of poetic tags from Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, arranged ready for
anybody who wishes to pursue the art of poetry according to the principles
of Vida. Here you may find choice of phrases to express the ideas of “going
to bed for the purpose of sleeping,” of “black and beautiful eyes,” of “shoes
that hurt the feet,” and of “horses that run rapidly.” It was inevitable that
this manual at once and reductio ad absurdum of the mechanic Art of
Poetical Imitation should come—indeed, others had preceded Mazzone, for
instance Fabricius, in Germany (see next Book). But one cannot help
invoking a little woe on those by whom it came.
Summo.

The twelve Discorsi[155] of Faustino Summo manage to cover as many
questions in their 93 leaves: the end of Poetry; the meaning of the word
philanthropia;[156] the last words (the purgation clause) of the Definition of
Tragedy; the possibility of a happy ending; the representation of atrocities
and deaths; the admissibility of true fables; the necessity of unity of action;
the propriety of drama in prose; furor poeticus; the sufficiency of verse to
make poetry; the legitimacy of tragi-comedy and pastoral; and the quality of
the Pastor Fido. Summo gives us our last word here with singular propriety.
He is not quite Aristotelian to the point of infallibility, and his orthodoxy is
what may be called a learned orthodoxy—that is to say, he is careful to
quote comments or arguments of many of the writers whom we have
mentioned in this chapter and the last, from Trissino to Denores, and of a
few whom we have not. But in him this orthodoxy is in the main
constituted: it is out of the stage of formation and struggle; and it is ready—
all the more so that many of its documents have already passed with
authority to other countries and languages—to take its place as the creed of
Europe.

97. My copy is the second edition (apud Petrum Santandreanum, s. l.,
1581).

98. This joke requires a little explanation and adaptation to get it into
English. The Latin is miror majores nostros sibi tam iniquos fuisse ut
factoris vocem maluerint oleariorum cancellis circumscribere. In fact,
Fattojo and Fattojano, if not fattore, do mean in Italian “Oil-Press” and
“Oil-Presser.”

99. Scaliger goes so far as to say that “it would be better never to have
read” the Symposium and the Phædrus, because of their taint with the
Grœcanicum scelus.

100. The decision of this is all the more remarkable that Scaliger does
not, as unwary moderns might expect, make verse the form of Poetry, but
the matter. Feet, rhythm, metre, these are the things that Poetry works in,
her stuff, her raw material. The skill of the poet in its various applications is
the form. A very little thought will show this to be the most decisive
negation possible of the Wordsworthian heresy—anticipated by many

sixteenth-century writers, from Italy to England, and though not exactly
authorised, countenanced by the ancients, from Aristotle downwards—that
verse is not essential in any way.

101. One cannot help thinking that this distinction, which is quite
contrary to those entertained by Aristotle and Quintilian, must have been
influenced by the cadences of the modern languages—Italian and French—
with which Scaliger was familiar. In both, but especially in French, the
actual “measuring-off” of syllables was the be-all and end-all of metre, the
easements provided in English and German by syllabic equivalence being
in French refused altogether, in Italian replaced only by the more meagre
aid of syncope and apocope.

102. As, even throughout the neo-classic age, very orthodox neo-classics
admitted, especially in the “Musæus v. Homer” case.

103. Varietas poetices κομητικὴ, sicut Cypassis Corinnæ. The text has
κομωτικὴ, which I do not find.

104. Spingarn, p. 172. “Disinterested treatment” of practical problems,
such as poems certainly are, “wholly aside from all practical
considerations,” sometimes leads to awkward results.

105. Mr Spingarn (p. 94) apparently states that he “formulated” them, but
the gist of the next two pages fully corrects this slip or ambiguity; and he
has himself pointed out with equal decision and correctness that the French
assumption contained in the phrase, Unités Scaligériennes, is unfounded.

106. P. 365.

107. Vienna, 1570. My copy is the second enlarged and improved issue,
which appeared at Basle five years later. I have also the companion edition
of Petrarch (Basle, 1582), and the Opere Varie Critiche, published, with a
Life, by Muratori, in 4to (Lione, 1727). Besides these he wrote an
“exposition” of Dante, which was lost, and he is said, by Muratori, to have
been never tired of reading, and discovering new beauties in, Boccaccio.
Bentley, Diss. on Phal., ed. 1817, p. liii, defending Castelvetro against
Boyle, says that “his books have at this present time such a mighty

reputation, that they are sold for their weight in silver in most countries of
Europe.” I am glad that this is not true now, for the Poetic by itself weighs
nearly 3 lb. But Europe often makes its valuations worse. I have seen,
though not bought, a copy for a shilling in these days.

108. See the curious remarks of Salviati, printed from MS. by Mr
Spingarn (op. cit., p. 316). Salviati thinks that Castelvetro too often wrote to
show off subtlety of opinion, and to be not like other people.

109. Op. Var., p. 83 sq.

110. Op. Var., pp. 288-306.

111. In fact, he subordinates the first to the other two. They make it
necessary. In order to appreciate his views, it is necessary to read the
commentary on all the Aristotelian places concerned, and also on that
touching Epic.

112. P. 101.

113. Poet. d’Arist., p. 278.

114. Poet. d’Arist., pp. 585, 586.

115. Ibid., p. 576.

116. Ibid., p. 23.

117. Poet. d’Arist., p. 545. It is fair to say that the ban is only pronounced
in reference to a single point—the management of speeches.

118. Ibid., p. 23.

119. Poet. d’Arist., p. 158.

120. It is perhaps well to meet a possible, though surely not probable
objection “Do you deny ranks in poetry?” Certainly not—but only the
propriety of excluding ranks which do not seem, to the censor, of the
highest.

121. At Venice, but ad instanza of a Ferrarese bookseller.

122. These pieces form the major part of Cesare Guasti’s Prose Diverse
di T. T. (2 vols., Florence, 1875).

123. For instance, my attention was drawn by Mr Ker to the fact that the
description of the subject of the third original Discorso given at the end of
the second (f. 24 original ed. vol. i. p. 48, Guasti) does not in the least fit the
actual contents, while the missing matter is duly supplied in the later book
(i. 162 sq., Guasti).

124. For instance in the opening of the first Discorsi (f. 2, verso):
Variamente tessendolo, di commune proprio, e di vecchio novo il facevano.

125. Bruno himself, in more places than one, takes the same line; indeed
his statement in the Eroici Furori, that “the rules are derived from the
poetry, and there are as many kinds and sorts of true rules as there are kinds
and sorts of true poets,” is the conclusion of the whole matter, and would
have done his friend Sidney a great deal of good. (The passage may be
found at p. 38 of the first vol. of the translation by I. Williams (London,
1887, or in the original, ed. Lagarde, p. 625).) But Bruno’s genius, as erratic
as it was brilliant, could not settle to mere Rhetoric.

126. Especially when they are contrasted with the superciliousness (v.
supra) of Lilius Giraldus and Scaliger.

127. It would be rather interesting to know whether the Furor Poeticus of
the second part of the Return from Parnassus has anything to do with
Patrizzi. There need be no connection, of course; but the correspondence of
England and Italy at this time in matters literary was so quick and intimate
that there might have been. Patrizzi’s book appeared in the probable year of
Shakespeare’s going to London, and of the production of Tamburlaine.
Bruno had then left England.

128. Deca Disputata, p. 122.

129. See Whately, Rhetoric, III. iii. 3, p. 216 (ed. 8, London, 1857), and
De Quincey, Rhetoric (Works, ed. Masson, x. 131).

130. Deca Disputata, p. 134 sq.

131. Of course an Aristotelian advocate may justly point out that the
Master after all only says μᾶλλον ἢ ποιητὴν, without absolutely denying the
latter title to Empedocles.

132. Deca Disputata, p. 175.

133. Deca Disputata, p. 192.

134. Who had been pars non minima in the exaltation of Tasso and
depreciation of Ariosto. See Spingarn, pp. 122, 123; and Serassi, Vita di
Tasso (Rome, 1785), pp. 331-348.

135. Deca Disputata, pp. 246-249.

136. This was long after the publication of the Trimerone (1586), and
when Patrizzi had been translated from Ferrara to a newly founded chair of
Platonic Philosophy at Rome, V. Serassi, op. cit., p. 475.

137. P. 95.

138. Pp. 221, 222. Of course it is possible to take exception even to
poeticamente—to ask “Yes; but what is this?” But the demurrer is only
specious. The very adverbial form shifts the sovereignty from the subject to
the treatment.

139. Ibid., p. 235.

140. The way in which Patrizzi is referred to after the lapse of a century
by Baillet and Gibert (v. inf., p. 320) shows at once the sort of magni
nominis umbra which still made itself felt, and the absence of any definite
knowledge to give body to the shade. For his dealings with Rhetoric, see
next Book, p. 329.

141. Discorsi Poetici, 1597.

142. Poesia Rappresentativa, 1598.

143. Della Imitatione Poetica, Venice, 1560; De Poetica Imitatione, ibid.,
1565.

144. His De Arte Poetica seems to have first appeared at Antwerp in
1579: I know it in his Opera, Naples, 1606.

145. Annotationi di M. Alessandro Piccolomini nel Libro della Poetica
d’Aristotele: Vinegia. The dedication to Cardinal Ferdinand dei Medici is
dated Ap. 20, 1572, from Piccolomini’s native town of Sienna, where he
became co-adjutor-archbishop. Some of Salviati’s MS. observations, printed

by Mr Spingarn, seem to show that even Piccolomini’s contemporaries
regarded him as a little too polymathic, while his Raffaella exhibits the less
grave side of the Renaissance. But he was now getting an old man, and died
six years later at the full three score and ten.

146. In Venetia, 1580. Why has Time, in the title-page woodcut of this,
an hour-glass as head-dress, but a scourge instead of a scythe in his hand?

147. Milton had read Mazzoni, and cites him.

148. There is a large folding table of the causes and kinds of visions.

149. Op. cit., p. 124.

150. Padua, 1588. Denores (whose name is often separated into “de
Nores”) was, like Patrizzi, a Professor of Philosophy, and, like Piccolomini,
very polymathic and polygraphic. He had a year earlier published a
Discourse (which I have not) on the Philosophical Principles of poetical
kinds, and had very much earlier still, in 1553, commented the Epistola ad
Pisones. His son Pietro was an affectionate and attentive disciple of Tasso’s
in his last days at Rome.

151. I have not found much about Zinano near to hand, nor have I
thought it worth while to go far afield in search of him. Tiraboschi (vii.,
1716, 1900) names him as a poet-miscellanist in almost every kind. My
copy, of 42 duodecimo pages, has been torn out of what was its cover, and
may have been its company.

152. His Explanationes de Arte Poetica (Rome, 1587) are simply notes
on Horace.

153. I have not yet been able to see L. Gambara, De Perfecta Poeseos
Ratione (Rome, 1576), and I gather that Mr Spingarn was in the same case,
as he refers not to the book, but to Baillet. According to that invaluable
person (iii. 70), Gambara must have been an early champion of the
uncompromisingly religious view of Poetry which appears in several
French seventeenth-century writers, and in our own Dennis. The poet is not
even to introduce a heathen divinity.

154. Venice, 1592-93.

155. Padua, 1600.

156. Cf. Butcher, op. cit., p. 297 and note.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CRITICISM OF THE PLÉIADE.
THE ‘RHETORICS’ OF THE TRANSITION—SIBILET—DU BELLAY—THE ‘DÉFENSE ET
ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRANÇAISE’—ITS POSITIVE GOSPEL AND THE
VALUE THEREOF—THE ‘QUINTIL HORATIEN’—PELLETIER’S ‘ART POÉTIQUE’—
RONSARD: HIS GENERAL IMPORTANCE—THE ‘ABRÉGÉ DE L’ART POÉTIQUE’—
THE ‘PREFACES TO THE FRANCIADE’—HIS CRITICAL GOSPEL—SOME MINORS—
PIERRE DE LAUDUN—VAUQUELIN DE LA FRESNAYE—ANALYSIS OF HIS ‘ART
POÉTIQUE’—THE FIRST BOOK—THE SECOND—THE THIRD—HIS EXPOSITION OF
‘PLÉIADE’ CRITICISM—OUTLIERS: TORY, FAUCHET, ETC.—PASQUIER: THE
‘RECHERCHES’—HIS KNOWLEDGE OF OLDER FRENCH LITERATURE, AND
CRITICISM OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY—MONTAIGNE: HIS
REFERENCES TO LITERATURE—THE ESSAY ‘ON BOOKS.’

There is, perhaps, no more remarkable proof of the extraordinarily
germinal character of Italian literature than the influence which it exercised
The Rhetorics on France in the department with which we here deal. It is
of the
Transition.
needless to say that the subsequent story of French
literature has shown how deep and wide is the critical vein
in the French literary spirit. But up to the middle of the sixteenth century
this vein was almost absolutely irrepertum—whether sic melius situm or
not. A few Arts of Poetry and Rhetoric had indeed been introduced across
the Channel long before we had any on this side, as we should expect in a
language so much more advanced than English, and as we have partly seen
in the preceding volume. The Art de dittier of Eustache Deschamps, at the
end of the fourteenth century, had been followed[157] throughout the fifteenth
by others, some of them bearing the not uninteresting or unimportant title of
“Seconde Rhétorique,” as distinguishing Poetics from the Art of Oratory.
The chief of these,[158] almost exactly a century later than the treatise of
Deschamps, used to be assigned to Henri de Croy, and is now (very likely
with no more reason) handed over to Molinet. But they were almost
entirely, if not entirely, occupied with the intricacies of the “forms” of
ballade, &c., and included no criticism properly so called.

The spirit and substance of these treatises seems to have been caught up
and embodied, about the year 1500, in another Rhetoric,[159] which became
very popular, and was known by such titles as the “Flower” or “Garden of
Rhetoric,” but the author of which is only known by one of those agreeably
conceited noms de guerre so frequent at the time, as “‘l’Infortunaté’” Its
matter appeared, without much alteration or real extension, in the works of
Pierre Fabri[160] and Gratien du Pont (1539),[161] and the actual birth of
French criticism proper is postponed, by most if not all historians, till the
fifth decade of the century, when Pelletier translated the Ars Poetica of
Horace in 1545, while Sibilet wrote an original Art Poétique three years
later, and just before Du Bellay’s epoch-making Défense.
There is little possibility of difference of opinion as to the striking critical
Sibilet. moment presented to us by the juxtaposition, with but a single
twelvemonth between, of Sibilet and Du Bellay. The importance of this
movement is increased, not lessened, by the fact that Sibilet himself is by
no means such a copyist of Gratien du Pont as Du Pont is of Fabri, and
Fabri of the unknown “Unfortunate,” and the “Unfortunate” of all his
predecessors to Deschamps. He does repeat the lessons of the Rhetorics as
to verse and rhyme, and so forth. He has no doubt about the excellence of
that “equivocal” rhyme to which France yet clings, though it has always
been unpleasing to an English ear. And (though with an indication that they
are passing out of fashion) he admits the most labyrinthine intricacies of the
ballade and its group.[162]
But he is far indeed from stopping here. He was (and small blame to him)
a great admirer of Marot, and he had already learnt to distrust that
outrageous “aureation” of French with Greek and Latin words which the
rhétoriqueurs had begun, which the intermediate school of Scève and
Heroet were continuing,[163] and which the Pléiade, though with an atoning
touch of elegance and indeed of poetry, was to maintain and increase, in the
very act of breaking with other rhétoriqueur traditions. He delights in
Marot’s own epigrams, and in the sonnets of Mellin de Saint-Gelais; and he
is said to have anticipated Ronsard in the adoption of the term “ode” in
French, though his odes are not in the least Pindaric (as for the matter of
that Ronsard’s are not). The epistle and the elegy give fresh intimation of
his independent following of the classics, and he pays particular attention to
the eclogue, dwells on the importance of the “version” (translation from
Greek or Latin into French verse), and in the opening of his book is not

very far from that half-Platonic, half anti-Platonic, deification of Poetry
which is the catch-cry of the true Renaissance critic everywhere. There is
not very much real, and probably still less intentional, innovation or revolt
in Sibilet; and it is precisely this that makes him so valuable. Fabri and
Gratien du Pont are merely of the old: in no important way do the form and
pressure of the coming time set their mark on them. Du Bellay is wholly of
the new: he is its champion and crusader, full of scorn for the old. Sibilet,
between them, shows, uncontentiously, the amount of leaning towards
sometimes revised or exotic novelty, and away from immediate and
domestic antiquity, which influenced the generation.
The position of the Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française may
be said to be in the main assured and uncontested, nor do I think it
necessary to make such a curious dictum as that it is “not in any true sense a
work of literary criticism at all” the subject of much counter-argument. In
Du Bellay. that case most undoubtedly the De Vulgari Eloquio, of
which it has been not much less strangely held to be little more than a
version adapted to the latitude of Paris, is not such a work either. I think it
very likely that Du Bellay knew the De Vulgari, which Trissino had long
before published in Italian; but both the circumstances and the purpose of
the two books seem to me as entirely different as their position in literary
criticism seems to me absolutely secure.
Whether this be so or not, Du Bellay’s circumstances are perfectly well
known, and his purpose is sun-clear, alike before him and before his
The Défense et readers. He is justifying the vulgar tongue,[164] but he is
Illustration de la
Langue Française.
justifying it as Ascham and his friends were doing in
England; with the proviso that it shall be reformed
upon, strengthened by, and altogether put to school to, the classical
languages in the first place, with in the second (and here Ascham would not
have agreed) Italian and even Spanish. His dealing is no doubt titularly and
ostensibly directed to the language; but his anxieties are wholly
concentrated on the language as the organ of literature—and specially of
poetry. That he made a mistake in turning his back, with the scorn he
shows, on the older language itself, and even on the verse-forms which had
so long occupied it, is perfectly true. This is the besetting sin of the
Renaissance—its special form of that general sin which, as we said at the
outset, doth so easily beset every age. But his scheme for the improvement
is far more original; and, except in so far as it may have been faintly

suggested by a passage of Quintilian,[165] had not, so far as I know, been
anticipated by any one in ancient or modern times. Unlike Sibilet, and
unlike preceding writers generally, he did not believe so very much in
translation—seeing justly that by it you get the matter, but nothing, or at
least not much, more.[166] He did not believe in the mere “imitation” of the
ancients either. I cannot but think that M. Brunetière[167] has been rather
unjust in upbraiding Du Bellay with the use of this word. He does use it: but
he explains it. He wishes the ancients to be imitated in their processes, not
merely in their results. His is no Ciceronianism; no “Bembism”; none of
that frank advice to “convey” which Vida had given before him, and to
which, unluckily, his master Ronsard condescended later. “How,” he asks,
“did Greek and Latin become such great literary languages?” Were they
always so? Not at all. It was due to culture, to care, to (in the case of Latin
at least) ingenious grafting of fresh branches from Greek. So is French to
graft from Greek, from Latin, from Italian, from Spanish even—so is the
essence of the classics and the other tongues to be converted into the blood
and nourishment of French.[168]
Is this “not in any pure sense literary criticism at all”? Is this “young”
Its positive gospel and the and “pedantic” and “too much praised” by (of all
value thereof.
Sauls among the prophets!) Désiré Nisard? I have
a great respect for Mr Spingarn’s erudition; I have a greater for M.
Brunetière’s masterly insight and grasp in criticism; but here I throw down
the glove to both. That Du Bellay was absolutely wrong in his scorn for
ballade and rondeau and other “épiceries” I am sure; that his master was
right in looking at least as much to the old French lexicon as to new
constructions or adoptions I am sure. But Du Bellay (half or all unawares,
as is the wont of finders and founders) has seized a secret of criticism which
is of the most precious, and which—with all politeness be it spoken—I
venture to think that M. Brunetière himself rather acknowledges and
trembles at, than really ignores. This free trade in language, in forms, in
processes,—this resolute determination to convert all the treasures of
antiquity and modernity alike into “food” for the literary organism, “blood”
for the literary veins, marrow for the literary bones,—is no small thing. It
may not be the absolute and sole secret of literary greatness. But we can
almost see that Greek, the most perfectly literary of all languages for a time,
withered and dwindled because it did not pursue this course; that Latin
followed it on too small a scale; above all, that English owes great part of

its strength, and life, and splendid flourishing of centuries, to it. Du Bellay
preached, perhaps more or less unconsciously, what Shakespeare practised
—whether consciously or unconsciously we need neither know nor care,
any more than in all probability he knew or cared himself.
No doubt all languages and all literatures have not the digestive strength
required to swallow poison and food, bread and stones, almost
indiscriminately, assimilating all the good, and dismissing most if not all of
the evil. There are not, and never have been in England, wanting people,
from the towering head of Swift down to quite creeping things of our own
time, who have been distressed by “mob” and by “bamboozle,” by
“velleity” and by “meticulous.” No doubt in France the objection has been
still greater, and perhaps better founded on reason. But these propositions
will not affect, in the slightest degree, the other proposition that Du Bellay,
in the Défense, stumbled upon, and perhaps even half-consciously realised,
that view of literature, and of language as the instrument of literature, which
will have the whole to be mainly un grand peut-être—a vast and endless
series of explorations in unknown seas, rather than a mathematical or
chemical process of compounding definite formulas and prescriptions, so as
to reach results antecedently certain. Very far would it have been from
Nisard, who was no doubt bribed by the militant classicism of the Pléiade,
to have given his praise had he thought this: I am even prepared to admit
that Du Bellay himself would probably not have thanked me for the
compliment of my theory. But hatred is often more sagacious than
friendship. Malherbe and those about Malherbe knew perfectly well what
the real spirit of the Pléiade was. And so does M. Brunetière, who has a
scent as keen as that of Malherbe and those about Malherbe, and is very
much better read, very much more scientifically equipped, and quite
infinitely better provided with intellectual and critical gift.[169]
It was unlikely, or rather impossible, that so revolutionary a challenge
should lack its answer, which duly appeared a year later under the odd title
The Quintil of Le Quintil Horatien.[170] This used to be attributed to
Horatien.
Charles Fontaine, a poet of parts; but it seems that he
repudiated it, and it is now handed over to a pedagogue of the name of
Aneau. It is a dogged little book, which treats the Défense very much as if it
were an impertinent school exercise, and goes through it with the lead
pencil in a fashion at once laborious, ineffectual, and suggestive of a vain
desire to substitute the birch rod. The author, whoever he was, might have

found plenty of things to say against Du Bellay, and he is on fairly solid
ground when he indignantly protests that William of Lorris, Chartier,
Villon, and others were not the artless clowns, or positive sinners, that this
petulant-sparkling star of the Pléiade had looked awry upon. But even here
his own ignorance of the still better things before the Rose disabled him:
and it is by no means certain that he would have had the wit to appreciate
them if he had known them. He thinks the sonnet too “easy,” poor man!
condemns the elegy on the absurd ground that it saddens the reader; and
(committing the same fault in defence which more modern critics have
committed in attack) bases his main, if not his whole, praise of Ballade and
Chant Royal, Rondeau and Rondel, on their mere difficulty. But his most
unfortunate, if not his most absurd, error was the line which, in common
with most respectable persons, both then and since, he takes up against the
verbum inusitatum, as shown in the new poetic diction of the Pléiade. This
was doubly unlucky: first, because the fifteenth-century poets whom he
champions had themselves “aureated” the language in or out of all
conscience already; and secondly, because this kind of criticism, whether it
be applied to Montaigne or Dryden, to Carlyle or Browning, is always a
dangerous delusion. Very classical critics have pecked and mocked at the
author of the Quintil Horatien because he black-marks not merely words
useful or beautiful, like sinueux, oblivieux, rasséréner, but even such now
sterling coin as liquide and patrie. It would be well if they, or those like
them, would think twice before condemning, as neologisms, terms which
may not impossibly seem as much matter of course to the twenty-fourth
century as patrie does to the twentieth. But the author of the Quintil is
really of that breed of carping critics which carps itself out of all common-
sense. He makes ponderous fun of the initial signature I. D. B. A. (“J. du
Bellay Angevin”); objects to the statement that “nature gave us tongues to
speak,” because Aristotle, Galen, and Petrus Hispanus agree that palate,
throat, lips, and teeth are also necessary to the process; to the use of voix
instead of son, where animals are not concerned. The sea would have no
voice for him—and doubtless had none.
From such mere “denigration” (the censor permits himself this word as a
Pelletier’s Art stone to throw at Du Bellay) no good thing could come:
Poétique.
and besides, for some generation or more, the brother stars
were to fight in their courses for Pléiade criticism as well as for Pléiade
poetry. The second Ars Poetica of the French Renaissance—the first in any

full modern sense—appeared in 1555 from the hand of Jacques Pelletier,
himself a spelling reformer, a professor, and, what is more, a
mathematician; but a man of versatile ability and much eagerness to
welcome any new good thing, with no small power of starting such things.
He was a pleasant poet, full of Pléiade manner before the Pléiade had been
formed; nor can even his absurd spelling[171] quite hide the beauty of such
things as

“Alors que la vermeille Aurore.”

