CHAPTER V.
ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM.
BACKWARDNESS OF ENGLISH CRITICISM NOT IMPLYING INFERIORITY—ITS CAUSE—THE INFLUENCE OF RHETORIC AND OTHER MATTERS—HAWES—THE FIRST TUDOR CRITICS—WILSON: HIS ‘ART OF RHETORIC’; HIS ATTACK ON “INKHORN TERMS”—HIS DEALING WITH FIGURES—CHEKE: HIS RESOLUTE ANGLICISM AND ANTI-PRECIOSITY—HIS CRITICISM OF SALLUST—ASCHAM—HIS PATRIOTISM—HIS HORROR OF ROMANCE, AND OF THE ‘MORTE D’ARTHUR’—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL ATTITUDE TO PROSE, AND TO POETRY—THE CRAZE FOR CLASSICAL METRES—SPECIAL WANTS OF ENGLISH PROSODY—ITS KINDS: (1) CHAUCERIAN—(2) ALLITERATIVE—(3) ITALIANATED—DEFICIENCIES OF ALL THREE—THE TEMPTATIONS OF CRITICISM IN THIS RESPECT—ITS ADVENTURERS: ASCHAM HIMSELF—WATSON AND DRANT—GASCOIGNE—HIS ‘NOTES OF INSTRUCTION’—THEIR CAPITAL VALUE—SPENSER AND HARVEY—THE PURITAN ATTACK ON POETRY—GOSSON—‘THE SCHOOL OF ABUSE’—LODGE’S ‘REPLY’—SIDNEY’S ‘APOLOGY FOR POETRY’—ABSTRACT OF IT—ITS MINOR SHORTCOMINGS AND MAJOR HERESIES—THE EXCUSES OF BOTH, AND THEIR AMPLE COMPENSATION—KING JAMES’S ‘REULIS AND CAUTELIS’—WEBBE’S ‘DISCOURSE’—SLIGHT IN KNOWLEDGE, BUT ENTHUSIASTIC, IF UNCRITICAL, IN APPRECIATION—PUTTENHAM’S (?) ‘ART OF ENGLISH POESIE’—ITS ERUDITION—SYSTEMATIC ARRANGEMENT AND EXUBERANT INDULGENCE IN FIGURES—MINORS: HARINGTON, MERES, WEBSTER, BOLTON, ETC.—CAMPION AND HIS ‘OBSERVATIONS’—DANIEL AND HIS ‘DEFENCE OF RHYME’—BACON—THE ‘ESSAYS’—THE ‘ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING’—ITS DENUNCIATION OF MERE WORD-STUDY—ITS VIEW OF POETRY—SOME “OBITER DICTA”—THE WHOLE OF VERY SLIGHT IMPORTANCE—STIRLING’S “ANACRISIS”—BEN JONSON: HIS EQUIPMENT—HIS ‘PREFACES,’ ETC.—THE DRUMMOND CONVERSATIONS—THE ‘DISCOVERIES’—FORM OF THE BOOK—ITS DATE—MOSAIC OF OLD AND NEW—THE FLING AT MONTAIGNE—AT ‘TAMERLANE’—THE SHAKESPEARE PASSAGE—AND THAT ON BACON—GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.
The fortune of England in matters political has often been noticed; and it has at least deserved to be noticed, hardly less often, in matters literary. One of the luckiest of these chances came at the time of the Renaissance; when the necessary changes were effected with the minimum of direct foreign influence, and so slowly that the natural force of the nation and the language was able completely, or almost completely, to assimilate the influences, both foreign and classical, that rained upon it.
Nor was this least the case in respect of criticism.[198] The history of this part of English literary evolution has been, until recently, much neglected; and it can hardly be said even yet to have received comprehensive attention. [Sidenote: _Backwardness of English Criticism not implying inferiority._] It is all the more necessary to bestow some time and pains on it here, with at least some fair hope of correcting an unfair depreciation. The Baron of Bradwardine (displaying that shrewd appreciation of contrast between English and Scottish characteristics which belonged, if not to himself, to his creator) remarked to Colonel Talbot that it was the Colonel’s “humour, as he [the Baron] had seen in other gentlemen of birth and honour” in the Colonel’s country, “to derogate from the honour of his burgonet.” Gentlemen of the most undoubted birth and honour (as such things go in literature), from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have displayed this humour in regard to English criticism. But there has been something too much of it; and it has been taken far too literally by the ignorant. M. Brunetière has expressed his opinion that Frenchmen would make _un véritable marché de dupe_ if they exchanged Boileau, Marmontel, La Harpe, and Co. for Lessing and some others. I shall not in this place express any opinion on that question directly. But, if this book does what I shall endeavour to make it do, it will at least show that to exchange, for any foreign company, our own critics, from Sidney and Ben Jonson, through Dryden and Addison, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, to Mr Arnold himself, would be “_un véritable marché de_”—Moses Primrose.
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Footnote 198:
The two chief monographs on this are Spingarn, _op. cit._, in the division appurtenant (pp. 253-310), and Professor F. E. Schelling, _Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth_, Philadelphia, 1891. Haslewood reprinted most of the texts together in _Ancient Critical Essays_, 2 vols., London, 1811-15, and Mr Arber the most important separately in his _English Reprints_. Mr Gregory Smith is now editing, for the Clarendon Press, the fullest collection yet issued.
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It will have been sufficiently seen in the last volume that the backwardness of English—a backwardness long exaggerated, but to some extent real, and to no small extent healthy—was nowhere exhibited more distinctly than in the department which supplies the materials of this history. Until the close of the fifteenth century, and for some decades afterwards, not a single critical treatise on English existed in the English language, or even in Latin; the nearest approach, even in fragment, to any utterance of the kind being the _naïf_ and interesting, but only infantinely critical, remarks of Caxton in his prefaces.[199]
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Footnote 199:
Such as those on the “fair language of France,” and the strictures passed by Margaret of England and Burgundy on the “default in mine English” (_History of Troy_); on the “right good and fair English” of Lord Rivers (_Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers_).
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The fact is that, not only until a nation is in command of a single form of “curial” speech for literary purposes, but until sufficient experiments have been made in at least a majority of the branches of literature, criticism is impossible, and would, if possible, be rather mischievous than beneficial. [Sidenote: _Its cause._] Now England, though it possessed at least one very great author, and more than a fair number of respectable seconds to him, was, up to 1500 at least, in neither case. Till the end of the fourteenth century it had been practically trilingual; it was bilingual till past the end of the fifteenth, if not till far into the seventeenth, so far as literature was concerned. Nor, till the towering eminence of Chaucer had helped to bring the vernacular into prominence, was there any one settled dialect of primacy in the vernacular itself. Further, the fifteenth century was nearly at its end before any bulk of prose, save on religious subjects, was written; and for another century the proportion of translation over original work in prose was very large indeed.
At the same time the scholastic Rhetoric—which had always played to criticism the part of a half-faithless guardian, who keeps his pupil out of the full enjoyment of his property, yet preserves that property in good condition to hand over to him perforce at some future time—was still faithfully taught.[200] [Sidenote: _The influence of Rhetoric and other matters._] The enlarged and more accurate study of the classics at the Revival of Learning set classical criticism once more before students in the originals; the eager study of those originals by Continental scholars was sure to reflect itself upon England; and, lastly, religious zeal and other motives combined, here as elsewhere, to make men determined to get the vernacular into as complete and useful a condition as possible. Nowhere does the intense national spirit, which is the glory of the Tudor period, appear more strongly than in this our scholastic and “umbratile” division of the national life.
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Footnote 200:
There has been some disposition to deny this, and to argue that despite the constant use of the _word_ Rhetoric in the fifteenth century, the teaching of the _thing_ had declined. I do not think there is much evidence of this as regards England; and the long and curious passage of Hawes, to be presently discussed, is strong evidence against it. Rhetoric has no less than _eight_ chapters of the _Pastime of Pleasure_, as against _one_ apiece for Grammar and Logic.
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Long, indeed, before this scholastic and regular criticism made its appearance, and during the whole course of the fifteenth century, critical appreciation, stereotyped and unmethodised it may be, but genuine for all that, and stimulating, had made its appearance. [Sidenote: _Hawes._] The extraordinary quality of Chaucer, the amiable pastime-making of Gower, and, a little later, the busy polygraphy and painful rhetoric of Lydgate, had, almost from the moment of Chaucer’s death, attracted and inspired students. The pretty phrase about Chaucer’s “gold dew-drops of speech,” which justly drew the approval of a critic so often unjustly severe on ante-Renaissance work as Mr Arnold, was, as is known even by tyros in the study of English literature, repeated, expanded, varied by almost every prominent writer for a century and a quarter at least, till it reaches, not exactly final, but most definite and noteworthy, expression in the work of Stephen Hawes, that curious swan-singer of English mediæval poetry. In the to us eccentric, if not positively absurd, exposition of the _Trivium_ and _Quadrivium_ which diversifies the account of the courtship of Grandamour and La Bell Pucell,[201] the praise of the Three is led up to by a discussion of Rhetoric and Poetics so elaborate and minute that it occupies more space than is given to all the other Arts together, and nearly double that which is given to all the rest, except a largely extended Astronomy. Rhetoric herself, after being greeted by and greeting her pupil in the most “aureate” style, divides herself into five parts, each of which has its chapter, with a “Replication against ignorant Persons” intervening, and many curious digressions such as the description of a sort of Earthly Paradise of Literature with four rivers, “Understanding,” “Closely-Concluding,” “Novelty,” and “Carbuncles,”[202] and a “Tower of Virgil” in their midst. Lydgate has been already praised for “versifying the depured rhetoric in English language,” but he comes up once more for eulogy as “_my_ master” in the peroration, and has in fact considerably more space than either Gower or Chaucer. Nor, confused and out of focus as such things must necessarily appear to us, should we forget that Hawes and his generation were not altogether uncritically endeavouring at what was “important to _them_”—the strengthening and enriching, namely, of English vocabulary, the extension of English literary practice and stock.
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Footnote 201:
_The Pastime of Pleasure_, ed. Wright (Percy Society, London, 1845), pp. 27-56.
Footnote 202:
This Fourth River will appear a less startling “novelty” when the _illuminating_ power attributed to the stone is remembered.
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Yet their criticism could but be uncritical: and the luck above referred to appears first in the peculiar scholastic character of the criticism of the first English school of critics deserving the name. [Sidenote: _The first Tudor critics._] No one of its members was exactly a man of genius, and this was perhaps lucky; for men of genius have rarely been observed to make the best schoolmasters. All were fully penetrated with the Renaissance adoration of the classics; and this was lucky again, because the classics alone could supply the training and the models just then required by English prose, and even to some extent by English poetry. All were very definitely set against Gallicising and Italianising; and yet again this was lucky, because England had been overdosed with French influence for centuries, while their opposition to Italian did perhaps some good, and certainly little harm. But all were thoroughly possessed by the idea that English, adjusted to classical models as far as possible, but not denationalised or denaturalised, ought to be raised into a sufficient medium of literary, as of familiar, communication for Englishmen. And—with that intense Renaissance belief in education, and a high and noble kind of education too, which puts to shame the chattering and pottering of certain later periods on this unlucky subject—all were determined, as far as in them lay, to bring English up to this point. The tendency was spread over a great number of persons, and a considerable period of time. Its representatives ranged from healthy and large-souled, if not quite heroic or inspired, scholars like Ascham to “acrid-quack” pedants like Gabriel Harvey. But the chief of these representatives were the well-known trio, of whom one has just been mentioned—Sir[203] Thomas Wilson, Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham. They were all friends, they were all contemporary members (to her glory be it ungrudgingly said) of one University, the University of Cambridge, and though the moral character of all, and especially of the first two, had something of the taints of self-seeking and of sycophancy, which were the blemishes of the Tudor type of writers, all had the merits of that type as exhibited in the man of the study rather than of the field—intense curiosity and industry, a real patriotism, a half-instinctive eagerness to action, a consciousness how best to adorn the Sparta that had fallen to their lot, and a business-like faculty of carrying their conceptions out. From various indications, positive and indirect, it would seem that Cheke, who was the eldest, was also the most “magnetic,” the most Socratically suggestive and germinal of the three: but his actual literary work is of much inferior importance to that of Ascham and Wilson.
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Footnote 203:
Wilson has usually been dignified in this way: but some authorities, including the _Dict. Nat. Biog._, deny him knighthood.
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Wilson’s _Art of Rhetoric_[204] is, as the other dates given in the text and notes will show sufficiently, by no means the first book of the school; nor is it that which has, on the whole, the most interest for us. [Sidenote: _Wilson: his_ Art of Rhetoric;] But it deserves precedence historically because, as no other does, it keys, or gears, the new critical tendency on to the old technical rhetoric. The first edition appeared in 1553, dedicated to Edward VI. Wilson dates his prologue to the second[205] on the 7th December 1560; but it does not seem to have been published till 1563. Between the date of the first edition and the writing of this Prologue, Wilson, an exile at Rome, had fallen into the claws of the Inquisition as author of the book and of another on Logic; and, as he recounts with natural palpitation, escaped literally “so as by fire,” his prison-house being in flames.
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Footnote 204:
It was not actually the first in English, Leonard Coxe having preceded him “about 1524” with an English adaptation, apparently, of Melanchthon. But this is of no critical importance.
Footnote 205:
My copy is of this, which is the fuller.
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His two first Books Wilson faithfully devotes to all the old technicalities—Invention, Disposition, Amplification, “States,” and the rest. [Sidenote: _his attack on “Inkhorn terms.”_] But his third Book, “Of Elocution,”[206] announces from the first an interest in the matter very different from the jejune rehashings of the ancients (and chiefly of those ancients least worth rehashing) which the mediæval Rhetorics mostly give us. In fact, Wilson had shown himself alive to the importance of the subject in the very opening of the work itself[207] by recounting, with much gusto, how “Phavorinus the Philosopher (as Gellius telleth the tale) did hit a young man over the thumbs very handsomely for using over-old and over-strange words.” And as soon as he has divided the requirements of Elocution under the four heads of Plainness, Aptness, Composition, and Exornation, he opens the stop which has been recognised as his characteristic one, by denouncing “strange inkhorn terms.” He inveighs against the “far-journeyed gentlemen” who, on their return home, as they love to go in foreign apparel, so they “powder their talk with oversea language,” one talking French-English, another “chopping in” with English-Italianated. Professional men, lawyers and auditors, have their turn of censure, and a real literary “document” follows in the censure of the “fine courtier who will talk nothing but Chaucer.” Most copious is he against undue “Latining” of the tongue, in illustration of which he gives a letter from a Lincolnshire gentleman which may owe royalty either to the Limousin Scholar of Rabelais, or even to Master Francis’ own original, Geoffrey Tory himself. And he points the same moral (very much after the manner of Latimer, for whom, as elsewhere appears, he had a great admiration) by divers facetious stories from his experience, “when I was in Cambridge, and student in the King’s College,” and from other sources. After which he falls in with Cicero as to the qualifications of words allowable.
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Footnote 206:
Fol. 82.
Footnote 207:
Fol. 1, _verso_, at bottom.
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“Aptness” follows: and here Sir Thomas, without knowing it, has cut at a folly of language revived three hundred years and more later than his own time. [Sidenote: _His dealing with Figures._] For he laughs at one who, “seeing a house fair-builded,” said to his fellow, “Good Lord, what a handsome _phrase_ of building is this!” Wilson’s butt would have been no little thought of by certain persons at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Indeed, one may seem to remember a sentence about the merits of a “passage” in a marble chimney-piece, which is a mere echo, conscious or unconscious, of his “phrase.” The same temper appears in the longer remarks on Composition; but when we come to Exornation, “a gorgeous beautifying of the tongue with borrowed words and change of sentence,” Wilson’s lease of originality has run out. He is still in the bondage of the Figures, which he describes ambitiously as a kind “not equally sparpled[208] about the whole oration, but so dissevered and parted as stars stand in the firmament, or flowers in a garden, or pretty-devised antiques in a cloth of Arras.” The enumeration is full of character and Elizabethan piquancy; but it still has the old fault of beginning at the wrong end. When a man writes even a good oration, much more that far higher thing a good piece of prose (which may be an oration, if need serves, or anything else), he does not say to himself, “Now I shall throw in some hyperbaton; now we will exhibit a little anadiplosis; this is the occasion surely for a passage of zeugma.” He writes as the spirit moves him, and as the way of art leads. One could wish, in reading Wilson, for another Sir Thomas, to deal with the Figurants as he has dealt with the Chaucerists and the Lincolnshire Latinisers. But we must not expect too much at once: and lucky are we if we often, or even sometimes, get so bold a striking out into new paths for a true end as we find in this _Art of Rhetoric_.
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Footnote 208:
One may regret “sparple” and “disparple,” which are good and picturesque Englishings of _e_(s)_parpiller_. The forms “spar_k_le” and “dispar_k_le,” which seem to have been commoner, are no loss, as being equivocal.
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Cheke has left no considerable English work, and he seems—as it is perhaps inevitable that at least some of the leaders in every period of innovation should seem—to have pushed innovation itself to and over the verge of crotchet. [Sidenote: _Cheke: his resolute Anglicism and anti-preciosity._] He was a spelling and pronouncing reformer both in Greek and English; and, classical scholar and teacher as he was, he seems to have fallen in with that curious survival of “Saxon” rendering of words not of Saxon origin, the great storehouse of which is the work of Reginald Pecock a century earlier. But he appears to have been one of the main and most influential sources of the double stream of tendency observable in Wilson himself, and still more in Ascham—the tendency on the one hand to use the classics as models and trainers in the formation of a generally useful and practicable English style, and on the other to insist that neither from classical nor from any other sources should English be adulterated by “inkhorn terms,” as Wilson calls them,[209] of any kind—that is to say, by archaisms, technicalities, preciousnesses, fished up as it were from the bottom of the ink-pot, instead of simply and naturally taken as they came from its surface to the pen. What Ascham tells us that he said of Sallust is the spirit, the centre, the kernel, of the criticism of the whole school—a dread that is to say, and a dislike and a censure of what he calls the “uncontented care to write better than he could.”[210] And it must be obvious that this sharply formulated censure is itself a critical _point de repère_ of the greatest value. It is well that it was not too much listened to—for the greatest results of English prose and verse in the great period, beginning a few years after Cheke’s death and continuing for an old man’s lifetime, were the result of this “never contented care,” which still reached something better than content. But if, at this early period, it had had too much way given to it, if the vigorous but somewhat sprawling infancy of Elizabethan English had been bid and let sprawl simply at its pleasure, the consequences could not but have been disastrous.
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Footnote 209:
Not that the phrase is of his invention. It seems to have been a catchword of the time, and occurs in Bale (1543), in Peter Ashton’s version of Jovius (1546), &c.
