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. [Sidenote: _The beginnings._] They are 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.
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Footnote 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.
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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 ways. [Sidenote: _Savonarola._] 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.
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Footnote 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.
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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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 22:
Vol. i. p. 380 _sq._
Footnote 23:
Or, “a pretty old woman that of a girl,” the position of the epithet between the two nouns being ambiguous.
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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.
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Footnote 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.
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It seems by no means improbable that this view was partly brought about by that remarkable influencer both of early mediæval and of early Renaissance thought, Dionysius the Areopagite. [Sidenote: _Pico, &c._] 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.
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Footnote 25:
More especially p. 46 _sq._ (2nd ed.) The influence of the _Somnium Scipionis_ of Macrobius may also have been considerable.
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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 under yet more distinguished auspices. [Sidenote: _Politian._] 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]
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Footnote 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.
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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.
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Footnote 27:
_V._ vol. i. p. 408.
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In the “Manto,” the first of the _Sylvæ_, the most important characteristic of sixteenth-century Italian criticism proper, the exaltation of Virgil, is already prominent. [Sidenote: _The_ Manto.] 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.
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Footnote 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, _Dum_que 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._
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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 Homer. [Sidenote: _The_ Ambra _and_ Rusticus.] The “Ambra,” a poem longer than the “Manto,” 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. [Sidenote: _The_ Nutricia.] But the “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.
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Footnote 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._
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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 dangerously by partisanship; but it is still criticism. [Sidenote: _Their merits_] 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. [Sidenote: _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 critical respects. His contemporary and friend, [Sidenote: _Petrus Crinitus: his_ De Poetis Latinis.] Petrus 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.
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Footnote 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.
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It is not at all improbable that _Poetics_ in one form or another, both Italian and “Tedescan,” may exist in MSS. of this period: [Sidenote: _Augustinus Olmucensis: his_ Defence of Poetry.] there is certainly work, even in print, of which very little notice has 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.
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Footnote 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.
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Another Transalpine may be admitted here, for reasons of time rather than of place, to introduce two undoubted Italians. [Sidenote: _Paradoxical attacks on it by Cornelius Agrippa, Landi, Berni._] It is customary to mention the name at least of Cornelius Agrippa,[32] if not exactly as a critic, at any rate as being a 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.
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Footnote 32:
I have used the _Opera_, 2 vols., Lugduni, 1531, 8vo. The passages cited will be found at ii. 14 _sq._
Footnote 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.
Footnote 34:
This, which is very amusing, opens the ed. of Berni’s _Opere_ in the Sonzogno collection (Milan, 1888).
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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 critical value than Vida’s _Poetics_.[35] [Sidenote: _Vida._] 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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 36:
Prof. A. S. Cook (Boston, 1892).
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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 authority. [Sidenote: _Importance of the_ Poetics.] The first is, that Vida anticipates in time even the 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 offered as a solace or pastime. [Sidenote: _Analysis of the piece._] These invocations 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.
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Footnote 37:
_Insignis facie ante alios_, ed. Oxon., p. 215.
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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_.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
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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 more lines than we [Sidenote: _Essential poverty of its theory._] have given pages might have been 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.
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Footnote 40:
Some would plead for “mosaic.” But the mosaic worker works his tiny cubes _himself_—he does not steal them ready made and arranged.
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When it is examined in detail the proceeding may excite even more astonishment, which will be wisely directed not more to [Sidenote: _Historical and symptomatic significance._] the original conception of it than to the extent to which, from 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-Classics, as following Nature and Reason. [Sidenote: _The alleged appeal to Reason and Nature._] That they said—perhaps that they thought—they followed both is 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.
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Footnote 41:
Cf. _Poet._, ii. 162. _Semper nutu rationis eant res._
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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. [Sidenote: _The main stream started._] Every now and then a short lull would occur; but this was always made 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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 43:
Dolce’s (1535) translation of Horace; Pazzi’s (1536) of Aristotle; Daniello’s _Poetica_ (1536), and Tolomei’s _Versi e Regole_ (1539).
Footnote 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).
Footnote 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).
Footnote 46:
The work of Piccolomini and Viperano.
Footnote 47:
That of Patrizzi, Tasso, and Denores.
Footnote 48:
That of Buonamici, Ingegneri, and Summo.
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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_. [Sidenote: _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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 50:
2 vols., Verona, 1729.
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Trissino does not, in his first instalment, busy himself with those abstract discussions which were soon to furnish the staple of Italian criticism. [Sidenote: _Division of his_ Poetic.] He adopts Aristotle’s “Imitation” briefly without cavil or 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 standpoint with sufficient clearness. [Sidenote: _His critical value._] It is almost purely 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]
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Footnote 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._
Footnote 52:
II. 95. Perhaps better “unlearned,” _indotti Poeti_.
Footnote 53:
Spingarn, p. 92.