And when, at the age of nearly forty, he wrote his Poetic, nobody could
charge him with being a mere theorist. He went heart and soul for the
Pléiade ideas, and like Du Bellay and the rest, as indeed was unavoidable,
busied himself first of all with the reform of the language. He recommends
the formation of a regular poetic diction, and goes so far (I do not say that it
is too far) as to approve of retaining double forms, one fully “frenchified,”
one simply Latin with a French termination (e.g., repousse and repulse), the
first for prosaic, the second for poetic use. The famous Pléiade stumbling-
blocks, the compound epithet and the inverted order of words, are no
stumbling-blocks for him—he takes them triumphantly in the stride of his
revolutionary ardour: and he joins Ronsard also in the safer if not more
popular recommendation of archaism, and of adoption of didactic forms at
pleasure. No doubt he is not always wise: though the Classical school which
followed had lost the right to reproach him with abusing the principle of
suiting the sound to the sense. But still there is a great wisdom in him.
Himself an excellent rhymer, he has some of the qualms about rhyme which
were so frequent in the sixteenth century; but he is sound on the point (in
French not admitting of any serious contest) that without rhyme poetry
becomes prose, and he is more than lukewarm as to classical metres. It is
sad but not surprising that he joins Du Bellay in condemning the delightful
if not all-sufficing metrical kinds which had produced such charming things
from Lescurel to Villon; and he duly recommends comedy, tragedy, and
epic in their place. As he had himself translated the Epistle to the Pisos
eleven years earlier, it is not wonderful that he sticks very close to it.
Whether, as has been said by some, he does not know Aristotle, may not be
quite certain; but it is certain that Aristotelian doctrines make no figure in
him: it will be remembered that they had not made much even in Italy at

this time. In fact, it seems reasonable to doubt whether, despite their
adoration of Greek, the Pléiade writers ever drew much direct inspiration
from the Poetics, though, in Italian translations and commentaries at least, it
must have influenced them to some extent.
The most interesting figure of Pléiade criticism, however, is, as it should
Ronsard: his be, Ronsard[172] himself. The greatness of this really great
general
importance.
poet must be injuriously affected, but ought not to be
obscured to critical judgment, both by the fact (for which
he is to blame) that he tried too many things and wrote too much; and by
the other fact (for which he is blameless) that he attempted a new theory
and practice of poetry, not, like his younger and more fortunate
contemporary Spenser, at the beginning of a great poetic wave in his own
country, but at a time when that country’s energies were steadily settling
towards prose. Yet he was nothing if not critical. The actual amount of
critical expression that he has left us is not large: it is a pity that he did not
devote to it some of the time which he might well have spared from his too
copious, and sometimes too undistinguished, versemanship. He is, like
Dryden (whom he resembles in not a few ways so much that I should be
surprised if the parallel has not struck others), somewhat careless of
outward consistency in his critical utterances—a carelessness indicative in
each case of real critical sincerity, of the fact that the two poets were
honestly seeking the way, and had the sense not to persevere in blind alleys
when they found them blind. Above all, like the whole of his school, he is
distinguished by a critical note, which must be dwelt on in the Interchapter
succeeding this book, but which may well be indicated here—the note that
they are much more bent on the production of new literature than on the
study of old.
But, for all this, he is a remarkable critic, and in his critical aperçus we
can ourselves perceive germs, indications, suggestions, which might have
resulted in the creation of a much larger body of actual criticism. Indeed
these are (as M. Pellissier[173] and others have shown) actually responsible
for much that is most characteristic, and for most of what is best, in the
Classical school of the next century, which affected to despise him, as well
as for other things which, if that school had followed them out, would have
saved it from its most fatal mistakes and shortcomings.
The main critical loci in Ronsard have been duly pointed out by his
editor, M. Prosper Blanchemain. They are the formal Abrégé de l’Art

The Abrégé de Poétique of 1565; the prefatory matter to his not too well-
l’Art Poétique.
starred epic, the Franciade, ten years later and onwards;
and the remarkable Caprice au Seigneur Simon Nicolas—a poem written
late, and not, it seems, published save posthumously. The
“Abridgement”[174] answers to its name, for it only fills just twenty
Elzevirian pages. It begins in a manner which shows (as so many other
things do in Ronsard) the gaps which separated him from, as well as the ties
which united him to, the usual thought of the Renaissance, and still more
that of the seventeenth century. Although there are of course exceptions, the
general drift of Italian criticism had been that poetry, like any other art or
science, is a thing teachable and learnable. On no other ground could the
“archæolatry,” which we have found almost universal, be maintained for a
moment. Now Ronsard, though he dwells again and again on the necessity
of study, begins with an apology for writing an Art of Poetry at all. He has
had, he says modestly, some experience and practice, and he will do his best
to give his correspondent[175] the benefit thereof. But poesy is plus mental
que traditif, which we may translate “more native to the mind than
communicable to it.” He accordingly converts (with an agreeable twist) the
stock invocation to the Muses into a real prayer for this mental endowment,
and with equal ingenuity freshens up the stale clichés about the divinity of
Ancient poets, and about the Muses refusing to lodge save in a virtuous and
pious mind. Therefore, too, study of these former favourites of poetry is
requisite. But from these generalities he plunges straight into extremely
minute details. Greek, Latin, and French—it is probable that he does not
mention Italian because his correspondent, Delbène, was of Italian
extraction—are to be carefully studied as languages. The rules of French
prosody—among which is here for the first time authoritatively included
the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes—are to be carefully
observed, and e is to be always elided before a vowel. It is perhaps worth
noting that Ronsard uses “cæsura” for “elision,” a catachresis in which he
had followers, and which even affected Dryden. Greek and Roman proper
names are, where possible, to be frenchified in termination. “The old words
of our romances” (this is of the first importance) are not to be ejected, but to
be chosen with care and prudence. Terms of art and technical similes are to
be sought out with extreme diligence, so as to supply life and nerve to the
book. Dialect-words may be used at need; the example of the Greeks being
invoked here—perhaps a little rashly. Invention, says Ronsard, is the

working of the Imagination; but he seems still inclined to the old limitation
of this word to the retailing of images, and reprobates more strongly than is
perhaps necessary or desirable ces inventions fantastiques et
mélancholiques qui ne se rapportent non plus l’une à l’autre que les songes
entrecoupés des frénétiques. There is to be first of all (note the Frenchman)
Order and Disposition in poetical devices.
This order and this disposition are to be secured by a happy nature in the
first place, and by a careful study of good models in the second. Among
these good models, “those who have illustrated our language in the last
fifteen years” (i.e., since the Défense) are to be counted in; and (this was
added later) foreign modern languages are also to be carefully studied for
the enriching of the mother tongue. “Elocution” is nothing else than “a
propriety and splendour of words well chosen, and ornamented with grave
and short sentences, which make verses shine, like as do precious stones,
well mounted, the fingers of some great seignior.”[176] The vocabulary must
be copious and composed of well-sifted words, with plentiful description
and comparison, moulded specially on Homer. The common form of
“great” poem-making follows, with reference to Aristotle as well as Horace,
with caution against trite and otiose epithets, against epithet-strings à
l’Italienne, but with a strong praise of the mot propre. Rhyme is treated
rather briefly; and then Ronsard drops to minutiæ of e's and h's, discusses
Alexandrines (which, in a later edition, he says he should have employed in
the Franciade but for powerful command) and “common” (decasyllabic)
verse, and others, passes to some grammatical and orthographical cautions,
and ends with the promise, unluckily never fulfilled, of a longer Poetic
some day.
It may have been in part payment of this promise that he wrote the
The Prefaces to Prefatory matter to the Franciade.[177] This, which, as it
the Franciade.
stands in the modern editions, is triform, consists of a short
Preface (or Au Lecteur) in prose, from the master’s own hand, to the
original edition; of a verse exordium, or rather Introduction, separate from
the poem proper; and, between the two, of a second Preface or Treatise on
Heroic Poetry of some length, which we have, not as it left the author’s pen,
but arranged and revised (it is said under his direction) by Claude Binet.
The critical interest of the verse Proem lies in the enthusiastic glorification
of Homer and Virgil (who have shown the whole secret of epic-writing, and
whose work the author bids his own “adore on its knees”), and in a spirited

reissue of the cardinal doctrine of the Pléiade that French is a fertile soil, all
overgrown and untilled, which must be brought under cultivation by the
unsparing labour of poets and scholars.
The first Preface begins with the time-honoured comparison, or contrast,
between History and Poetry, as dealing, the one with verity, the other with
verisimilitude. Hence Ronsard strikes off to set Homer and Virgil far above
all others, and to fix a stigma on Ariosto as presenting a body handsome
enough in members, but so counterfeit and monstrous as a whole that it is
like an unwholesome dream. He has evidently on his mind the objections,
perhaps of the ancients, perhaps of some Italians, to the combination of
historical poetry, and endeavours to meet the objection that he comes nearer
to actual history “than Virgilian art permits” by the rather perilous excuse
that Virgil only lived under a second emperor, while he himself lives under
the successor of a long line of kings, and that Charles our Lord and King
insisted on no invidious preference being shown to some of his ancestors
over the others. Indeed Ronsard is too typical a Frenchman for a sense of
humour to be exactly his strong point.
He then proceeds to name, as his example, rather “the naïve facility of
Homer than the curious diligence of Virgil”: though he ventures to
reprehend some excess of improbability in the scheme and details of the
Iliad, and ends with some particulars of apology and explanation. The most
curious of these are a passage giving reasons (by no means in strict
accordance with the sentence referred to above) for rejecting the
Alexandrine in favour of the decasyllable, and a pathetic appeal to the
reader not to read his poem like an official document,[178] but to
accommodate his voice to its passion, and especially to raise that voice
whenever he comes to a mark of exclamation.
The second, later, longer, and, as we have said, not quite authentic,
Preface, addressed to the Lecteur Aprentif, is a discourse on the Heroic
Poem in general; and as such is responsible for the specimens of the kind
with which the next century was troubled in France, if not for those from
the Henriade downwards, which serve as even less cheerful ornaments to
the French literature of the eighteenth. We have seen already how
carefulness and trouble about this thing had been gathering and growing in
Italy, and how it was, in Ronsard’s own days, causing the storm about the
Gerusalemme. The “Maronolatry” which France shared with Italy led to it
directly; and even the championship of Homer (as in Ronsard’s own case)

—the attempt to establish two kings of the Epic Brentford—was certain to
conduce to it. Ronsard himself, however, does not at first attempt the
general question; indeed it is hardly possible to draw attention too often to
the far greater abstinence from general and deductive consideration which
at this time characterises the French critics, as compared with the Italians.
He begins with a fresh attack (not quite in the best faith, if his own later
remarks be pressed, as perhaps they need not be) on the Alexandrine; and,
by a deflection more natural in the original than it appears in a summary,
goes off to a panegyric of periphrasis, which again was only too docilely
received by his successors of all schools for the next two centuries in
France. His examples are taken from Virgil—indeed the earlier part of this
Preface, at any rate, is as enthusiastically Virgilian as Scaliger himself could
desire. Then he puts stress once more on the significant epithet, lays down
obiter the delightfully arbitrary dictum that, as the unity of drama is the
revolution of a day, so the unity of at least a war-epic is the revolution of a
year, dwells largely on his favourite distinction between the poet and the
versifier, which he justifies (not too well) by insisting on artful variations of
the narrative by speeches, dreams, prophecies, pictures,[179] auguries,
fantastic visions, and appearances of gods and demons. All this time we
have heard nothing of Homer, and indeed have read nearly half a score
pages before his name occurs as furnishing Virgil with some of his facts and
personages, just as he had drawn his own from older stories, “comme nous
faisons des contes de Lancelot, de Tristan, de Gauvain, et d’Artus,” a
passage to be noted. The dozen or so which remain are oddly occupied by a
sort of jumble of notes and hints to the epic poet, reminding one of that
valuable paper of advice which Sir John Hawkins sent to Captain Amyas
Leigh, on “all points from the mounting of ordnance to the use of vitriol and
limmons against the scurvy.” He must describe splendid palaces and
grounds, trace heroes and heroines to gods and nymphs, dress them
handsomely, wound them in the right places,[180] not invent too much, allow
himself enjambement and hiatus, use plentiful comparisons and terms of art,
do things handsomely in general, boil his very kettles with a Homeric
afflatus,[180] be thoroughly careful about study, but, above all, attend to
diction, as to which the cautions and licences of the Abrégé are repeated in
fuller form, with a special injunction not to Ciceronianise idly, but to faire
un lexicon des vieils mots d’Artus, de Lancelot, et de Gauvain.

Ronsard will necessarily give us text for remark on the criticism of the
His critical Pléiade in the Interchapter following this Book. But we
gospel.
must say a little of his critical attitude here. That it is of
more interest than positive importance cannot easily be denied. Not only for
our purpose, but for its own, it is injured by the very sincerity, practicalness,
and common-sense of the writer’s purpose and view. He clearly does not
regard the past of French literature with quite such a petulant contempt as
that of Pelletier and Du Bellay. But he is even more steadily and thoroughly
convinced that something better can, should, and shall be done: and it is on
the doing of this, by himself and others, that all his thoughts are fixed. He
does not give himself the time—he does not, it is evident, think it in the
least worth while—to take a critical survey of the past in any detail, or with
any general grouping. It is enough for him that Homer and Virgil are of the
greatest, and that their work is also of the greatest; and he wishes
Frenchmen to go and do likewise. He almost, if not altogether, accepts the
end as a datum; and is only troubled about the means. In regard to some of
these means his doctrine, though somewhat ondoyant and even inconsistent,
is surprisingly sound and original. If part of it was accepted with advantage
by his countrymen in the centuries which followed, other parts were
discarded and neglected, with an almost incalculably disastrous result. That
“lexicon of the old words of Lancelot and Artus” would have saved French
from the drab smug insignificance of its eighteenth-century garb; those
cautions about enjambement and the like might almost have done for France
what Spenser and Shakespeare did for England.
But this comparative independence in some points was—probably from
the want of that real historical horizontality of view which, of all the
sixteenth-century critics, Cinthio, Castelvetro, and Patrizzi alone seem in
various degrees to have attained—accompanied by a singular servility and
conventionality in others. “Why, O Prince of Poets!” one feels inclined to
say, “with all reverence to your grey and laurelled head—why should we
trouble ourselves about peintures insérées contre le dos d’une muraille, et
des harnois, et principalement des boucliers because one very great poet
found them useful to produce historical effects nearly three thousand years
ago, and another much lesser poet chose to imitate him slavishly some
thousand years later? Why should we do it, even supposing the two poets to
be on a level? Very likely Homer’s warriors had painted or graven bucklers.
We have not. Arthur’s knights had not—at least the paintings (assuming

them to be armorial) were quite different. Why should we have the
‘monstrous language of horses wounded to death’? Why this childish
limitation in imitation? Handsome dresses are admirable things: but why
must we be limited to lion-skins and panther-skins and bearskins for the
material? If we have got to make a cauldron boil, let it double double, boil
and bubble by all means: but suppose we don’t want to boil it?” To all this
we not only get no answer from Ronsard; but in his critical writing (not, as
we have said, extensive nor always outwardly consistent, but thoroughly
uniform in spirit) we find no trace of any such aporia ever having presented
itself to his mind. They did these things and produced good effects: let us do
them that we may produce good. It seems a “good old rule” enough: yet
perhaps it is “a simple plan” also in more senses than one.
Good or bad, complete or incomplete, this criticism is the very soul of the
Pléiade. Its playwrights, such as Grévin[181] and Jean de la Taille,[182]
followed Italian practice in prefixing argumentative discussions to their
plays—reflecting on the mediæval drama, comparing, in modest or buoyant
Some minors. spirit, their own work to that of the ancients, and the like. A
section of the school (as was almost unavoidable, despite the “No-
Surrender” resistance which French as a language opposes to the
proceeding) tried classical metres after the principles of Tolomei: and
Jacques de la Taille, the brother of Jean, a poet and dramatist of fantastic
but distinct ability, wrote a tractate[183] in defence of them. They made closer
and closer approximations to the absolute Trinity of Unities: and though Du
Bellay in his youthful fervour had committed himself to a not unwise
antinomianism, they more and more showed themselves as the true
ancestors of the neo-classic school, by framing and insisting on “rules.” The
great men of letters who were more or less unattached, but well-willing
irregulars of the school, such as Pasquier and Montaigne, bestow, in their
different ways, increasing attention on literary criticism and literary history.
And, just before and after the junction of the centuries, when the Pléiade
proper had set, and its influence was about to wane before the narrow and
arbitrary classicism of Malherbe on the one hand, and the rococo-
picaresque of the Spanish school on the other, there appeared two formal
Arts of Poetry, the one the complete and final code of Pléiade Poetic, the
other a rather hybrid and nondescript product, chequering Ronsardism with
a good deal of Italian matter.

This last,[184] the earlier to appear, in 1598, had for author Pierre de
Laudun, sometimes spoken of, from a seignory of his, as de Laudun
Pierre de d’Aigaliers. It is in prose, and its author, who is roundly
Laudun.
described by Herr Rücktaschel as a “copyist of the purest
water,” diversifies his borrowings from Sibilet, Ronsard, and Pelletier on
the one hand, from Scaliger and “Vituperani” on the other, with plentiful
examples from his own work; for he had followed one greater man with a
Franciade and ante-dated another with a Horace. I cannot enter any strong
protest against the hard words (not confined to those already quoted) which
his German critic bestows on him.[185] His real interest is purely that of
symptom and tendency, in which respect he shows a rather odd but not
uninstructive mixture. On one side he rejects the Ronsardising coinage of
words and adoption of dialect forms, with other Pléiade traits. On another
he shows himself recalcitrant to the coming classicastry by declaring that
“we are not bound by their laws”—e.g., in regard to the number of acts. On
a third we find him emphasising this attitude into an absolute refusal of the
Unity of Time, against which he says almost all the obvious and sensible
things, in a fashion to some extent redeeming what is on the whole the work
of a not very intelligent bookmaker.
Vauquelin de la Fresnaye has not this sudden cry of the voice in the
desert: but his Art Poétique is, as a whole, a book of infinitely greater
interest and value than Laudun’s. Vauquelin was a gentleman and lawyer of
Normandy, who, born at the château whence he took his name, near
Falaise, fought, amused himself, loved the country and its sports, became
President at Caen, and wrote verses of no small merit in various kinds. His
Vauquelin de la Art Poétique was more than thirty years on the stocks: and
Fresnaye.
having had its keel laid in 1574, when the Pléiade, though a
quarter of a century old, was still in full flourishing, did not get launched till
1605, when a new age had begun in more than chronological fashion. It is a
composition of considerable bulk, consisting of three books, each running
to rather under twelve hundred lines. Either of deliberation, or as a result of
intermittent attention during the time in which it was a-preparing, Vauquelin
arranged it (or failed to arrange it) in most admired disorder. The precisians
of the next age would have been horrified at the promiscuous character of
its observations; and some would have been grateful to its latest editor[186] if,
in addition to, or instead of, part of the elaborate and very valuable
apparatus criticus of various kinds which he has given, he had prefixed an

argument. As it is, we must make one: for the book, if not one of our very
greatest points de repère, is yet such a point.
After a prose address to the Reader, containing a rather touching
reference to the flight of time and the change of public opinion since he had
begun his work, to the cares of life, and the troubles of the realm, and the
Analysis of his death of old friends—he begins with the proper invocation.
Art Poétique.
Immediately after he gives, as has been justly observed, a
warning note by an elaborate simile-description of Poesy as an ordered
garden, with beds and paths and hedges, wherein if any rude boy should
trample on the beds, desert the paths, and break down the espaliers, the
gardener would assuredly make injurious observations to him, and drive
him out—the Gardener being further identified as no less a person than the
Divinity. This comparison would of itself show that Vauquelin aims at no
arrogant originality; but he is yet more explicit. His four guides are le fils de
Nicomache (Aristotle, of course; but note how Ronsard’s fatal counsel of
periphrasis has already sunk, never to be quite extracted, into the French
mind!), the “harper of Calabria” (Horace), Vida, and Minturno.[187] But he
hardly apologises for writing in French. Then, borrowing from Cleanthes,
through Seneca, the old comparison of verse to “a trumpet which adds
power to the voice,” he passes non sine Dis—with abundant indulgence in
mythology—to the exaltation of Number and Harmony at large, and to
theorising in the Imitation of Nature. He holds high the banner of the
Ronsardian unification of Arts; and while insisting that even the ugly may
be made interesting, if not beautiful, in the imitation of it, repeats the old
cautions about inconsistent and too fantastic admixture of imagery. Among
other followings of Ronsard we note the earnest advice to cultivate stately
descriptions and abundant ornament. But he does not omit—though it must
be allowed he does not observe it over strictly himself—the caution to keep
the thread,

“Si tu fais un Sonnet, ou si tu fais une Ode.”