Footnote 210:
Of course Cheke had in his mind the passage of Quintilian concerning Julius Florus (_v. supra_, i. 313).
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This criticism of Sallust, which may be found at length in Ascham’s _Schoolmaster_,[211] is quite a _locus_ in its kind. [Sidenote: _His criticism of Sallust._] It is not of the justest, for the prepossession of the sentence quoted above (which stands in the forefront of it) colours it all through. It has funny little scholastic lapses in logic, such as the attempt to apply the old brocard _Orator est vir bonus dicendi peritus_ to the disadvantage of Sallust, as compared not only with Cicero but with Cæsar, on the score of morality. It would have been pleasant to observe the countenances of Fausta and Servilia if this had been argued in their joint presence. And the dislike of Thucydides, to which a disliker of Sallust is almost necessarily driven, argues a literary palate not of the most refined. But the disposition of the supposed causes of the faults of Sallust’s style, when, having sown his wild oats, he took to literature, and borrowed his vocabulary from Cato and Varro, and his method from Thucydides himself, is an exceedingly ingenious piece of critical pleading. Even if it will not hold water, it shows us a stage of criticism advanced, in some directions, beyond anything that classical or mediæval times can show. The other great “place” of Cheke’s writing occurs in his letter[212] to Hoby on that learned knight’s translation of Castiglione, with its solemn judgment (the author, though but in middle age, was ill, and in fact almost dying), “I am of this opinion, that our own tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein if we take no heed betimes, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep house as a bankrupt.” The analogy, of course, is a false one:—there is no need to pay, nor possibility of payment, any more than a conquering monarchy needs to fear the repayment of the tribute it draws from others, or than a sturdy plant need dread bankruptcy because it owes nourishment to earth, and air, and the rain of heaven. But once more the position is a definite, and not a wholly untenable, critical position: and Cheke shows himself here as at once engineer and captain of it.
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Footnote 211:
Ed. Arber, pp. 154-159.
Footnote 212:
This may be found in Arber’s Introduction to the book just cited, p. 5; or in Professor Raleigh’s ed. of Hoby (London, 1900), pp. 12, 13.
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The chief representative of this school is, however, beyond question, the always agreeable, and but seldom other than admirable, author of _Toxophilus_ and _The Schoolmaster_ himself.[213] [Sidenote: _Ascham._] His positive achievements in English literature do not here directly concern us; nor does the debate between those who regard him as a Euphuist before Euphuism, and those who will have him to be the chief example of the plain style in early Elizabethan literature. I confess myself to be on the side of the latter; though I know what the former mean. But it is with what Ascham thought as a critic, not with what he did as a writer, that we are here busy; and on this there is no reasonable opening for serious difference of opinion. Ascham’s critical position and opinions are clear, not only from his two famous and pleasant little books, but from the constant literary references in his letters, ranging from elaborate lucubrations on the study of the classics to an amusing little Cambridge fling at the older university, where, as we learn from a letter of exactly the middle of the century, taste was in so shocking a condition that Oxford men actually paid more attention to Lucian and Apuleius than to Cicero and Xenophon.[214]
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Footnote 213:
For these two books Mr Arber’s excellent reprints can hardly be bettered. But for our purposes the _Letters_ are also needed; and these, with other things, will be found in Giles’s edition of the _Works_, 3 vols. in 4, London, 1864-65.
Footnote 214:
_Quid omnes Oxonienses sequuntur plane nescio, sed ante aliquot menses in Aula incidi in quendam illius Academiæ, qui nimium præferendo Lucianum, Plutarchum et Herodianum, Senecam, A. Gellium, et Apuleium utramque linguam in nimis senescentem et effœtam ætatem compingere mihi videbatur_—Giles, i. 190. The whole letter (to Sturm) is worth reading.
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[Sidenote: _His patriotism._]
The _Toxophilus_ itself is a critical document in parts, both for the initial manifesto of his desire “to write this English matter in the English tongue for English men,” and for the more elaborate defence of the proceeding (a defence repeated in the numerous Latin letters accompanying the copies of the book he sent to his friends), as well as for one of those hits at Romance which were characteristic of Renaissance scholars too generally, and were particularly to be expected in very moral and rather prosaic persons like Ascham. But we necessarily turn to the _Schoolmaster_ for a full exposition of Ascham’s critical _ethos_, and we find it.
A tendency rather to slight poetry, one great heresy concerning it (of which more presently), and the above-mentioned contempt or even horror of romance—these are the worst things to be noted here. [Sidenote: _His horror of Romance_,] All these are connected with a wider critical heresy, which is prevalent in England to this day, and which emerges most interestingly in this infancy of English criticism. This heresy is the valuing of examples, and even of whole kinds, of literary art, not according to their perfection on their own artistic standards, not according to the quantity or quality of artistic pleasure which they are fitted to give; but according to certain principles—patriotic, political, ethical, or theological—which the critic holds or does not hold, as the case may be. This fallacy being one of those proper—or, at least, inseparably accidental—to the human intellect, is of course perceptible enough in antiquity itself. It is, as we have seen, rife in Plato, and more rife in Plutarch; and there is no doubt that the devotion of the Renaissance to the greatest of Greek philosophers and prosemen, to the most entertaining of Greek biographers and moralists, had not a little to do with its reappearance, though the struggle of the Reformation, and the national jealousies which this struggle bred or helped, had more. But no one has given more notable examples of it than Ascham by his attack on “books of feigned chivalry,” in _Toxophilus_,[215] and his well-known censure of the _Morte d’Arthur_ in _The Schoolmaster_.[216]
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Footnote 215:
P. 19, ed. Arber. The passage contains a stroke at monasticism.
Footnote 216:
P. 80, ed. Arber.
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Than this book there was, at Ascham’s date, no more exquisite example of English prose in existence. There is not to this day a book, either in prose or in verse, which has more of the true Romantic charm. [Sidenote: _and of the_ Morte d’Arthur.] There are few better instances anywhere of subtly combined construction of story than are to be found in some of its parts; and, to a catholic judgment, which busies itself with the matter and spirit of a book, there are few books which teach a nobler temper of mind, which inculcate with a more wonderful blending of sternness and sympathy the great moral that “the doer shall suffer,” that “for all these things God shall bring us into judgment,” or which display more accomplished patterns of man and sweeter examples of woman. Yet Ascham (and he had read the book) saw in it nothing but “open manslaughter and bold bawdry.”
Apart from this somewhat Philistine prudery—which occupies itself more reasonably with Italian _novelle_, and the translations of them into English—Ascham’s criticism is of a piece with that of the whole school in all but a very few points. He differed with Wilson, and with most of the scholars of his time, on the subject of translation, which he rightly enough regarded as a useful engine of education, but as quite incapable of giving any literary equivalent for the original. He agreed both with Wilson and with Cheke as to the impropriety of adulterating English with any foreign tongue, ancient or modern. He was, all the same, an exceedingly fervent Ciceronian and devotee of the golden age of Latin. And when we come in one[217] of his letters to Sturm on the name of Pigna (_v. supra_, p. 62), the rival of Cinthio Giraldi, there seems to be established a contact, of the most interesting, between English and Italian criticism. But (as indeed we might have expected) no allusion to Pigna’s view of the despised romances is even hinted: it is his dealing with the _aureolum libellum_ of Horace that Ascham has read, his dealings with Aristotle and Sophocles that he wishes to read.
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Footnote 217:
Thought to be his last, and written in Dec. 1568; ed. Giles, ii. 189. The correspondence with Sturm is, as we should expect, particularly literary.
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Putting his theory and his practice together, and neglecting for the moment his moral “craze,” we can perceive in him a tolerably distinct ideal of English prose, which he has only not illustrated by actual criticism of the reviewing sort, because the material was so scanty. [Sidenote: _His general critical attitude to Prose_,] This prose is to be fashioned with what may be excusably called a kind of squint—looking partly at Latin and Greek construction and partly at English vernacular usage. It does not seem that, great as was his reverence for Cheke, he was bitten by Cheke’s mania for absolute Teutonism; nor does he appear to have gone to the extreme of Latimer and Latimer’s admirer, Wilson, in caring to mingle merely familiar speech with his ordered vernacular. But he went some way in this direction: he was by no means proof against that Delilah of alliteration which, like a sort of fetch or ghost of the older alliterative prosody, bewitched the mid-sixteenth-century verse and prose of England, and had not lost hold on Spenser himself. And he had belief in certain simple Figures of the antithetic and parallel kind. But he was, above all, a schoolmaster—as even being dead he spoke—to English literature; and his example and his precepts together tended to establish a chastened, moderately classical, pattern of writing, which in the next generation produced the admirable English prose of Hooker, and was not without influence on the less accomplished, but more germinal and protreptic, style of Jonson.
We must praise him less when we come to poetry. [Sidenote: _and to Poetry._] The history of the craze for classical metre and against rhyme in England, which practically supplies our earliest subject of purely critical debate, is a very curious one, and may—perhaps must—be considered from more points of view than one, before it is rightly and completely understood. At first sight it looks like mere mid-summer madness—the work of some Puck of literature—if not even as the incursion into the calm domains of scholarship and criticism of that popular _delirium tremens_, which has been often illustrated in politics. Shifting of the standpoint, and more careful consideration, will discover some excuses for it, as well as much method in it. But it must be regarded long, and examined carefully, before the real fact is discovered—the fact that, mischievous and absurd as it was in itself, unpardonable as are the attempts to revive it, or something like it, at this time of day, it was in its own day a kind of beneficent “distemper”—a necessary, if morbid, stage in the development of English prosody and English criticism.
Inasmuch as the most obvious and indubitable, as well as universal, cause of the craze was the profound Renaissance admiration for the classics, it was inevitable that something of the kind should make its appearance in most European countries. [Sidenote: _The craze for Classical Metres._] But other and counteracting causes prevented it from assuming, in any of them, anything like the importance that it attained in England. Unrhymed classical metres, like almost every literary innovation of the time, had been first attempted in Italy;[218] but the established and impregnable supremacy of forms like the Sonnet, the Canzone, the _ottava_ and _terza rima_, put rhyme out of real danger there. They were attempted in France.[219] But French had for centuries possessed a perfectly well-defined system of prosody, adapted and adequate to the needs and nature of the language. And, moreover, the singularly _atonic_ quality of this language, its want not only of the remotest approach to quantity but even of any decided accent, made the experiment not merely ridiculous, as indeed it mostly was in English, but all but impossible. Spanish was following Italian, and did not want to follow anything else: and German was not in case to compete.
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Footnote 218:
_V. supra_, p. 46.
Footnote 219:
_V. supra_, p. 127.
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With English the patient was very much more predisposed to the disease. [Sidenote: _Special wants of English Prosody._] Not only two, but practically three, different systems of prosody, which were really to some extent opposed to each other, and might well seem more opposed than they actually were, disputed, in practice, the not too fertile or flourishing field of English poetry. There was the true Chaucerian system of blended English prosody, the legitimate representative of the same composite influences which have moulded English language, and which had been slowly developed through the half-chaotic beginnings of Middle English verse, and then with almost premature suddenness perfected up to a certain stage by Chaucer himself. [Sidenote: _Its kinds:_ (1)_Chaucerian._] This system combined—though not yet in perfect freedom—the strict syllabic foot-division of the French with the syllabic licence of Anglo-Saxon, so as to produce a system of syllabic equivalence similar in nature to, if not yet fully in practice freer than, that of the Greek Iambic trimeter. It admitted a considerable variety of metres, the base-integers of which were the octosyllable and decasyllable, with lines of six, twelve, and others occasionally, combined in pairs or arranged in stanzas of more or less intricate forms. But—by a historic accident which has even yet to be rather taken as found than fully explained—nobody for more than a hundred years had been able to produce really good regular[220] poetry in Southern English by this metre, and certain changes in pronunciation and vocabulary—especially the disuse of the final vocalised _e_—were putting greater and greater difficulties in the way of its practice.
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Footnote 220:
There had, of course, been some charming jets of folk-song in ballad, carol, and what not.
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Secondly, there was the revived alliterative metre, either genuine—that is to say, only roughly syllabic and not rhymed, but rhythmed nearer to the anapæstic form than to any other—or allied with rhyme, and sometimes formed into stanzas of very considerable intricacy. [Sidenote: _(2) Alliterative._] This, which had arisen during the fourteenth century, no one quite knows how or where, apparently in the North, and which had maintained a vigorous though rather artificial life during the fifteenth, had not wholly died out, being represented partly by the ballad metre, by doggerel twelves, fourteeners, and other long shambling lines, and by a still lively tendency towards alliteration itself, both in metred verse and in prose. Latterly, during Ascham’s own youth, a sort of _rapprochement_ between these two had made the fourteeners and Alexandrines, rather less doggerelised, very general favourites; but had only managed to communicate to them a sort of lolloping amble, very grievous and sickening to the delicate ear.
[Sidenote: (3) _Italianated._]
Thirdly, and in close connection with this combination, Wyatt, Surrey, and other poets had, by imitating Italian models, especially in the sonnet, striven to raise, to bind together, to infuse with energy and stiffen with backbone, the ungainly shambling body of English verse: and Surrey, again following the Italians, had tried, with some success, the unrhymed decasyllable soon to be so famous as blank verse.
Now critical observation at the time might survey this field with view as extensive and intensive as it could apply, and be far from satisfied with the crops produced. [Sidenote: _Deficiencies of all three._] To represent the first system there was nobody but Chaucer, who, great and greatly admired as he was, was separated from the men of 1550 by a period of time almost as long as that which separates us from Pope, and by a much greater gulf of pronunciation and accent. Nobody could write like Chaucer—unless the Chaucerian _Chorizontes_ are right in attributing _The Court of Love_ to this time, in which case there was some one who could write very much like Chaucer indeed. There was no Langland, and nobody who could write in the least like Langland. In sheer despair, men of talent like Skelton, when they were not Chaucerising heavily, were indulging (of course with more dulcet intervals now and then) in mere wild gambades of doggerel.
But it will be said, Was there not the new Italianated style of poets of such promise as Wyatt and Surrey? There was. Yet it must be remembered that Wyatt and Surrey themselves are, after all, poets of more promise than performance; that their promise itself looks much more promising to us, seeing as we do its fulfilment in Spenser and onward, than it need have done, or indeed could do, to contemporaries; that stalwart Protestants and stout Englishmen feared and loathed the Italianation of anything English; and lastly, that even the prosody of Wyatt and Surrey is, in a very high degree, experimental, tentative, incomplete. We laugh, or are disgusted, at the twists and tortures applied by the hexametrists to our poor mother tongue; but Wyatt at least puts almost as awkward constraints on her.
It is not surprising that in the presence of these unsatisfying things, and in the nonage of catholic literary criticism, men should have turned for help to those classics which were the general teachers and helpers of the time. [Sidenote: _The temptations of Criticism in this respect._] There was indeed—already published just as Ascham had attained his year of discretion—a treatise, by the greatest man of letters for some fifteen hundred years at least, which contained the germ of a warning. But it is not likely that Ascham or any of his good Cambridge friends had seen Trissino’s translation of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_; and, if any had, it would have been a stroke of genius to carry Dante’s generalisation from the Romance tongues further. To almost any man of the Renaissance it would have seemed half sacrilege and half madness to examine ancient and modern literatures on the same plane, and decide what was germane to each and what common to all. Greek Prosody had been good enough, with very minor alterations, for Latin; how should any of these upstart modern tongues refuse what had been good enough for both? And let it be remembered, too, that they were only half wrong. Greek and Latin _did_ provide up to a certain point—that of the foot as distinguished from the metre—examples which, duly guarded, could be quite safely followed, which indeed could not and cannot be neglected without loss and danger for English. It was when they went further, and endeavoured to impose the classical combinations of feet on English, that they fell.
Yet even from the first they had glimpses and glimmerings of truth which might have warned them; while in their very errors they often display that combination of independence and practical spirit which is the too often undervalued glory of English criticism. [Sidenote: _Its adventurers: Ascham himself._] Ascham himself—besotted as he is with wrath[221] against “our rude beggarly rhyming,” confident as he is that the doggerel of his old friend Bishop Watson of Lincoln—
“All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities,”—
exhibits[222] as “right quantitie” of syllables and true order of versifying as either Greek or Latin—yet saw[223] that “our English tongue doth not well receive the nature of _Carmen Heroicum_, because _dactylus_, the aptest foot for that verse, is seldom found in English.” Truly it is not; your dactyl is apt to play the “Waler”—to buck under an English rider, and either throw him altogether, or force the alteration of the pace to anapæsts. The best apparent dactylics in English—the verses of Kingsley’s _Andromeda_—are not really dactylic-hexameters at all, they are five-foot anapæstics, with a very strong _anacrusis_ at the beginning, and a weak hypercatalectic syllable at the end. And with this fatal confession of Ascham (who had not a very poetical head), that of Campion, an exquisite poet and a keen though warped critic, coincides, as we shall see, a generation later. But the thing had to be done; and it was done, or at least attempted.
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Footnote 221:
It is curious that, in this very _début_ of English criticism, the incivility with which critics are constantly and too justly charged makes its appearance. Ascham would seem to have been a good-natured soul enough. Yet he abuses rhyme and its partisans in the true “Père Duchêne” style which some critics still affect. “To follow the Goths in rhyming instead of the Greeks in versifying” is “to eat acorns with swine, when we may eat wheat bread among men.” Rhymers are “a rude multitude,” “rash, ignorant heads,” “wandering blindly in their foul wrong way,” &c.
Footnote 222:
_Schoolmaster_, _ed. cit._, p. 73. Ascham actually _quotes_ the Greek and the Latin of Homer and Horace, and declares Watson’s stuff to be made as “naturally” as the one and as “aptly” as the other!
Footnote 223:
Ibid., p. 145.
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When the craze first took form in England we do not exactly know. Ascham observes vaguely that “this misliking of rhyming beginneth not now of any newfangle singularity, but hath been long been misliked, and that of men of greatest learning and deepest judgment.”[224] [Sidenote: _Watson and Drant._] We all think that the persons who agree with us are men of great learning and deep judgment, so that matter may be passed over. But apparently the thing was one, and not the best, of the fruits of that study of the classics, and specially of Greek, which, beginning at Oxford, passed thence to Cambridge, and was taken up so busily in Ascham’s own college, St John’s. Thomas Watson,[225] the Bishop of Lincoln, above referred to, was Master of the College; Ascham himself, it is hardly necessary to say, was a fellow of it. And still descending in the collegiate hierarchy, it was an undergraduate of St John’s, Thomas Drant, who somewhat later drew up rules for Anglo-Classic versifying—rules that occupied Spenser and Harvey, with the result of producing some interesting letters and some very deplorable doggerel. Drant seems to have been the “legislator of Parnassus” to the innovators; but we have little work of his, and that little does not bear on the special subject.
