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 [Sidenote: _The Critical starting-point of the Renaissance._] the Middle Ages had brought the materials and the methods 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]
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Footnote 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.
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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.
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Footnote 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.
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It is not much more than a hundred years since the French Revolution, a single event in one department only of things [Sidenote: _Influences at work: General._] actual, was 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.”
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Footnote 3:
Mr Froude in the opening of his _History_.
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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 inducements of two different kinds. [Sidenote: _Particular._] 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 [Sidenote: _Weakness of Vernaculars._] maintained command, of matter. Germany was far worse 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 classics dealt with this very subject of Literary Criticism, [Sidenote: _Recovery of 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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
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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. [Sidenote: _Necessity of defence against Puritanism._] Almost as soon as—almost before indeed—the main battle 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 early days of the press. [Sidenote: _The line of criticism resultant._] There can be very little question 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.
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Footnote 6:
Vol. i. p. 457 _sq._
Footnote 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”?
Footnote 8:
Vol. i. p. 414 _note_
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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 specially conspicuous in the Middle Ages. [Sidenote: _Not necessarily anti-mediæval,_] The “Defence of 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 wholly or mainly to the consideration of “the subject.” [Sidenote: _but classical_]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 religious and philosophical truth. [Sidenote: _and anti-Puritan._]Calling in turn Aristotle 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.
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Footnote 9:
Vol. i. pp. 67, 68.
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It would, however, be a glaring omission if the critical position of Erasmus himself were not set forth at some length.[10] [Sidenote: _Erasmus._] 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.
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Footnote 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.
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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 philosophical or rhetorical teacher. [Sidenote: _The_ Ciceronianus.] The piece[11] (which has 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.
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Footnote 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_.
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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 does occur. [Sidenote: _The_ Colloquies.] 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.
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Footnote 12:
I use the Tauchnitz ed. (with the _Encomium Moriæ_) in 2 vols. (Leipsic: 1829).
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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.
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Footnote 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.
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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 by one Adrian Barland of Louvain to his brother. [Sidenote: _The_ Letters.] 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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
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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.
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Footnote 16:
Mihi semper placuit carmen quod a prosa, sed optima, non longe recederet.—_Op. cit._, col. 420.
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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]
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Footnote 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).
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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] could do little for criticism proper; and for the [Sidenote: _Distribution of the Book._] same (or yet 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.
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Footnote 18:
See _infra_ (pp. 27-29) on Augustinus Olmucensis (Käsenbrot) and Cornelius Agrippa.
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