The praise of order and consistency gives place to remarks on diction
which repeat the Ronsardist canons and cautions, and to a fashionable
contempt (to be taken up later, as so much else was, by the thankless Neo-
The First Book. Classics) of Anagrams and Acrostics. The usual twinning of
Homer and Virgil is succeeded by reference to some other classics: and for

a time Vauquelin seems to be confining himself (in so far as his expatiatory
manner ever admits confinement) to the ouvrage héroique, whence he turns
to other kinds, and the verse-forms suitable for them. He repeats Du
Bellay’s curse on ballade and rondeau,[188] and passes like him to a special
eulogy of the Sonnet, in which (as Du Bellay was not able to do) he is able
now to produce a stately list of French practitioners. This part of the Book,
a little after its middle, is full of literary history and allusion, the latter
touching foreign languages and literatures as well as French. And the rest of
it is occupied with a fresh and rather disorderly account of styles and kinds,
with the verse and diction proper to each, ending up with a curious
amplification of Quintilian’s story[189] about Apelles and Antigonus, the
moral of which seems to be a sort of Medio tutissimus ibis
The Second Book also has its due invocations to the Muses and the King:
and Vauquelin divagates, in his amiable way, for some hundred lines before
he settles down to paraphrase Horace’s warning about the scriptor cyclicus,
and to give, as examples of exordium, not merely a refashioning in
Alexandrines of the opening of Ronsard’s Franciade, but a long extract
The Second. from his own projected epic of the Israëlide. But as soon as
he has done this (to the extent, it is true, of some fifty lines) he affects
shame at quoting himself, and bids the poet swim in the Greek and Latin
sea, especially in Virgil. In fact, Vauquelin is much more of a Virgil-
worshipper than Ronsard, and almost as much as Vida, if not as Scaliger;
and it is curious to see in his work that unconquerable, and as it were
magnetic, repulsion from the greater poetry of Homer, and attraction
towards the lesser verse of Virgil, which more and more shows itself, from
the start of the Renaissance to the finish of the eighteenth century. Although
he again and again diverges to the prose Epic (with the usual example of
Heliodorus and the Æthiopica), to the artificial epic unity of a year (which
he doubtless took, after Ronsard, from Minturno), and so forth, he as
constantly returns to Virgil, describing him in one place plumply as “second
to Homer in age, but first in rank.”
Then he reverts to his Horace, and, not forgetting a hint to the poet (one
frequent with him) that he had better take French and Christian subjects
such as the crusade of St Louis, he dilutes largely the famous clauses of his
model on keeping the type of age and youth, &c. This leads him naturally to
the subject of drama, on which he is, of course, severely Horatian;
especially in regard to messengers and the avoidance of awkward things on

the stage. He has the Pléiade drama, too, before him as he writes; extols the
Chorus, and again does not forget his hints of Christian subjects. But in the
sequel he leaves his ancient authorities, and their severer tastes, rather on
one side, in order to dwell at great length on the accessories of the stage—
music, mise-en-scène, &c., with a not uninteresting reference—like that of
Sibilet (v. supra) earlier, and possibly due to it—to the moralities of nos
vieux François, as well as a welcome to the Ballet and to his native Vaux-
de-Vire. He indulges in a warm eulogy of French as a language passing all
the vulgars of Europe, and of French poetry, and then handles Satire, a
subject in which he was an expert, and which he had treated in a prose
Discourse, joined to his own exercises in the kind. He connects it with the
Provençal Sirvente, allows the coq-à-l'âne a sort of poor-relationship, and
dwells on French lyric poets at some length, once more commending Latin
models and (in a deflection, more logical than some of his, to the subject of
iambic and other metre) noticing the recent attempts at a quantified
prosody. On this subject he prudently declines to commit himself: posterity
must decide. And the rest of the Book again busies itself with various styles
and kinds, the measures proper to them, and the authors, modern as well as
ancient, who have treated them best.
These lucubrations, however, disorderly as they may seem, contain
numerous things of interest—a just remark on rhyme as practically the
equivalent of stricter metrical arrangement; observations on the prose
Lancelot, &c., showing that Vauquelin was not destitute of that knowledge
of the older literature of his country which distinguished France and
Frenchmen rather creditably in the Renaissance, and to which we shall
presently return. Divers contemporary authors are also mentioned, Garnier
being singled out for special (and well deserved) praise; and there is a
pleasant reminiscence of the time when

Nous passions dans Poitiers l’Avril de notre vie,

and, instead of attending to the study of the law, followed the frolics of the
Muses. The actual close of the Second Book is a neither undignified nor ill-
felt wail over the sufferings of France in the religious wars, and an
expression of confidence in the King’s powers of healing.
The Third. The Third Book, after the usual decorative beginnings,
returns to Drama, and takes up Comedy, with praise for Grévin and Belleau,

and a long discussion of the nature and varieties of the kind, including
Tragi-comedy, in which, naturally, the Bradamante of Garnier, the only
considerable example, is taken for study. Next a turn, half abrupt, is made to
Pastoral; and then Vauquelin returns to his favourite Satire and to other
forms, taking his texts from Horace, Vida, and his own fancy, in a slightly
bewildering manner, but to some extent carrying off the à propos de bottes
of his argument by his serene indifference to it, and the total absence of any
awkward apologies or attempts to join. By degrees he settles, or seems to be
settling, to the general questions (What is the end of poetry? Instruction or
Pleasure? and the like), but turns from them to a long catalogue of the poets
of his time.
The foot-by-foot following of Horace, which is more noticeable than ever
in the last three or four hundred lines—with the licence of going off at any
tangent from Horatian texts which Vauquelin also permits himself—would
account for any amount of the desultoriness which is only disguised (if,
indeed, it can be said to be disguised) from the most careless, in Horace
himself, by the brevity of his scale and the brilliancy of his phrase. But we
do not, of course, go to Vauquelin for an orderly treatise; we go to him that
he may tell us what an interesting and remarkable division of French men of
letters knew of criticism and thought of literature.
His answer is not the less, but the more, valuable because of its apparent
incoherence, this incoherence being itself a piece of evidence in the case.
His exposition of The Pléiade, as we have said more than once, was eagerly
Pléiade
criticism.
critical; but it had a strictly practical object, its criticism
being entirely subsidiary and preliminary to the desire of
creation. We meet here with nothing of the rather fatally “disinterested”
investigation of the Italians. Even the ancients are studied less with a view
to appreciating their beauties than with the desire to steal their thunder.
The precepts of Vauquelin’s four guides—of Horace first and most of all,
of Aristotle occasionally, of Vida pretty often, and of Minturno
nonnunquam, are all adjusted to this end. Incidentally, of course, Vauquelin
shows us some general critical views—the canonisation of Virgil, the
adherence to the classical Senecan drama, the discouragement of mediæval
forms, if not entirely of mediæval subjects and language. But, directly, he is
the technical instructor, not the theoretical critic. His technique, with some
slight alterations, is almost purely that of Ronsard, and displays the same
admixture of the classical tendency which the seventeenth century took up

and hardened, with a quasi-romantic breadth and licence which that century
rejected. It is easy to say, and not very difficult to see, that it might—that it
actually did—result in a practice too promiscuous at worst, at best a little
too eclectic—that French was not ready in point of time, and perhaps not
quite suited in point of temperament, for the bridle to be flung too freely on
the neck of Pegasus; and that Vauquelin is almost directly responsible for
inciting the growth of the weeds at which his successor Boileau slashed
with such a desperate hook sixty years later. It is even possible to say, on
the other side, that Du Bellay’s questioning of rules altogether was, from
the Romantic point of view, sounder than Vauquelin’s provision of what
may be called conditional licences. We ought, however, to look at the Art
Poétique rather in the light of what had gone before its long-delayed
appearance than of what followed—at the production of 1559-1600, not at
that of 1600-1660. It is in effect an a posteriori rationalising and
methodising of Pléiade Poetry. This poetry is even now not much known in
England, and its defects—inequality, heaviness at times, pedantry, a strange
and almost irritating inability to get the wings quite free save at rare
moments—are undeniable. But there is something, in the Art itself, of the
better qualities of its subjects: and to those who give themselves the trouble
to make their acquaintance, these subjects have a strange and a peculiar
charm, in their mixture of gravity and grace, of love and lore, of paganism
and piety, yea, of Classic and Romantic themselves. The hedone of the
Pléiade is alethes as well as oikeia, and in this handbook of the school
Vauquelin has revealed at least some of its secrets. Those who can do this
are no contemptible, and no common, critics.
But though Vauquelin thus sums up, in spirit as in time, the formal
criticism of the Pléiade, we have not yet quite done with this. It has been,
Outliers: Tory, throughout, the practice of this book to take into
Fauchet, &c.
consideration not only such formal expressions, but also
those of men who, outside formal rhetoric or deliberate criticism, represent
the literary taste of their time. The latter part of the French sixteenth century
is not poor in such. On the contrary, the interest in literature of this kind
which it displays perhaps exceeds that shown in any country of Europe.
Even Italy, despite its immensely greater volume of formal literary
discussion and academic literary history, falls short in a certain intelligent
independence of consideration. We might draw on works of many kinds,
from the eccentric and mainly grammatical or typographical but extremely

interesting Champfleury of Geoffroy Tory (which, as is well known,
contains the original of Rabelais’ Limousin scholar) as early as 1529; we
might without too great straining bring in Master Francis himself, and we
cannot justly neglect the name of Claude Fauchet, who almost deserves that
of Premier historian of literature in Europe. But, obeying that system of
representative treatment, especially in the outlying departments, of the
subject, the necessity of which grows more urgent at every chapter and
almost every page of this book, we may chiefly deal with two writers, the
one almost as much of an antiquary and historian as Fauchet, but of greater
literary faculty and a pleasanter style; the other one of the great names of
the world’s letters, and, in his own fitful fashion, referring to literature itself
frequently and importantly enough. To those who know anything of the
time this last sentence will have already named, without naming, Etienne
Pasquier and Michel de Montaigne.
The chapters of Pasquier’s[190] Recherches de la France, in which he deals
with French literature, are perhaps the most interesting of the whole. He had
Pasquier: The himself been an ardent disciple of the Pléiade, and a
Recherches.
pleasant poet, in his youth; and in his maturer years he
applied to the history of literature the same untiring research and sound
good sense which made him the first historical inquirer, as distinguished
from mere chroniclers, in France. It is not entirely unimportant that, in his
preliminary remarks on the subject, he announces his intention of devoting
his seventh book to French Poetry and his eighth to French language—a
pointed if unintentional expression of the predominance of poetry in
literature even as late as the end of the sixteenth century. His first
observations are directed to the difference between French and other
modern languages on the one hand, and ancient poetry on the other, in the
matter of rhyme, which he would derive (not without at least as much
justification of probability and history as other theorists can allege) from the
rhythmical parallelisms of prose speech, at first accidentally sweetened by
homœoteleuton, and then deliberately by rhyme itself. He is well aware that
the language of the Franks must have been German; and his theory of
French as composed of three languages, Walloon (by which he probably
means Gallic or Celtic), Latin, and Frankish, will be more obnoxious to
philological pedants than to philosophical philologists. He knows the
monorhymed chansons such as Berte aux grans Piés, but is disposed to put
them unnecessarily late—nay, he seems to think that there was little before

the thirteenth century and Philip Augustus. Yet he is not unaware of the
much greater antiquity of the decasyllable as compared with the
Alexandrine.
Indeed Pasquier has a not inconsiderable knowledge of mediæval poetry
—a knowledge at any rate extending far beyond that of the Pléiade
generally, who were as a rule content to recognise, with a certain toleration,
His knowledge the Roman de la Rose. He knows and praises Helinand, the
of older French
literature,
authors of the great Alixandre, Thibaut de Champagne,
Chrestien de Troyes, Raoul de Houdenc—not merely, it
would seem, from Fauchet’s book, but in themselves; and he quotes Ogier
le Danois, Athis et Prophilias, Cléomadès, &c. Like a sensible man, he has
that indispensable chapter on Provençal literature which some would cast
out of French literary history, thereby making it unintelligible. And then he
passes to the prose Arthurian romances, and to the formal poetry of the
fourteenth century, of which he speaks without any of the exaggerated and
slightly unintelligent—certainly intolerant—contempt of Du Bellay and
Vauquelin. “Servitude, que je ne die gêne d’esprit, admirable,” “ces
mignardises” are his mild censures of them, and he gives particular
attention to Froissart and Alain Chartier, with mention of Villon and others,
and a very high eulogium of Pathelin. He does not, he says, know the
author (nor do we), but he will dare to say that this farce, as a whole and in
parts, fait contrecarre to the comedies of both Greeks and Romans. He is
fairly copious on the men of letters of the first half of the century, and then
begins a new chapter with the picturesque and often-quoted phrase about
the “great fleet of poets” that the reign of Henri II. brought forth, and their
new style of poetry.
He gives to Maurice Scève the honour of captaining the leading ship of
this fleet; and then follow all the well-known names (and some not so well
known) of the school proper, the catalogue being capped by some extremely
interesting and valuable critical-anecdotic remarks on the greater writers,
and criticism of especially Ronsard himself. One could hardly be more just
contemporary
French poetry.
on this difficult[191] poet than is Pasquier, who allows him
not merely grandeur but sweetness to almost any extent,
“quand il a voulu doux couler”; calls him grand poète entre poètes, but
admits that he was “très mauvais censeur et aristarque de ses livres.” Then
he partly returns upon his steps in another chapter, where he approaches
French poetry from a different side, considering especially its verse-

structure, with examples from Marot downwards, and dwelling on the
alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes which Ronsard had
sanctioned. On this matter the historical equity of Pasquier is especially
noticeable, as opposed to the somewhat excessive correctness (according to
pedagogic ideas of the correct) shown by most Frenchmen. He declines to
take a side between “this new diligence and the old nonchalance.” And he
makes the very acute observation that Marot only allowed himself this
nonchalance in verse which was not to be sung—a proof, as he remarks,
that though Master Clement might not be Ronsard’s equal in learning, he
had a facilité d’esprit admirable. In yet another passage he compares
French with Italian poetry, and, emboldened by this, with Latin itself;
taking the patriotic side with equal courage and ingenuity, and ending with
the citation of some of his own Latin verses on Ronsard, and with the sigh,
“De toute cette grande compagnie qui mit la main à la plume sous Henri II.
il restait quatre, Théodore de Bèze, Ponthus de Thyard, Louis le Caron, et
moi.” Then, after a short appendix-chapter on classical metres in French
(which he would like to approve, but seems in two minds about), he passes
to language, on his treatment of which we cannot dwell. But he never
allows himself to stray far from literature, and makes a pretext for returning
at some length to his beloved Pathelin.
It may be observed that Pasquier, though interested in letters to an
extreme degree, enjoys more than he judges—not perhaps the worst defect
of the critic.
The agile and penetrating intelligence of Montaigne could hardly have
failed in any age to devote itself to literature; in his own age this devotion
Montaigne: his was especially inevitable. That his dealings with the subject
references to
literature.
are dealings in the height of his own fashion, it is
unnecessary to say. Not many things could be more
characteristic than the Essay on Pedantry (I. 24), in which the whole spirit
and motive, not merely of the Pléiade, but of the sixteenth century
generally, are subjected to the irregular glancing criticism of the essayist.
This single paper would enable one to understand the fling of a man like
Ben Jonson—the reverse of unintelligent, the reverse of unhumorous, but
full of erudition, and of sixteenth-century reverence for it—at “All the
essayists, even their master Montaigne.” On the general question whether
what is commonly called pedantry is a good or a bad thing, Montaigne’s
verdict comes simply to a “Mass! I cannot tell!” He bestows hearty praise

on Du Bellay, a non-pedantic and courtier-like man of letters, who yet was
enthusiastic for learning; heartier on Adrian Turnebus, a pedant in the
common injurious sense; and in the middle of his essay he plays on study of
Greek and Latin, on quotations from Plato and Cicero, on “arming oneself
against the fear of death, at the cost and charges of Seneca.”[192] The much
longer chapter on Education, addressed to Diane de Foix, which
immediately follows, contains one of the worst expressions of Renaissance
contempt of mediæval literature, in the boast that “of the Lancelots of the
Lake, the Amadis, the Huons of Bordeaux, with which childhood amuses
itself,” he did not know so much as the name. “My Lord Michael” is great,
but even he might have been greater if he had known them.
Indeed hardly anywhere does Montaigne exhibit his own undulation and
diversity more fully than in relation to letters—at one time amassing ancient
instances as if he were totally oblivious of the remarks above about Plato
and Seneca; at another criticising for himself[193] with inimitable freshness
and gusto; and at another again informing the scholar, with much coolness,
that if he will take off hood and gown, drop Latin, and not deafen men’s
ears with unmitigated Aristotle, he will be at the level of all the world, and
perhaps below it.
Even this, it will be seen, is not so very far from the cardinal Pléiade
principle, that study of the ancients is an excellent thing, but that its chief
value is to equip and strengthen the student for practice in French. And
Montaigne, like the rest of his contemporaries and compatriots, always had
this “cultivation of the garden” before him. It is well known how the real
pedants of his own time objected to his neologisms, just as Fontaine (or
whoever was the author of the Quintil) did to those of Du Bellay; and how
large a part these neologisms played in the development and nourishing of
French prose. Every one who knows anything of Montaigne knows his
enthusiastic eulogy of Amyot, and of the services which that grant
translateur had rendered to French. And everybody should know the
delicate and subtle appreciation which he lavishes, in a fashion so different
from the indiscriminate laudations of Scaliger, on favourite passages of the
ancients, more particularly[194] on the Venus and Vulcan passage of Virgil,
and the Venus and Mars passage of Lucretius.
Of course Montaigne’s interests, despite his exquisite literary
The Essay On accomplishment, are not primarily literary. But he has
Books.
given one entire Essay (II. 10), and that not of the shortest,

to Books; and he has frequent glancings at the subject, sometimes
characteristically racy, as that at the Heptameron, “un gentil livre pour son
estoffe.” The “Books” essay begins with one of his familiar jactations of
imperfection. He has some reading, but no faculty of retention. He often
intentionally plagiarises—for instance from Plutarch and Seneca. He does
not seek in books anything more than amusement and knowledge of himself
and of life. He refuses to grapple—at any great expense of labour—with
difficulties. He likes Rabelais, Boccaccio, and Johannes Secundus for mere
pastime, but repeats his depressing scorn for romances, and confesses, as
did Darwin on the score of Shakespeare, that he cannot take the pleasure he
used to take in Ariosto and Ovid. He thinks Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, and
Catullus (especially Virgil in the Georgics and the Fifth Æneid) at the top of
poetry—a grouping which makes us long to pin the elusive Perigourdin
down, and force him, Proteus as he is, to give us his exquisite reasons. His
judgment on Lucan is a little commonplace, “not the style but the
sentiments”—whereas the sentiments of Lucan are but Roman “common
form,” and his style, if not of the best kind, is great in a kind not the best.
He thinks Terence “the very darling and grace of Latin,” and is half
apologetic as to the equalling of Lucretius to Virgil, positively violent (it is,
he thinks, bestise et stupidité barbarique)[195] on that of Virgil to Ariosto,
and depressing again in regard to Plautus (Terence sent bien mieux son
gentilhomme). He returns again and again to the style of Terence; and warns
us of the coming classicism by his objections to the “fantastiques élévations
Espagnoles et Pétrarchistes,” being equally “correct” in exalting (or at least
in his reasons for the exaltation, there being no doubt about the fact)
Catullus above Martial. On Greek authors as such he frankly and repeatedly
declares his incompetence to give judgment; but “now that Plutarch has
been made French,” he can as frankly yoke him once more with Seneca,
and extol the pair super æthera, boldly expressing his comparative distaste
for Cicero. He would like to have “a dozen of [Diogenes] Laertius,” for the
“human document,” of course; and puts Cæsar above all other historians,
including Sallust, while he has something to say of divers French writers of
the class—Froissart (who, he thinks, gives “the crude matter of history”),
Comines, Du Bellay-Langey, and others. It is to be noted that in this place
he says nothing about French poetry. And when he does take up the subject
much later, in II. 17, at the end of the “Essay on Presumption,” he is very
brief, only saying that he thinks Ronsard and Du Bellay “hardly far from

the ancient perfection.” At the beginning of II. 36 he divides with the
majority on the merits of Homer and Virgil, though he once more admits a
disqualification, which in this case is, of course, total. And in the famous
remark,[196] “Poetry is an amusement proper for women; it is a frolic and
subtle art, disguised, talkative, quite occupied with pleasure and display,
like them,” he gives no doubt a certain measure of his critical capacity in
less specially conditioned matters.
This capacity is, indeed, strictly limited. Montaigne is almost, if not
quite, as much set as his beloved Plutarch on the life-side of literature, as
the only one that really interests him; and, in addition, he has an obstinate
prosaic inclination, with which Plutarch does not seem to be nearly so
chargeable. Yet he must have found mention here, not merely as our first
very great French man of letters,[197] who has left us literary opinions, but as
the very light and glory of the French intellect at the meeting of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as thus giving an index of the
greatest value to its tastes and opinions. He displays (conditioning it in the
ways just mentioned, and others, by his intense idiosyncrasy) the general
literary attitude of the time—an active, practical, striving towards
performance, a rather conventional and arbitrary admiration of the farther
past, a contempt, or at least good-natured underestimation, of the nearer,
and fair, if vague, hopes for the future. But considering the intensely critical
character of Montaigne’s intellect in most directions, its exertions in this
direction tell us even more by what they do not, than by what they do.

157. See Petit de Julleville, ii. 392, who quotes four between c. 1405 and
c. 1475; and for a monograph E. Langlois, De Artibus Rhetoricæ Rythmicæ,
Paris, 1890. To this may be added, as commentaries on this chapter, the
corresponding division in Spingarn, op. cit., Part II., pp. 172-250; the
extensive and valuable Introduction to M. Georges Pellissier’s edition of
Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (Paris, 1885); and Herr Rücktaschel’s Einige Arts
Poétiques aus der Zeit Ronsards und Malherbes (Leipsic, 1889).

158. L’Art et Science de Rhétorique, 1493, printed by Verard, and
reprinted by Crapelet. Another, a little later, was printed about 1500, and
reprinted in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne, Anciennes Poésies Françaises,
iii. 118. It is odd that M. Petit de Julleville, who does not give the volume

and page of that very extensive collection, and misquotes its title, should
speak of this as “in prose.” It is in verse: divided under short headings,
sometimes of teaching, sometimes of example, as in this notable “Rondel
équivoqué,” Avoir, Fait Avoir Avoir, Avoir Fait-Avoir, Fait, where each
word is a line. The interpretation may be left as a treat for the reader.

159. L’Instructif de la seconde Rhétorique, or Le Jardin de Plaisance.

160. Grant et vray art de pleine Rhétorique, Rouen, 1521.

161. Rhétorique Métrifiée, Paris, 1539. Between Fabri and Gratien du
Pont appeared in 1529 Geoffrey Tory’s Champfleury, a more grammatical
than critical miscellany, which is elsewhere glanced at; and the very
noteworthy critical remarks prefixed by Marot to his edition of Villon in
1533. M. Gaston Paris is assuredly right when he calls this (in his charming
little book on the author of the Ballade des Pendus, Paris, 1901) “un des
plus anciens morceaux de critique littéraire que l’on ait écrits en français,”
and its appreciative sympathy, if not co-extensive with the merits of the
work, leaves little to desire in the points which it touches. In fact, the mere
selection of Villon and of the Roman de la Rose, as the subjects of his
editorial care, shows in Master Clement the presence of a deep instinctive
critical faculty, which has only partially and incidentally developed itself. In
this, as in not a few other points, Marot himself seems to me to have had for
the most part inadequate justice from critics; though here as elsewhere it
may be allowed that time and circumstance prevented him from doing
himself justice. His intense affection for literature and poetry, the light
glancing quality of his wit and intellect, the absence of all pomposity,
pedantry, and parade, and the shrewd sense which (in judgment if not quite
in conduct) distinguished him, go very far to constitute the equipment of the
accomplished critic. But his short life, perhaps a certain instability of
character, and the immature condition of the special state of literature in his
time, with the ever-deplorable distractions of the religious upheaval, gave
him little chance.