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Footnote 224:
P. 147. The extraordinary confusion of mind of the time is illustrated by Ascham’s sheltering himself behind Quintilian!
Footnote 225:
Not to be confounded with Thomas Watson, the author of the _Hecatompathia_, who came later, and was an Oxford man.
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Mischievous craze as it was, however,[226] it had the merit of turning the attention of Englishmen to really critical study of poetry, and it appears, more or less, as the _motif_ of most of the group of critical writings, from Gascoigne’s _Notes of Instruction_ to Daniel’s _Defence of Rhyme_, which we shall now discuss.
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Footnote 226:
Some authorities have been much too mild towards it. For instance, the late Mr Henry Morley, who says, “Thomas Drant, of course, did not suppose that his rules were sufficient.” This is charitable, but outside, or rather against, the evidence.
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In the most interesting little treatise[227] which heads or initials[228] the now goodly roll of books in English criticism, George Gascoigne, though he was himself a Cambridge man, does not make any reference to the craze. [Sidenote: _Gascoigne._] The tract was written at the request of an Italian friend, Eduardo Donati. It is exceedingly short; but as full of matter, and very good matter, as need be. In duty bound Gascoigne begins with insistence on fine invention, without which neither “thundering in rym ram ruff, quoth my master Chaucer,” nor “rolling in pleasant words,” nor “abounding in apt vocables,” will suffice. But he passes over this very swiftly, as over trite and obvious expressions,[229] suitableness of phrase, &c., and attacks the great literary question of the time, Prosody.
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Footnote 227:
_Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English_, ed. Arber (with _The Steel Glass_, &c.), pp. 31-41, London, 1868. Originally in the 4to edition of Gascoigne’s _Poems_ (London, 1575). Mr Spingarn sees indebtedness in it to Ronsard.
Footnote 228:
The observations of Ascham, Wilson, and the others being incidental merely.
Footnote 229:
“If I should undertake to write in praise of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her crystal eye nor her cherry lip.”
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He begins his attack by the modest and half-apologetic request, “This may seem a presumptuous order,” that, whatever the verse chosen be, it be regular, and not wobbling backwards and forwards between twelve and fourteen syllables on no principle. [Sidenote: _His_ Notes of Instruction.] Then he enjoins the maintenance of regular and usual accent or quantity; and in so doing insists on a standard in regard to which not merely Wyatt and Surrey earlier, but even Spenser later, were much less scrupulous. “Treasure,” he says, you must use with the first syllable long and the second short: you must not make it “treasùre.” And then he makes a very curious observation:—
“Commonly nowadays in English rhymes, for I dare not call them English verses, we use none other order but a foot of two syllables,” to wit, the Iamb. “We have,” he says, “in other times used other kinds of metres,” as
"No wight | in the world | that wealth | can attain,"[230]
(_i.e._, anapæsts), while “our Father Chaucer had used the same liberty in feet and measures that the Latinists do use,” that is to say, syllabic equivalence of two shorts to a long. And he laments the tyranny of the Iamb; but says, “we must take the ford as we find it.”
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Footnote 230:
Gascoigne does not use this division, or ¯ and ˘ but ´ and ` for long and short, ~ (circumflex) for common, and indented lines ([dissyllabic] and [trisyllabic]) for dissyllabic and trisyllabic foot arrangements.
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Then, after some particular cautions,—a renewed one as to quantifying words aright—“understànd,” not “undérstand,” &c., as to using as many monosyllables as possible (it is amusing to read this and remember the opposite caution of Pope),—he comes to rhyme, and warns his scholar against rhyme without reason. Alliteration is to be moderate: you must not “hunt a letter to death.” Unusual words are to be employed carefully and with a definite purpose to “draw attentive reading.” Be clear and sensible.[231] Keep English order, and invert substantive and adjective seldom and cautiously. Be moderate in the use also of that “shrewd fellow, poetical licence,” who actually reads "hea|ven" for "heavn"![232]
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Footnote 231:
“For the haughty obscure verse doth not much delight, and the verse that is too easy is like a tale of a roasted horse.”
Footnote 232:
See Mitford, _Harmony of Language_, p. 105, who thinks the licence just the other way, and indeed roundly pronounces the pronunciation in one syllable “impossible.” A little later, again, Guest thinks the _dis_-syllable “uncouth and vulgar.” A most documentary disagreement!
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As for the pause or Cæsura, Gascoigne is not injudicious. “The pause,” he says, “will stand best in the middle” of an octosyllable, at the fourth syllable in a “verse of ten,” at the sixth (or middle again) of an Alexandrine, and at the eighth in a fourteener. But it is at the discretion of the writer in Rhythm royal: “it forceth not where the pause be till the end of the line”—and this liberty will assuredly draw to more.
Next he enumerates stanzas:—Rhyme royal itself, ballades, sonnets, Dizains, and Sixains, Virelays, and the “Poulter’s measure,” of twelve and fourteen alternately, to which his own contemporaries were so unfortunately addicted. You must “finish the sentence and meaning at the end of every staff”: and (by the way) he has “forgotten a notable kind of rhyme called riding rhyme, which is what our father Chaucer used in his Canterbury tales, and in divers other delectable and light enterprises.” It is good for “a merry tale,” Rhyme royal for a “grave discourse,” Ballads and Sonnets for love-poems, &c., and it would be best, in his judgment, to keep Poulter’s measure for Psalms and hymns. And so he makes an end, “doubting his own ignorance.”
The chief points about this really capital booklet are as follows:—Gascoigne’s recognition of the importance of overhauling English Prosody; his good sense on the matter of the cæsura, and of Chaucer’s adoption of the principles of equivalenced scansion; his acknowledgment with regret of the impoverishment which, in the sterility of the mid-sixteenth century before Spenser, was a fact, as resulting from the tyranny of the iamb; the shrewdness of his general remarks; and, last but not least, his entire silence about the new versifying, the “Dranting of Verses.” [Sidenote: _Their capital value._] It is possible (for though he was at Cambridge he seems to admit that he did not acquire any great scholarship there) that he had not come into contact with any one who took interest in this: but it is improbable that it would have appealed to his robust sense of poetry, unsicklied by Harvey’s pedantry, and not misled by Spenser’s classical enthusiasm.
At this time, however, or not long after—the _Notes_ must have been written between 1572 and 1575, and the correspondence of Spenser and Harvey actually appeared in 1579—these other persons were thinking a great deal about the classical metres. The _Five Letters_ (“Three” and “Two”[233]—not to be confused with the _Four Letters_ which Harvey issued long afterwards about Greene) are full of the subject, and of poetical criticism generally. They, together with the controversy which arose over Gosson’s _School of Abuse_, and which indirectly produced Sidney’s _Apology for Poetry_, make the years 1579-1580 as notable in the history of English criticism as the appearances of _Euphues_ and _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ make them in that of creative literature.
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Footnote 233:
See Grosart’s _Works of Gabriel Harvey_, vol. i. pp. 6-150. Parts will be found in the Globe edition of Spenser, pp. 706-710.
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Spenser’s first letter informs Harvey that “they [Sidney and Dyer] have proclaimed in their ἀρειωπάγῳ[234] [the literary _cénacle_ of Leicester House] a general surceasing and silence of bald rhymers, and also of the very best too: instead whereof they have, by the authority of their whole Senate, prescribed certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for English verse, having had thereof already great practice, and drawn me to their faction.” [Sidenote: _Spenser and Harvey._] And later, “I am more in love with English versifying than with rhyming, which I should have done long since if I would have followed your counsel.” He hints, however, gently, that Harvey’s own verses (these coterie writers always keep the name “verses” for their hybrid abortions) once or twice “make a breach in Master Drant’s rules.” Which was, of course, a very dreadful thing, only to be “condoned _tanto poetæ_.” He requites Harvey with a few Iambics, which he “dare warrant precisely perfect for the feet, and varying not one inch from the Rule.” And then follows the well-known piece beginning—
“Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state,”
where certainly the state must have been bad if it was as infelicitous as the verse.
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Footnote 234:
I am not responsible for the eccentricities of this form.
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Not such was Gabriel Harvey that he might take even a polite correction; and his reply is a proper donnish setting-down of a clever but presumptuous youth. He respects the Areopagus—indeed they were persons of worship, and Harvey was a _roturier_—more than Spenser can or will suppose, and he likes the trimeters (indeed, though poor things, they were Spenser’s own after all, and such as no man but Spenser could have written in their foolish kind) more than Spenser “can or will easily believe.” But—and then follows much reviewing in the now stale hole-picking kind, which has long been abandoned, save by the descendants of Milbourne and Kenrick, and a lofty protestation that “myself never saw your gorbellied master’s rules, nor heard of them before.”
The Three Letters which follow[235] are distributed in subject between an Earthquake (which has long since ceased to quake for us) and the hexameters. They open with a letter from Spenser, in which he broaches the main question, “Whether our English accent will endure the Hexameter?” and doubts. Yet he has a hankering after it, encloses his own—
“See ye the blindfoldèd pretty god, that feathered archer,” &c.,
and prays that Harvey would either follow the rules of the great Drant, indorsed by Sidney, or else send his own. Harvey replies in double. The first part is some very tragical mirth about the earthquake; the second, “A Gallant Familiar Letter,” tackles the question of versification.
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Footnote 235:
In order of composition, not of publication.
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This gallant familiarity might possibly receive from harsh critics the name of uneasy coxcombry; but it is at any rate clear that the author has set about the matter very seriously. He expresses delight that Sidney and Dyer, “the two very diamonds of her Majesty’s Court,” have begun to help forward “the exchange of barbarous and balductum[236] rhymes with artificial verses”; thinks their “lively example” will be much better than Ascham’s “dead advertisement” in the _Schoolmaster_. He would like (as should we) to have Drant’s prosody. His own Rules and Precepts will probably not be very different; but he will take time before drafting them finally. He thinks (reasonably enough) that before framing a standard English Grammar or Rhetoric (therein including Prosody), a standard orthography must first be agreed upon. And he suggests that “we beginners” (this from the author of these truly “barbarous and balductum” antics to the author of the _Faerie Queene_ is distinctly precious) have the advantage, like Homer and Ennius, of setting examples. “A New Year’s Gift to M. George Bilchaunger,” in very doleful hexameters, follows, and after a little gird at Spenser’s “See ye the Blindfoldèd,” another sprout of Harvey’s brain in the same kind, which has been, perhaps, more, and more deservedly, laughed at than any of these absurdities, except the scarcely sane jargon-doggerel of Stanyhurst—
“What might I call this tree? a Laurell? o bonny Laurell! Needs to thy boughs will I bow this knee, and veil my bonetto;”
with yet another—
“Since _Galateo_[237] came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp.”
He thinks that the author of this last “wanted but some delicate choice elegant poesy” of Sidney’s or Dyer’s for a good pattern. After some further experiments of his own, or his brother’s, in hexametring some of Spenser’s own “emblems” in the _Calendar_, he turns to Spenser himself, whom, it seems, he ranks next the same “incomparable and miraculous genius in the catalogue of our very principal English Aristarchi.” He proceeds to speak of some of that earlier work which, as in _The Dying Pelican_, is certainly, or in the _Dreams_, possibly, lost. After which he writes himself down for all time in the famous passage about the _Faerie Queene_, which he had “once again nigh forgotten,” but which he now sends home “in neither better nor worse case than he found her.” “As for his judgment,” he is “void of all judgment if Spenser’s _Nine Comedies_ [also lost] are not nearer Ariosto’s than that Elvish Queene is to the _Orlando_, which” Spenser “seems to emulate, and hopes to overgo.” And so he ends his paragraph with the yet more famous words, “If so be the _Faery Queene_ be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I say, and yet I will not say what I thought, but there an end for this once, and fare you well till God or some good Angel put you in a better mind!” Which words let all who practise criticism grave in their memories, and recite them daily, adding, “Here, but for the grace of God——!” if they be modest and fear Nemesis.
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Footnote 236:
This word, which is certainly a cousin of “balderdash,” is a good example of the slang and jargon so often mixed with their preciousness by the Elizabethans. Nash borrowed it from Harvey to use against him; and the eccentric Stanyhurst even employs it in his _Virgil_. Stanyhurst’s hexameters, by the way (_vide_ Mr Arber’s Reprint in the _English Scholars Library_, No. 10, London, 1880), are, thanks partly to their astounding lingo, among the maddest things in English literature; but his prose prefatory matter, equally odd in phrase, has some method in its madness.
Footnote 237:
La Casa’s book of etiquette and behaviour.
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After an interval, however, Harvey returns to actual criticism, and shows himself in rather better figure by protesting, in spite of “five hundred Drants,” against the alteration of the quantity of English words by accenting “Majesty” and “Manfully,” and “Carpenter” on the second syllable. And he falls in with Gascoigne on the subject of such words as “Heaven.” Nor could he, even if he had been far less of a pedant and coxcomb, have given better or sounder doctrine than that with which he winds up. “It is the vulgar and natural mother Prosody, that alone worketh the feat, as the only supreme foundress and reformer of Position, Diphthong, Orthography, or whatsoever else; whose affirmatives are nothing worth if she once conclude the negative.” And for this sound doctrine, not unsoundly enlarged upon, and tipped with a pleasant Latin farewell to _“mea domina Immerita, mea bellissima Collina Clouta”_, let us leave Gabriel in charity.[238]
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Footnote 238:
The further letters to Spenser, which Dr Grosart has borrowed from the Camden Society’s _Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey_, touch literary matters not seldom, but with no new important deliverances. In the later (1592) _Four Letters_, the embroidery of railing at the dead Greene and the living Nash has almost entirely hidden the literary canvas.
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[Sidenote: _The Puritan attack on Poetry._]
Meanwhile the strong critical set of the time—so interesting, if not so satisfying, after the absolute silence of criticism in English earlier—was being shown in another direction by a different controversy, to which, as we have seen, Spenser makes allusion. The points which chiefly interested him at the moment were formal; those to which we now come were partly of the same class though of another species, partly transcending form.
Stephen Gosson is one of the persons of whom, as is by no means always the case, it would really be useful to know more than we do know about their private history and character. [Sidenote: _Gosson._] What disgust, what disappointment, what tardy development of certain strains of temper and disposition he underwent, we do not know; but something of the kind there must have been to make a young man of four-and-twenty, a fair scholar, already of some note for both dramatic and poetical writing, and obviously of no mean intellectual powers, swing violently round, and denounce plays, and poems, and almost literature generally, as the works of the Devil. It is quite insufficient to ejaculate “Puritanism!” or “Platonism!” for neither of these was a new thing, and the question is why Gosson was not affected by them earlier or later.
Let us, however, now as always, abstain from speculation when we have fact; and here we have at least three very notable facts—Gosson’s _School of Abuse_,[239] with its satellite tractates, Lodge’s untitled _Reply_,[240] and the famous _Defence of Poesy_ or _Apology for Poetry_[241] which Sidney (to whom Gosson had rashly dedicated his book) almost certainly intended as a counterblast, though either out of scorn, as Spenser hints, or (more probably from what we know of him) out of amiable and courteous dislike to requite a compliment with an insult, he takes no direct notice of Gosson at any time.
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Footnote 239:
Reprinted by Mr Arber, with its almost immediately subsequent _Apology_. I wish he had added the _Ephemerides of Phialo_ which accompanied the _Apology_, and the _Plays Confuted_ of three years later; for these books—very small and very difficult of access—add something to the controversy.
Footnote 240:
Several times reprinted; most recently by the present writer in _Elizabethan and Jacobean Pamphlets_ (London, 1892).
Footnote 241:
Also frequently (indeed oftener) reprinted as by Arber, London, 1868; Shuckburgh, Cambridge, 1891; Cook, Boston (U.S.A.), 1890.
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_The School of Abuse_ (which is written in such a style as almost to out-Euphuise the contemporary _Euphues_ itself) is critical wholly from the moral side, and with reference to the actual, not the necessary or possible, state of poetry. [Sidenote: The School of Abuse.] There are even, the author says, some good plays, including at least one of his own; but the whole of ancient poetry (he says little or nothing of modern) is infected by the blasphemy and immorality of Paganism, and nearly the whole of the modern stage is infected by the abuses of the theatre—of which Gosson speaks in terms pretty well identical with those which Puritan teachers had for some years past been using in sermon and treatise. But outside of the moral and religious line he does not step: he is solely occupied with the lies and the licence of poets and players.
Lodge’s reply (the title-page of it has been lost, but it _may_ be the _Honest Excuses_ to which Gosson refers as having been published against him) is almost entirely an appeal to authority, seasoned with a little personal invective. [Sidenote: _Lodge’s_ Reply.] Lodge strings together all the classical names he can think of, with a few mediæval, to show that Poetry, Music (which Gosson had also attacked), and even the theatre, are not bad things. But he hardly attempts any independent justification of them as good ones, especially from the purely literary point of view. In fact, his pamphlet—though interesting as critical work from the associate of great creators in drama, himself a delightful minor poet and no contemptible pioneer of English prose fiction—is merely one of the earliest adaptations in English of an unreal defence to an attack, logically as unreal though actually dangerous. The charlatan-geniuses of the Renaissance, with Cornelius Agrippa[242] at their head, had refurbished the Platonic arguments for the sincere but pestilent reformers of the Puritan type. Lodge and his likes, in all countries from Italy outwards and from Boccaccio downward, accept the measure of the shadowy daggers of their opponents, and attempt to meet them with weapons of similar temper. The only reality of the debate is in its accidents, not in its main purport. But the assailants, in England at least, had for the time an unfair advantage, because the defence could point to no great poet but Chaucer. The real answer was being provided by one of themselves in the shape of _The Faerie Queene_.
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Footnote 242:
_V. supra_, p. 28.
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Sidney’s book, though pervaded by the same delusion, is one of far more importance. [Sidenote: _Sidney’s_ Apology for Poetry.] It is not free from faults—in fact, it has often been pointed out that some of Sidney’s doctrines, if they had been accepted, would have made the best efforts of Elizabethan literature abortive. But the defects of detail, of which more presently, are mixed with admirable merits; the critic shows himself able, as Gosson had not been able, to take a wide and catholic, instead of a peddling and pettifogging, view of morality. Instead of merely stringing authorities together like Lodge, he uses authority indeed, but abuses it not; and while not neglecting form he does not give exclusive attention to it.
His main object, indeed (though he does not know it), is the defence, not so much of Poetry as of Romance. He follows the ancients in extending the former term to any prose fiction: but it is quite evident that he would have, in his _mimesis_, a quality of imagination which Aristotle nowhere insists upon, and which is in the best sense Romantic. And of this poetry, or romance, he makes one of the loftiest conceptions possible. All the hyperboles of philosophers or of poets, on order, justice, harmony, and the like, are heaped upon Poetry herself, and all the Platonic objections to her are retorted or denied.[243]
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Footnote 243:
Our two chief English-writing authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr Spingarn, are at odds as to Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italians. He quotes them but sparingly—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, among the older writers, Fracastoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of the moderns—and Mr Symonds thought that he owed them little or nothing. Mr Spingarn, on the other hand, represents him as following them all in general, and Minturno in particular. As usual, it is a case of the gold and silver shield. My own reading of the Italian writers of 1530-80 leaves me in no doubt that Sidney knew them, or some of them, pretty well. But his _attitude_ is very different from theirs as a whole, and already significant of some specially English characteristics in criticism.