Footnote 54:
_Et ancor oggi si fa._
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The growth during the interval had been of three kinds, sometimes blended, sometimes kept apart. [Sidenote: _Editors, &c., of the_ Poetics.] The first kind consisted of 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. [Sidenote: _Pazzi._] Before 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]
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Footnote 55:
Spingarn, p. 102.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 57:
Dolce had translated the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace into Italian the year before.
Footnote 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.
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In the critical handling of these editors and commentators we find, as we should expect, much of the old rhetorical trifling. [Sidenote: _Robortello_, _Segni_, _Maggi_, _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.
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Footnote 59:
Maggi in his commentary. See Spingarn, p. 27.
Footnote 60:
_V. infra_, p. 71.
Footnote 61:
_Discoveries_, _sub fin._ (iii. 419 of Cunningham’s 3 vol. ed.)
Footnote 62:
On him see also note _infra_, pp. 49, 50.
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Nor was such theory left without direct and independent exposition during the period which we are considering. [Sidenote: _Theorists: Daniello._] The first 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]
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Footnote 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.
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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 between poetry and truth. [Sidenote: _Fracastoro._] 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.
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Footnote 64:
_Fracastorii Opera_, 2 vols., Lyons, 1591. The _Naugerius_ is at i. 319-365.
Footnote 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).
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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 Toscana_of Claudio Tolomei (1539) and Muzio’s or Mutio’s Italian verse _Arte Poetica_, which was published with some other work in 1551.[66] [Sidenote: _Formalists: Mutio. Tolomei and classical metres._] The last is noteworthy as an early example of the vernacular critical poem—a kind suggested by Horace, and 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 _dis_realise 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.
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Footnote 66:
_Rime Diverse_ (Venice, f. 68-94). The name on the title-page is Mu_t_io, and the spelling Mu_z_io, 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.
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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 happens, qualify in a undecided manner for two, or for all. [Sidenote: _Others: Tomitano, Lionardi, B. Tasso, Capriano._] As early as 1545 Tomitano[67] had dwelt on the above-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]
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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_.
Footnote 70:
_Della Vera Poetica_, Venice, 1555.
Footnote 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.
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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. [Sidenote: _Il Lasca._] I 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 taking account of the critical attitude of Italy at the time. [Sidenote: _Bembo._] 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. [Sidenote: _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 other pieces, overflows constantly into his letters.[75] [Sidenote: _Varchi._] 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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 74:
In _Prose Scelte di P. Bembo_, ed. Costero (Milan, 1880), pp. 141-278.
Footnote 75:
Ed. Costero, 2 vols. (Milan, 1879 and 1884).
Footnote 76:
Ed. Costero (Milan, 1888).
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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.
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Footnote 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.
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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 age, and has too seldom been recovered since. [Sidenote: _Minturno._] 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. [Sidenote: _The_ De Poeta.] But 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.
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Footnote 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.
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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]
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 80:
Ut doceat, ut delectet, ut moveat. Suggested by Cicero on the orator.
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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_).
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 82:
“Vain and amatorious.”
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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 not give one the idea of a man who would conceal debts. [Sidenote: _The_ Arte Poetica.] In 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]
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 84:
See next Book, p. 369.
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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 than to some other authors before noticed. [Sidenote: _Their value._] 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 against. [Sidenote: _Giraldi Cinthio’s_ Discorsi.] The exact date of the most interesting of them, and 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. [Sidenote: _On Romance._] Cinthio 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.
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Footnote 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.
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In their main contention Cinthio and Pigna were no doubt right, and much in advance of their time. [Sidenote: _On Drama._] 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—sometimes not. [Sidenote: _Some points in both._] For instance, when Cinthio (i. 24) cites his 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.
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Footnote 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_.
Footnote 87:
_Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art_, p. 232.
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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_. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _Pigna._] It is 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.
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Footnote 88:
Venice, 1554, 4to.
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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 Cardinal Rangoni. [Sidenote: _Lilius Giraldus: his_ De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum.] Lilius, who was now in a good old age (he had been born in 1478), a Humanist of the better class, 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 more remarkable, of Chaucer.[91] [Sidenote: _Its width of range._] Neither France nor 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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 90:
_Op. cit._, pp. 62, 63, 70. Giraldus also knows Colet, Grocyn, and others of the set.
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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.
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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 _Labyrinthus_ and the seventeenth century. [Sidenote: _But narrowness of view._] Giraldus, though 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 than original composition in the vulgar tongue. [Sidenote: _Horror at preference of 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.
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Footnote 93:
The supposed _date_ of the conversation is, as usual in such case, thrown a good deal back.
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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 writing in the Latin tongue. [Sidenote: _Yet a real critic in both kinds._] It is of those who do so write—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 lascivire et vagari videtur_, he says of Pontanus. [Sidenote: _Short_ précis _of the dialogues_.] Recalled 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.
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Footnote 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.
Footnote 95:
Ed. cit., p. 25.
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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 critical theory. [Sidenote: _Their great historic value._] The _De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum_ gives 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.
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Footnote 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.
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