162. With the Lyons reprint (v. infra) of Sibilet and the Quintil Horatien
is given an Autre Art Poétique, short and strictly practical. It notices
Ronsard, but gives the old forms.

163. It would be clearly improper to load this book with much general
French literary history. But those who would thoroughly appreciate the
position may find an endeavour to put it briefly in my Short History of the
subject, Book II. chaps, i., ii., and iv. (6th ed., Oxford, 1901). If they want
more they had better go to MM. Darmesteter and Hatzfeld’s admirable
Seizième Siècle in France (Paris, 1878), or, best of all, to the last 150 pp. of
the first vol. of Crepet’s Poètes Français. M. Ch. d’Héricault’s prefaces
here, with his introduction to Marot (ed. Garnier), are not likely to be soon
equalled.

164. For a poet of such eminence and a book of such importance, Du
Bellay and the Défense are curiously difficult of access. M. Marty-Laveaux'
ed. of the Works, with the Pléiade generally (Paris, 1876), is very scarce and
dear. M. Becq de Fouquières’ Selections are, it is said, out of print, though
they can be obtained. A Versailles reprint I know only through the British
Museum Catalogue. It is odd how, in almost all languages, reprinting, like a
more agreeable, if less troublesome, process, seems to “go by favour.”

165. That quoted supra, at i. 316.

166. Of course in an earlier stage you do get much more. English, for
instance, profited almost infinitely by translation from French and from
Latin prose in the late fourteenth century, and throughout the fifteenth. But
French was past this stage, or nearly past it, when Du Bellay wrote.

167. L’Evolution des genres (Paris, 1890), p. 43 sq.

168. M. Brunetière quotes this famous and striking expression, but
complains that we are not told how it is to be done. Our English supplies a
sufficient reply to this in famous words, “by reading, marking, learning, and
inwardly digesting.”

169. The small space given to the Défense here may seem inconsistent
with the importance assigned to it. The fact is, however,—and this fact no
doubt explains to some extent, if it does not excuse, the views of those who
do not think it very important,—that its details require little notice. Its claim
lies in its eager eloquence, in the new position sketched above, and
(negatively) in its onslaught on the forms of French poetry for two hundred

years past. Du Bellay’s critical views reappear in the “Epistle to the Reader”
in his Olive (ed. Becq de Fouquières, pp. 67-76), in that prefixed to his Vers
Traduits (ibid., pp. 151-157), in the vigorous defence of vernacular verse
addressed to the second of the three Valois Marguerites (ibid., pp. 127-129),
and elsewhere.

170. Others call it Le Quintil Censeur. It appears not unnecessary to say
that “Quintil” has not, and could not have, any reference to “Quintilian,”
but refers to the Quintilius of Horace (Art. Po., 438). The original edition
seems to be very rare: the British Museum only possesses the Lyons reprint
(with Sibilet) of 1556. It seems to have been also reprinted with Du Bellay
at Versailles in 1878, but this I do not possess. Some make the title
Horatian or Horace.

171. “Vermeille” with him is “vermeilhæ”; “voix,” “voès”; “neigeux,”
“negeus”; Lucan, “Lukein,” &c.

172. Œuvres Complètes, ed. Blanchemain, 8 vols., Paris, 1857-1867.
They are not quite “complete,” but the omissions (which may be found, if
anybody wants them, in such respectable works as the Cabinet Satirique
&c.) fortunately do not concern us.

173. In ed. of Vauquelin (sup. cit.), xxviii. sq.

174. Ed. cit., vii. 317-337

175. Alphonse Delbène, Abbé of Haute-Combe in Savoy.

176.

“Jewels five words long
That on the stretched forefinger of all time
Sparkle for ever.”
—Tennyson, The Princess.

177. Ed. cit., iii. 7-39.

178. Plustost à la façon d’une missive, ou de quelques lettres royaux, que
d’un poème bien prononcé.

179. Principalement des boucliers.

180. Odd as these things may seem, they are not fool-born jests of an idle
historian. Ronsard actually says them, though at greater length. See p. 28,
“Su tu veux faire mourir sur-le-champ quelque capitaine, il le faut navrer
au plus mortel lieu du corps, comme le cerveau, le cœur, la gorge,” &c.,
&c.; and, p. 29, “Car s’il fait bouillir de l’eau en un chaudron,” &c., &c.

181. In the Prefatory Discourse to his Mort de César (1562). He extols
Aristotle and Horace, but does not like Seneca.

182. In the prefatory matter of his Saül le Furieux, 1572. Jean assails the
native drama, especially the Moralities, and thinks highly of Seneca.

183. La Manière de faire des vers en Français comme en Grec et en
Latin, Paris, 1573. There is a useful abstract of this in Rücktaschel, op. cit.,
pp. 23-27.

184. L’art Poétique Français, Paris, 1598. This, like almost all the works
noticed in this chapter, is but a little book, odd to compare with the close-
packed Italian quartos. But it is longer than most of its fellows.

185. Some abatement, however, may be claimed, if only on the ground
that Laudun is absolutely sound on the vernacular question.

186. M. Pellissier, to whose already cited edition the references following
are made.

187. I agree with Mr Spingarn (p. 187) and disagree with M. Pellissier (p.
xxxviii) in thinking that this reference to Minturno is quite serious. The
French editor, indeed, speaks of Minturno rather oddly, coupling him with
Vida as “les deux poètes Italiens,” and saying that both “ne font que
remâcher les préceptes des anciens,” which Vauquelin only says of Vida.
This is of more than doubtful justice as to Minturno, and why call him a

“poet”? He may have written in verse on other occasions, for aught I know,
but his two Poetics are as unquestionably in prose as Vida’s one is in verse.

188. Oste moy la Ballade, oste moy le Rondeau.

189. Inst. Orat., II. xiii. 13. The anecdote in Quintilian is very simple:
Apelles paints Antigonus in profile to hide a lost eye. Vauquelin (on
uncertain authority) expands this into a long story of a competition between
Polygnotus, Scopas, and Diocles.

190. The Recherches have not been completely reprinted, I think, since
1723. All their literary matter, however, is included in M. Léon Feugère’s
extremely useful and well-edited Œuvres Choisies d’E. P. (2 vols., Paris,
1849). It extends from i. 230 to ii. 134, what follows on the University of
Paris being itself not quite irrelevant.

191. Difficult, that is, to appraise critically—not to understand.

192. Vol. i. p. 165, ed. Courbet and Royer. Je n’aime point cette
suffisance relative et mendiée, he goes on with his own absolute and
unborrowed stamp of phrase and epithet.

193. Cf., for instance, the remarkable critical comparison of Tacitus and
Seneca in the Eighth Essay of the Third Book, towards the close (iv. 37 ed.
cit.)

194. If there is anywhere a happier critical phrase, in its particular kind,
than “cette noble circumfusa, mère du gentil infusus,” I do not know it.

195. Ed. cit., ii. 112. Most of the expressions quoted are in the immediate
context.

196. III. 3, Les Trois Commerces, ed. cit., iii. 288.

197. Rabelais is no real exception. It is needless to say that Gargantua
and Pantagruel do contain matter touching on literature. But Rabelais
comes too early to be critical. The “Library of Saint-Victor” and other
things are simply alarums and excursions of his general campaign against

the rearguard of “monkish ignorance”; and in his references to French
poetry he does not seem to have got beyond—or to have wished to get
beyond—complacent acquiescence in rhétoriqueur pedantry.

CHAPTER V.

ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
BACKWARDNESS OF ENGLISH CRITICISM NOT IMPLYING INFERIORITY—ITS CAUSE—
THE INFLUENCE OF RHETORIC AND OTHER MATTERS—HAWES—THE FIRST
TUDOR CRITICS—WILSON: HIS ‘ART OF RHETORIC’; HIS ATTACK ON “INKHORN
TERMS”—HIS DEALING WITH FIGURES—CHEKE: HIS RESOLUTE ANGLICISM AND
ANTI-PRECIOSITY—HIS CRITICISM OF SALLUST—ASCHAM—HIS PATRIOTISM—
HIS HORROR OF ROMANCE, AND OF THE ‘MORTE D’ARTHUR’—HIS GENERAL
CRITICAL ATTITUDE TO PROSE, AND TO POETRY—THE CRAZE FOR CLASSICAL
METRES—SPECIAL WANTS OF ENGLISH PROSODY—ITS KINDS: (1) CHAUCERIAN
—(2) ALLITERATIVE—(3) ITALIANATED—DEFICIENCIES OF ALL THREE—THE
TEMPTATIONS OF CRITICISM IN THIS RESPECT—ITS ADVENTURERS: ASCHAM
HIMSELF—WATSON AND DRANT—GASCOIGNE—HIS ‘NOTES OF INSTRUCTION’—
THEIR CAPITAL VALUE—SPENSER AND HARVEY—THE PURITAN ATTACK ON
POETRY—GOSSON—‘THE SCHOOL OF ABUSE’—LODGE’S ‘REPLY’—SIDNEY’S
‘APOLOGY FOR POETRY’—ABSTRACT OF IT—ITS MINOR SHORTCOMINGS AND
MAJOR HERESIES—THE EXCUSES OF BOTH, AND THEIR AMPLE COMPENSATION
—KING JAMES’S ‘REULIS AND CAUTELIS’—WEBBE’S ‘DISCOURSE’—SLIGHT IN
KNOWLEDGE, BUT ENTHUSIASTIC, IF UNCRITICAL, IN APPRECIATION—
PUTTENHAM’S (?) ‘ART OF ENGLISH POESIE’—ITS ERUDITION—SYSTEMATIC
ARRANGEMENT AND EXUBERANT INDULGENCE IN FIGURES—MINORS:
HARINGTON, MERES, WEBSTER, BOLTON, ETC.—CAMPION AND HIS
‘OBSERVATIONS’—DANIEL AND HIS ‘DEFENCE OF RHYME’—BACON—THE
‘ESSAYS’—THE ‘ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING’—ITS DENUNCIATION OF MERE
WORD-STUDY—ITS VIEW OF POETRY—SOME “OBITER DICTA”—THE WHOLE OF
VERY SLIGHT IMPORTANCE—STIRLING’S “ANACRISIS”—BEN JONSON: HIS
EQUIPMENT—HIS ‘PREFACES,’ ETC.—THE DRUMMOND CONVERSATIONS—THE
‘DISCOVERIES’—FORM OF THE BOOK—ITS DATE—MOSAIC OF OLD AND NEW—
THE FLING AT MONTAIGNE—AT ‘TAMERLANE’—THE SHAKESPEARE PASSAGE—
AND THAT ON BACON—GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.

The fortune of England in matters political has often been noticed; and it
has at least deserved to be noticed, hardly less often, in matters literary. One
of the luckiest of these chances came at the time of the Renaissance; when
the necessary changes were effected with the minimum of direct foreign
influence, and so slowly that the natural force of the nation and the
language was able completely, or almost completely, to assimilate the
influences, both foreign and classical, that rained upon it.

Nor was this least the case in respect of criticism.[198] The history of this
part of English literary evolution has been, until recently, much neglected;
and it can hardly be said even yet to have received comprehensive attention.
Backwardness of English It is all the more necessary to bestow some time
Criticism not implying
inferiority.
and pains on it here, with at least some fair hope
of correcting an unfair depreciation. The Baron of
Bradwardine (displaying that shrewd appreciation of contrast between
English and Scottish characteristics which belonged, if not to himself, to his
creator) remarked to Colonel Talbot that it was the Colonel’s “humour, as
he [the Baron] had seen in other gentlemen of birth and honour” in the
Colonel’s country, “to derogate from the honour of his burgonet.”
Gentlemen of the most undoubted birth and honour (as such things go in
literature), from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have displayed this humour in
regard to English criticism. But there has been something too much of it;
and it has been taken far too literally by the ignorant. M. Brunetière has
expressed his opinion that Frenchmen would make un véritable marché de
dupe if they exchanged Boileau, Marmontel, La Harpe, and Co. for Lessing
and some others. I shall not in this place express any opinion on that
question directly. But, if this book does what I shall endeavour to make it
do, it will at least show that to exchange, for any foreign company, our own
critics, from Sidney and Ben Jonson, through Dryden and Addison, Samuel
Johnson and Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, to Mr Arnold himself, would be
“un véritable marché de”—Moses Primrose.
It will have been sufficiently seen in the last volume that the
backwardness of English—a backwardness long exaggerated, but to some
extent real, and to no small extent healthy—was nowhere exhibited more
distinctly than in the department which supplies the materials of this
history. Until the close of the fifteenth century, and for some decades
afterwards, not a single critical treatise on English existed in the English
language, or even in Latin; the nearest approach, even in fragment, to any
utterance of the kind being the naïf and interesting, but only infantinely
critical, remarks of Caxton in his prefaces.[199]
The fact is that, not only until a nation is in command of a single form of
“curial” speech for literary purposes, but until sufficient experiments have
been made in at least a majority of the branches of literature, criticism is
impossible, and would, if possible, be rather mischievous than beneficial.
Its cause. Now England, though it possessed at least one very great

author, and more than a fair number of respectable seconds to him, was, up
to 1500 at least, in neither case. Till the end of the fourteenth century it had
been practically trilingual; it was bilingual till past the end of the fifteenth,
if not till far into the seventeenth, so far as literature was concerned. Nor,
till the towering eminence of Chaucer had helped to bring the vernacular
into prominence, was there any one settled dialect of primacy in the
vernacular itself. Further, the fifteenth century was nearly at its end before
any bulk of prose, save on religious subjects, was written; and for another
century the proportion of translation over original work in prose was very
large indeed.
At the same time the scholastic Rhetoric—which had always played to
criticism the part of a half-faithless guardian, who keeps his pupil out of the
full enjoyment of his property, yet preserves that property in good condition
to hand over to him perforce at some future time—was still faithfully
The influence of Rhetoric taught.[200] The enlarged and more accurate study
and other matters.
of the classics at the Revival of Learning set
classical criticism once more before students in the originals; the eager
study of those originals by Continental scholars was sure to reflect itself
upon England; and, lastly, religious zeal and other motives combined, here
as elsewhere, to make men determined to get the vernacular into as
complete and useful a condition as possible. Nowhere does the intense
national spirit, which is the glory of the Tudor period, appear more strongly
than in this our scholastic and “umbratile” division of the national life.
Long, indeed, before this scholastic and regular criticism made its
appearance, and during the whole course of the fifteenth century, critical
appreciation, stereotyped and unmethodised it may be, but genuine for all
Hawes that, and stimulating, had made its appearance. The extraordinary
.
quality of Chaucer, the amiable pastime-making of Gower, and, a
little later, the busy polygraphy and painful rhetoric of Lydgate, had, almost
from the moment of Chaucer’s death, attracted and inspired students. The
pretty phrase about Chaucer’s “gold dew-drops of speech,” which justly
drew the approval of a critic so often unjustly severe on ante-Renaissance
work as Mr Arnold, was, as is known even by tyros in the study of English
literature, repeated, expanded, varied by almost every prominent writer for
a century and a quarter at least, till it reaches, not exactly final, but most
definite and noteworthy, expression in the work of Stephen Hawes, that
curious swan-singer of English mediæval poetry. In the to us eccentric, if

not positively absurd, exposition of the Trivium and Quadrivium which
diversifies the account of the courtship of Grandamour and La Bell Pucell,
[201]
the praise of the Three is led up to by a discussion of Rhetoric and
Poetics so elaborate and minute that it occupies more space than is given to
all the other Arts together, and nearly double that which is given to all the
rest, except a largely extended Astronomy. Rhetoric herself, after being
greeted by and greeting her pupil in the most “aureate” style, divides herself
into five parts, each of which has its chapter, with a “Replication against
ignorant Persons” intervening, and many curious digressions such as the
description of a sort of Earthly Paradise of Literature with four rivers,
“Understanding,” “Closely-Concluding,” “Novelty,” and “Carbuncles,”[202]
and a “Tower of Virgil” in their midst. Lydgate has been already praised for
“versifying the depured rhetoric in English language,” but he comes up
once more for eulogy as “my master” in the peroration, and has in fact
considerably more space than either Gower or Chaucer. Nor, confused and
out of focus as such things must necessarily appear to us, should we forget
that Hawes and his generation were not altogether uncritically endeavouring
at what was “important to them”—the strengthening and enriching, namely,
of English vocabulary, the extension of English literary practice and stock.
Yet their criticism could but be uncritical: and the luck above referred to
appears first in the peculiar scholastic character of the criticism of the first
The first Tudor English school of critics deserving the name. No one of its
critics.
members was exactly a man of genius, and this was
perhaps lucky; for men of genius have rarely been observed to make the
best schoolmasters. All were fully penetrated with the Renaissance
adoration of the classics; and this was lucky again, because the classics
alone could supply the training and the models just then required by English
prose, and even to some extent by English poetry. All were very definitely
set against Gallicising and Italianising; and yet again this was lucky,
because England had been overdosed with French influence for centuries,
while their opposition to Italian did perhaps some good, and certainly little
harm. But all were thoroughly possessed by the idea that English, adjusted
to classical models as far as possible, but not denationalised or
denaturalised, ought to be raised into a sufficient medium of literary, as of
familiar, communication for Englishmen. And—with that intense
Renaissance belief in education, and a high and noble kind of education too,
which puts to shame the chattering and pottering of certain later periods on

this unlucky subject—all were determined, as far as in them lay, to bring
English up to this point. The tendency was spread over a great number of
persons, and a considerable period of time. Its representatives ranged from
healthy and large-souled, if not quite heroic or inspired, scholars like
Ascham to “acrid-quack” pedants like Gabriel Harvey. But the chief of
these representatives were the well-known trio, of whom one has just been
mentioned—Sir[203] Thomas Wilson, Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham.
They were all friends, they were all contemporary members (to her glory be
it ungrudgingly said) of one University, the University of Cambridge, and
though the moral character of all, and especially of the first two, had
something of the taints of self-seeking and of sycophancy, which were the
blemishes of the Tudor type of writers, all had the merits of that type as
exhibited in the man of the study rather than of the field—intense curiosity
and industry, a real patriotism, a half-instinctive eagerness to action, a
consciousness how best to adorn the Sparta that had fallen to their lot, and a
business-like faculty of carrying their conceptions out. From various
indications, positive and indirect, it would seem that Cheke, who was the
eldest, was also the most “magnetic,” the most Socratically suggestive and
germinal of the three: but his actual literary work is of much inferior
importance to that of Ascham and Wilson.
Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric[204] is, as the other dates given in the text and
notes will show sufficiently, by no means the first book of the school; nor is
Wilson: his Art it that which has, on the whole, the most interest for us. But
of Rhetoric;
it deserves precedence historically because, as no other
does, it keys, or gears, the new critical tendency on to the old technical
rhetoric. The first edition appeared in 1553, dedicated to Edward VI. Wilson
dates his prologue to the second[205] on the 7th December 1560; but it does
not seem to have been published till 1563. Between the date of the first
edition and the writing of this Prologue, Wilson, an exile at Rome, had
fallen into the claws of the Inquisition as author of the book and of another
on Logic; and, as he recounts with natural palpitation, escaped literally “so
as by fire,” his prison-house being in flames.
His two first Books Wilson faithfully devotes to all the old technicalities
—Invention, Disposition, Amplification, “States,” and the rest. But his third
his attack on Book, “Of Elocution,”[206] announces from the first an
“Inkhorn
terms.”
interest in the matter very different from the jejune
rehashings of the ancients (and chiefly of those ancients

least worth rehashing) which the mediæval Rhetorics mostly give us. In
fact, Wilson had shown himself alive to the importance of the subject in the
very opening of the work itself[207] by recounting, with much gusto, how
“Phavorinus the Philosopher (as Gellius telleth the tale) did hit a young man
over the thumbs very handsomely for using over-old and over-strange
words.” And as soon as he has divided the requirements of Elocution under
the four heads of Plainness, Aptness, Composition, and Exornation, he
opens the stop which has been recognised as his characteristic one, by
denouncing “strange inkhorn terms.” He inveighs against the “far-journeyed
gentlemen” who, on their return home, as they love to go in foreign apparel,
so they “powder their talk with oversea language,” one talking French-
English, another “chopping in” with English-Italianated. Professional men,
lawyers and auditors, have their turn of censure, and a real literary
“document” follows in the censure of the “fine courtier who will talk
nothing but Chaucer.” Most copious is he against undue “Latining” of the
tongue, in illustration of which he gives a letter from a Lincolnshire
gentleman which may owe royalty either to the Limousin Scholar of
Rabelais, or even to Master Francis’ own original, Geoffrey Tory himself.
And he points the same moral (very much after the manner of Latimer, for
whom, as elsewhere appears, he had a great admiration) by divers facetious
stories from his experience, “when I was in Cambridge, and student in the
King’s College,” and from other sources. After which he falls in with
Cicero as to the qualifications of words allowable.
“Aptness” follows: and here Sir Thomas, without knowing it, has cut at a
folly of language revived three hundred years and more later than his own
His dealing with time. For he laughs at one who, “seeing a house fair-
Figures.
builded,” said to his fellow, “Good Lord, what a handsome
phrase of building is this!” Wilson’s butt would have been no little thought
of by certain persons at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth. Indeed, one may seem to remember a sentence about the
merits of a “passage” in a marble chimney-piece, which is a mere echo,
conscious or unconscious, of his “phrase.” The same temper appears in the
longer remarks on Composition; but when we come to Exornation, “a
gorgeous beautifying of the tongue with borrowed words and change of
sentence,” Wilson’s lease of originality has run out. He is still in the
bondage of the Figures, which he describes ambitiously as a kind “not
equally sparpled[208] about the whole oration, but so dissevered and parted as

stars stand in the firmament, or flowers in a garden, or pretty-devised
antiques in a cloth of Arras.” The enumeration is full of character and
Elizabethan piquancy; but it still has the old fault of beginning at the wrong
end. When a man writes even a good oration, much more that far higher
thing a good piece of prose (which may be an oration, if need serves, or
anything else), he does not say to himself, “Now I shall throw in some
hyperbaton; now we will exhibit a little anadiplosis; this is the occasion
surely for a passage of zeugma.” He writes as the spirit moves him, and as
the way of art leads. One could wish, in reading Wilson, for another Sir
Thomas, to deal with the Figurants as he has dealt with the Chaucerists and
the Lincolnshire Latinisers. But we must not expect too much at once: and
lucky are we if we often, or even sometimes, get so bold a striking out into
new paths for a true end as we find in this Art of Rhetoric.
Cheke has left no considerable English work, and he seems—as it is
perhaps inevitable that at least some of the leaders in every period of
innovation should seem—to have pushed innovation itself to and over the
Cheke: his verge of crotchet. He was a spelling and pronouncing
resolute
Anglicism and
reformer both in Greek and English; and, classical scholar
anti-preciosity. and teacher as he was, he seems to have fallen in with that
curious survival of “Saxon” rendering of words not of
Saxon origin, the great storehouse of which is the work of Reginald Pecock
a century earlier. But he appears to have been one of the main and most
influential sources of the double stream of tendency observable in Wilson
himself, and still more in Ascham—the tendency on the one hand to use the
classics as models and trainers in the formation of a generally useful and
practicable English style, and on the other to insist that neither from
classical nor from any other sources should English be adulterated by
“inkhorn terms,” as Wilson calls them,[209] of any kind—that is to say, by
archaisms, technicalities, preciousnesses, fished up as it were from the
bottom of the ink-pot, instead of simply and naturally taken as they came
from its surface to the pen. What Ascham tells us that he said of Sallust is
the spirit, the centre, the kernel, of the criticism of the whole school—a
dread that is to say, and a dislike and a censure of what he calls the
“uncontented care to write better than he could.”[210] And it must be obvious
that this sharply formulated censure is itself a critical point de repère of the
greatest value. It is well that it was not too much listened to—for the
greatest results of English prose and verse in the great period, beginning a

few years after Cheke’s death and continuing for an old man’s lifetime,
were the result of this “never contented care,” which still reached
something better than content. But if, at this early period, it had had too
much way given to it, if the vigorous but somewhat sprawling infancy of
Elizabethan English had been bid and let sprawl simply at its pleasure, the
consequences could not but have been disastrous.
This criticism of Sallust, which may be found at length in Ascham’s
His criticism of Schoolmaster,[211] is quite a locus in its kind. It is not of the
Sallust.
justest, for the prepossession of the sentence quoted above
(which stands in the forefront of it) colours it all through. It has funny little
scholastic lapses in logic, such as the attempt to apply the old brocard
Orator est vir bonus dicendi peritus to the disadvantage of Sallust, as
compared not only with Cicero but with Cæsar, on the score of morality. It
would have been pleasant to observe the countenances of Fausta and
Servilia if this had been argued in their joint presence. And the dislike of
Thucydides, to which a disliker of Sallust is almost necessarily driven,
argues a literary palate not of the most refined. But the disposition of the
supposed causes of the faults of Sallust’s style, when, having sown his wild
oats, he took to literature, and borrowed his vocabulary from Cato and
Varro, and his method from Thucydides himself, is an exceedingly
ingenious piece of critical pleading. Even if it will not hold water, it shows
us a stage of criticism advanced, in some directions, beyond anything that
classical or mediæval times can show. The other great “place” of Cheke’s
writing occurs in his letter[212] to Hoby on that learned knight’s translation of
Castiglione, with its solemn judgment (the author, though but in middle age,
was ill, and in fact almost dying), “I am of this opinion, that our own tongue
should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing
of other tongues, wherein if we take no heed betimes, ever borrowing and
never paying, she shall be fain to keep house as a bankrupt.” The analogy,
of course, is a false one:—there is no need to pay, nor possibility of
payment, any more than a conquering monarchy needs to fear the
repayment of the tribute it draws from others, or than a sturdy plant need
dread bankruptcy because it owes nourishment to earth, and air, and the rain
of heaven. But once more the position is a definite, and not a wholly
untenable, critical position: and Cheke shows himself here as at once
engineer and captain of it.