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It has been said that there is no direct reference to Gosson in the _Apology_, though the indirect references are fairly clear. [Sidenote: _Abstract of it._] Sidney begins (in the orthodox Platonic or Ciceronian manner) somewhat off his subject, by telling how the right virtuous Edward Wotton, and he himself, once at the Emperor’s Court learnt horsemanship of John Pietro Pugliano, the Imperial Equerry, and recounting with pleasant irony some magnifying of his office by that officer. Whence, by an equally pleasant rhetorical turn, he slips into a defence of _his_ office—his “unelected vocation” of poet. Were not the earliest and greatest authors of all countries, Musæus, Homer, Hesiod, in Greece (not to mention Orpheus and Linus), Livius Andronicus and Ennius among the Romans, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italy, Chaucer and Gower for “our English”—were they not all poets? Even the philosophers in Greece used poetry, and Plato himself is a poet almost against his will. Herodotus called his nine books after the Muses; and he and all historians have stolen or usurped things of poetry. Wales, Ireland, “the most barbarous and simple Indians,” are cited. Nay, further, did not the Romans call a poet _vates_, a “prophet”? and, by presumption, may we not call David’s psalms a divine poem? Whatever some may think,[244] it is no profanation to do so. For what is a poet? What do we mean by adopting that Greek title for him? We mean that he is a _maker_. All other arts and sciences limit themselves to nature; the poet alone transcends it, improves it, makes, nay, brings it (“let it not be deemed too saucy a comparison”) in some sort into competition with the Creator Himself whom he imitates.
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Footnote 244:
Savonarola, _v. sup._, p. 20.
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The kinds of this imitation are then surveyed—“Divine,” “Philosophical,” and that of the third or right sort, who only imitate to invent and improve, which neither divine nor philosophic poets can do. These classes are subdivided according to their matter—heroic, tragic, comic, &c.—or according to the sorts of verses they liked best to write in, “for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in that numerous kind of writing which is called verse—indeed but apparelled, verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry.” And again, “it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet.” Xenophon and Heliodorus were both poets in prose.
Now let us “weigh this latter part of poetry first by works and then by parts,” having regard always to the “Architectonice or mistress-knowledge,” the knowledge of a man’s self, ethically and politically. Philosophy, history, law, &c., are then “weighed” against poetry at some length: and the judgment of Aristotle that Poetry is _philosophoteron_ and _spoudaioteron_ than history, is affirmed chiefly on the odd ground of poetical justice,—the right always triumphing in poetry though not in fact. Instances of the moral and political uses of poetry follow. Then for the parts. Pastoral, comedy, tragedy, &c., are by turns surveyed and defended; and it is in the eulogy of lyric that the famous sentence about _Chevy Chase_[245] occurs. After this, and after a stately vindication of Poetry’s right to the laurel, he turns to the objections of the objectors. Although repeating the declaration that “rhyming and versing make not poetry,” he argues that if they _were_ inseparable,[246] verse is the most excellent kind of writing, far better than prose. As to the abuses of poetry, they are but abuses, and do not take away the use, as is proved by a great number of stock examples.
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Footnote 245:
“I must confess my own barbarousness: I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.”
Footnote 246:
“As indeed it seemeth Scaliger judgeth.”
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Why, then, has England grown so hard a stepmother to poets? They are bad enough as a rule, no doubt; though Chaucer did excellently considering his time. The _Mirror for Magistrates_ is good; so is Surrey; and _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ “hath much poetry,” though “the old rustic language” is bad, since neither Theocritus, nor Virgil, nor Sannazar has it. And what is the reason of our inferiority? The neglect of rule. From this point onwards Sidney certainly “exposes his legs to the arrows” of those who ignore the just historic estimate. He pours ridicule on all our tragedies except _Gorboduc_, and still more on our mongrel tragi-comedies. We must follow the Unities, which, as it is, are neglected even in _Gorboduc_, “how much more in all the rest?” Whence he proceeds (unconscious how cool the _reductio ad absurdum_ will leave us) to the famous ridicule of “Asia on the one side and Africa on the other,” of “three ladies walking to gather flowers,” and how the same place which was a garden becomes a rock, and then a cave with a monster, and then a battlefield with two armies—of the course of two lives in two hours’ space, &c. And he concludes with some remarks on versification, which we should gladly have seen worked out. For he does not now seem to be in that antagonistic mood towards rhyme which Spenser’s letters to Harvey discover in him. On the contrary, he admits _two_ styles, ancient and modern, the former depending on quantity, the latter depending on “number,” accent, and rhyme. He indeed thinks English fit for both sorts, and denies “neither sweetness nor majesty” to rhyme, but is, like almost all his contemporaries and followers (except Gascoigne partially), in a fog as to “numbers” and cæsura. The actual end comes a very little abruptly by an exhortation of some length, half humorous, half serious, to all and sundry, to be “no more to jest at the reverent title of a rhymer.”
The importance of this manifesto, both symptomatically and typically, can hardly be exaggerated. [Sidenote: _Its minor shortcomings_] It exposes the temper of the generation which actually produced the first-fruits of the greatest Elizabethan poetry; it served as a stimulant and encouragement to all the successive generations of the great age. That Sidney makes mistakes both in gross and detail—that he even makes some rather serious mistakes from the mere “point of view of the examiner”—is of course undeniable. He has a good deal of the merely traditional mode of Renaissance respect for classical—and for some modern—authority. That, for instance, there is a good deal to be said, and that not only from the point of view of Ben Jonson, against Spenser’s half-archaic half-rustic dialect in the _Calendar_, few would refuse to grant. But Theocritus _did_ use dialect: it would not in the least matter whether either he or Virgil did not; and if it did, what has the modern and partly vernacular name of Sannazar to do with the matter? It can only be replied that Spenser, by permitting “E. K.'s” annotation, did much to invite this sort of criticism; and that Englishmen’s reluctance to rely on the inherent powers of the English language was partly justified (for hardly any dead poet but Chaucer and no dead prose-writers but Malory and perhaps Berners deserved the title of “great”), partly came from very pardonable ignorance.
It has been already observed that Sidney is by no means peremptory about the “new versifying”; and in particular has absolutely none of the craze against rhyme as rhyme which animated persons of every degree of ability, from Milton to Stanyhurst, during more than a century. His remarks on versification are, however, too scanty to need much comment.
There remain his two major heresies, the declaration that verse is not inseparable from poetry, and the denunciation of tragi-comedy. [Sidenote: _and major heresies._] In both the authority of the ancients must again bear good part of the blame, but in both he has additional excuses. As to the “pestilent heresy of prose poetry,” he is at least not unwilling to argue on the hypothesis that verse _were_ necessary to poetry, though he does not think it is. He is quite sure that verse is anyhow a nobler medium than prose. As for the plays, there is still more excuse for him. His classical authorities were quite clear on the point; and as yet there was nothing to be quoted on the other side—at least in English. Spanish had indeed already made the experiment of tragi-comic and anti-unitarian treatment; but I do not think any of the best Spanish examples had yet appeared, and there is great difference between the two theatres. In English itself not one single great or even good play certainly existed on the model at Sidney’s death; and, from what we have of what did exist, we can judge how the rough verse, the clumsy construction, or rather absence of construction, the entire absence of clear character-projection, and the higgledy-piggledy of huddled horrors and horseplay, must have shocked a taste delicate in itself and nursed upon classical and Italian literature. [Sidenote: _The excuses of both,_] And it is noteworthy that even _Gorboduc_, with all its regularity and “Senecation,” does not bribe Sidney to overlook at least some of its defects. He is here, as elsewhere,—as indeed throughout,—neither blind nor bigoted. He is only in the position of a man very imperfectly supplied with actual experiments and observations, confronted with a stage of creative production but just improving from a very bad state, and relying on old and approved methods as against new ones which had as yet had no success.
And had his mistakes been thrice what they are, the tone and temper of his tractate would make us forgive them three times over. [Sidenote: _and their ample compensation._] That “moving of his heart as with a trumpet” communicates itself to his reader even now, and shows us the motion in the heart of the nation at large that was giving us the _Faerie Queene_, that was to give us _Hamlet_ and _As You Like It_. What though the illustrations sometimes make us smile? that the praise of the moral and political effects of poetry may sometimes turn the smile into a laugh or a sigh? Poetry after all, like all other human things, has a body and a soul. The body must be fashioned by art—perhaps the body _is_ art; but the soul is something else. The best poetry will not come without careful consideration of form and subject, of kind and style; but it will not necessarily come with this consideration. There must be the inspiration, the enthusiasm, the _afflatus_, the glow; and they are here in Sidney’s tractate. Nor must we fail to draw attention, once more, to the difference of the English critical spirit here shown as regards both Italian and French.
In the decade which followed,[247] three notable books of English criticism appeared, none of them exhibiting Sidney’s _afflatus_, but all showing the interest felt in the subject, and one exceeding in method, and at least attempted range, anything that English had known, or was to know, for more than a century. [Sidenote: _King James’s_ Reulis and Cautelis.] These were King James the First’s (as yet only “the Sixth’s”) _Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie_, 1585; William Webbe’s _Discourse of English Poesie_, next year; and the anonymous _Arte of English Poesie_, which appeared in 1589, and which (on rather weak evidence, but with no counter-claimant) is usually attributed to George Puttenham.[248]
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Footnote 247:
It may be desirable to note that Sidney’s book, though very well known, as was the wont then, in MS., to all who cared to know, was never printed till 1595, nearly ten years after the author’s death.
Footnote 248:
All three are included in Mr. Arber’s _Reprints_, where the desirable, or desired, biographical and bibliographical apparatus will be duly found.
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The first is the slightest; but it is interesting for more than its authorship. It was attached to James’s _Essays of a Prentice in the Divine Art_, of which it gives some rules: it shows that Buchanan had taken pains with his pupil; and it also exhibits that slightly scholastic and “peddling,” but by no means unreal, shrewdness and acumen which distinguished the British Solomon in his happier moments. It is characteristic that James is not in the least afraid of the charge of attending to mint, anise, and cumin. He plunges without any rhetorical exordium into what he calls “just colours”—do not rhyme on the same syllable, see that your rhyme is on accented syllables only, do not let your first or last word exceed two or three syllables at most. This dread of polysyllables, so curious to us, was very common at the time: it was one of the things from which Shakespeare’s silent sovereignty delivered us by such touches of spell-dissolving mastery as
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”
Then he passes to feet, of which he practically allows only the iamb; while he very oddly gives the word “foot” to the syllable, not the combination of syllables; and lays down the entirely arbitrary rule that the number of “feet”—_i.e._, syllables—must be even, not odd. There is to be a sharp section (“cæsura”) in the middle of every line, long or short; and the difference of long, short, and “indifferent” (common) feet or syllables is dwelt upon, with its influence of “flowing,” as the King calls rhythm. Cautions on diction follow, and some against commonplaces, which look as if the royal prentice had read Gascoigne, a suggestion confirmed elsewhere.[249] Invention is briefly touched; and the tract finishes with a short account of the kinds of verse: “rhyme”—_i.e._, the heroic couplet, “quhilk servis onely for lang historieis”; a heroical stanza of nine lines, rhymed _aabaabbab_; _ottava rima_, which he calls “ballat royal”; rhyme royal, which he calls “Troilus verse”; “rouncifals,” or “tumbling verse” (doggerel alliterative, with bob and wheel); sonnets; “common” verse (octosyllable couplets); “all kinds of broken or cuttit verse,” &c.
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Footnote 249:
It is, however, excessive to represent James as a mere copyist of Gascoigne.
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The tract is, as has been said, interesting, because it is an honest, and by no means unintelligent, attempt to make an English prosody, with special reference to a dialect which had done great things in its short day, but which had been specially affected—not to say specially disorganised—by the revived and bastard alliteration of the fifteenth century. Probably it was the study of French (where the iamb had long been the only foot) which, quite as much as mere following of Gascoigne, induced James to extend that crippling limitation to English; and the same influence may be seen in his insistence on the hard-and-fast section. These things (the latter of which at least rather endeared him to Dr Guest)[250] are, of course, quite wrong; but they express the genuine and creditable desire of the time to impose some order on the shambling doggerel of the generation or two immediately preceding. We find the same tendency even in Spenser, as far as rigid dissyllabic feet and sections are concerned; and it is certainly no shame for the Royal prentice to follow, though unknowing, the master and king of English poetry at the time when he wrote.
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Footnote 250:
Who also caught at James’s “tumbling verse” as a convenient stigmatisation for the true English equivalenced liberty.
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One would not, however, in any case have expected from James evidence of the root of the matter in poetry. [Sidenote: _Webbe’s_ Discourse.] There is more of this root, though less scholarship and also more “craze,” in the obscure William Webbe, of whom we know practically nothing except that he was a Cambridge man, a friend of Robert Wilmot (the author of _Tancred and Gismund_) and private tutor to the sons of Edward Sulyard of Flemyngs, an Essex squire. The young Sulyards must have received some rather dubious instruction in the classics, for Webbe, in his inevitable classical exordium, thinks that Pindar was older than Homer, and that Horace came after—apparently a good while after—Ovid, and about the same time as Juvenal and Persius. He was, however, really and deeply interested in English verse; and his enthusiasm for Spenser—“the new poet,” “our late famous poet,” “the mightiest English poet that ever lived,” is, if not in every case quite according to knowledge, absolutely right on the whole, and very pleasant and refreshing to read. It is, indeed, the first thing of the kind that we meet with in English; for the frequent earlier praises of Chaucer are almost always long after date, always uncritical, and for the most part[251] much rather expressions of a conventional tradition than of the writer’s deliberate preference.
It was Webbe’s misfortune, rather than his fault, that, like his idol (but without that idol’s resipiscence), and, like most loyal Cambridge men, with the examples of Watson, Ascham, and Drant before them, he was bitten with “the new versifying.” [Sidenote: _Slight in knowledge,_] It was rather his fault than his misfortune that he seems to have taken very little pains to acquaint himself with the actual performance of English poetry. Even of Gower he speaks as though he only knew him through the references of Chaucer and others: though three editions of the _Confessio_—Caxton’s one and Berthelette’s two—were in print in his time. His notice of Chaucer himself is curiously vague, and almost limited to his powers as a satirist, while he has, what must seem to most judges,[252] the astonishing idea of discovering “good proportion of verse and meetly current style” in Lydgate, though he reproves him for dealing with “superstitious and odd matters.” That he thinks _Piers Plowman_ later than Lydgate is unlucky, but not quite criminal. He had evidently read it—indeed the book, from its kinship in parts to the Protestant, not to say the Puritan, spirit, appealed to Elizabethan tastes, and Crowley had already printed two editions of it, Rogers a third. But he makes upon it the extraordinary remark, “The first I have seen that observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme.” What Webbe here means by “quantity,” or whether he had any clear deliberate meaning at all, it is impossible to see: it is needless to say that Langland is absolutely non-quantitative in the ordinary sense, that if “quantity” means number of syllables he observes none, and that he can be scanned only on the alliterative-accentual system. For Gascoigne Webbe relies on “E. K.”; brackets “the divers works of the old Earl of Surrey” with a dozen others; is copious on Phaer, Golding, &c., and mentions George Whetstone and Anthony Munday in words which would be adequate for Sackville (who is not named), and hardly too low for Spenser; while Gabriel Harvey is deliberately ranked with Spenser himself. Yet these things, rightly valued, are not great shame to Webbe. If he borrows from “E. K.” some scorn of the “ragged rout of rakehell rhymers,” and adds more of his own, he specifies nobody; and his depreciation is only the defect which almost necessarily accompanies the quality of his enthusiasm.
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Footnote 251:
Occleve—no genius, but a true man enough—deserves exception perhaps best.
Footnote 252:
The Germans—in this, as in other matters, more hopelessly to seek in English now than, _teste_ Porson, they were a century ago in Greek—have followed Webbe, as indeed Warton had strangely done; and of course some Englishmen have followed the Germans. Lydgate himself knew better, though some of the shorter poems attributed to him are metrically, as well as in other ways, not contemptible.
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His piece, though not long, is longer than those of Gascoigne, Sidney, and King James. [Sidenote: _but enthusiastic,_] After a dedication (not more than excusably laudatory) to his patron Sulyard, there is a curious preface to “The Noble Poets of England,” who, if they had been inclined to be censorious, might have replied that Master Webbe, while complimenting them, went about to show that the objects of his compliment did not exist. “It is,” he says, “to be wondered of all, and is lamented of many, that, while all other studies are used eagerly, only Poetry has found fewest friends to amend it.” We have “as sharp and quick wits” in England as ever were Greeks and Romans: our tongue is neither coarse nor harsh, as she has already shown. All that is wanted is “some perfect platform or Prosodia of versifying”: either in imitation of Greeks and Latins, or with necessary alterations. So, if the Noble Poets would “look so low from their divine cogitations”, and “run over the simple censure” of Master Webbe’s “weak brain,” something might, perhaps, be done.
[Sidenote: _if uncritical,_]
The treatise itself begins with the usual etymological definition of poetry, as “making,” and the usual comments on the word “Vates”; but almost immediately digresses into praise of our late famous English poet who wrote the _Shepherd’s Calendar_ and a wish to see his “English Poet” (mentioned by E. K.), which, alas! none of us have ever seen. This is succeeded, first by the classical and then by the English historical sketches, which have been commented upon. It ends with fresh laudation of Spenser.
Webbe then turns to the general consideration of poetry (especially from the allegoric-didactic point of view), subject, kinds, &c.; and it is to be observed that, though he several times cites Aristotle, he leans much more on Horace, and on Elyot’s translations from him and other Latins. He then proceeds to a rather unnecessarily elaborate study of the _Æneid_, with large citations both from the original and from Phaer’s translation, after which he returns once more to Spenser, and holds him up as at least the equal of Virgil and Theocritus. Indeed the _Calendar_ is practically his theme all through, though he diverges from and embroiders upon it. Then, after glancing amiably enough at Tusser, and mentioning a translation of his own of the _Georgics_, which has got into the hands of some piratical publisher, he attacks the great rhyme-question, to which he has, from the Preface onwards, more than once alluded. Much of what he says is borrowed, or a little advanced, from Ascham; but Webbe is less certain about the matter than his master, and again diverges into a consideration of divers English metres, always illustrated, where possible, from the _Calendar_. Still harking back again, he decides that “the true kind of versifying” might have been effected in English: though (as Campion, with better wits, did after him) he questions whether some alteration of the actual Greek and Latin forms is not required. He gives a list of classical feet (fairly correct, except that he makes the odd confusion of a trochee and a tribrach), and discusses the liberties which must be taken with English to adjust it to some of them. Elegiacs, he thinks, will not do: Hexameters and Sapphics go best. And, to prove this, he is rash enough to give versions of his own, in the former metre, of Virgil’s first and second eclogues, in the latter of Spenser’s beautiful
“Ye dainty nymphs that in this blessed brook.”