The chief representative of this school is, however, beyond question, the
always agreeable, and but seldom other than admirable, author of
Ascham. Toxophilus and The Schoolmaster himself.[213] His positive
achievements in English literature do not here directly concern us; nor does
the debate between those who regard him as a Euphuist before Euphuism,
and those who will have him to be the chief example of the plain style in
early Elizabethan literature. I confess myself to be on the side of the latter;
though I know what the former mean. But it is with what Ascham thought
as a critic, not with what he did as a writer, that we are here busy; and on
this there is no reasonable opening for serious difference of opinion.
Ascham’s critical position and opinions are clear, not only from his two
famous and pleasant little books, but from the constant literary references in
his letters, ranging from elaborate lucubrations on the study of the classics
to an amusing little Cambridge fling at the older university, where, as we
learn from a letter of exactly the middle of the century, taste was in so
shocking a condition that Oxford men actually paid more attention to
Lucian and Apuleius than to Cicero and Xenophon.[214]
His patriotism. The Toxophilus itself is a critical document in parts, both
for the initial manifesto of his desire “to write this English matter in the
English tongue for English men,” and for the more elaborate defence of the
proceeding (a defence repeated in the numerous Latin letters accompanying
the copies of the book he sent to his friends), as well as for one of those hits
at Romance which were characteristic of Renaissance scholars too
generally, and were particularly to be expected in very moral and rather
prosaic persons like Ascham. But we necessarily turn to the Schoolmaster
for a full exposition of Ascham’s critical ethos, and we find it.
A tendency rather to slight poetry, one great heresy concerning it (of
which more presently), and the above-mentioned contempt or even horror
His horror of of romance—these are the worst things to be noted here.
Romance,
All these are connected with a wider critical heresy, which
is prevalent in England to this day, and which emerges most interestingly in
this infancy of English criticism. This heresy is the valuing of examples,
and even of whole kinds, of literary art, not according to their perfection on
their own artistic standards, not according to the quantity or quality of
artistic pleasure which they are fitted to give; but according to certain
principles—patriotic, political, ethical, or theological—which the critic
holds or does not hold, as the case may be. This fallacy being one of those

proper—or, at least, inseparably accidental—to the human intellect, is of
course perceptible enough in antiquity itself. It is, as we have seen, rife in
Plato, and more rife in Plutarch; and there is no doubt that the devotion of
the Renaissance to the greatest of Greek philosophers and prosemen, to the
most entertaining of Greek biographers and moralists, had not a little to do
with its reappearance, though the struggle of the Reformation, and the
national jealousies which this struggle bred or helped, had more. But no one
has given more notable examples of it than Ascham by his attack on “books
of feigned chivalry,” in Toxophilus,[215] and his well-known censure of the
Morte d’Arthur in The Schoolmaster.[216]
Than this book there was, at Ascham’s date, no more exquisite example
of English prose in existence. There is not to this day a book, either in prose
and of the or in verse, which has more of the true Romantic charm.
Morte
d’Arthur.
There are few better instances anywhere of subtly
combined construction of story than are to be found in
some of its parts; and, to a catholic judgment, which busies itself with the
matter and spirit of a book, there are few books which teach a nobler temper
of mind, which inculcate with a more wonderful blending of sternness and
sympathy the great moral that “the doer shall suffer,” that “for all these
things God shall bring us into judgment,” or which display more
accomplished patterns of man and sweeter examples of woman. Yet
Ascham (and he had read the book) saw in it nothing but “open
manslaughter and bold bawdry.”
Apart from this somewhat Philistine prudery—which occupies itself
more reasonably with Italian novelle, and the translations of them into
English—Ascham’s criticism is of a piece with that of the whole school in
all but a very few points. He differed with Wilson, and with most of the
scholars of his time, on the subject of translation, which he rightly enough
regarded as a useful engine of education, but as quite incapable of giving
any literary equivalent for the original. He agreed both with Wilson and
with Cheke as to the impropriety of adulterating English with any foreign
tongue, ancient or modern. He was, all the same, an exceedingly fervent
Ciceronian and devotee of the golden age of Latin. And when we come in
one[217] of his letters to Sturm on the name of Pigna (v. supra, p. 62), the
rival of Cinthio Giraldi, there seems to be established a contact, of the most
interesting, between English and Italian criticism. But (as indeed we might
have expected) no allusion to Pigna’s view of the despised romances is even

hinted: it is his dealing with the aureolum libellum of Horace that Ascham
has read, his dealings with Aristotle and Sophocles that he wishes to read.
Putting his theory and his practice together, and neglecting for the
moment his moral “craze,” we can perceive in him a tolerably distinct ideal
of English prose, which he has only not illustrated by actual criticism of the
His general reviewing sort, because the material was so scanty. This
critical attitude
to Prose,
prose is to be fashioned with what may be excusably called
a kind of squint—looking partly at Latin and Greek
construction and partly at English vernacular usage. It does not seem that,
great as was his reverence for Cheke, he was bitten by Cheke’s mania for
absolute Teutonism; nor does he appear to have gone to the extreme of
Latimer and Latimer’s admirer, Wilson, in caring to mingle merely familiar
speech with his ordered vernacular. But he went some way in this direction:
he was by no means proof against that Delilah of alliteration which, like a
sort of fetch or ghost of the older alliterative prosody, bewitched the mid-
sixteenth-century verse and prose of England, and had not lost hold on
Spenser himself. And he had belief in certain simple Figures of the
antithetic and parallel kind. But he was, above all, a schoolmaster—as even
being dead he spoke—to English literature; and his example and his
precepts together tended to establish a chastened, moderately classical,
pattern of writing, which in the next generation produced the admirable
English prose of Hooker, and was not without influence on the less
accomplished, but more germinal and protreptic, style of Jonson.
and to Poetry. We must praise him less when we come to poetry. The
history of the craze for classical metre and against rhyme in England, which
practically supplies our earliest subject of purely critical debate, is a very
curious one, and may—perhaps must—be considered from more points of
view than one, before it is rightly and completely understood. At first sight
it looks like mere mid-summer madness—the work of some Puck of
literature—if not even as the incursion into the calm domains of scholarship
and criticism of that popular delirium tremens, which has been often
illustrated in politics. Shifting of the standpoint, and more careful
consideration, will discover some excuses for it, as well as much method in
it. But it must be regarded long, and examined carefully, before the real fact
is discovered—the fact that, mischievous and absurd as it was in itself,
unpardonable as are the attempts to revive it, or something like it, at this
time of day, it was in its own day a kind of beneficent “distemper”—a

necessary, if morbid, stage in the development of English prosody and
English criticism.
Inasmuch as the most obvious and indubitable, as well as universal, cause
of the craze was the profound Renaissance admiration for the classics, it
was inevitable that something of the kind should make its appearance in
The craze for most European countries. But other and counteracting
Classical
Metres.
causes prevented it from assuming, in any of them,
anything like the importance that it attained in England.
Unrhymed classical metres, like almost every literary innovation of the
time, had been first attempted in Italy;[218] but the established and
impregnable supremacy of forms like the Sonnet, the Canzone, the ottava
and terza rima, put rhyme out of real danger there. They were attempted in
France.[219] But French had for centuries possessed a perfectly well-defined
system of prosody, adapted and adequate to the needs and nature of the
language. And, moreover, the singularly atonic quality of this language, its
want not only of the remotest approach to quantity but even of any decided
accent, made the experiment not merely ridiculous, as indeed it mostly was
in English, but all but impossible. Spanish was following Italian, and did
not want to follow anything else: and German was not in case to compete.
With English the patient was very much more predisposed to the disease.
Special wants of Not only two, but practically three, different systems of
English
Prosody.
prosody, which were really to some extent opposed to each
other, and might well seem more opposed than they
actually were, disputed, in practice, the not too fertile or flourishing field of
English poetry. There was the true Chaucerian system of blended English
prosody, the legitimate representative of the same composite influences
which have moulded English language, and which had been slowly
developed through the half-chaotic beginnings of Middle English verse, and
then with almost premature suddenness perfected up to a certain stage by
Its kinds: Chaucer himself. This system combined—though not yet in
(1)Chaucerian.
perfect freedom—the strict syllabic foot-division of the
French with the syllabic licence of Anglo-Saxon, so as to produce a system
of syllabic equivalence similar in nature to, if not yet fully in practice freer
than, that of the Greek Iambic trimeter. It admitted a considerable variety of
metres, the base-integers of which were the octosyllable and decasyllable,
with lines of six, twelve, and others occasionally, combined in pairs or
arranged in stanzas of more or less intricate forms. But—by a historic

accident which has even yet to be rather taken as found than fully explained
—nobody for more than a hundred years had been able to produce really
good regular[220] poetry in Southern English by this metre, and certain
changes in pronunciation and vocabulary—especially the disuse of the final
vocalised e—were putting greater and greater difficulties in the way of its
practice.
Secondly, there was the revived alliterative metre, either genuine—that is
to say, only roughly syllabic and not rhymed, but rhythmed nearer to the
anapæstic form than to any other—or allied with rhyme, and sometimes
(2) Alliterative. formed into stanzas of very considerable intricacy. This,
which had arisen during the fourteenth century, no one quite knows how or
where, apparently in the North, and which had maintained a vigorous
though rather artificial life during the fifteenth, had not wholly died out,
being represented partly by the ballad metre, by doggerel twelves,
fourteeners, and other long shambling lines, and by a still lively tendency
towards alliteration itself, both in metred verse and in prose. Latterly,
during Ascham’s own youth, a sort of rapprochement between these two
had made the fourteeners and Alexandrines, rather less doggerelised, very
general favourites; but had only managed to communicate to them a sort of
lolloping amble, very grievous and sickening to the delicate ear.

(3) Italianated. Thirdly, and in close connection with this combination,
Wyatt, Surrey, and other poets had, by imitating Italian models, especially
in the sonnet, striven to raise, to bind together, to infuse with energy and
stiffen with backbone, the ungainly shambling body of English verse: and
Surrey, again following the Italians, had tried, with some success, the
unrhymed decasyllable soon to be so famous as blank verse.
Now critical observation at the time might survey this field with view as
extensive and intensive as it could apply, and be far from satisfied with the
Deficiencies of crops produced. To represent the first system there was
all three.
nobody but Chaucer, who, great and greatly admired as he
was, was separated from the men of 1550 by a period of time almost as long
as that which separates us from Pope, and by a much greater gulf of
pronunciation and accent. Nobody could write like Chaucer—unless the
Chaucerian Chorizontes are right in attributing The Court of Love to this
time, in which case there was some one who could write very much like
Chaucer indeed. There was no Langland, and nobody who could write in
the least like Langland. In sheer despair, men of talent like Skelton, when
they were not Chaucerising heavily, were indulging (of course with more
dulcet intervals now and then) in mere wild gambades of doggerel.
But it will be said, Was there not the new Italianated style of poets of
such promise as Wyatt and Surrey? There was. Yet it must be remembered
that Wyatt and Surrey themselves are, after all, poets of more promise than
performance; that their promise itself looks much more promising to us,
seeing as we do its fulfilment in Spenser and onward, than it need have
done, or indeed could do, to contemporaries; that stalwart Protestants and
stout Englishmen feared and loathed the Italianation of anything English;
and lastly, that even the prosody of Wyatt and Surrey is, in a very high
degree, experimental, tentative, incomplete. We laugh, or are disgusted, at
the twists and tortures applied by the hexametrists to our poor mother
tongue; but Wyatt at least puts almost as awkward constraints on her.
It is not surprising that in the presence of these unsatisfying things, and in
the nonage of catholic literary criticism, men should have turned for help to
those classics which were the general teachers and helpers of the time.
The temptations There was indeed—already published just as Ascham had
of Criticism in
this respect.
attained his year of discretion—a treatise, by the greatest
man of letters for some fifteen hundred years at least,
which contained the germ of a warning. But it is not likely that Ascham or

any of his good Cambridge friends had seen Trissino’s translation of the De
Vulgari Eloquio; and, if any had, it would have been a stroke of genius to
carry Dante’s generalisation from the Romance tongues further. To almost
any man of the Renaissance it would have seemed half sacrilege and half
madness to examine ancient and modern literatures on the same plane, and
decide what was germane to each and what common to all. Greek Prosody
had been good enough, with very minor alterations, for Latin; how should
any of these upstart modern tongues refuse what had been good enough for
both? And let it be remembered, too, that they were only half wrong. Greek
and Latin did provide up to a certain point—that of the foot as distinguished
from the metre—examples which, duly guarded, could be quite safely
followed, which indeed could not and cannot be neglected without loss and
danger for English. It was when they went further, and endeavoured to
impose the classical combinations of feet on English, that they fell.
Yet even from the first they had glimpses and glimmerings of truth which
might have warned them; while in their very errors they often display that
combination of independence and practical spirit which is the too often
Its adventurers: undervalued glory of English criticism. Ascham himself—
Ascham himself.
besotted as he is with wrath[221] against “our rude beggarly
rhyming,” confident as he is that the doggerel of his old friend Bishop
Watson of Lincoln—

“All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities,”—

exhibits[222] as “right quantitie” of syllables and true order of versifying as
either Greek or Latin—yet saw[223] that “our English tongue doth not well
receive the nature of Carmen Heroicum, because dactylus, the aptest foot
for that verse, is seldom found in English.” Truly it is not; your dactyl is apt
to play the “Waler”—to buck under an English rider, and either throw him
altogether, or force the alteration of the pace to anapæsts. The best apparent
dactylics in English—the verses of Kingsley’s Andromeda—are not really
dactylic-hexameters at all, they are five-foot anapæstics, with a very strong
anacrusis at the beginning, and a weak hypercatalectic syllable at the end.
And with this fatal confession of Ascham (who had not a very poetical
head), that of Campion, an exquisite poet and a keen though warped critic,

coincides, as we shall see, a generation later. But the thing had to be done;
and it was done, or at least attempted.
When the craze first took form in England we do not exactly know.
Ascham observes vaguely that “this misliking of rhyming beginneth not
now of any newfangle singularity, but hath been long been misliked, and
Watson and that of men of greatest learning and deepest judgment.”[224]
Drant.
We all think that the persons who agree with us are men of
great learning and deep judgment, so that matter may be passed over. But
apparently the thing was one, and not the best, of the fruits of that study of
the classics, and specially of Greek, which, beginning at Oxford, passed
thence to Cambridge, and was taken up so busily in Ascham’s own college,
St John’s. Thomas Watson,[225] the Bishop of Lincoln, above referred to, was
Master of the College; Ascham himself, it is hardly necessary to say, was a
fellow of it. And still descending in the collegiate hierarchy, it was an
undergraduate of St John’s, Thomas Drant, who somewhat later drew up
rules for Anglo-Classic versifying—rules that occupied Spenser and
Harvey, with the result of producing some interesting letters and some very
deplorable doggerel. Drant seems to have been the “legislator of Parnassus”
to the innovators; but we have little work of his, and that little does not bear
on the special subject.
Mischievous craze as it was, however,[226] it had the merit of turning the
attention of Englishmen to really critical study of poetry, and it appears,
more or less, as the motif of most of the group of critical writings, from
Gascoigne’s Notes of Instruction to Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme, which we
shall now discuss.
In the most interesting little treatise[227] which heads or initials[228] the now
goodly roll of books in English criticism, George Gascoigne, though he was
himself a Cambridge man, does not make any reference to the craze. The
Gascoigne. tract was written at the request of an Italian friend, Eduardo
Donati. It is exceedingly short; but as full of matter, and very good matter,
as need be. In duty bound Gascoigne begins with insistence on fine
invention, without which neither “thundering in rym ram ruff, quoth my
master Chaucer,” nor “rolling in pleasant words,” nor “abounding in apt
vocables,” will suffice. But he passes over this very swiftly, as over trite and
obvious expressions,[229] suitableness of phrase, &c., and attacks the great
literary question of the time, Prosody.

He begins his attack by the modest and half-apologetic request, “This
may seem a presumptuous order,” that, whatever the verse chosen be, it be
regular, and not wobbling backwards and forwards between twelve and
His Notes of fourteen syllables on no principle. Then he enjoins the
Instruction.
maintenance of regular and usual accent or quantity; and in
so doing insists on a standard in regard to which not merely Wyatt and
Surrey earlier, but even Spenser later, were much less scrupulous.
“Treasure,” he says, you must use with the first syllable long and the second
short: you must not make it “treasùre.” And then he makes a very curious
observation:—
“Commonly nowadays in English rhymes, for I dare not call them
English verses, we use none other order but a foot of two syllables,” to wit,
the Iamb. “We have,” he says, “in other times used other kinds of metres,”
as

"No wight | in the world | that wealth | can attain,"[230]

(i.e., anapæsts), while “our Father Chaucer had used the same liberty in feet
and measures that the Latinists do use,” that is to say, syllabic equivalence
of two shorts to a long. And he laments the tyranny of the Iamb; but says,
“we must take the ford as we find it.”
Then, after some particular cautions,—a renewed one as to quantifying
words aright—“understànd,” not “undérstand,” &c., as to using as many
monosyllables as possible (it is amusing to read this and remember the
opposite caution of Pope),—he comes to rhyme, and warns his scholar
against rhyme without reason. Alliteration is to be moderate: you must not
“hunt a letter to death.” Unusual words are to be employed carefully and
with a definite purpose to “draw attentive reading.” Be clear and sensible.
[231]
Keep English order, and invert substantive and adjective seldom and
cautiously. Be moderate in the use also of that “shrewd fellow, poetical
licence,” who actually reads "hea|ven" for "heavn"![232]
As for the pause or Cæsura, Gascoigne is not injudicious. “The pause,”
he says, “will stand best in the middle” of an octosyllable, at the fourth
syllable in a “verse of ten,” at the sixth (or middle again) of an Alexandrine,
and at the eighth in a fourteener. But it is at the discretion of the writer in
Rhythm royal: “it forceth not where the pause be till the end of the line”—
and this liberty will assuredly draw to more.

Next he enumerates stanzas:—Rhyme royal itself, ballades, sonnets,
Dizains, and Sixains, Virelays, and the “Poulter’s measure,” of twelve and
fourteen alternately, to which his own contemporaries were so unfortunately
addicted. You must “finish the sentence and meaning at the end of every
staff”: and (by the way) he has “forgotten a notable kind of rhyme called
riding rhyme, which is what our father Chaucer used in his Canterbury
tales, and in divers other delectable and light enterprises.” It is good for “a
merry tale,” Rhyme royal for a “grave discourse,” Ballads and Sonnets for
love-poems, &c., and it would be best, in his judgment, to keep Poulter’s
measure for Psalms and hymns. And so he makes an end, “doubting his own
ignorance.”
The chief points about this really capital booklet are as follows:—
Gascoigne’s recognition of the importance of overhauling English Prosody;
his good sense on the matter of the cæsura, and of Chaucer’s adoption of
the principles of equivalenced scansion; his acknowledgment with regret of
the impoverishment which, in the sterility of the mid-sixteenth century
before Spenser, was a fact, as resulting from the tyranny of the iamb; the
shrewdness of his general remarks; and, last but not least, his entire silence
Their capital about the new versifying, the “Dranting of Verses.” It is
value.
possible (for though he was at Cambridge he seems to
admit that he did not acquire any great scholarship there) that he had not
come into contact with any one who took interest in this: but it is
improbable that it would have appealed to his robust sense of poetry,
unsicklied by Harvey’s pedantry, and not misled by Spenser’s classical
enthusiasm.
At this time, however, or not long after—the Notes must have been
written between 1572 and 1575, and the correspondence of Spenser and
Harvey actually appeared in 1579—these other persons were thinking a
great deal about the classical metres. The Five Letters (“Three” and
“Two”[233]—not to be confused with the Four Letters which Harvey issued
long afterwards about Greene) are full of the subject, and of poetical
criticism generally. They, together with the controversy which arose over
Gosson’s School of Abuse, and which indirectly produced Sidney’s Apology
for Poetry, make the years 1579-1580 as notable in the history of English
criticism as the appearances of Euphues and The Shepherd’s Calendar make
them in that of creative literature.