It is enough to say that he succeeds in stripping all three of every rag of poetry. A translation of Fabricius’[253] prose syllabus of Horace’s rules, gathered not merely out of the _Ep. ad Pisones_ but elsewhere, and an “epilogue,” modest as to himself, sanguine as to what will happen when “the rabble of bald rhymes is turned to famous works,” concludes the piece.
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Footnote 253:
_V. infra_, p. 354.
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[Sidenote: _in appreciation._]
On the whole, to use the hackneyed old phrase once more, we could have better spared a better critic than Webbe, who gives us—in a fashion invaluable to map-makers of the early exploration of English criticism—the workings of a mind furnished with no original genius for poetry, and not much for literature, not very extensively or accurately erudite, but intensely _interested_ in matters literary, and especially in matters poetical, generously enthusiastic for such good things as were presented to it, not without some mother-wit even in its crazes, and encouraged in those crazes not, as in Harvey’s case, by vanity, pedantry, and bad taste, but by its very love of letters. Average dispositions of this kind were, as a rule, diverted either into active life—very much for the good of the nation—or—not at all for its good—into the acrid disputes of hot-gospelling and Puritanism. Webbe, to the best of his modest powers, was a devotee of literature: for which let him have due honour.
Puttenham—or whosoever else it was, if it was not Puttenham[254]—has some points of advantage, and one great one of disadvantage, in comparison with Webbe. [Sidenote: _Puttenham’s (?)_ Art of English Poesie.] In poetical faculty there is very little to choose between them—the abundant specimens of his own powers, which the author or _The Art of English Poesie_ gives (and which are eked out by a late copy of one of the works referred to, _Partheniades_), deserve the gibes they receive in one of our scanty early notices of the book, that by Sir John Harington (_v. infra_). On the other hand, Puttenham has very little of that engaging enthusiasm which atones for so much in his contemporary. But this very want of enthusiasm somewhat prepares us for, though it need not necessarily accompany, merits which we do not find in Webbe, considered as a critic. _The Art of English Poesy_, which, as has been said, appeared in 1589, three years later than Webbe’s, but which, from some allusions, may have been written, or at least begun, before it, and which, from other allusions, must have been the work of a man well advanced in middle life, is methodically composed, very capable in range and plan, and supported with a by no means contemptible erudition, and no inconsiderable supply of judgment and common-sense. It was unfortunate for Puttenham that he was just a little too old: that having been—as from a fairly precise statement of his he must have been—born _cir._ 1530-35, he belonged to the early and uncertain generation of Elizabethan men of letters, the Googes and Turbervilles, and Gascoignes, not to the generation of Sidney and Spenser, much less to that of Shakespeare and Jonson. But what he had he gave: and it is far from valueless.
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Footnote 254:
The whole of the documents in the case will be found, clearly put, in Mr Arber’s _Introduction_. The first attribution is in Bolton (_v. infra_) some fifteen years later than the date of the book, and not quite positive (“as the Fame is”). But there is no other claimant who has anything to put in: and the almost diseased aversion of “persons of quality” (Puttenham was possibly a nephew of Sir Thomas Elyot’s, and a Gentleman-Pensioner of the Queen’s) to avowing authorship is well known.
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The book is “to-deled” (as the author of the _Ancren Riwle_ would say) into three books—“Of Poets and Poesie,” “Of Proportion,” and “Of Ornament.” [Sidenote: _Its erudition._] It begins, as usual, with observations on the words poet and maker, references to the ancients, &c.; but this exordium, which is fitly written in a plain but useful and agreeable style, is commendably short. The writer lays it down, with reasons, that there may be an Art of English as of Latin and Greek poetry; but cannot refrain from the same sort of “writing at large” as to poets being the first philosophers, &c., which we have so often seen.[255] Indeed we must lay our account with the almost certain fact that all writers of this period had seen Sidney’s _Defence_ at least in MS. or had heard of it. He comes closer to business with his remarks on the irreption of rhyme into Greek and Latin poetry; and shows a better knowledge of leonine and other mediæval Latin verse, not merely than Webbe, but even than Ascham. A very long section then deals with the question—all-interesting to a man of the Renaissance—in what reputation poets were with princes of old, and how they be now contemptible (wherein Puttenham shows a rather remarkable acquaintance with modern European literature), and then turns to the subject or matter of poesy and the forms thereof, handling the latter at great length, and with a fair sprinkle of literary anecdote. At last he comes to _English_ poetry; and though, as we might expect, he does not go behind the late fourteenth century, he shows rather more knowledge than Webbe and (not without slips here and elsewhere) far more comparative judgment. It must, however, be admitted that, engaging as is his description of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate,” he does not show to advantage in the patronising glance in passing at “that other gentleman who wrote the late _Shepherd’s Calendar_,” contrasted with the description of the Queen our Sovereign lady, “whose Muse easily surmounteth all the rest in any kind on which it may please her Majesty to employ her pen.” But here the allowance comes in: the stoutest Tory of later days can never wholly share, though he may remotely comprehend, the curious mixture of religious, romantic, patriotic, amatory, and interested feelings with which the men of the sixteenth century wrote about Gloriana.
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Footnote 255:
Harington, a person of humour, and a typical Englishman, perstringes this as well as other things in his fling at the _Art_.
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The second book deals with Proportion, in which word Puttenham includes almost everything belonging to Prosody in its widest sense—staff, stanza, measure, metres, and feet, “cæsure,” rhyme, accent, cadence, situation (by which he means the arrangement of the rhymes), and proportion in figure. [Sidenote: _Systematic arrangement_] On most of these heads he speaks more or less in accordance with his fellows (though he very noticeably abstains from extreme commendation or condemnation of rhyme), save that, for the moment, he seems to neglect the “new versifying.” It is, however, but for a moment. After his chapters on “proportion” in figure (the fanciful egg, wheel, lozenge, &c., which he himself argues for, and which were to make critics of the Addisonian type half-angry and half-sad), he deals with the subject.
About this “new versifying” he is evidently in two minds. He had glanced at it before (and refers to the glance now)[256] as “a nice and scholastic curiosity.” However, “for the information of our young makers, and pleasure to those who be delighted in novelty, _and to the intent that we may not seem by ignorance or oversight to omit_,”[257] he “will now deal with it.” Which he does at great length; and, at any rate sometimes, with a clearer perception of the prosodic values than any other, even Spenser, had yet shown. But he does not seem quite at home in the matter, and glides off to a discussion of feet—classical feet—in the usual rhymed English verse.
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Footnote 256:
Here as elsewhere we may note evidences of possible revision in the book. That there was some such revision is certain; for instance, Ben Jonson’s copy (the existence of which is not uninteresting) contains a large cancel of four leaves, not found in other copies known. For this and other points of the same kind, see Mr Arber’s edition.
Footnote 257:
“Reviewing” was as yet in its infancy—a curiously lively one though, with Nash and others coming on. Puttenham seems to have understood its little ways rather well.
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The third book is longer than the first and second put together, and is evidently that in which the author himself took most pleasure. [Sidenote: _and exuberant indulgence in Figures._] It is called “Of Ornament,” but practically deals with the whole question of _lexis_ or style, so that it is at least common to Rhetoric and Poetics. In one respect, too, it belongs more specially to the former, in that it contains the most elaborate treatment of rhetorical figures to be found, up to its time, in English literature. Full eighty pages are occupied with the catalogue of these “Figures Auricular” wherein Puttenham (sometimes rather badly served by his pen or his printer) ransacks the Greek rhetoricians, and compiles a list (with explanations and examples) of over one hundred and twenty. It is preceded and followed by more general remarks, of which some account must be given.
Beginning with an exordial defence of ornament in general, Puttenham proceeds to argue that set speeches, as in Parliament, not merely may but ought to be couched in something more than a conversational style. This added grace must be given by (1) Language, (2) Style, (3) Figures. On diction he has remarks both shrewd and interesting, strongly commending the language of the Court and of the best citizens, not provincial speech, or that of seaports, or of universities, or in other ways merely technical. “The usual speech of the Court and that of London and the shires lying about London, within ten miles and not much above” is his norm. There is also a noteworthy and very early reference to English dictionaries, and a cautious section on neologisms introduced from other tongues to fill wants. Style he will have reached by “a constant and continual tenor of writing,” and gives the usual subdivision of high, low, and middle. And so to his Figures.
The details and illustrations of the long catalogue of these invite comment, but we must abstain therefrom. When the list is finished, Puttenham returns to his generalities with a discussion of the main principle of ornament, which he calls _Decorum_ or “Decency,” dividing and illustrating the kinds of it into choice of subject, diction, delivery, and other things, not without good craftsmanship, and with a profusion of anecdotes chiefly of the Helotry kind. He then (rather oddly, but not out of keeping with his classical models) has a chapter of decorum in behaviour, turns to the necessity of concealing art, and ends with a highly flattering conclusion to the Queen.
We have yet to mention some minorities; less briefly, the two champions—Campion and Daniel, who brought the question of “Rhyme _v._ 'Verse'” to final arbitrament of battle; the great name (not so great here as elsewhere) of Francis Bacon; and lastly, one who, if representative of a further stage, is far the greatest of Elizabethan critics, and perhaps the only English critic who deserves the adjective great before Dryden.
The earliest (1591) of these is Sir John Harington, in the prefatory matter[258] of his translation of the _Orlando_, which contains the gibe at Puttenham above referred to. [Sidenote: _Minors: Harington, Meres, Webster, Bolton, &c._] It is otherwise much indebted to Sidney, from whom, however, Harington differs in allowing more scope to allegorical interpretation. Then comes Francis Meres, whose _Palladis Tamia_[259] (1598) is to be eternally mentioned with gratitude, because it gives us our one real document about the order of Shakespeare’s plays, but is quite childish in the critical characterisation which it not uninterestingly attempts. Webster’s equally famous, and universally known, epitheting of the work of Shakespeare and others in the Preface to _The White Devil_ (1612) adds yet another instance of the short sight of contemporaries; but tempting as it may be to comment on these, it would not become a Historian of Criticism to do so in this context. Sir W. Vaughan in _The Golden Grove_ (1600) had earlier dealt, and Bolton[260] in his _Hypercritica_ (1616), and Peacham in his _Complete Gentleman_ (1622), were later to deal, with Poetry, but in terms adding nothing to, and probably borrowed from, the utterances of Sidney, Webbe, and Puttenham. Their contributions are “sma’ sums,” as Bailie Nicol Jarvie says, and we must neglect them.
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Footnote 258:
Reprinted by Haslewood. Whetstone’s Preface to _Promos and Cassandra_ (1578) and A. Fraunce’s _Arcadian Rhetoric_ (1588) are earlier still. The former anticipates Sidney in objecting to the irregularity of English plays: the latter is a strong partisan of classical metres, his practice in which is sufficiently roughly treated by Ben Jonson in his _Conversations_, _v. infra_, p. 199.
Footnote 259:
Reprinted (in its critical section) by Mr Arber, _English Garner_, ii. 94 _sq._
Footnote 260:
Bolton’s criticism of his contemporaries is extracted in Warton (iv. 204 _sq._, ed. Hazlitt). The writer, who is dealing with History, and speaking directly of language, disallows most of Spenser (excepting the _Hymns_) and all Chaucer, Lydgate, Langland, and Skelton, can “endure” Gascoigne, praises Elizabeth and James (of course), Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Constable, Southwell, Sackville, Surrey, Wyatt, Raleigh, Donne, and Greville, but gives the palm for “vital, judicious, and practicable” language to Jonson.
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The most interesting literary result of the “new versifying” craze is to be found, without doubt, in the _Observations in the Art of English Poesy_ of Thomas Campion[261] and the subsequent _Defence of Rhyme_ of Samuel Daniel. [Sidenote: _Campion and his_ Observations.] The former was issued in 1602, and the latter still later:—that is to say more than twenty years after Spenser’s and Harvey’s letters, and more than thirty after the appearance—let alone the writing—of Ascham’s _Schoolmaster_. In the interval the true system of English prosody had put itself practically beyond all real danger; but the critical craze had never received its quietus. Nay, it survived to animate Milton: and there are persons whom we could only name for the sake of honour, and who do not seem to see that it is dead even yet. Both the writers mentioned were true poets: and the curious thing is that the more exquisitely romantic poet of the two was the partisan of classical prosody. But Campion—who dedicated his book to Lord Buckhurst, the _doyen_ (except poor old Churchyard) of English poetry at the time, and one whose few but noble exercises in it need hardly vail their crest to any contemporary poetry but Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s—was far too wise a man, as well as far too good a poet, to champion any longer the break-neck and break-jaw hexameters of Harvey and Stanyhurst. We have seen that almost from the first there had been questions of heart among the partisans of the New Versifying. That English is not tolerant of dactyls—that the dactyl, do what you will, in English, will tilt itself into an anapæst with an anacrusis—is a truth which no impartial student of metre with an ear, and with an eye to cover the history of English poetry, can deny. Some even of these pioneers had seen this: Campion has the boldness to declare it in the words, “It [the dactylic hexameter] is an attempt altogether against the nature of our language.” But though he was bold so far, he was not quite bold enough. He could not surmount the queer Renaissance objection to rhyme. That all the arguments against the “barbarism” of this tell equally against Christianity, chivalry, the English constitution, the existence of America, gunpowder, glass-windows, coal-fires, and a very large number of other institutions of some usefulness, never seems to have occurred to any of these good folk. But no man can escape his time. Campion, not noticing, or not choosing to notice, the intensely English quality of the anapæst, limits, or almost limits, our verse to iambs and trochees. It was possible for him—though it still appears to be difficult for some—to recognise the tribrach, the mere suggestion of which in English verse threw Dr Guest into a paroxysm of “!!!!’s,” but which exists as certainly as does the iamb itself. On the contrary he shows himself in advance of Guest, and of most behind Guest to his own time, by admitting tribrachs in the third and fifth places. Nay, he even sees that a trochee may take the place of an iamb (Milton’s probably borrowed secret) in the first place, though his unerring ear (I think there is no verse of Campion’s that is unmusical) insists on some other foot than an iamb following—otherwise, he says, “it would too much _drink up_ the verse.” But, on the whole, he sets himself to work, a self-condemned drudge, to make iambic and trochaic verses without rhyme. And on these two, with certain licences, he arranges schemes of English elegiacs, anacreontics, and the rest. Some of the examples of these are charming poems, notably the famous “_Rose-Cheeked Laura_,” and the beautiful “_Constant to None_,” while Campion’s subsequent remarks on English quantity are among the acutest on the subject. But the whole thing has on it the curse of “flying in the face of nature.” You have only to take one of Campion’s own poems (written mostly _after_ the _Observations_) in natural rhyme, and the difference will be seen at once. It simply comes to this—that the good rhymeless poems would be infinitely better with rhyme, and that the bad ones, while they might sometimes be absolutely saved by the despised invention of Huns and Vandals, are always made worse by its absence.
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Footnote 261:
Ed. Bullen, _Works of Dr Thomas Campion_, London, 1889.
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In the preface of Daniel’s answering _Defence of Rhyme to all the worthy lovers and learned professors_ [_thereof_] _within His Majesty’s dominions_,[262] he says that he wrote it “about a year since,” upon the “great reproach” given by Campion, and some give it the date of 1603 or even 1602; but Dr Grosart’s reprint is dated five years later. [Sidenote: _Daniel and his_ Defence of Rhyme.] The learned gentleman to whom it was specially written was no less a person than William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom some of us (acknowledging that the matter is no matter) do not yet give up as “Mr W. H.” The advocate affects, with fair rhetorical excuse (though of course he must have known that the craze was nearly half a century old, and had at least not been discouraged by his patron’s uncle nearly a generation before), to regard the attack on rhyming as something new, as merely concerned with the “measures” of Campion. Daniel, always a gentleman, deals handsomely with his antagonist, whom he does not name, but describes as “this detractor whose commendable rhymes, albeit now an enemy to rhyme, have given heretofore to the world the best notice of his worth,” and as a man “of fair parts and good reputation.” And having put himself on the best ground, in this way, from the point of view of morals and courtesy, he does the same in matter of argument by refusing to attack Campion’s “numbers” in themselves (“We could,” he says well, “have allowed of his numbers, had he not graced his rhymes”), and by seizing the unassailable position given by custom and nature—“Custom that is before all law; Nature that is above all art.” In fact, not Jonson himself, and certainly none else before Jonson, has comprehended, or at least put, the truth of the matter as Daniel puts it, that arbitrary laws imposed on the poetry of any nation are absurd—that the verse of a language is such as best consorts with the nature of that language. This seems a truism enough perhaps; but it may be very much doubted whether all critics recognise it, and its consequences, even at the present day. And it is certain that we may search other early English critics in vain for a frank recognition of it. With an equally bold and sure foot he strides over the silly stuff about “invention of barbarous ages” and the like. Whatever its origin (and about this he shows a wise carelessness), it is “an excellence added to this work of measure and harmony, far happier than any proportion quantity could ever show.” It “gives to the ear an echo of a delightful report,” and to the memory “a deeper impression of what is delivered.” He is less original (as well as, some may think, less happy) in distinguishing the accent of English from the quantity of the classical tongues; but the classicisers before Campion, if not Campion himself, had made such a mess of quantity, and had played such havoc with accent, that he may well be excused. The universality of rhyme is urged, and once more says Daniel (with that happy audacity in the contemning of vain things which belongs to the born exploders of crazes), “If the barbarian likes it, it is because it sways the affections of the barbarian; if civil nations practise it, it works upon their hearts; if all, then it has a power in nature upon all.” But it will be said, “Ill customs are to be left.” No doubt: but the question is begged. Who made _this_ custom “ill”? Rhyme aims at pleasing—and it pleases. Suffer then the world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes, for all the tyrannical rules of rhetoric cannot make it otherwise. Why are we to be a mere _servum pecus_, only to imitate the Greeks and Latins? Their way was natural to them: let ours be so to us. “Why should laboursome curiosity still lay affliction on our best delights?” Moreover, to a spirit whom nature hath “fitted for that mystery,” rhyme is no impediment, “but rather giveth wings to mount.” The necessary historical survey follows, with a surprising and very welcome justification of the Middle Ages against both Classics and Renaissance. “Let us,” says this true Daniel come to judgment, “go not further, but look upon the wonderful architecture of the State of England, and see whether they were unlearned times that could give it such a form?” And if politically, why not poetically? Some acute and, in the other sense, rather sharp criticism of Campion’s details follows, with a few apologetic remarks for mixture of masculine and feminine rhymes on his own part: and the whole concludes in an admirable peroration with a great end-note to it. Not easily shall we find, either in Elizabethan times or in any other, a happier combination of solid good sense with eager poetic sentiment, of sound scholarship with wide-glancing intelligence, than in this little tractate of some thirty or forty ordinary pages, which dispelled the delusions of two generations, and made the poetical fortune of England sure.
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Footnote 262:
Chalmers’s _Poets_, iii. 551-560; Grosart’s _Works of Samuel Daniel_, iv. 29-67.
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The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism have sometimes been spoken of with reverence: and it is not uncommon to find, amid the scanty classics of the subject, which until recently have been recommended to the notice of inquirers, not merely a place, but a place of very high honour, assigned to _The Advancement of Learning_. [Sidenote: _Bacon._] Actual, unprejudiced, and to some extent expert, reference to the works, however, will not find very much to justify this estimate: and, indeed, a little thought, assisted by very moderate knowledge, would suffice to make it rather surprising that Bacon should give us so much, than disappointing that he should give us little or nothing. A producer of literature who at his best has few superiors, and a user of it for purposes of quotation, who would deserve the name of genius for this use alone if he had no other title thereto—Bacon was yet by no means inclined by his main interests and objects, or by his temperament, either towards great exaltation of letters, or towards accurate and painstaking examination of them. Indeed, it is in him—almost first of all men, certainly first of all great modern men—that we find that partisan opposition between literature and science which has constantly developed since. It is true that his favourite method of examination into “forms” might seem tempting as applied to literature; and that it would, incidentally if not directly, have yielded more solid results than his Will-o'-the-wisp chase of the Form of Heat. But this very craze of his may suggest that if he had undertaken literary criticism it would have been on the old road of Kinds and Figures and Qualities, in which we could expect little but glowing rhetorical generalisation from him.
Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually have from him very different. [Sidenote: _The_ Essays.] The Essays practically give us nothing but the contents of that _Of Studies_, a piece too well known to need quotation; too much in the early pregnant style of the author to bear compression or analysis; and too general to repay it. For the critic and the man of letters generally it is, in its own phrase, to be not merely tasted, nor even swallowed, but chewed and digested; yet its teachings have nothing more to do with the critical function of “study” than with all others.
The _Advancement_[263] at least excuses the greatness thrust upon it in the estimates above referred to, not merely by the apparent necessity that the author should deal with Criticism, but by a certain appearance of his actually doing so. [Sidenote: _The_ Advancement of Learning.] Comparatively early in the First Book he tackles the attention to style which sprang up at the Renaissance, opening his discussion by the ingenious but slightly unhistorical attribution of it to Martin Luther, who was forced to awake all antiquity, and call former times to his succour, against the Bishop of Rome. Not a few names, for the best part of two centuries before the great cause of _Martinus_ v. _Papam_ was launched, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Erasmus and Reuchlin, will put in evidence before the tribunal of chronology against this singular assertion; and though the Italian Humanists of the fifteenth century might not (at least in thought) care anything for the Pope except as a source of donatives and benefices, it is certain that most of them were as constitutionally disinclined to abet Luther as they were chronologically disabled from in any way abetting him. Bacon’s argument and further survey are, however, better than this beginning. To understand the ancients (he says justly enough) it was necessary to make a careful study of their language. Further, the opposition of thought to the Schoolmen naturally brought about a recoil from the barbarisms of Scholastic style, and the anxiety to win over the general imprinted care and elegance and vigour on preaching and writing. All this, he adds as justly, turned to excess. [Sidenote: _Its denunciation of mere word-study._] Men began to “hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their words with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.” The Ciceronianism of Osorius, Sturm, “Car of Cambridge,” and even Ascham, receives more or less condemnation; and Erasmus is, of course, cited for gibes at it. On this text Bacon proceeds to enlarge in his own stately rhetoric, coolly admitting that it “is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.” But he very quickly glides off into his usual denunciations of the schoolmen. Nor have I found anything else in this First Book really germane to our purpose; for one cannot cite as such the desultory observations on patronage of literature (among other branches of learning) which fill a good part of it.
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Footnote 263:
It ought to be, but from certain signs perhaps is not, unnecessary to say that the _De Augmentis_ is itself no mere Latin version of the _Advancement_, but a large expansion of it. There seems, however, no necessity here to deal with both.
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The Second Book is somewhat more fruitful in quantity, if not very much; but the quality remains not very different. The opening “Address to the King” contains, in an interesting first draft (as we may call it), the everlasting grumble of the scientific man, that science is not sufficiently endowed, the further grumble at mere book-learning, the cry for the promotion—by putting money in its purse—of research. The Second and Third Chapters contain some plans of books drawn up in Bacon’s warm imaginative way, especially a great series of Histories, with the _History of England_ for their centre. And then we come, in the Fourth Chapter, to Poesy.
But except for Bacon’s majestic style (which, however, by accident or intention, is rather below itself here) there is absolutely nothing novel. [Sidenote: _Its view of Poetry._] The view (which, as we have seen, all the Elizabethan critics adopted, probably from the Italians)—the view is that poetry is just a part of learning licensed in imagination; a fanciful history intended to give satisfaction to the mind of man in things where history is not; something particularly prevalent and useful in barbarous ages; divisible into narrative, representative and allusive; useful now and then, but (as Aristotle would say) not a thing to take very seriously. Yet poetry, a _vinum dæmonum_ at the worst, a mere illusion anyhow, is still, even as such, a refuge from, and remedy for, sorrow and toil. Of its form, as distinguished from its matter, he says,[264] “Poetry is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present.” He attempts no defence of it as of other parts of learning, because “being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind.” And he turns from it to philosophy, with the more than half-disdainful adieu, “It is not good to stay too long in the theatre.”
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Footnote 264:
_Advancement of Learning_, Bk. II. iv.
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We might almost quit him here with a somewhat similar leave-taking; but for his great reputation some other places shall be handled. [Sidenote: _Some_ obiter dicta.] At XIV. 11 there are some remarks on the delusive powers of words; at XVI. 4, 5 some on grammar and rhetoric, including a rather interesting observation, not sufficiently expanded or worked out, that “in modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances”; in XVIII. a handling of strictly oratorical rhetoric, with a digression to these “Colours of Good and Evil” which interested Bacon so much; in XX. another descant on the same art; in XXI. a puff of the _Basilikon Doron_; in XXXII. observations on the moral influence of books; in XXXV. some general observations on literature; and, just before the close, a well-known and often-quoted eulogy, certainly not undeserved, of the eloquence of the English pulpit for forty years past.
If it were not for the singular want of a clear conception of literary Criticism, which has prevailed so long and so widely, it would hardly be necessary to take, with any seriousness at all, a man who has no more than this to say on the subject.[265] [Sidenote: _The whole of very slight importance._] It is most assuredly no slight to Bacon to deny him a place in a regiment where he never had the least ambition to serve. That he was himself a great practitioner of literature, and so, necessarily if indirectly, a critic of it in his own case, is perfectly true; the remarks which have been quoted above on the Ciceronians show that, when he took the trouble, and found the opportunity, he could make them justly and soundly. But his purpose, his interests, his province, his vein, lay far elsewhere. To him, it is pretty clear, literary expression was, in relation to his favourite studies and dreams, but a higher kind of pen-and-ink or printing-press. He distrusted the stability of modern languages, and feared that studies couched in them might some day or other come to be unintelligible and lost to the world. This famous fear explains the nature and the limits of his interest in literature. It was a vehicle or a treasury, a distributing agent or a guard. Its functions and qualities accorded: it was to be clear, not disagreeable, solidly constructed, intelligible to as large a number of readers as possible. The psychological character and morphological definition of poetry interested him philosophically. But in the art and the beauty of poetry and literature generally, for their own sakes, he seems to have taken no more interest than he did in the coloured pattern plots in gardens, which he compared to “tarts.” To a man so minded, as to those more ancient ones of similar mind whom we have discussed in the first volume, Criticism proper could, at the best, be a pastime to be half ashamed of—a “theatre” in which to while away the hours; it could not possibly be a matter of serious as well as enthusiastic study.
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Footnote 265:
I have more than once said that controversy or polemic in detail with other writers is forbidden here. But those who wish to see what has been said for Bacon will find most of the references in Messrs Gayley and Scott’s invaluable book. The panegyrists—from my honoured friend and predecessor, Professor Masson, to Mr Worsfold—all rely on the description of poetry above referred to, as “Feigned History,” with what follows on its advantages and on poetical justice, &c. All this seems to me, however admirably expressed, to be obvious and rudimentary to the _x_th and the _n_th.
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Between Bacon and Ben may be best noticed the short _Anacrisis or Censure of Poets, Ancient and Modern_,[266] by Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. [Sidenote: _Stirling’s_ Anacrisis.] It has received high praise;[267] but even those who think by no means ill of _Aurora_, may find some difficulty in indorsing this. It is simply a sort of “Note,” written, as the author says, to record his impressions during a reading of the poets, which he had undertaken as refreshment after great travail both of body and mind. He thinks Language “but the apparel of poesy,” thereby going even further than those who would assign that position to verse, and suggesting a system of “Inarticulate Poetics,” which he would have been rather put to it to body forth. He only means, however, that he judges in the orthodox Aristotelian way, by “the fable and contexture.” A subsequent comparison of a poem to a garden suggests Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (_v. supra_, p. 129), whom he may have read. Alexander is a sort of general lover in poetry; he likes this in Virgil, that in Ovid, that other in Horace; defends Lucan against Scaliger, even to the point of blaming the conclusion of the _Æneid_; finds “no man that doth satisfy him more than that notable Italian, Torquato Tasso”; admits the historical as well as the fictitious poetic subject; but thinks that “the treasures of poetry cannot be better bestowed than upon the apparelling of Truth; and Truth cannot be better apparelled to please young lovers than with the excellences of poetry.” Disrespectful language neither need nor should be used of so slight a thing, which is, and pretends to be, nothing more than a sort of table-book entry by a gentleman of learning as well as quality. But, if it has any “importance” at all, it is surely that of being yet another proof of the rapid diffusion of critical taste and practice, not of stating “theory and methods considerably in advance of the age.” If we could take extensively his protest against those who “would bound the boundless liberty of the poet,” such language might indeed be justified; but the context strictly limits it to the very minor, though then, and for long before and after, commonly debated, question of Fiction _v._ History in subject.
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Footnote 266:
To be most readily found in Rogers’s _Memorials of the Earl of Stirling_ (vol. ii. pp. 205-210; Edinburgh, 1877), where, however, it appears merely as one of the Appendices to a book of more or less pure genealogy, without the slightest editorial information as to date or _provenance_. It seems to be taken from the 1711 folio of Drummond’s _Works_: and to have been written in 1634, between Bacon’s death and Ben’s.
Footnote 267:
From Park, and from Messrs Gayley and Scott. I did not always agree with my late friend Dr Grosart: but I think he was better advised when he called it “disappointing.”
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Save perhaps in one single respect (where the defect was not wholly his fault), Ben Jonson might be described as a critic armed at all points. [Sidenote: _Ben Jonson: his equipment._] His knowledge of literature was extremely wide, being at the same time solid and thorough. While he had an understanding above all things strong and masculine, he was particularly addicted, though in no dilettante fashion, to points of form. His whole energies, and they were little short of Titanic, were given to literature. And, lastly, if he had not the supremest poetic genius, he had such a talent that only the neighbourhood of supremacy dwarfs it. Where he came short was not in a certain hardness of temper and scholasticism of attitude: for these, if kept within bounds, and tempered by that enthusiasm for letters which he possessed, are not bad equipments for the critic. It was rather in the fact that he still came too early for it to be possible for him, except by the help of a miracle, to understand the achievements and value of the vernaculars. By his latest days, indeed,[268] the positive performance of these was already very great. Spain has hardly added anything since, and Italy not very much, to her share of European literature; France was already in the first flush of her “classical” period, after a long and glorious earlier history: and what Ben’s own contemporaries in England had done, all men know. But mediæval literature was shut from him, as from all, till far later; he does not seem to have been much drawn to Continental letters, and, perhaps in their case, as certainly in English, he was too near—too much a part of the movement—to get it into firm perspective.
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Footnote 268:
It may be well to point out that these days carried him far beyond the point at which we have stopped for Italian and for French. His solidarity with the Elizabethans proper, however, makes his inclusion here imperative: and the fact must be taken into consideration in judging the relative lengths of this and the preceding chapters.
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In a sense the critical temper in Jonson is all-pervading. It breaks out side by side with, and sometimes even within, his sweetest lyrics; it interposes what may be called _parabases_ in the most unexpected passages[269] of his plays. [Sidenote: _His_ Prefaces, _&c._] _The Poetaster_ is almost as much criticism dramatised as _The Frogs_. But there are three “places,” or groups of places, which it inspires, not in mere suggestion, but with propriety—the occasional Prefaces, or observations, to and on the plays themselves, the _Conversations with Drummond_, and, above all, the at last fairly (though not yet sufficiently) known _Discoveries_ or _Timber_.
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Footnote 269:
Take as one of a hundred, and from the less read pieces, that interesting passage in the masque of _The New World Discovered in the Moon_, which Gifford has made more interesting by a further discovery in Theobald’s copy:—
_Chro._ Is he a man’s poet or a woman’s poet, I pray you?
_2nd Her._ Is there any such difference?
_Fact._ Many, as betwixt your man’s tailor and your woman’s tailor.
_1st Her._ How, may we beseech you?
_Fact._ I’ll show you: your man’s poet may break out strong and deep i' the mouth, ... but your woman’s poet must flow, and stroke the ear, and as one of them said of himself sweetly—
“Must write a verse as smooth and calm as cream, In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.”
Whereon the injured “Tibbalds”: “_Woman’s Poet, his soft versification—Mr P——_.”
The Induction to _Every Man out of His Humour_, a very large part of _Cynthia’s Revels_, with its principal character of Crites, and its audacious self-praise in the Epilogue, not a little of _The Silent Woman_, and scores of other places in play and poem, might be added.
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To piece together, with any elaboration, the more scattered critical passages would be fitter for a monograph on Jonson than for a History of Criticism. The “Address to the Readers” of _Sejanus_, which contains a reference to the author’s lost _Observations on Horace, his Art of Poetry_ (not the least of such losses) is a fair specimen of them: the dedication of _Volpone_ to “the most noble and most equal sisters, Oxford and Cambridge,” a better. In both, and in numerous other passages of prose and verse, we find the real and solid, though somewhat partial, knowledge, the strong sense, the methodic scholarship of Ben, side by side with his stately, not Euphuistic, but rather too close-packed style, his not ill-founded, but slightly excessive, self-confidence, and that rough knock-down manner of assertion and characterisation which reappeared in its most unguarded form in the _Conversations_ with Drummond.
The critical utterances of these _Conversations_ are far too interesting to be passed over here, though we cannot discuss them in full. [Sidenote: _The Drummond Conversations._] They tell us that Ben thought all (other) rhymes inferior to couplets, and had written a treatise (which, again, would we had!) both against Campion and Daniel (see _ante_). His objection to “stanzas and cross rhymes” was that “as the purpose might lead beyond them, they were all forced.” Sidney “made every one speak as well as himself,” and so did not keep “decorum” (cf. Puttenham above). Spenser’s stanzas and matter did not please him. Daniel was no poet. He did not like Drayton’s “long verses,” nor Sylvester’s and Fairfax’s translations. He thought the translations of Homer (Chapman’s) and Virgil (Phaer’s) into “long Alexandrines” (_i.e._, fourteeners) were but prose: yet elsewhere we hear that he “had some of Chapman by heart.” Harington’s _Ariosto_ was the worst of all translations. Donne was sometimes “profane,” and “for not keeping of accent deserved hanging”; but elsewhere he was “the first poet of the world in some things,” though, “through not being understood, he would perish.”[270] Shakespeare “wanted art”: and “Abram Francis (Abraham Fraunce) in his English Hexameters was a fool.” “Bartas was not a poet, but a verser, because he wrote not fiction.” He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, “which were like Procrustes’ bed.” Guarini incurred the same blame as Sir Philip: and Lucan was good in parts only. “The best pieces of Ronsard were his Odes.” Drummond’s own verses “were all good, but smelled too much of the schools.” The “silver” Latins, as we should expect, pleased him best. “To have written Southwell’s ‘Burning Babe,’ he would have been content to destroy many of his.”
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Footnote 270:
These dicta, thus juxtaposed, should make all argument about apparently one-sided judgments superfluous. If Drummond had omitted the first or the last, we should have been utterly wrong in arguing from the remainder.
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These are the chief really critical items, though there are others (putting personal gossip aside) of interest; but it may be added, as a curiosity, that he told Drummond that he himself “writ all first in prose” at Camden’s suggestion, and held that “verses stood all by sense, without colours or accent” (poetic diction or metre), “which yet at other times he denied,” says the reporter, a sentence ever to be remembered in connection with these jottings. Remembering it, there is nothing shocking in any of these observations, nor anything really inconsistent. A true critic never holds the neat, positive, “reduced-to-its-lowest-terms” estimate of authors, in which a criticaster delights. His view is always facetted, conditioned. But he may, in a friendly chat, or a conversation for victory, exaggerate this facet or condition, while altogether suppressing others; and this clearly is what Ben did.
For gloss on the _Conversations_, for reduction to something like system of the critical remarks scattered through the works, and for the nearest approach we can have to a formal presentment of Ben’s critical views, we must go to the _Discoveries_.[271]
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Footnote 271:
The best separate edition is that of Prof. Schelling of Philadelphia (Boston, U.S.A., 1892). I give the pp. of this, as well as the Latin Headings of sections, which will enable any one to trace the passage in complete editions of the Works such as Cunningham’s Gifford. It is strange that no one has numbered these sections for convenience of reference.