Spenser’s first letter informs Harvey that “they [Sidney and Dyer] have
proclaimed in their ἀρειωπάγῳ[234] [the literary cénacle of Leicester House]
a general surceasing and silence of bald rhymers, and also of the very best
too: instead whereof they have, by the authority of their whole Senate,
prescribed certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for
English verse, having had thereof already great practice, and drawn me to
Spenser and their faction.” And later, “I am more in love with English
Harvey.
versifying than with rhyming, which I should have done
long since if I would have followed your counsel.” He hints, however,
gently, that Harvey’s own verses (these coterie writers always keep the
name “verses” for their hybrid abortions) once or twice “make a breach in
Master Drant’s rules.” Which was, of course, a very dreadful thing, only to
be “condoned tanto poetæ.” He requites Harvey with a few Iambics, which
he “dare warrant precisely perfect for the feet, and varying not one inch
from the Rule.” And then follows the well-known piece beginning—

“Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,”

where certainly the state must have been bad if it was as infelicitous as the
verse.
Not such was Gabriel Harvey that he might take even a polite correction;
and his reply is a proper donnish setting-down of a clever but presumptuous
youth. He respects the Areopagus—indeed they were persons of worship,
and Harvey was a roturier—more than Spenser can or will suppose, and he
likes the trimeters (indeed, though poor things, they were Spenser’s own
after all, and such as no man but Spenser could have written in their foolish
kind) more than Spenser “can or will easily believe.” But—and then
follows much reviewing in the now stale hole-picking kind, which has long
been abandoned, save by the descendants of Milbourne and Kenrick, and a
lofty protestation that “myself never saw your gorbellied master’s rules, nor
heard of them before.”
The Three Letters which follow[235] are distributed in subject between an
Earthquake (which has long since ceased to quake for us) and the
hexameters. They open with a letter from Spenser, in which he broaches the
main question, “Whether our English accent will endure the Hexameter?”
and doubts. Yet he has a hankering after it, encloses his own—

“See ye the blindfoldèd pretty god, that feathered archer,” &c.,

and prays that Harvey would either follow the rules of the great Drant,
indorsed by Sidney, or else send his own. Harvey replies in double. The first
part is some very tragical mirth about the earthquake; the second, “A
Gallant Familiar Letter,” tackles the question of versification.
This gallant familiarity might possibly receive from harsh critics the
name of uneasy coxcombry; but it is at any rate clear that the author has set
about the matter very seriously. He expresses delight that Sidney and Dyer,
“the two very diamonds of her Majesty’s Court,” have begun to help
forward “the exchange of barbarous and balductum[236] rhymes with
artificial verses”; thinks their “lively example” will be much better than
Ascham’s “dead advertisement” in the Schoolmaster. He would like (as
should we) to have Drant’s prosody. His own Rules and Precepts will
probably not be very different; but he will take time before drafting them
finally. He thinks (reasonably enough) that before framing a standard
English Grammar or Rhetoric (therein including Prosody), a standard
orthography must first be agreed upon. And he suggests that “we beginners”
(this from the author of these truly “barbarous and balductum” antics to the
author of the Faerie Queene is distinctly precious) have the advantage, like
Homer and Ennius, of setting examples. “A New Year’s Gift to M. George
Bilchaunger,” in very doleful hexameters, follows, and after a little gird at
Spenser’s “See ye the Blindfoldèd,” another sprout of Harvey’s brain in the
same kind, which has been, perhaps, more, and more deservedly, laughed at
than any of these absurdities, except the scarcely sane jargon-doggerel of
Stanyhurst—

“What might I call this tree? a Laurell? o bonny Laurell!
Needs to thy boughs will I bow this knee, and veil my bonetto;”

with yet another—

“Since Galateo[237] came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp.”

He thinks that the author of this last “wanted but some delicate choice
elegant poesy” of Sidney’s or Dyer’s for a good pattern. After some further
experiments of his own, or his brother’s, in hexametring some of Spenser’s
own “emblems” in the Calendar, he turns to Spenser himself, whom, it

seems, he ranks next the same “incomparable and miraculous genius in the
catalogue of our very principal English Aristarchi.” He proceeds to speak of
some of that earlier work which, as in The Dying Pelican, is certainly, or in
the Dreams, possibly, lost. After which he writes himself down for all time
in the famous passage about the Faerie Queene, which he had “once again
nigh forgotten,” but which he now sends home “in neither better nor worse
case than he found her.” “As for his judgment,” he is “void of all judgment
if Spenser’s Nine Comedies [also lost] are not nearer Ariosto’s than that
Elvish Queene is to the Orlando, which” Spenser “seems to emulate, and
hopes to overgo.” And so he ends his paragraph with the yet more famous
words, “If so be the Faery Queene be fairer in your eye than the Nine
Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I
say, and yet I will not say what I thought, but there an end for this once, and
fare you well till God or some good Angel put you in a better mind!” Which
words let all who practise criticism grave in their memories, and recite them
daily, adding, “Here, but for the grace of God——!” if they be modest and
fear Nemesis.
After an interval, however, Harvey returns to actual criticism, and shows
himself in rather better figure by protesting, in spite of “five hundred
Drants,” against the alteration of the quantity of English words by accenting
“Majesty” and “Manfully,” and “Carpenter” on the second syllable. And he
falls in with Gascoigne on the subject of such words as “Heaven.” Nor
could he, even if he had been far less of a pedant and coxcomb, have given
better or sounder doctrine than that with which he winds up. “It is the
vulgar and natural mother Prosody, that alone worketh the feat, as the only
supreme foundress and reformer of Position, Diphthong, Orthography, or
whatsoever else; whose affirmatives are nothing worth if she once conclude
the negative.” And for this sound doctrine, not unsoundly enlarged upon,
and tipped with a pleasant Latin farewell to “mea domina Immerita, mea
bellissima Collina Clouta”, let us leave Gabriel in charity.[238]
The Puritan Meanwhile the strong critical set of the time—so
attack on Poetry.
interesting, if not so satisfying, after the absolute silence of
criticism in English earlier—was being shown in another direction by a
different controversy, to which, as we have seen, Spenser makes allusion.
The points which chiefly interested him at the moment were formal; those
to which we now come were partly of the same class though of another
species, partly transcending form.

Stephen Gosson is one of the persons of whom, as is by no means always
the case, it would really be useful to know more than we do know about
Gosson. their private history and character. What disgust, what
disappointment, what tardy development of certain strains of temper and
disposition he underwent, we do not know; but something of the kind there
must have been to make a young man of four-and-twenty, a fair scholar,
already of some note for both dramatic and poetical writing, and obviously
of no mean intellectual powers, swing violently round, and denounce plays,
and poems, and almost literature generally, as the works of the Devil. It is
quite insufficient to ejaculate “Puritanism!” or “Platonism!” for neither of
these was a new thing, and the question is why Gosson was not affected by
them earlier or later.
Let us, however, now as always, abstain from speculation when we have
fact; and here we have at least three very notable facts—Gosson’s School of
Abuse,[239] with its satellite tractates, Lodge’s untitled Reply,[240] and the
famous Defence of Poesy or Apology for Poetry[241] which Sidney (to whom
Gosson had rashly dedicated his book) almost certainly intended as a
counterblast, though either out of scorn, as Spenser hints, or (more probably
from what we know of him) out of amiable and courteous dislike to requite
a compliment with an insult, he takes no direct notice of Gosson at any
time.
The School of Abuse (which is written in such a style as almost to out-
Euphuise the contemporary Euphues itself) is critical wholly from the moral
side, and with reference to the actual, not the necessary or possible, state of
The School of poetry. There are even, the author says, some good plays,
Abuse.
including at least one of his own; but the whole of ancient
poetry (he says little or nothing of modern) is infected by the blasphemy
and immorality of Paganism, and nearly the whole of the modern stage is
infected by the abuses of the theatre—of which Gosson speaks in terms
pretty well identical with those which Puritan teachers had for some years
past been using in sermon and treatise. But outside of the moral and
religious line he does not step: he is solely occupied with the lies and the
licence of poets and players.
Lodge’s reply (the title-page of it has been lost, but it may be the Honest
Excuses to which Gosson refers as having been published against him) is
almost entirely an appeal to authority, seasoned with a little personal
Lodge’s Reply. invective. Lodge strings together all the classical names he

can think of, with a few mediæval, to show that Poetry, Music (which
Gosson had also attacked), and even the theatre, are not bad things. But he
hardly attempts any independent justification of them as good ones,
especially from the purely literary point of view. In fact, his pamphlet—
though interesting as critical work from the associate of great creators in
drama, himself a delightful minor poet and no contemptible pioneer of
English prose fiction—is merely one of the earliest adaptations in English
of an unreal defence to an attack, logically as unreal though actually
dangerous. The charlatan-geniuses of the Renaissance, with Cornelius
Agrippa[242] at their head, had refurbished the Platonic arguments for the
sincere but pestilent reformers of the Puritan type. Lodge and his likes, in
all countries from Italy outwards and from Boccaccio downward, accept the
measure of the shadowy daggers of their opponents, and attempt to meet
them with weapons of similar temper. The only reality of the debate is in its
accidents, not in its main purport. But the assailants, in England at least, had
for the time an unfair advantage, because the defence could point to no
great poet but Chaucer. The real answer was being provided by one of
themselves in the shape of The Faerie Queene.
Sidney’s book, though pervaded by the same delusion, is one of far more
Sidney’s importance. It is not free from faults—in fact, it has often
Apology for
Poetry.
been pointed out that some of Sidney’s doctrines, if they
had been accepted, would have made the best efforts of
Elizabethan literature abortive. But the defects of detail, of which more
presently, are mixed with admirable merits; the critic shows himself able, as
Gosson had not been able, to take a wide and catholic, instead of a peddling
and pettifogging, view of morality. Instead of merely stringing authorities
together like Lodge, he uses authority indeed, but abuses it not; and while
not neglecting form he does not give exclusive attention to it.
His main object, indeed (though he does not know it), is the defence, not
so much of Poetry as of Romance. He follows the ancients in extending the
former term to any prose fiction: but it is quite evident that he would have,
in his mimesis, a quality of imagination which Aristotle nowhere insists
upon, and which is in the best sense Romantic. And of this poetry, or
romance, he makes one of the loftiest conceptions possible. All the
hyperboles of philosophers or of poets, on order, justice, harmony, and the
like, are heaped upon Poetry herself, and all the Platonic objections to her
are retorted or denied.[243]

It has been said that there is no direct reference to Gosson in the Apology,
Abstract of it. though the indirect references are fairly clear. Sidney
begins (in the orthodox Platonic or Ciceronian manner) somewhat off his
subject, by telling how the right virtuous Edward Wotton, and he himself,
once at the Emperor’s Court learnt horsemanship of John Pietro Pugliano,
the Imperial Equerry, and recounting with pleasant irony some magnifying
of his office by that officer. Whence, by an equally pleasant rhetorical turn,
he slips into a defence of his office—his “unelected vocation” of poet. Were
not the earliest and greatest authors of all countries, Musæus, Homer,
Hesiod, in Greece (not to mention Orpheus and Linus), Livius Andronicus
and Ennius among the Romans, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italy,
Chaucer and Gower for “our English”—were they not all poets? Even the
philosophers in Greece used poetry, and Plato himself is a poet almost
against his will. Herodotus called his nine books after the Muses; and he
and all historians have stolen or usurped things of poetry. Wales, Ireland,
“the most barbarous and simple Indians,” are cited. Nay, further, did not the
Romans call a poet vates, a “prophet”? and, by presumption, may we not
call David’s psalms a divine poem? Whatever some may think,[244] it is no
profanation to do so. For what is a poet? What do we mean by adopting that
Greek title for him? We mean that he is a maker. All other arts and sciences
limit themselves to nature; the poet alone transcends it, improves it, makes,
nay, brings it (“let it not be deemed too saucy a comparison”) in some sort
into competition with the Creator Himself whom he imitates.
The kinds of this imitation are then surveyed—“Divine,”
“Philosophical,” and that of the third or right sort, who only imitate to
invent and improve, which neither divine nor philosophic poets can do.
These classes are subdivided according to their matter—heroic, tragic,
comic, &c.—or according to the sorts of verses they liked best to write in,
“for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical
inventions in that numerous kind of writing which is called verse—indeed
but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry.” And
again, “it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet.” Xenophon and
Heliodorus were both poets in prose.
Now let us “weigh this latter part of poetry first by works and then by
parts,” having regard always to the “Architectonice or mistress-
knowledge,” the knowledge of a man’s self, ethically and politically.
Philosophy, history, law, &c., are then “weighed” against poetry at some

length: and the judgment of Aristotle that Poetry is philosophoteron and
spoudaioteron than history, is affirmed chiefly on the odd ground of
poetical justice,—the right always triumphing in poetry though not in fact.
Instances of the moral and political uses of poetry follow. Then for the
parts. Pastoral, comedy, tragedy, &c., are by turns surveyed and defended;
and it is in the eulogy of lyric that the famous sentence about Chevy
Chase[245] occurs. After this, and after a stately vindication of Poetry’s right
to the laurel, he turns to the objections of the objectors. Although repeating
the declaration that “rhyming and versing make not poetry,” he argues that
if they were inseparable,[246] verse is the most excellent kind of writing, far
better than prose. As to the abuses of poetry, they are but abuses, and do not
take away the use, as is proved by a great number of stock examples.
Why, then, has England grown so hard a stepmother to poets? They are
bad enough as a rule, no doubt; though Chaucer did excellently considering
his time. The Mirror for Magistrates is good; so is Surrey; and The
Shepherd’s Calendar “hath much poetry,” though “the old rustic language”
is bad, since neither Theocritus, nor Virgil, nor Sannazar has it. And what is
the reason of our inferiority? The neglect of rule. From this point onwards
Sidney certainly “exposes his legs to the arrows” of those who ignore the
just historic estimate. He pours ridicule on all our tragedies except
Gorboduc, and still more on our mongrel tragi-comedies. We must follow
the Unities, which, as it is, are neglected even in Gorboduc, “how much
more in all the rest?” Whence he proceeds (unconscious how cool the
reductio ad absurdum will leave us) to the famous ridicule of “Asia on the
one side and Africa on the other,” of “three ladies walking to gather
flowers,” and how the same place which was a garden becomes a rock, and
then a cave with a monster, and then a battlefield with two armies—of the
course of two lives in two hours’ space, &c. And he concludes with some
remarks on versification, which we should gladly have seen worked out.
For he does not now seem to be in that antagonistic mood towards rhyme
which Spenser’s letters to Harvey discover in him. On the contrary, he
admits two styles, ancient and modern, the former depending on quantity,
the latter depending on “number,” accent, and rhyme. He indeed thinks
English fit for both sorts, and denies “neither sweetness nor majesty” to
rhyme, but is, like almost all his contemporaries and followers (except
Gascoigne partially), in a fog as to “numbers” and cæsura. The actual end
comes a very little abruptly by an exhortation of some length, half

humorous, half serious, to all and sundry, to be “no more to jest at the
reverent title of a rhymer.”
The importance of this manifesto, both symptomatically and typically,
Its minor can hardly be exaggerated. It exposes the temper of the
shortcomings
generation which actually produced the first-fruits of the
greatest Elizabethan poetry; it served as a stimulant and encouragement to
all the successive generations of the great age. That Sidney makes mistakes
both in gross and detail—that he even makes some rather serious mistakes
from the mere “point of view of the examiner”—is of course undeniable.
He has a good deal of the merely traditional mode of Renaissance respect
for classical—and for some modern—authority. That, for instance, there is a
good deal to be said, and that not only from the point of view of Ben
Jonson, against Spenser’s half-archaic half-rustic dialect in the Calendar,
few would refuse to grant. But Theocritus did use dialect: it would not in
the least matter whether either he or Virgil did not; and if it did, what has
the modern and partly vernacular name of Sannazar to do with the matter?
It can only be replied that Spenser, by permitting “E. K.'s” annotation, did
much to invite this sort of criticism; and that Englishmen’s reluctance to
rely on the inherent powers of the English language was partly justified (for
hardly any dead poet but Chaucer and no dead prose-writers but Malory and
perhaps Berners deserved the title of “great”), partly came from very
pardonable ignorance.
It has been already observed that Sidney is by no means peremptory
about the “new versifying”; and in particular has absolutely none of the
craze against rhyme as rhyme which animated persons of every degree of
ability, from Milton to Stanyhurst, during more than a century. His remarks
on versification are, however, too scanty to need much comment.
There remain his two major heresies, the declaration that verse is not
inseparable from poetry, and the denunciation of tragi-comedy. In both the
and major authority of the ancients must again bear good part of the
heresies.
blame, but in both he has additional excuses. As to the
“pestilent heresy of prose poetry,” he is at least not unwilling to argue on
the hypothesis that verse were necessary to poetry, though he does not think
it is. He is quite sure that verse is anyhow a nobler medium than prose. As
for the plays, there is still more excuse for him. His classical authorities
were quite clear on the point; and as yet there was nothing to be quoted on
the other side—at least in English. Spanish had indeed already made the

experiment of tragi-comic and anti-unitarian treatment; but I do not think
any of the best Spanish examples had yet appeared, and there is great
difference between the two theatres. In English itself not one single great or
even good play certainly existed on the model at Sidney’s death; and, from
what we have of what did exist, we can judge how the rough verse, the
clumsy construction, or rather absence of construction, the entire absence of
clear character-projection, and the higgledy-piggledy of huddled horrors
and horseplay, must have shocked a taste delicate in itself and nursed upon
The excuses of classical and Italian literature. And it is noteworthy that
both,
even Gorboduc, with all its regularity and “Senecation,”
does not bribe Sidney to overlook at least some of its defects. He is here, as
elsewhere,—as indeed throughout,—neither blind nor bigoted. He is only in
the position of a man very imperfectly supplied with actual experiments and
observations, confronted with a stage of creative production but just
improving from a very bad state, and relying on old and approved methods
as against new ones which had as yet had no success.
And had his mistakes been thrice what they are, the tone and temper of
and their ample his tractate would make us forgive them three times over.
compensation.
That “moving of his heart as with a trumpet” communicates
itself to his reader even now, and shows us the motion in the heart of the
nation at large that was giving us the Faerie Queene, that was to give us
Hamlet and As You Like It. What though the illustrations sometimes make
us smile? that the praise of the moral and political effects of poetry may
sometimes turn the smile into a laugh or a sigh? Poetry after all, like all
other human things, has a body and a soul. The body must be fashioned by
art—perhaps the body is art; but the soul is something else. The best poetry
will not come without careful consideration of form and subject, of kind
and style; but it will not necessarily come with this consideration. There
must be the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the afflatus, the glow; and they are
here in Sidney’s tractate. Nor must we fail to draw attention, once more, to
the difference of the English critical spirit here shown as regards both
Italian and French.
In the decade which followed,[247] three notable books of English
criticism appeared, none of them exhibiting Sidney’s afflatus, but all
showing the interest felt in the subject, and one exceeding in method, and at
least attempted range, anything that English had known, or was to know, for
more than a century. These were King James the First’s (as yet only “the

King James’s Sixth’s”) Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in
Reulis and
Cautelis.
Scottis Poesie, 1585; William Webbe’s Discourse of
English Poesie, next year; and the anonymous Arte of
English Poesie, which appeared in 1589, and which (on rather weak
evidence, but with no counter-claimant) is usually attributed to George
Puttenham.[248]
The first is the slightest; but it is interesting for more than its authorship.
It was attached to James’s Essays of a Prentice in the Divine Art, of which it
gives some rules: it shows that Buchanan had taken pains with his pupil;
and it also exhibits that slightly scholastic and “peddling,” but by no means
unreal, shrewdness and acumen which distinguished the British Solomon in
his happier moments. It is characteristic that James is not in the least afraid
of the charge of attending to mint, anise, and cumin. He plunges without
any rhetorical exordium into what he calls “just colours”—do not rhyme on
the same syllable, see that your rhyme is on accented syllables only, do not
let your first or last word exceed two or three syllables at most. This dread
of polysyllables, so curious to us, was very common at the time: it was one
of the things from which Shakespeare’s silent sovereignty delivered us by
such touches of spell-dissolving mastery as

“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”

Then he passes to feet, of which he practically allows only the iamb; while
he very oddly gives the word “foot” to the syllable, not the combination of
syllables; and lays down the entirely arbitrary rule that the number of
“feet”—i.e., syllables—must be even, not odd. There is to be a sharp
section (“cæsura”) in the middle of every line, long or short; and the
difference of long, short, and “indifferent” (common) feet or syllables is
dwelt upon, with its influence of “flowing,” as the King calls rhythm.
Cautions on diction follow, and some against commonplaces, which look as
if the royal prentice had read Gascoigne, a suggestion confirmed elsewhere.
[249]
Invention is briefly touched; and the tract finishes with a short account
of the kinds of verse: “rhyme”—i.e., the heroic couplet, “quhilk servis
onely for lang historieis”; a heroical stanza of nine lines, rhymed
aabaabbab; ottava rima, which he calls “ballat royal”; rhyme royal, which
he calls “Troilus verse”; “rouncifals,” or “tumbling verse” (doggerel

alliterative, with bob and wheel); sonnets; “common” verse (octosyllable
couplets); “all kinds of broken or cuttit verse,” &c.
The tract is, as has been said, interesting, because it is an honest, and by
no means unintelligent, attempt to make an English prosody, with special
reference to a dialect which had done great things in its short day, but which
had been specially affected—not to say specially disorganised—by the
revived and bastard alliteration of the fifteenth century. Probably it was the
study of French (where the iamb had long been the only foot) which, quite
as much as mere following of Gascoigne, induced James to extend that
crippling limitation to English; and the same influence may be seen in his
insistence on the hard-and-fast section. These things (the latter of which at
least rather endeared him to Dr Guest)[250] are, of course, quite wrong; but
they express the genuine and creditable desire of the time to impose some
order on the shambling doggerel of the generation or two immediately
preceding. We find the same tendency even in Spenser, as far as rigid
dissyllabic feet and sections are concerned; and it is certainly no shame for
the Royal prentice to follow, though unknowing, the master and king of
English poetry at the time when he wrote.
One would not, however, in any case have expected from James evidence
Webbe’s of the root of the matter in poetry. There is more of this
Discourse.
root, though less scholarship and also more “craze,” in the
obscure William Webbe, of whom we know practically nothing except that
he was a Cambridge man, a friend of Robert Wilmot (the author of Tancred
and Gismund) and private tutor to the sons of Edward Sulyard of Flemyngs,
an Essex squire. The young Sulyards must have received some rather
dubious instruction in the classics, for Webbe, in his inevitable classical
exordium, thinks that Pindar was older than Homer, and that Horace came
after—apparently a good while after—Ovid, and about the same time as
Juvenal and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply interested in
English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser—“the new poet,” “our late
famous poet,” “the mightiest English poet that ever lived,” is, if not in every
case quite according to knowledge, absolutely right on the whole, and very
pleasant and refreshing to read. It is, indeed, the first thing of the kind that
we meet with in English; for the frequent earlier praises of Chaucer are
almost always long after date, always uncritical, and for the most part[251]
much rather expressions of a conventional tradition than of the writer’s
deliberate preference.

It was Webbe’s misfortune, rather than his fault, that, like his idol (but
without that idol’s resipiscence), and, like most loyal Cambridge men, with
the examples of Watson, Ascham, and Drant before them, he was bitten
Slight in with “the new versifying.” It was rather his fault than his
knowledge,
misfortune that he seems to have taken very little pains to
acquaint himself with the actual performance of English poetry. Even of
Gower he speaks as though he only knew him through the references of
Chaucer and others: though three editions of the Confessio—Caxton’s one
and Berthelette’s two—were in print in his time. His notice of Chaucer
himself is curiously vague, and almost limited to his powers as a satirist,
while he has, what must seem to most judges,[252] the astonishing idea of
discovering “good proportion of verse and meetly current style” in Lydgate,
though he reproves him for dealing with “superstitious and odd matters.”
That he thinks Piers Plowman later than Lydgate is unlucky, but not quite
criminal. He had evidently read it—indeed the book, from its kinship in
parts to the Protestant, not to say the Puritan, spirit, appealed to Elizabethan
tastes, and Crowley had already printed two editions of it, Rogers a third.
But he makes upon it the extraordinary remark, “The first I have seen that
observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme.” What
Webbe here means by “quantity,” or whether he had any clear deliberate
meaning at all, it is impossible to see: it is needless to say that Langland is
absolutely non-quantitative in the ordinary sense, that if “quantity” means
number of syllables he observes none, and that he can be scanned only on
the alliterative-accentual system. For Gascoigne Webbe relies on “E. K.”;
brackets “the divers works of the old Earl of Surrey” with a dozen others; is
copious on Phaer, Golding, &c., and mentions George Whetstone and
Anthony Munday in words which would be adequate for Sackville (who is
not named), and hardly too low for Spenser; while Gabriel Harvey is
deliberately ranked with Spenser himself. Yet these things, rightly valued,
are not great shame to Webbe. If he borrows from “E. K.” some scorn of the
“ragged rout of rakehell rhymers,” and adds more of his own, he specifies
nobody; and his depreciation is only the defect which almost necessarily
accompanies the quality of his enthusiasm.
His piece, though not long, is longer than those of Gascoigne, Sidney,
but enthusiastic, and King James. After a dedication (not more than
excusably laudatory) to his patron Sulyard, there is a curious preface to
“The Noble Poets of England,” who, if they had been inclined to be

censorious, might have replied that Master Webbe, while complimenting
them, went about to show that the objects of his compliment did not exist.
“It is,” he says, “to be wondered of all, and is lamented of many, that, while
all other studies are used eagerly, only Poetry has found fewest friends to
amend it.” We have “as sharp and quick wits” in England as ever were
Greeks and Romans: our tongue is neither coarse nor harsh, as she has
already shown. All that is wanted is “some perfect platform or Prosodia of
versifying”: either in imitation of Greeks and Latins, or with necessary
alterations. So, if the Noble Poets would “look so low from their divine
cogitations”, and “run over the simple censure” of Master Webbe’s “weak
brain,” something might, perhaps, be done.
if uncritical, The treatise itself begins with the usual etymological
definition of poetry, as “making,” and the usual comments on the word
“Vates”; but almost immediately digresses into praise of our late famous
English poet who wrote the Shepherd’s Calendar and a wish to see his
“English Poet” (mentioned by E. K.), which, alas! none of us have ever
seen. This is succeeded, first by the classical and then by the English
historical sketches, which have been commented upon. It ends with fresh
laudation of Spenser.
Webbe then turns to the general consideration of poetry (especially from
the allegoric-didactic point of view), subject, kinds, &c.; and it is to be
observed that, though he several times cites Aristotle, he leans much more
on Horace, and on Elyot’s translations from him and other Latins. He then
proceeds to a rather unnecessarily elaborate study of the Æneid, with large
citations both from the original and from Phaer’s translation, after which he
returns once more to Spenser, and holds him up as at least the equal of
Virgil and Theocritus. Indeed the Calendar is practically his theme all
through, though he diverges from and embroiders upon it. Then, after
glancing amiably enough at Tusser, and mentioning a translation of his own
of the Georgics, which has got into the hands of some piratical publisher, he
attacks the great rhyme-question, to which he has, from the Preface
onwards, more than once alluded. Much of what he says is borrowed, or a
little advanced, from Ascham; but Webbe is less certain about the matter
than his master, and again diverges into a consideration of divers English
metres, always illustrated, where possible, from the Calendar. Still harking
back again, he decides that “the true kind of versifying” might have been
effected in English: though (as Campion, with better wits, did after him) he

questions whether some alteration of the actual Greek and Latin forms is
not required. He gives a list of classical feet (fairly correct, except that he
makes the odd confusion of a trochee and a tribrach), and discusses the
liberties which must be taken with English to adjust it to some of them.
Elegiacs, he thinks, will not do: Hexameters and Sapphics go best. And, to
prove this, he is rash enough to give versions of his own, in the former
metre, of Virgil’s first and second eclogues, in the latter of Spenser’s
beautiful

“Ye dainty nymphs that in this blessed brook.”

It is enough to say that he succeeds in stripping all three of every rag of
poetry. A translation of Fabricius’[253] prose syllabus of Horace’s rules,
gathered not merely out of the Ep. ad Pisones but elsewhere, and an
“epilogue,” modest as to himself, sanguine as to what will happen when
“the rabble of bald rhymes is turned to famous works,” concludes the piece.
in appreciation. On the whole, to use the hackneyed old phrase once
more, we could have better spared a better critic than Webbe, who gives us
—in a fashion invaluable to map-makers of the early exploration of English
criticism—the workings of a mind furnished with no original genius for
poetry, and not much for literature, not very extensively or accurately
erudite, but intensely interested in matters literary, and especially in matters
poetical, generously enthusiastic for such good things as were presented to
it, not without some mother-wit even in its crazes, and encouraged in those
crazes not, as in Harvey’s case, by vanity, pedantry, and bad taste, but by its
very love of letters. Average dispositions of this kind were, as a rule,
diverted either into active life—very much for the good of the nation—or—
not at all for its good—into the acrid disputes of hot-gospelling and
Puritanism. Webbe, to the best of his modest powers, was a devotee of
literature: for which let him have due honour.
Puttenham—or whosoever else it was, if it was not Puttenham[254]—has
some points of advantage, and one great one of disadvantage, in comparison
Puttenham’s (?) with Webbe. In poetical faculty there is very little to choose
Art of English
Poesie.
between them—the abundant specimens of his own
powers, which the author or The Art of English Poesie
gives (and which are eked out by a late copy of one of the works referred to,
Partheniades), deserve the gibes they receive in one of our scanty early

notices of the book, that by Sir John Harington (v. infra). On the other hand,
Puttenham has very little of that engaging enthusiasm which atones for so
much in his contemporary. But this very want of enthusiasm somewhat
prepares us for, though it need not necessarily accompany, merits which we
do not find in Webbe, considered as a critic. The Art of English Poesy,
which, as has been said, appeared in 1589, three years later than Webbe’s,
but which, from some allusions, may have been written, or at least begun,
before it, and which, from other allusions, must have been the work of a
man well advanced in middle life, is methodically composed, very capable
in range and plan, and supported with a by no means contemptible
erudition, and no inconsiderable supply of judgment and common-sense. It
was unfortunate for Puttenham that he was just a little too old: that having
been—as from a fairly precise statement of his he must have been—born
cir. 1530-35, he belonged to the early and uncertain generation of
Elizabethan men of letters, the Googes and Turbervilles, and Gascoignes,
not to the generation of Sidney and Spenser, much less to that of
Shakespeare and Jonson. But what he had he gave: and it is far from
valueless.
The book is “to-deled” (as the author of the Ancren Riwle would say) into
three books—“Of Poets and Poesie,” “Of Proportion,” and “Of Ornament.”
Its erudition. It begins, as usual, with observations on the words poet and
maker, references to the ancients, &c.; but this exordium, which is fitly
written in a plain but useful and agreeable style, is commendably short. The
writer lays it down, with reasons, that there may be an Art of English as of
Latin and Greek poetry; but cannot refrain from the same sort of “writing at
large” as to poets being the first philosophers, &c., which we have so often
seen.[255] Indeed we must lay our account with the almost certain fact that all
writers of this period had seen Sidney’s Defence at least in MS. or had
heard of it. He comes closer to business with his remarks on the irreption of
rhyme into Greek and Latin poetry; and shows a better knowledge of
leonine and other mediæval Latin verse, not merely than Webbe, but even
than Ascham. A very long section then deals with the question—all-
interesting to a man of the Renaissance—in what reputation poets were with
princes of old, and how they be now contemptible (wherein Puttenham
shows a rather remarkable acquaintance with modern European literature),
and then turns to the subject or matter of poesy and the forms thereof,
handling the latter at great length, and with a fair sprinkle of literary

anecdote. At last he comes to English poetry; and though, as we might
expect, he does not go behind the late fourteenth century, he shows rather
more knowledge than Webbe and (not without slips here and elsewhere) far
more comparative judgment. It must, however, be admitted that, engaging
as is his description of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “vein most lofty, insolent, and
passionate,” he does not show to advantage in the patronising glance in
passing at “that other gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd’s Calendar,”
contrasted with the description of the Queen our Sovereign lady, “whose
Muse easily surmounteth all the rest in any kind on which it may please her
Majesty to employ her pen.” But here the allowance comes in: the stoutest
Tory of later days can never wholly share, though he may remotely
comprehend, the curious mixture of religious, romantic, patriotic, amatory,
and interested feelings with which the men of the sixteenth century wrote
about Gloriana.
The second book deals with Proportion, in which word Puttenham
includes almost everything belonging to Prosody in its widest sense—staff,
stanza, measure, metres, and feet, “cæsure,” rhyme, accent, cadence,
situation (by which he means the arrangement of the rhymes), and
Systematic proportion in figure. On most of these heads he speaks
arrangement
more or less in accordance with his fellows (though he very
noticeably abstains from extreme commendation or condemnation of
rhyme), save that, for the moment, he seems to neglect the “new
versifying.” It is, however, but for a moment. After his chapters on
“proportion” in figure (the fanciful egg, wheel, lozenge, &c., which he
himself argues for, and which were to make critics of the Addisonian type
half-angry and half-sad), he deals with the subject.
About this “new versifying” he is evidently in two minds. He had
glanced at it before (and refers to the glance now)[256] as “a nice and
scholastic curiosity.” However, “for the information of our young makers,
and pleasure to those who be delighted in novelty, and to the intent that we
may not seem by ignorance or oversight to omit,”[257] he “will now deal with
it.” Which he does at great length; and, at any rate sometimes, with a clearer
perception of the prosodic values than any other, even Spenser, had yet
shown. But he does not seem quite at home in the matter, and glides off to a
discussion of feet—classical feet—in the usual rhymed English verse.
The third book is longer than the first and second put together, and is
evidently that in which the author himself took most pleasure. It is called

and exuberant “Of Ornament,” but practically deals with the whole
indulgence in
Figures.
question of lexis or style, so that it is at least common to
Rhetoric and Poetics. In one respect, too, it belongs more
specially to the former, in that it contains the most elaborate treatment of
rhetorical figures to be found, up to its time, in English literature. Full
eighty pages are occupied with the catalogue of these “Figures Auricular”
wherein Puttenham (sometimes rather badly served by his pen or his
printer) ransacks the Greek rhetoricians, and compiles a list (with
explanations and examples) of over one hundred and twenty. It is preceded
and followed by more general remarks, of which some account must be
given.
Beginning with an exordial defence of ornament in general, Puttenham
proceeds to argue that set speeches, as in Parliament, not merely may but
ought to be couched in something more than a conversational style. This
added grace must be given by (1) Language, (2) Style, (3) Figures. On
diction he has remarks both shrewd and interesting, strongly commending
the language of the Court and of the best citizens, not provincial speech, or
that of seaports, or of universities, or in other ways merely technical. “The
usual speech of the Court and that of London and the shires lying about
London, within ten miles and not much above” is his norm. There is also a
noteworthy and very early reference to English dictionaries, and a cautious
section on neologisms introduced from other tongues to fill wants. Style he
will have reached by “a constant and continual tenor of writing,” and gives
the usual subdivision of high, low, and middle. And so to his Figures.
The details and illustrations of the long catalogue of these invite
comment, but we must abstain therefrom. When the list is finished,
Puttenham returns to his generalities with a discussion of the main principle
of ornament, which he calls Decorum or “Decency,” dividing and
illustrating the kinds of it into choice of subject, diction, delivery, and other
things, not without good craftsmanship, and with a profusion of anecdotes
chiefly of the Helotry kind. He then (rather oddly, but not out of keeping
with his classical models) has a chapter of decorum in behaviour, turns to
the necessity of concealing art, and ends with a highly flattering conclusion
to the Queen.
We have yet to mention some minorities; less briefly, the two champions
—Campion and Daniel, who brought the question of “Rhyme v. 'Verse'” to
final arbitrament of battle; the great name (not so great here as elsewhere)

of Francis Bacon; and lastly, one who, if representative of a further stage, is
far the greatest of Elizabethan critics, and perhaps the only English critic
who deserves the adjective great before Dryden.
The earliest (1591) of these is Sir John Harington, in the prefatory
matter[258] of his translation of the Orlando, which contains the gibe at
Minors: Puttenham above referred to. It is otherwise much indebted
Harington,
Meres, Webster,
to Sidney, from whom, however, Harington differs in
Bolton, &c. allowing more scope to allegorical interpretation. Then
comes Francis Meres, whose Palladis Tamia[259] (1598) is to
be eternally mentioned with gratitude, because it gives us our one real
document about the order of Shakespeare’s plays, but is quite childish in the
critical characterisation which it not uninterestingly attempts. Webster’s
equally famous, and universally known, epitheting of the work of
Shakespeare and others in the Preface to The White Devil (1612) adds yet
another instance of the short sight of contemporaries; but tempting as it may
be to comment on these, it would not become a Historian of Criticism to do
so in this context. Sir W. Vaughan in The Golden Grove (1600) had earlier
dealt, and Bolton[260] in his Hypercritica (1616), and Peacham in his
Complete Gentleman (1622), were later to deal, with Poetry, but in terms
adding nothing to, and probably borrowed from, the utterances of Sidney,
Webbe, and Puttenham. Their contributions are “sma’ sums,” as Bailie
Nicol Jarvie says, and we must neglect them.
The most interesting literary result of the “new versifying” craze is to be
found, without doubt, in the Observations in the Art of English Poesy of
Thomas Campion[261] and the subsequent Defence of Rhyme of Samuel
Campion and Daniel. The former was issued in 1602, and the latter still
his
Observations.
later:—that is to say more than twenty years after Spenser’s
and Harvey’s letters, and more than thirty after the
appearance—let alone the writing—of Ascham’s Schoolmaster. In the
interval the true system of English prosody had put itself practically beyond
all real danger; but the critical craze had never received its quietus. Nay, it
survived to animate Milton: and there are persons whom we could only
name for the sake of honour, and who do not seem to see that it is dead even
yet. Both the writers mentioned were true poets: and the curious thing is
that the more exquisitely romantic poet of the two was the partisan of
classical prosody. But Campion—who dedicated his book to Lord
Buckhurst, the doyen (except poor old Churchyard) of English poetry at the

time, and one whose few but noble exercises in it need hardly vail their
crest to any contemporary poetry but Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s—was far
too wise a man, as well as far too good a poet, to champion any longer the
break-neck and break-jaw hexameters of Harvey and Stanyhurst. We have
seen that almost from the first there had been questions of heart among the
partisans of the New Versifying. That English is not tolerant of dactyls—
that the dactyl, do what you will, in English, will tilt itself into an anapæst
with an anacrusis—is a truth which no impartial student of metre with an
ear, and with an eye to cover the history of English poetry, can deny. Some
even of these pioneers had seen this: Campion has the boldness to declare it
in the words, “It [the dactylic hexameter] is an attempt altogether against
the nature of our language.” But though he was bold so far, he was not quite
bold enough. He could not surmount the queer Renaissance objection to
rhyme. That all the arguments against the “barbarism” of this tell equally
against Christianity, chivalry, the English constitution, the existence of
America, gunpowder, glass-windows, coal-fires, and a very large number of
other institutions of some usefulness, never seems to have occurred to any
of these good folk. But no man can escape his time. Campion, not noticing,
or not choosing to notice, the intensely English quality of the anapæst,
limits, or almost limits, our verse to iambs and trochees. It was possible for
him—though it still appears to be difficult for some—to recognise the
tribrach, the mere suggestion of which in English verse threw Dr Guest into
a paroxysm of “!!!!’s,” but which exists as certainly as does the iamb itself.
On the contrary he shows himself in advance of Guest, and of most behind
Guest to his own time, by admitting tribrachs in the third and fifth places.
Nay, he even sees that a trochee may take the place of an iamb (Milton’s
probably borrowed secret) in the first place, though his unerring ear (I think
there is no verse of Campion’s that is unmusical) insists on some other foot
than an iamb following—otherwise, he says, “it would too much drink up
the verse.” But, on the whole, he sets himself to work, a self-condemned
drudge, to make iambic and trochaic verses without rhyme. And on these
two, with certain licences, he arranges schemes of English elegiacs,
anacreontics, and the rest. Some of the examples of these are charming
poems, notably the famous “Rose-Cheeked Laura,” and the beautiful
“Constant to None,” while Campion’s subsequent remarks on English
quantity are among the acutest on the subject. But the whole thing has on it
the curse of “flying in the face of nature.” You have only to take one of

Campion’s own poems (written mostly after the Observations) in natural
rhyme, and the difference will be seen at once. It simply comes to this—that
the good rhymeless poems would be infinitely better with rhyme, and that
the bad ones, while they might sometimes be absolutely saved by the
despised invention of Huns and Vandals, are always made worse by its
absence.
In the preface of Daniel’s answering Defence of Rhyme to all the worthy
lovers and learned professors [thereof] within His Majesty’s dominions,[262]
he says that he wrote it “about a year since,” upon the “great reproach”
given by Campion, and some give it the date of 1603 or even 1602; but Dr
Daniel and his Grosart’s reprint is dated five years later. The learned
Defence of
Rhyme.
gentleman to whom it was specially written was no less a
person than William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom
some of us (acknowledging that the matter is no matter) do not yet give up
as “Mr W. H.” The advocate affects, with fair rhetorical excuse (though of
course he must have known that the craze was nearly half a century old, and
had at least not been discouraged by his patron’s uncle nearly a generation
before), to regard the attack on rhyming as something new, as merely
concerned with the “measures” of Campion. Daniel, always a gentleman,
deals handsomely with his antagonist, whom he does not name, but
describes as “this detractor whose commendable rhymes, albeit now an
enemy to rhyme, have given heretofore to the world the best notice of his
worth,” and as a man “of fair parts and good reputation.” And having put
himself on the best ground, in this way, from the point of view of morals
and courtesy, he does the same in matter of argument by refusing to attack
Campion’s “numbers” in themselves (“We could,” he says well, “have
allowed of his numbers, had he not graced his rhymes”), and by seizing the
unassailable position given by custom and nature—“Custom that is before
all law; Nature that is above all art.” In fact, not Jonson himself, and
certainly none else before Jonson, has comprehended, or at least put, the
truth of the matter as Daniel puts it, that arbitrary laws imposed on the
poetry of any nation are absurd—that the verse of a language is such as best
consorts with the nature of that language. This seems a truism enough
perhaps; but it may be very much doubted whether all critics recognise it,
and its consequences, even at the present day. And it is certain that we may
search other early English critics in vain for a frank recognition of it. With
an equally bold and sure foot he strides over the silly stuff about “invention

of barbarous ages” and the like. Whatever its origin (and about this he
shows a wise carelessness), it is “an excellence added to this work of
measure and harmony, far happier than any proportion quantity could ever
show.” It “gives to the ear an echo of a delightful report,” and to the
memory “a deeper impression of what is delivered.” He is less original (as
well as, some may think, less happy) in distinguishing the accent of English
from the quantity of the classical tongues; but the classicisers before
Campion, if not Campion himself, had made such a mess of quantity, and
had played such havoc with accent, that he may well be excused. The
universality of rhyme is urged, and once more says Daniel (with that happy
audacity in the contemning of vain things which belongs to the born
exploders of crazes), “If the barbarian likes it, it is because it sways the
affections of the barbarian; if civil nations practise it, it works upon their
hearts; if all, then it has a power in nature upon all.” But it will be said, “Ill
customs are to be left.” No doubt: but the question is begged. Who made
this custom “ill”? Rhyme aims at pleasing—and it pleases. Suffer then the
world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes, for all the tyrannical
rules of rhetoric cannot make it otherwise. Why are we to be a mere servum
pecus, only to imitate the Greeks and Latins? Their way was natural to
them: let ours be so to us. “Why should laboursome curiosity still lay
affliction on our best delights?” Moreover, to a spirit whom nature hath
“fitted for that mystery,” rhyme is no impediment, “but rather giveth wings
to mount.” The necessary historical survey follows, with a surprising and
very welcome justification of the Middle Ages against both Classics and
Renaissance. “Let us,” says this true Daniel come to judgment, “go not
further, but look upon the wonderful architecture of the State of England,
and see whether they were unlearned times that could give it such a form?”
And if politically, why not poetically? Some acute and, in the other sense,
rather sharp criticism of Campion’s details follows, with a few apologetic
remarks for mixture of masculine and feminine rhymes on his own part: and
the whole concludes in an admirable peroration with a great end-note to it.
Not easily shall we find, either in Elizabethan times or in any other, a
happier combination of solid good sense with eager poetic sentiment, of
sound scholarship with wide-glancing intelligence, than in this little tractate
of some thirty or forty ordinary pages, which dispelled the delusions of two
generations, and made the poetical fortune of England sure.