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The fact that we find no less than four titles for the book—_Timber_, _Explorata_, _Discoveries_, and _Sylva_—with others of its peculiarities, is explained by the second fact that Jonson never published it. [Sidenote: _The_ Discoveries.] It never appeared in print till the folio of 1641, years after its author’s death. The _Discoveries_ are described as being made “upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notions of the times.” They are, in fact, notes unnumbered and unclassified (though batches of more or fewer sometimes run on the same subject), each with its Latin heading, and varying in length from a few lines to that of his friend (and partly master) Bacon’s shorter _Essays_. The influence of those “silver” Latins whom he loved so much is prominent: large passages are simply translated from Quintilian, and for some time[272] the tenor is ethical rather than literary. A note on _Perspicuitas—elegantia_ (p. 7) breaks these, but has nothing noteworthy about it, and _Bellum scribentium_ (p. 10) is only a satiric exclamation on the folly of “writers committed together by the ears for ceremonies, syllables, points,” &c. The longer _Nil gratius protervo libro_ (pp. 11, 12) seems a retort for some personal injury, combined with the old complaint of the decadence and degradation of poetry.[273] There is just but rather general stricture in _Eloquentia_ (p. 16) on the difference between the arguments of the study and of the world. “I would no more choose a rhetorician for reigning in a school,” says Ben, “than I would choose a pilot for rowing in a pond.”[274] _Memoria_ (p. 18) includes a gird at Euphuism. At last we come to business. _Censura de poetis_ (p. 21), introduced by a fresh fling at Euphuism, in _De vere argutis_, opens with a tolerably confident note, “Nothing in our age is more preposterous than the running judgments upon poetry and poets,” with much more to the same effect, the whole being pointed by the fling, “If it were a question of the water-rhymer’s[275] works against Spenser’s, I doubt not but they would find more suffrages.” The famous passage on Shakespeare follows: and the development of Ben’s view, “would he had blotted a thousand,” leads to a more general disquisition on the differences of wits, which includes the sentence already referred to. “Such [_i.e._, haphazard and inconsistent] are all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne.” The notes now keep close to literature throughout in substance, though their titles (_e.g._, _Ignorantia animæ_), and so forth, may seem wider. A heading, _De Claris Oratoribus_ (p. 26), leads to yet another of the purple passages of the book—that on Bacon, in which is intercalated a curious _Scriptorum catalogus_, limited, for the most part, though Surrey and Wyatt are mentioned, to prose writers. And then for some time ethics, politics, and other subjects, again have Ben’s chief attention.[276]
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Footnote 272:
It may be observed that the shorter aphorisms rise to the top—at least the beginning.
Footnote 273:
“He is upbraidingly called a poet.... The professors, indeed, have made the learning cheap.”
Footnote 274:
It is here that Ben borrows from Petronius not merely the sentiment but the phrase, “umbratical doctor” (see vol. i. p. 244 note).
Footnote 275:
“Taylor the Water-Poet,” certainly bad enough as a poet—though not as a man. But the selection of Spenser as the other pole is an invaluable correction to the sweeping attack in the _Conversations_.
Footnote 276:
Perhaps, indeed, an exception should be made in favour of the section _De malignitate Studentium_, p. 34, which reiterates the necessity of “the exact knowledge of all virtues and their contraries” on the part of the poet.
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We return to literature, after some interval (but with a parenthetic glance at the _poesis et pictura_ notion at p. 49), on p. 52, in a curious unheaded letter to an unnamed Lordship on Education, much of which is translated directly from Ben Jonson’s favourite Quintilian; and then directly accost it again with a tractatule _De stilo et optimo scribendi genere_, p. 54, hardly parting company thereafter. Ben’s prescription is threefold: read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and exercise your own style much. But he is well aware that no “precepts will profit a fool,” and he adapts old advice to English ingeniously, in bidding men read, not only Livy before Sallust, but also Sidney before Donne, and to beware of Chaucer or Gower at first. Here occurs the well-known _dictum_, that Spenser “in affecting the ancients writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter.” A fine general head opens with the excellent version of Quintilian, “We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of Difficulty,” and this is followed by some shrewd remarks on diction—the shrewdest being that, after all, the best custom makes, and ever will continue to make, the best speech—with a sharp stroke at Lucretius for “scabrousness,” and at Chaucerisms. Brevity of style, Tacitean and other, is cautiously commended. In the phrase (_Oratio imago animi_), p. 64, “language most shows a man,” Ben seems to anticipate Buffon, as he later does Wordsworth and Coleridge, by insisting that style is not merely the dress, but the body of thought.[277] All this discussion, which enters into considerable detail, is of the first importance, and it occupies nearly a quarter of the whole book. It is continued, the continuation reaching till the end, by a separate discussion of poetry.
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Footnote 277:
He may have taken this from the Italians.
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It is interesting, but less so than what comes before. A somewhat acid, though personally guarded, description of the present state of the Art introduces the stock definition of “making,” and its corollary that a poet is not one who writes in measure, but one who feigns—all as we have found it before, but (as we should expect of Ben) in succincter and more scholarly form. Yet the first requisite of the poet is _ingenium_—goodness of natural wit; the next exercise of his parts—“bringing all to the forge and file” (_sculpte, lime, cisèle!_); the third Imitation—to which Ben gives a turn (not exactly new, for we have met it from Vida downwards), which is not an improvement, by keeping its modern meaning, and understanding by it the following of the classics. “But that which we especially require in him is an exactness of study and multiplicity of reading.” Yet his liberty is not to be so narrowly circumscribed as some would have it. This leads to some interesting remarks on the ancient critics, which the author had evidently meant to extend: as it is, they break off short.[278] We turn to the Parts of comedy and tragedy, where Ben is strictly regular—the fable is the imitation of one entire and perfect action, &c. But this also breaks off, after a discussion of fable itself and episode, with an evidently quite disconnected fling at “hobbling poems which run like a brewer’s cart on the stones.”
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Footnote 278:
This is one of the most lacrimable of the gaps. Ben must have known other authorities besides Quintilian well: he even quotes, though only in part, the great passage of Simylus (vol. i. p. 25 note).
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These _Discoveries_ have to be considered with a little general care before we examine them more particularly. [Sidenote: _Form of the book._] They were, it has been said, never issued by the author himself, and we do not know whether he ever would have issued them in their present form. On the one hand, they are very carefully written, and not mere jottings. In form (though more modern in style) they resemble the earlier essays of that Bacon whom they so magnificently celebrate, in their deliberate conciseness and pregnancy. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to doubt that some at least were intended for expansion; it is difficult not to think that there was plenty more stuff of the same kind in the solidly constructed and well-stored treasuries of Ben’s intelligence and erudition. It is most difficult of all not to see that, in some cases, the thoughts are co-ordinated into regular tractates, in others left loose, as if for future treatment of the same kind.
Secondly, we should like to know rather more than we do of the _time_ of their composition. [Sidenote: _Its date._] Some of them—such as the retrospect of Bacon, and to a less degree that of Shakespeare—_must_ be late; there is a strong probability that all date from the period between the fire in Ben’s study, which destroyed so much, and his death—say between 1620 and 1637. But at the same time there is nothing to prevent his having remembered and recopied observations of earlier date.
Thirdly, it is most important that we rightly understand the composition of the book. [Sidenote: _Mosaic of old and new._] It has sometimes been discovered[279] in these _Discoveries_, with pride, or surprise, or even scorn, that Ben borrowed in them very largely from the ancients. Of course he did, as well as something, though less, from the Italian critics of the age immediately before his own.[280] But in neither case could he have hoped for a moment—and in neither is there the slightest reason to suppose that he would have wished if he could have hoped—to disguise his borrowings from a learned age. When a man—such as, for instance, Sterne—wishes to steal and escape, he goes to what nobody reads, not to what everybody is reading. And the Latins of the Silver Age, the two Senecas, Petronius, Quintilian, Pliny, were specially favourites with the Jacobean time. In what is going to be said no difference will be made between Ben’s borrowings and his original remarks: nor will the fact of the borrowing be referred to unless there is some special critical reason. Even the literal translations, which are not uncommon, are made his own by the nervous idiosyncrasy of the phrase, and its thorough adjustment to the context and to his own vigorous and massive temperament.
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Footnote 279:
I am most anxious not to be thought to reflect on Professor Schelling in this remark. Dr Schelling’s indagations of Ben’s debts are most interesting, and always made in the right spirit, while, like a good farmer and sportsman, he has left plenty for those who come after him to glean and bag. For instance, the very curious passage, taken verbatim from the elder Seneca, about the Platonic Apology (cf. vol. i. p. 237).
Footnote 280:
Yet in re-reading Jonson, just after a pretty elaborate overhauling of the Italians, I find very little certain indebtedness of detail. Mr Spingarn seems to me to go too far in tracing, p. 88, “small Latin and less Greek” to Minturno’s “small Latin and _very_ small Greek,” and the distinction of _poeta_, _poema_, _poesis_ to Scaliger or Maggi. Fifty people might have independently thought of the first; and the second is an application of a “common form” nearly as old as rhetoric.
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Of real “book-criticism” there are four chief passages, the brief flings at Montaigne and at “_Tamerlanes_ and _Tamerchams_,” and the longer notices of Shakespeare and Bacon.
The flirt at “all the Essayists, even their master Montaigne,” is especially interesting, because of the high opinion which Jonson elsewhere expresses of Bacon, the chief, if not the first, English Essayist of his time, and because of the fact that not a few of these very _Discoveries_ are “Essays,” if any things ever were. [Sidenote: _The fling at Montaigne;_] Nor would it be very easy to make out a clear distinction, in anything but name, between some of Ben’s most favourite ancient writers and these despised persons. It is, however, somewhat easier to understand the reason of the condemnation. Jonson’s classically ordered mind probably disliked the ostentatious desultoriness and incompleteness of the Essay, the refusal, as it were out of mere insolence, to undertake an orderly treatise. Nor is it quite impossible that he failed fully to understand Montaigne, and was to some extent the dupe of that great writer’s fanfaronade of promiscuousness.
The “_Tamerlane_ and _Tamercham_”[281] fling is not even at first sight surprising. [Sidenote: _at_ Tamerlane,] It was quite certain that Ben would seriously despise what Shakespeare only laughed at—the confusion, the bombast, the want of order and scheme in the “University Wits”—and it is not probable that he was well enough acquainted with the even now obscure development of the earliest Elizabethan drama to appreciate the enormous improvement which they wrought. Nay, the nearer approach even of such a dull thing as _Gorboduc_ to “the height of Seneca his style,” might have a little bribed him as it bribed Sidney. He is true to his side—to his division of the critical creed—in this also.
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Footnote 281:
P. 27. “The _Tamerlanes_ and _Tamerchams_ of the late age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them.” It is just worth noting that Jonson thought there was more than this in Marlowe; and that the early edd. of _Tamburlaine_ are anonymous.
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The train of thought—censure of the vulgar preference—runs clear from this to the best known passage of the whole, the section _De Shakespeare Nostrat_. [Sidenote: _the Shakespeare Passage,_] It cannot be necessary to quote it, or to point out that Ben’s eulogy, splendid as it is, acquires tenfold force from the fact that it is avowedly given by a man whose general literary theory is different from that of the subject, while the censure accompanying it loses force in exactly the same proportion. What Ben here blames, any ancient critic (perhaps even Longinus) would have blamed too: what Ben praises, it is not certain that any ancient critic, except Longinus, would have seen. Nor is the captious censure of “Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause” the least interesting part of the whole. The paradox is not in our present texts: and there have, of course, not been wanting commentators to accuse Jonson of garbling or of forgetfulness. This is quite commentatorially gratuitous and puerile. It is very like Shakespeare to have written what Ben says: very like Ben to object to the paradox (which, _pace tanti viri_, is not “ridiculous” at all, but a deliberate and effective hyperbole); very like the players to have changed the text; and most of all like the commentators to make a fuss about the matter.
What may seem the more unstinted eulogy of Bacon is not less interesting. [Sidenote: _and that on Bacon_.] For here it is obvious that Ben is speaking with fullest sympathy, and with all but a full acknowledgment of having met an ideal. Except the slight stroke, “when he could spare or pass by a jest,” and the gentle insinuation that _Strength_, the gift of God, was what Bacon’s friends had to implore for him, there is no admixture whatever in the eulogy of “him who hath filled up all numbers,[282] and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred to insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” Indeed it could not have been—even if Ben Jonson had not been a friend, and, in a way, follower of Bacon—but that he should regard the Chancellor as his chief of literary men. Bacon, unluckily for himself, lacked the “unwedgeable and gnarled” strength of the dramatist, and also was without his poetic fire, just as Ben could never have soared to the vast, if vague, conceptions of Bacon’s materialist-Idealism. But they were both soaked in “literature,” as then understood; they were the two greatest masters of the closely packed style that says twenty things in ten words: and yet both could, on occasion, be almost as rhetorically imaginative as Donne or Greville. It is doubtful whether Bacon’s own scientific scorn for words without matter surpassed Jonson’s more literary contempt of the same phenomenon. Everywhere, or almost everywhere, there was between them the _idem velle et idem nolle_.
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Footnote 282:
One cannot but remember—with pity or glee, according to mood and temperament—how the Bacon-Shakespeare-maniacs have actually taken this in the sense of _poetic_ “numbers.” But in truth their study is not likely to be much in haughty Rome and its language, or to have led them either to Petronius and his _omnium nume[ro]rum_, or to Seneca and his _insolenti Græciæ_.
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A limited précis, however, and a few remarks on special points, cannot do the _Discoveries_ justice. The fragmentary character of the notes that compose it, the pregnant and deliberately “astringed” style in which these notes are written, so that they are themselves the bones, as it were, of a much larger treatise, defy such treatment. Yet it is full of value, as it gives us more than glimpses
“Of what a critic was in Jonson lost,”
or but piecemeal shown. We shall return, in the next chapter, to his relative position; but something should be said here of his intrinsic character.
He does not, as must have been clearly seen, escape the “classical” limitation. [Sidenote: _General character of the book._] With some ignorance, doubtless, and doubtless also some contempt, of the actual achievements of prose romance, and with that stubborn distrust of the modern tongues for miscellaneous prose purposes, which lasted till far into the seventeenth century, if it did not actually survive into the eighteenth, he still clings to the old mistakes about the identity of poetry and “fiction,” about the supremacy of oratory in prose. We hear nothing about the “new versifying,” though no doubt this would have been fully treated in his handling of Campion and Daniel: but had he had any approval for it, that approval must have been glanced at. His preference for the (stopped) couplet[283] foreshadowed that which, with beneficial effects in some ways, if by no means in all, was to influence the whole of English poetry, with the rarest exceptions, for nearly two centuries. The personal arrogance which, as in Wordsworth’s case, affected all Ben’s judgment of contemporaries, and which is almost too fully reflected in the Drummond Conversations, would probably have made even his more deliberate judgments of these—his judgments “for publication”—inadequate. But it is fair to remember that Ben’s theory (if not entirely his practice, especially in his exquisite lyrics and almost equally exquisite masques) constrained him to be severe to those contemporaries, from Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne downwards. The mission of the generation may be summed up in the three words, Liberty, Variety, Romance. Jonson’s tastes were for Order, Uniformity, Classicism.
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Footnote 283:
Daniel had frankly defended _enjambement_.
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He is thus doubly interesting—interesting as putting both with sounder scholarship and more original wit what men from Ascham to Puttenham, and later, had been trying to say before him, in the sense of adapting classical precepts to English: and far more interesting as adumbrating, beforehand, the creed of Dryden, and Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Many of his individual judgments are as shrewd as they are one-sided; they are always well, and sometimes admirably, expressed, in a style which unites something of Elizabethan colour, and much of Jacobean weight, with not a little of Augustan simplicity and proportion. He does not head the line of English critics; but he heads, and worthily, that of English critics who have been great both in criticism and in creation.[284]
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Footnote 284:
It seemed unnecessary to enlarge the space given to the men of Eliza and our James, by including the merer grammarians and pedagogues, from Mulcaster to that fervid Scot, Mr Hume, who, in 1617, extolled the “Orthography and Congruity” of his native speech (ed. Wheatley, E.E.T.S., 1865). Of Mulcaster, however, it deserves to be mentioned that, not so much in his _Positions_ (1581: ed. Quick, London, 1887), which have been, as in his _Elementarie_, which should be, reprinted, he displays a more than Pléiade enthusiasm for the vernacular. Unluckily this last is not easy of access, even the B.M. copy being a “Grenville” book, and hedged round with forms and fears.
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INTERCHAPTER IV.
The proper appreciation of the period surveyed in the foregoing Book is of perhaps greater importance than that of any other part of this History. We have seen, in the three preceding Interchapters, what it was that prevented Greek, Roman, and Mediæval criticism respectively from attaining completeness, and how the preventives worked. We saw further, in the last pages of the First Volume, in what condition literature, and at least the possibilities of the criticism of literature, were left at the beginning of the Renaissance. And now we have seen what additions the Renaissance made—not, indeed, in detail, to literature itself, for that belongs to another story than ours, but what additions it made—to the criticism of literature. In mere bulk these additions were very considerable. The extant critical writing of these hundred years (or rather of the last seventy of them), excluding mere rhetorical schoolbooks, probably exceeds, and very largely exceeds, the total of classical and mediæval work on the subject which we possess, even inclusive of schoolbooks. For the very first time Criticism, not as a sort of half accidental and more than half shame-faced extension of Rhetoric, but in and for itself, received a really large share of the intellectual attention of the period.
Moreover, the advantages possessed by Renaissance critics (as we partly also saw in the place referred to) were likewise very great. Men were beginning really to know and really to understand antiquity; they had the whole body of mediæval literature complete, finished, ready for their appreciation; and they or their contemporaries were daily and yearly building up great literatures in all the principal countries of Europe, except Germany, and not wholly despicable literatures there and elsewhere. The excuse of the want of comparison, which had been valid for Greece, less valid but still partly so for Rome, and valid again, though for different reasons, in the Middle Ages, was dwindling and disappearing every day. There was no want of interest in the subject; there was no want of examples, both encouraging and warning, of method.
Nor is it possible to deny that the actual accomplishment of the time was very considerable likewise. When a century finds a certain department of intellectual activity almost uncultivated; when it leaves that subject in a state of active cultivation; and when, further, two following centuries are content to opine almost wholly in the sense to which it has generally inclined,—that century can hardly be said to have wasted its years. Accomplishment—very remarkable and solid accomplishment—it can certainly boast. It must be the business of this Interchapter to examine the nature and (partly at least) the value of that accomplishment, now that we have fully surveyed its items, and frankly admitted a certain general result.
In considering the critical achievement of Italy, the earliest in time, the most abundant in result, the most influential—in fact an abridgment, and no mean abridgment, of that of Europe—we cannot but see at once that there was a certain disadvantage accompanying the inevitableness and the general propriety of this Italian prerogative. No other country had so much learning; but, for this very reason, no other country was so certain rather to over- than to under-value the importance of ancient doctrine. No country had so perfect a literature, though other countries had literatures older, richer, and more vigorous; but this very perfection, while it might seem to provide a fertile field for criticism, had two dangers. The Italians were likely to look down upon, or simply to ignore, other literatures; and, from the failing, though slowly and not conspicuously failing, force of their creative power, they were likely to turn to logomachies and debating-society wrangles. Nay, there was a third peril. No country had so little properly mediæval literature as Italy; and none therefore was more certain to set the fashion of ignoring or slighting that mediæval performance which is so invaluable as a check and balance-redresser. And perhaps we might even add a fourth—that while French and English had got practically beyond the reach of mere dialect-jealousy, Italian had not; and that too much of the abundant interest in literature was throughout turned upon mere grammar and mere linguistics.