The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism have
sometimes been spoken of with reverence: and it is not uncommon to find,
amid the scanty classics of the subject, which until recently have been
recommended to the notice of inquirers, not merely a place, but a place of
very high honour, assigned to The Advancement of Learning. Actual,
Bacon. unprejudiced, and to some extent expert, reference to the
works, however, will not find very much to justify this estimate: and,
indeed, a little thought, assisted by very moderate knowledge, would suffice
to make it rather surprising that Bacon should give us so much, than
disappointing that he should give us little or nothing. A producer of
literature who at his best has few superiors, and a user of it for purposes of
quotation, who would deserve the name of genius for this use alone if he
had no other title thereto—Bacon was yet by no means inclined by his main
interests and objects, or by his temperament, either towards great exaltation
of letters, or towards accurate and painstaking examination of them. Indeed,
it is in him—almost first of all men, certainly first of all great modern men
—that we find that partisan opposition between literature and science which
has constantly developed since. It is true that his favourite method of
examination into “forms” might seem tempting as applied to literature; and
that it would, incidentally if not directly, have yielded more solid results
than his Will-o'-the-wisp chase of the Form of Heat. But this very craze of
his may suggest that if he had undertaken literary criticism it would have
been on the old road of Kinds and Figures and Qualities, in which we could
expect little but glowing rhetorical generalisation from him.
Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually have from
The Essays. him very different. The Essays practically give us nothing
but the contents of that Of Studies, a piece too well known to need
quotation; too much in the early pregnant style of the author to bear
compression or analysis; and too general to repay it. For the critic and the
man of letters generally it is, in its own phrase, to be not merely tasted, nor
even swallowed, but chewed and digested; yet its teachings have nothing
more to do with the critical function of “study” than with all others.
The Advancement[263] at least excuses the greatness thrust upon it in the
estimates above referred to, not merely by the apparent necessity that the
author should deal with Criticism, but by a certain appearance of his
The actually doing so. Comparatively early in the First Book he
Advancement of
Learning.
tackles the attention to style which sprang up at the

Renaissance, opening his discussion by the ingenious but slightly
unhistorical attribution of it to Martin Luther, who was forced to awake all
antiquity, and call former times to his succour, against the Bishop of Rome.
Not a few names, for the best part of two centuries before the great cause of
Martinus v. Papam was launched, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Erasmus
and Reuchlin, will put in evidence before the tribunal of chronology against
this singular assertion; and though the Italian Humanists of the fifteenth
century might not (at least in thought) care anything for the Pope except as
a source of donatives and benefices, it is certain that most of them were as
constitutionally disinclined to abet Luther as they were chronologically
disabled from in any way abetting him. Bacon’s argument and further
survey are, however, better than this beginning. To understand the ancients
(he says justly enough) it was necessary to make a careful study of their
language. Further, the opposition of thought to the Schoolmen naturally
brought about a recoil from the barbarisms of Scholastic style, and the
anxiety to win over the general imprinted care and elegance and vigour on
preaching and writing. All this, he adds as justly, turned to excess. Men
Its denunciation began to “hunt more after words than matter; more after the
of mere word-
study.
choiceness of the phrase and the round and clean
composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the
clauses, and the varying and illustration of their words with tropes and
figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of
argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.” The Ciceronianism of
Osorius, Sturm, “Car of Cambridge,” and even Ascham, receives more or
less condemnation; and Erasmus is, of course, cited for gibes at it. On this
text Bacon proceeds to enlarge in his own stately rhetoric, coolly admitting
that it “is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the
obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.”
But he very quickly glides off into his usual denunciations of the
schoolmen. Nor have I found anything else in this First Book really
germane to our purpose; for one cannot cite as such the desultory
observations on patronage of literature (among other branches of learning)
which fill a good part of it.
The Second Book is somewhat more fruitful in quantity, if not very
much; but the quality remains not very different. The opening “Address to
the King” contains, in an interesting first draft (as we may call it), the
everlasting grumble of the scientific man, that science is not sufficiently

endowed, the further grumble at mere book-learning, the cry for the
promotion—by putting money in its purse—of research. The Second and
Third Chapters contain some plans of books drawn up in Bacon’s warm
imaginative way, especially a great series of Histories, with the History of
England for their centre. And then we come, in the Fourth Chapter, to
Poesy.
But except for Bacon’s majestic style (which, however, by accident or
intention, is rather below itself here) there is absolutely nothing novel. The
Its view of view (which, as we have seen, all the Elizabethan critics
Poetry.
adopted, probably from the Italians)—the view is that
poetry is just a part of learning licensed in imagination; a fanciful history
intended to give satisfaction to the mind of man in things where history is
not; something particularly prevalent and useful in barbarous ages; divisible
into narrative, representative and allusive; useful now and then, but (as
Aristotle would say) not a thing to take very seriously. Yet poetry, a vinum
dæmonum at the worst, a mere illusion anyhow, is still, even as such, a
refuge from, and remedy for, sorrow and toil. Of its form, as distinguished
from its matter, he says,[264] “Poetry is but a character of style, and
belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present.” He
attempts no defence of it as of other parts of learning, because “being as a
plant that cometh of the lust of the earth without a formal seed, it hath
sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind.” And he turns from
it to philosophy, with the more than half-disdainful adieu, “It is not good to
stay too long in the theatre.”
We might almost quit him here with a somewhat similar leave-taking; but
Some obiter for his great reputation some other places shall be handled.
dicta.
At XIV. 11 there are some remarks on the delusive powers
of words; at XVI. 4, 5 some on grammar and rhetoric, including a rather
interesting observation, not sufficiently expanded or worked out, that “in
modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses
as of dances”; in XVIII. a handling of strictly oratorical rhetoric, with a
digression to these “Colours of Good and Evil” which interested Bacon so
much; in XX. another descant on the same art; in XXI. a puff of the
Basilikon Doron; in XXXII. observations on the moral influence of books;
in XXXV. some general observations on literature; and, just before the
close, a well-known and often-quoted eulogy, certainly not undeserved, of
the eloquence of the English pulpit for forty years past.

If it were not for the singular want of a clear conception of literary
Criticism, which has prevailed so long and so widely, it would hardly be
necessary to take, with any seriousness at all, a man who has no more than
The whole of this to say on the subject.[265] It is most assuredly no slight
very slight
importance.
to Bacon to deny him a place in a regiment where he never
had the least ambition to serve. That he was himself a great
practitioner of literature, and so, necessarily if indirectly, a critic of it in his
own case, is perfectly true; the remarks which have been quoted above on
the Ciceronians show that, when he took the trouble, and found the
opportunity, he could make them justly and soundly. But his purpose, his
interests, his province, his vein, lay far elsewhere. To him, it is pretty clear,
literary expression was, in relation to his favourite studies and dreams, but a
higher kind of pen-and-ink or printing-press. He distrusted the stability of
modern languages, and feared that studies couched in them might some day
or other come to be unintelligible and lost to the world. This famous fear
explains the nature and the limits of his interest in literature. It was a
vehicle or a treasury, a distributing agent or a guard. Its functions and
qualities accorded: it was to be clear, not disagreeable, solidly constructed,
intelligible to as large a number of readers as possible. The psychological
character and morphological definition of poetry interested him
philosophically. But in the art and the beauty of poetry and literature
generally, for their own sakes, he seems to have taken no more interest than
he did in the coloured pattern plots in gardens, which he compared to
“tarts.” To a man so minded, as to those more ancient ones of similar mind
whom we have discussed in the first volume, Criticism proper could, at the
best, be a pastime to be half ashamed of—a “theatre” in which to while
away the hours; it could not possibly be a matter of serious as well as
enthusiastic study.
Between Bacon and Ben may be best noticed the short Anacrisis or
Censure of Poets, Ancient and Modern,[266] by Sir William Alexander, Earl
Stirling’s of Stirling. It has received high praise;[267] but even those
Anacrisis.
who think by no means ill of Aurora, may find some
difficulty in indorsing this. It is simply a sort of “Note,” written, as the
author says, to record his impressions during a reading of the poets, which
he had undertaken as refreshment after great travail both of body and mind.
He thinks Language “but the apparel of poesy,” thereby going even further
than those who would assign that position to verse, and suggesting a system

of “Inarticulate Poetics,” which he would have been rather put to it to body
forth. He only means, however, that he judges in the orthodox Aristotelian
way, by “the fable and contexture.” A subsequent comparison of a poem to
a garden suggests Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (v. supra, p. 129), whom he
may have read. Alexander is a sort of general lover in poetry; he likes this
in Virgil, that in Ovid, that other in Horace; defends Lucan against Scaliger,
even to the point of blaming the conclusion of the Æneid; finds “no man
that doth satisfy him more than that notable Italian, Torquato Tasso”; admits
the historical as well as the fictitious poetic subject; but thinks that “the
treasures of poetry cannot be better bestowed than upon the apparelling of
Truth; and Truth cannot be better apparelled to please young lovers than
with the excellences of poetry.” Disrespectful language neither need nor
should be used of so slight a thing, which is, and pretends to be, nothing
more than a sort of table-book entry by a gentleman of learning as well as
quality. But, if it has any “importance” at all, it is surely that of being yet
another proof of the rapid diffusion of critical taste and practice, not of
stating “theory and methods considerably in advance of the age.” If we
could take extensively his protest against those who “would bound the
boundless liberty of the poet,” such language might indeed be justified; but
the context strictly limits it to the very minor, though then, and for long
before and after, commonly debated, question of Fiction v. History in
subject.
Save perhaps in one single respect (where the defect was not wholly his
fault), Ben Jonson might be described as a critic armed at all points. His
Ben Jonson: his knowledge of literature was extremely wide, being at the
equipment.
same time solid and thorough. While he had an
understanding above all things strong and masculine, he was particularly
addicted, though in no dilettante fashion, to points of form. His whole
energies, and they were little short of Titanic, were given to literature. And,
lastly, if he had not the supremest poetic genius, he had such a talent that
only the neighbourhood of supremacy dwarfs it. Where he came short was
not in a certain hardness of temper and scholasticism of attitude: for these,
if kept within bounds, and tempered by that enthusiasm for letters which he
possessed, are not bad equipments for the critic. It was rather in the fact that
he still came too early for it to be possible for him, except by the help of a
miracle, to understand the achievements and value of the vernaculars. By
his latest days, indeed,[268] the positive performance of these was already

very great. Spain has hardly added anything since, and Italy not very much,
to her share of European literature; France was already in the first flush of
her “classical” period, after a long and glorious earlier history: and what
Ben’s own contemporaries in England had done, all men know. But
mediæval literature was shut from him, as from all, till far later; he does not
seem to have been much drawn to Continental letters, and, perhaps in their
case, as certainly in English, he was too near—too much a part of the
movement—to get it into firm perspective.
In a sense the critical temper in Jonson is all-pervading. It breaks out side
by side with, and sometimes even within, his sweetest lyrics; it interposes
what may be called parabases in the most unexpected passages[269] of his
His Prefaces, plays. The Poetaster is almost as much criticism dramatised
&c.
as The Frogs. But there are three “places,” or groups of
places, which it inspires, not in mere suggestion, but with propriety—the
occasional Prefaces, or observations, to and on the plays themselves, the
Conversations with Drummond, and, above all, the at last fairly (though not
yet sufficiently) known Discoveries or Timber.
To piece together, with any elaboration, the more scattered critical
passages would be fitter for a monograph on Jonson than for a History of
Criticism. The “Address to the Readers” of Sejanus, which contains a
reference to the author’s lost Observations on Horace, his Art of Poetry (not
the least of such losses) is a fair specimen of them: the dedication of
Volpone to “the most noble and most equal sisters, Oxford and Cambridge,”
a better. In both, and in numerous other passages of prose and verse, we
find the real and solid, though somewhat partial, knowledge, the strong
sense, the methodic scholarship of Ben, side by side with his stately, not
Euphuistic, but rather too close-packed style, his not ill-founded, but
slightly excessive, self-confidence, and that rough knock-down manner of
assertion and characterisation which reappeared in its most unguarded form
in the Conversations with Drummond.
The critical utterances of these Conversations are far too interesting to be
The Drummond passed over here, though we cannot discuss them in full.
Conversations.
They tell us that Ben thought all (other) rhymes inferior to
couplets, and had written a treatise (which, again, would we had!) both
against Campion and Daniel (see ante). His objection to “stanzas and cross
rhymes” was that “as the purpose might lead beyond them, they were all
forced.” Sidney “made every one speak as well as himself,” and so did not

keep “decorum” (cf. Puttenham above). Spenser’s stanzas and matter did
not please him. Daniel was no poet. He did not like Drayton’s “long
verses,” nor Sylvester’s and Fairfax’s translations. He thought the
translations of Homer (Chapman’s) and Virgil (Phaer’s) into “long
Alexandrines” (i.e., fourteeners) were but prose: yet elsewhere we hear that
he “had some of Chapman by heart.” Harington’s Ariosto was the worst of
all translations. Donne was sometimes “profane,” and “for not keeping of
accent deserved hanging”; but elsewhere he was “the first poet of the world
in some things,” though, “through not being understood, he would
perish.”[270] Shakespeare “wanted art”: and “Abram Francis (Abraham
Fraunce) in his English Hexameters was a fool.” “Bartas was not a poet, but
a verser, because he wrote not fiction.” He cursed Petrarch for redacting
verses to sonnets, “which were like Procrustes’ bed.” Guarini incurred the
same blame as Sir Philip: and Lucan was good in parts only. “The best
pieces of Ronsard were his Odes.” Drummond’s own verses “were all good,
but smelled too much of the schools.” The “silver” Latins, as we should
expect, pleased him best. “To have written Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe,’ he
would have been content to destroy many of his.”
These are the chief really critical items, though there are others (putting
personal gossip aside) of interest; but it may be added, as a curiosity, that he
told Drummond that he himself “writ all first in prose” at Camden’s
suggestion, and held that “verses stood all by sense, without colours or
accent” (poetic diction or metre), “which yet at other times he denied,” says
the reporter, a sentence ever to be remembered in connection with these
jottings. Remembering it, there is nothing shocking in any of these
observations, nor anything really inconsistent. A true critic never holds the
neat, positive, “reduced-to-its-lowest-terms” estimate of authors, in which a
criticaster delights. His view is always facetted, conditioned. But he may, in
a friendly chat, or a conversation for victory, exaggerate this facet or
condition, while altogether suppressing others; and this clearly is what Ben
did.
For gloss on the Conversations, for reduction to something like system of
the critical remarks scattered through the works, and for the nearest
approach we can have to a formal presentment of Ben’s critical views, we
must go to the Discoveries.[271]

The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book—Timber,
Explorata, Discoveries, and Sylva—with others of its peculiarities, is
The Discoveries. explained by the second fact that Jonson never published it.
It never appeared in print till the folio of 1641, years after its author’s death.
The Discoveries are described as being made “upon men and matter as they
have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar
notions of the times.” They are, in fact, notes unnumbered and unclassified
(though batches of more or fewer sometimes run on the same subject), each
with its Latin heading, and varying in length from a few lines to that of his
friend (and partly master) Bacon’s shorter Essays. The influence of those
“silver” Latins whom he loved so much is prominent: large passages are
simply translated from Quintilian, and for some time[272] the tenor is ethical
rather than literary. A note on Perspicuitas—elegantia (p. 7) breaks these,
but has nothing noteworthy about it, and Bellum scribentium (p. 10) is only
a satiric exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together by the ears
for ceremonies, syllables, points,” &c. The longer Nil gratius protervo libro
(pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some personal injury, combined with the old
complaint of the decadence and degradation of poetry.[273] There is just but
rather general stricture in Eloquentia (p. 16) on the difference between the
arguments of the study and of the world. “I would no more choose a
rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says Ben, “than I would choose a pilot
for rowing in a pond.”[274] Memoria (p. 18) includes a gird at Euphuism. At
last we come to business. Censura de poetis (p. 21), introduced by a fresh
fling at Euphuism, in De vere argutis, opens with a tolerably confident note,
“Nothing in our age is more preposterous than the running judgments upon
poetry and poets,” with much more to the same effect, the whole being
pointed by the fling, “If it were a question of the water-rhymer’s[275] works
against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages.” The
famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and the development of Ben’s
view, “would he had blotted a thousand,” leads to a more general
disquisition on the differences of wits, which includes the sentence already
referred to. “Such [i.e., haphazard and inconsistent] are all the Essayists,
even their master Montaigne.” The notes now keep close to literature
throughout in substance, though their titles (e.g., Ignorantia animæ), and so
forth, may seem wider. A heading, De Claris Oratoribus (p. 26), leads to
yet another of the purple passages of the book—that on Bacon, in which is
intercalated a curious Scriptorum catalogus, limited, for the most part,

though Surrey and Wyatt are mentioned, to prose writers. And then for
some time ethics, politics, and other subjects, again have Ben’s chief
attention.[276]
We return to literature, after some interval (but with a parenthetic glance
at the poesis et pictura notion at p. 49), on p. 52, in a curious unheaded
letter to an unnamed Lordship on Education, much of which is translated
directly from Ben Jonson’s favourite Quintilian; and then directly accost it
again with a tractatule De stilo et optimo scribendi genere, p. 54, hardly
parting company thereafter. Ben’s prescription is threefold: read the best
authors, observe the best speakers, and exercise your own style much. But
he is well aware that no “precepts will profit a fool,” and he adapts old
advice to English ingeniously, in bidding men read, not only Livy before
Sallust, but also Sidney before Donne, and to beware of Chaucer or Gower
at first. Here occurs the well-known dictum, that Spenser “in affecting the
ancients writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter.” A fine
general head opens with the excellent version of Quintilian, “We should not
protect our sloth with the patronage of Difficulty,” and this is followed by
some shrewd remarks on diction—the shrewdest being that, after all, the
best custom makes, and ever will continue to make, the best speech—with a
sharp stroke at Lucretius for “scabrousness,” and at Chaucerisms. Brevity
of style, Tacitean and other, is cautiously commended. In the phrase (Oratio
imago animi), p. 64, “language most shows a man,” Ben seems to anticipate
Buffon, as he later does Wordsworth and Coleridge, by insisting that style is
not merely the dress, but the body of thought.[277] All this discussion, which
enters into considerable detail, is of the first importance, and it occupies
nearly a quarter of the whole book. It is continued, the continuation
reaching till the end, by a separate discussion of poetry.
It is interesting, but less so than what comes before. A somewhat acid,
though personally guarded, description of the present state of the Art
introduces the stock definition of “making,” and its corollary that a poet is
not one who writes in measure, but one who feigns—all as we have found it
before, but (as we should expect of Ben) in succincter and more scholarly
form. Yet the first requisite of the poet is ingenium—goodness of natural
wit; the next exercise of his parts—“bringing all to the forge and file”
(sculpte, lime, cisèle!); the third Imitation—to which Ben gives a turn (not
exactly new, for we have met it from Vida downwards), which is not an
improvement, by keeping its modern meaning, and understanding by it the

following of the classics. “But that which we especially require in him is an
exactness of study and multiplicity of reading.” Yet his liberty is not to be
so narrowly circumscribed as some would have it. This leads to some
interesting remarks on the ancient critics, which the author had evidently
meant to extend: as it is, they break off short.[278] We turn to the Parts of
comedy and tragedy, where Ben is strictly regular—the fable is the
imitation of one entire and perfect action, &c. But this also breaks off, after
a discussion of fable itself and episode, with an evidently quite
disconnected fling at “hobbling poems which run like a brewer’s cart on the
stones.”
These Discoveries have to be considered with a little general care before
Form of the we examine them more particularly. They were, it has been
book.
said, never issued by the author himself, and we do not
know whether he ever would have issued them in their present form. On the
one hand, they are very carefully written, and not mere jottings. In form
(though more modern in style) they resemble the earlier essays of that
Bacon whom they so magnificently celebrate, in their deliberate
conciseness and pregnancy. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to
doubt that some at least were intended for expansion; it is difficult not to
think that there was plenty more stuff of the same kind in the solidly
constructed and well-stored treasuries of Ben’s intelligence and erudition. It
is most difficult of all not to see that, in some cases, the thoughts are co-
ordinated into regular tractates, in others left loose, as if for future treatment
of the same kind.
Secondly, we should like to know rather more than we do of the time of
Its date. their composition. Some of them—such as the retrospect of
Bacon, and to a less degree that of Shakespeare—must be late; there is a
strong probability that all date from the period between the fire in Ben’s
study, which destroyed so much, and his death—say between 1620 and
1637. But at the same time there is nothing to prevent his having
remembered and recopied observations of earlier date.
Thirdly, it is most important that we rightly understand the composition
Mosaic of old of the book. It has sometimes been discovered[279] in these
and new.
Discoveries, with pride, or surprise, or even scorn, that Ben
borrowed in them very largely from the ancients. Of course he did, as well
as something, though less, from the Italian critics of the age immediately
before his own.[280] But in neither case could he have hoped for a moment—

and in neither is there the slightest reason to suppose that he would have
wished if he could have hoped—to disguise his borrowings from a learned
age. When a man—such as, for instance, Sterne—wishes to steal and
escape, he goes to what nobody reads, not to what everybody is reading.
And the Latins of the Silver Age, the two Senecas, Petronius, Quintilian,
Pliny, were specially favourites with the Jacobean time. In what is going to
be said no difference will be made between Ben’s borrowings and his
original remarks: nor will the fact of the borrowing be referred to unless
there is some special critical reason. Even the literal translations, which are
not uncommon, are made his own by the nervous idiosyncrasy of the
phrase, and its thorough adjustment to the context and to his own vigorous
and massive temperament.
Of real “book-criticism” there are four chief passages, the brief flings at
Montaigne and at “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams,” and the longer notices of
Shakespeare and Bacon.
The flirt at “all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne,” is especially
interesting, because of the high opinion which Jonson elsewhere expresses
of Bacon, the chief, if not the first, English Essayist of his time, and
because of the fact that not a few of these very Discoveries are “Essays,” if
The fling at any things ever were. Nor would it be very easy to make
Montaigne;
out a clear distinction, in anything but name, between some
of Ben’s most favourite ancient writers and these despised persons. It is,
however, somewhat easier to understand the reason of the condemnation.
Jonson’s classically ordered mind probably disliked the ostentatious
desultoriness and incompleteness of the Essay, the refusal, as it were out of
mere insolence, to undertake an orderly treatise. Nor is it quite impossible
that he failed fully to understand Montaigne, and was to some extent the
dupe of that great writer’s fanfaronade of promiscuousness.
The “Tamerlane and Tamercham”[281] fling is not even at first sight
at Tamerlane, surprising. It was quite certain that Ben would seriously
despise what Shakespeare only laughed at—the confusion, the bombast, the
want of order and scheme in the “University Wits”—and it is not probable
that he was well enough acquainted with the even now obscure
development of the earliest Elizabethan drama to appreciate the enormous
improvement which they wrought. Nay, the nearer approach even of such a
dull thing as Gorboduc to “the height of Seneca his style,” might have a

little bribed him as it bribed Sidney. He is true to his side—to his division
of the critical creed—in this also.
The train of thought—censure of the vulgar preference—runs clear from
this to the best known passage of the whole, the section De Shakespeare
the Shakespeare Nostrat. It cannot be necessary to quote it, or to point out
Passage,
that Ben’s eulogy, splendid as it is, acquires tenfold force
from the fact that it is avowedly given by a man whose general literary
theory is different from that of the subject, while the censure accompanying
it loses force in exactly the same proportion. What Ben here blames, any
ancient critic (perhaps even Longinus) would have blamed too: what Ben
praises, it is not certain that any ancient critic, except Longinus, would have
seen. Nor is the captious censure of “Cæsar did never wrong but with just
cause” the least interesting part of the whole. The paradox is not in our
present texts: and there have, of course, not been wanting commentators to
accuse Jonson of garbling or of forgetfulness. This is quite
commentatorially gratuitous and puerile. It is very like Shakespeare to have
written what Ben says: very like Ben to object to the paradox (which, pace
tanti viri, is not “ridiculous” at all, but a deliberate and effective hyperbole);
very like the players to have changed the text; and most of all like the
commentators to make a fuss about the matter.
What may seem the more unstinted eulogy of Bacon is not less
and that on interesting. For here it is obvious that Ben is speaking with
Bacon.
fullest sympathy, and with all but a full acknowledgment of
having met an ideal. Except the slight stroke, “when he could spare or pass
by a jest,” and the gentle insinuation that Strength, the gift of God, was
what Bacon’s friends had to implore for him, there is no admixture
whatever in the eulogy of “him who hath filled up all numbers,[282] and
performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred to
insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” Indeed it could not have been—even if
Ben Jonson had not been a friend, and, in a way, follower of Bacon—but
that he should regard the Chancellor as his chief of literary men. Bacon,
unluckily for himself, lacked the “unwedgeable and gnarled” strength of the
dramatist, and also was without his poetic fire, just as Ben could never have
soared to the vast, if vague, conceptions of Bacon’s materialist-Idealism.
But they were both soaked in “literature,” as then understood; they were the
two greatest masters of the closely packed style that says twenty things in
ten words: and yet both could, on occasion, be almost as rhetorically