Perhaps for these reasons, perhaps for others, perhaps for none assignable except by superfluous guess-work, Italian criticism, active and voluminous as it was, settled very early into certain well-marked limits and channels, and almost wholly confined itself within them, though these channels underwent no infrequent intersection or confluence.
The main texts and patterns of the critics of the Italian Renaissance were three—the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace, the _Poetics_ of Aristotle, and the various Platonic places dealing with poetry. These latter had, as we have seen, begun to affect Italian thought, directly or by transmission through this or that medium, before the close of the fourteenth century; and the maintenance of the Platonic ban, the refutation of it, or the more or less ingenious acceptance and evasion of it, with the help of the Platonic blessing, had been a tolerably familiar exercise from the time of Boccaccio to the time of Savonarola. But Horace and Aristotle gave rules and patterns of much more definiteness. Of the writers of the abundant critical literature which has been partly surveyed, some directly comment these texts; others follow them with more or less selection or combination; many take up separate questions suggested by them; very few, if any, face the subject without some prepossession derived from them.
The very earliest regular criticism, as in Vida and the first books of Trissino, is either strictly grammatical and formal or else tends to expatiate further in the Horatian path of rather desultory practical hints for composition, these latter usually tending towards a more or less slavish “Follow the ancients.” But, from the time of Daniello onwards, more abstract views and questionings, especially in the direction of a sort of Eirenicon between Aristotle and Plato, begin to engage the attention of critics, sometimes as a prelude to study of formal Poetics, sometimes to the exclusion of this. The most thoroughgoing as well as about the ablest example of this latter kind is probably the _Naugerius_ of Fracastoro, where this distinguished physician and physicist, himself a skilled versifier and even something of a poet, scarcely touches poets and poetry in the concrete more than he might in a dialogue on physics or metaphysics, and is entirely occupied with questions of the extremest “metapoetic,” or metacriticism.
This kind of discussion, which is prominent in the whole body of critics from Daniello to Summo, is, with its extensions in the direction of the Theory of the Drama, the Theory of the Heroic Poem, &c., no doubt the most characteristic, and perhaps even the constitutive, feature of Italian criticism. It seems to have been that which most attracted foreign scholars, and stirred them up to emulation; it is very rarely omitted altogether by anybody, save the merest grammarians. In fact, it so impressed itself, during this period, upon the imagination, the memory, the intellectual habit, not merely of Italy but of Europe, that to this day critics who neglect it are looked at askance by many, if not by most, of their fellows.
Questions, however, more practical than these, yet not of quite such extreme practicality as the mere questions of grammar and dialect, of metric and composition, did actually occupy the Italians. About the middle of the century the lucubrations of Cinthio and Pigna on the question of the Romances and their relation to Epic and to the Aristotelian system, opened up the most promising prospect by far that had ever yet been disclosed to criticism. Had these inquiries been followed up—had they been extended from the Romance to the _novella_, which had already become such a feature of Italian vernacular literature—had Italy provided something not less vigorous, but more polished, than the English Interlude and romantic mystery of the _Mary Magdalene_ type, or the French _farce_ and _sotie_, so that a similar investigation might have been further extended to drama—there is no saying what might not have been achieved. But this was not permitted.
As a matter of fact, the times were not ready, nor the circumstances. The profitable promise of the discussion on the _romanzi_ dwindled off into the mere logomachies or personalities of the _Gerusalemme_ controversy, and into endless formula-making for the abstract Heroic Poem. But little trace of it is seen on the vigorous and independent mind of Castelvetro; less on the equally vigorous, still more independent, but perhaps rather more scholastic, mind of Patrizzi. For the former, Aristotle is still the special though not quite the exclusive battleground, or canvas, or whatever metaphor may be preferred; and he labours—as all these Italians do, in strange apparent, though perhaps not real, contrast to the vagueness and far-reaching sweep of their more abstract inquiries—under a difficulty, under a seeming impossibility, of getting beyond disjointed observations and comments on Aristotle, Homer, Dante, Petrarch, into a fruitful and satisfying critical study of any poem or poet. Scaliger drills the whole mob of formal and theoretical particulars into an orderly regiment, indulges in plentiful criticism of the verbal and occasional kind, attempts to take a (for him) complete historic survey, and achieves at least a quasi-tiebeam, a bastard unity, for his work by his all-pervading, uncompromising Virgil-worship, which gives a test for everything, an answer for everything, a standard always at hand. Patrizzi seems, with his double method of historical survey and argumentative inquiry, to have at last unbarred the very gates of the true path. But he does not proceed far along it; and astonishingly sound as well as original as are many of his conclusions, he hardly attempts to apply them to modern poetry, except in the _Trimerone_, where he is too much entangled in the special quibbles and squabbles of the controversy to which it belongs. All the rest—even interesting people like Minturno—sometimes peep over the wall, yet confine their actual walk within it.
Between all the schools, and from among the welter of the individuals, there arises, in the mysterious way in which such things do arise, and which defies all but shallow and superficial explanation, a sort of general critical creed, every particular article of which would probably have been signed by no two particular persons—perhaps by no one—but which is ready to become, and in the next century does become, orthodox and accepted as a whole. And this creed runs somewhat as follows:—
On the higher and more abstract questions of poetry (which are by no means to be neglected) Aristotle is the guide; but the meaning of Aristotle is not always self-evident even so far as it goes, and it sometimes requires supplementing. Poetry is the imitation of nature: but this imitation may be carried on either by copying nature as it is or by inventing things which do not actually exist, and have never actually existed, but which conduct themselves according to the laws of nature and reason. The poet is _not_ a public nuisance, but quite the contrary. He must, however, both delight _and_ instruct.
As for the Kinds of poetry, they are not mere working classifications of the practice of poets, but have technically constituting definitions from which they might be independently developed, and according to which they ought to be composed. The general laws of Tragedy are given by Aristotle; but it is necessary to extend his prescription of Unity so as to enjoin three species—of Action, Time, and Place. Tragedy must be written in verse, which, though not exactly the constituting form of poetry generally, is almost or quite inseparable from it. The illegitimacy of prose in Comedy is less positive. Certain extensions of the rules of the older Epic may be admitted, so as to constitute a new Epic or Heroic Poem; but it is questionable whether this may have the full liberty of Romance, and it is subject to Unity, though not to the dramatic Unity. Other Kinds are inferior to these.
In practising them, and in practising all, the poet is to look first, midmost, and last to the practice of the ancients. “The ancients” may even occasionally be contracted to little more than Virgil; they may be extended to take in Homer, or may be construed much more widely. But taking things on the whole, “the ancients” have anticipated almost everything, and in everything that they have anticipated have done so well that the best chance of success is simply to imitate them. The detailed precepts of Horace are never to be neglected; if supplemented, they must be supplemented in the same sense.
It is less the business of the historian, after drawing up this creed, to criticise it favourably or unfavourably, than to point out that it had actually, by the year 1600, come very near to formulated existence. We shall find it in actual formulation in the ensuing book; we have already seen it in more than adumbration, governing the pronouncements of a scholar and a man of genius like Ben Jonson thirty years later than the close of the sixteenth century. A full estimate of its merits and demerits must be postponed to the close of this volume. But it may be observed at once that it is, _prima facie_, not a perfect creed by any means. It has (and this, I think, has been too seldom noticed) a fault, almost, if not quite, as great on the _a priori_ side as that which it confessedly has on the _a posteriori_. It does not face the facts; it blinks all mediæval and a great deal of existing modern literature. But, then, to do it justice, it does not pretend to do other than blink them. The fault in its own more special province is much more glaring, though, as has been said, it has, by a sort of sympathy, been much more ignored. There is no real connection between the higher and the lower principles of Neo-Classicism. There is not merely one crevasse, not easily to be crossed, in this glacier of Correctness; there are two or three. Let us, for argument’s sake, concede all the points in Fracastoro’s _Naugerius_, the Aconcagua or Everest of the school. Let us allow that to the real lover of poetry it skills not much whether he grants or denies all its propositions. But how are we to pass from these to the further group—to allow that Reason, Common-Sense, Nature, will govern the poet’s mediate and lower necessities? How from this, again, to the still other group of dramatic, heroic, miscellaneous requirements of the Correct? How from any of them to the entirely arbitrary warning clause that the ancients have actually or virtually anticipated everything?
On the more obvious faults of Italian criticism in detail—its extravagant Virgil-worship; its refusal (except in such rare and practically isolated cases as Lilius Giraldus’ knowledge of Chaucer and Wyatt, Patrizzi’s of Fauchet and his Old French subjects) to take any account of foreign modern literature; its coterie-squabbling and the rest, it would not be profitable to dwell much. But it is curious and instructive to notice how little appreciative criticism of contemporaries this active critical period gives. If you start a controversy of an ancient against a modern or a modern against a modern—of Homer against Ariosto, or of Ariosto against Tasso—there will be plenty of persons to take a hand. For a really _appreciative_ study of any writer, modern or ancient, I do not know where to look. Men are so besotted, on the one hand, with their inquiries into general principles; on the other, with their sporadic annotations, that they cannot attempt anything of the kind.
Yet it would be an act of the grossest injustice and ingratitude to refuse or to stint recognition of the immense services that the Italians rendered to criticism at this time. It was, in their own stately word, a veritable case of _risorgimento_; and of resurrection in a body far better organised, far more gifted, than that which had gone to sleep a thousand years before.
In the year 1500 we may look over Europe and find criticism really alive and awake _nusquam et nullibi_—at best fast asleep, and dreaming a little with the dreams of Gavin Douglas or (had he lived a couple of years longer) of Savonarola, or of such more infantine persons as Augustine Käsenbrot. In 1600 criticism is a classed and recognised department of literature; Faustino Summo, in the very year, can quote authority after authority, refer—as to a sort of common law of the subject—to _dicta_ and _obiter dicta_ of nearly three generations of distinguished judges. And Italian criticism has colonised: its colonies, with the virtues of that kind, are showing characteristics sometimes quite different, though derived from those of the mother country, and are carrying the critical torch round the world. No matter for the moment whether the more perfect way has been reached, or the less perfect way declined upon. The time of “liking grossly,” of composing anyhow, has passed: that of critical study of the old, and critical reception of the new, has begun.
Never, therefore, shall I join in the anathema in which De Quincey[285] has coupled Italian critics with Greek rhetoricians. In fact, the Italians suffer far more unjustly than the Greeks. Castelvetro and Patrizzi alone would be enough to clear their company handsomely: Capriano, Cinthio Giraldi, Minturno could put in quite sufficient bail on their own recognisances: yet others would leave the court more than recommended to mercy.[286] I disagree with many of the principles of most of them; I wish that even those with whom I agree had opened their eyes wider, kept them more steadily on the object, and cared less about fighting abstract prizes, and more about appreciating the goods which the gods had given them in concrete literature. It was also a misfortune, no doubt, that no man of very distinct genius and whole-hearted devotion gave himself up to the business. Vida was a good kind of pedant, and Trissino at heart a philologist; Daniello, Capriano, and most of the rest, including even Minturno, down to Denores and Summo, persons of respectable talent merely; Fracastoro, a man of science; Cinthio, a novelist and miscellanist; Scaliger, a not quite so good kind of more deeply-dyed pedant; Castelvetro, a scholar, with the scholar’s quarrelsomeness; Patrizzi, a philosopher primarily; Torquato Tasso himself, a great poet, with, for a poet, a sensible and logical but curiously timid and hesitating mind. Not a few of them did great things for Criticism; all together they did a really mighty thing for her and for Literature: but they were not her sworn servants, as Lessing and Hazlitt, as Sainte-Beuve and Arnold, were later.
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Footnote 285:
See vol. i. p. 321 note.
Footnote 286:
Fracastoro and Scaliger could at once obtain a writ of ease, as De Quincey is evidently speaking of “Italian” critics in the vernacular. I hope he was not thinking of Tasso here, or of Gravina later: but the seventeenth and eighteenth century men are certainly in more danger of his judgment.
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Let there be to them not the less but almost the more glory! It is something—nay, it is very much—to have created a Kind. Up to their time Criticism had been a mere Cinderella in the literary household. Aristotle had taken her up as he had taken all Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoricians had found her a useful handmaid to Rhetoric. Roman _dilettanti_ had dallied with her. The solid good sense and good feeling of Quintilian had decided that she must be “no casual mistress but a wife” (perhaps on rather polygamic principles) to the student of oratory. Longinus had suddenly fixed her colours on his helmet, and had ridden in her honour the most astonishing little _chevauchée_ in the annals of adventurous literature. The second greatest poet of the world had done her at once yeoman’s service and stately courtesy. And yet she was, in the general literary view, not so much _déclassée_ as not classed at all—not “out,” not accorded the _entrées_.
This was now all over. The country which gave the literary tone and set the literary fashions of Europe had adopted Criticism in the most unmistakable manner—whether in the manner wisest or most perfect is not for the present essential. Rank thus given is never lost; at any rate, there is no recorded instance of a literary attainder for Kinds, whatever there may be for persons.
When this criticism passes the Alps, and we pass them with it, a curious difference is to be perceived. We leave the abstract side of the matter almost wholly behind us—the most abstract side perhaps wholly. A little of the Platonic generalities, relieved from the Platonic detraction, may be indulged in _pro forma_, and Vauquelin (in that odd familiarity with Deity which the French have always displayed) may image God as a gardener ordering the garden of Poesy with trim walks, and neatly planted beds, and hedges, which must not be trespassed on, or from, or through. But the French attention almost wholly deserts such things for the mediate generalities of kind and form; and is constantly tempted to desert these also for the still lower and more particular questions of language, prosody, and style. The fact is, that the circumstances have entirely changed. The Italians, though they may not know it, are in a state of declining vitality and creative force as regards actual literature; even Tasso is an “old man’s child” among their greatest. Besides, to do them justice, there is very little left for them to do with their mere means of language and the like. It is quite different with French and Frenchmen. If they are rashly neglectful (and Fauchet, Pasquier, and others are soon on the spot to vindicate them to some extent from this neglect) of their further past, there is some excuse for impatience of the past that is nearer; and it is even natural and human, though far from praiseworthy, that they should scorn the once charming formal devices which latterly, in most hands, have been so destitute of charm. But make allowance as we may for the causes, the facts remain. French criticism is much the least important of the three divisions which we have considered in the foregoing book. Not only does it begin late; not only does it fail to be very fertile; but its individual documents require a certain kindness to speak very highly of their virtues, and a good deal of blindness to conceal their shortcomings. I have protested above against a too low estimate of the critical value of the _Défense et Illustration_. Its critical interest is really great, and its critical importance really high; but this greatness and this importance are scarcely absolute. They belong to it as to one of our very first pieces of _revolutionary_ criticism—one of the first in which the newly hatched and fledged critical spirit of Europe shows itself of falcon breed, and sets out to fight and destroy as well as to build nests and hatch young in its turn. The censure of the _Défense_ is very mainly unjust, and its positive doctrine, though generous, and, in the circumstances, not insalutary, is vague, not very far-sighted, and, at the very best, extremely incomplete. What saves it is, first, the abundant and conclusive evidence that it gives of the critic being actually abroad in earnest, of the time of mere acquiescence and tradition having ceased, of there being writers who are determined to attack some kinds of writing and encourage others with their very best will and power; and, secondly, the generous and uncompromising championship of the vernacular, which is the greatest glory of the Pléiade, and which, followed in other countries, gave us the great modern literatures. Du Bellay has the credit of bringing criticism, if we may so speak, nearer to her true object than almost any Italian critic of his own century had done, though he does not himself either practise or prescribe the best way of getting at that object.
The criticism of his colleague, or master, Ronsard, is, as we have seen, injured by its small bulk, by its rather fragmentary character, by the fact that the most considerable piece of it has passed through another hand, and that we have only that hand’s own testimony for the faithfulness of the rehandling, and by not a little decided inconsistency. But it has the same militant, practical spirit as Du Bellay’s in quality, and more of it in proportional quantity. Moreover, it is extremely _germinal_. Those[287] who contend that the classical French criticism of the seventeenth century was only the Pléiade criticism of the sixteenth, denying its masters, omitting some, if not always the worst, parts of their creed, narrowed in range, and perfected in apparent system, have a great deal to say for themselves. Nor can there be reasonable doubt that, though Du Bellay was the first to speak critically, the teaching was the teaching of Ronsard throughout. Of this teaching, the injunction to enrich the language by archaism, and dialect, and word-coining (even by reading the forgotten romances of Arthur), was the very best part, and the first to be discarded by the ingratitude of the rebellious disciples, Malherbe and those about him. The worst part, which was not discarded but retained, was the adoption of the Italian doctrines about the hybrid kind of “Heroic” or “Long” Poem. But in most points the criticism of Ronsard justifies itself by a real adherence, conscious or unconscious, to the practical ideals of the French.
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Footnote 287:
M. Pellissier and others have taken this line.
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These characteristics recur (to much greater advantage, because of its far greater bulk, and in spite of its flagrant desultoriness) in the work of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye. Here we have, put certainly not with much method, but with plenty of talent, and at no unsuitable length, the whole of the Italian teaching, in small points and in large, that had commended itself to the French mind up to this time, with such additions, adaptations, and corrections as vernacular needs had induced, or vernacular genius insisted on. We see in it, very decidedly, the obsession of the “long poem,” which France was not to outgrow for two centuries. We see the tendency to burden criticism with innumerable petty “rules” (or with attentions to “licence” nearly as burdensome), which was also to beset the nation. And in general we see also what it may not be improper (in connection with a school so fond of neologism and word-imitation) to call the “pottering” tendency, which was the worse side of Pléiade criticism. Vauquelin has really a great deal to say, and much of what he has to say is sensible. He escapes many errors of his forerunners, more of his successors, and it is comparatively seldom that one feels inclined to put an absolute black mark against any of his suggestions or cautions. But the whole is not only formless, but also invertebrate. Vauquelin does not, like some of the Italians, confine himself to grave and lofty generalisations on the highest questions affecting Poetry. He does not, like others, or these same at other moments, take an orderly survey of detail according to a coherent scheme. He simply has, as the cant phrase goes, “a few remarks to offer” on much more than a few points.
It has been already said that this provisional, tentative, and somewhat ineffectual character is characteristic, and prophetically characteristic, of the school. The Pléiade did not, like Ronsard’s slightly younger contemporary Spenser and his followers in England, set French poetry once for all on the path on which, with whatever minor changes, it was henceforth to go. Some thirty or forty years of never wholly successful experiment were succeeded by an unjust supplanting, and by another thirty or forty of random tentatives, corresponding in some ways to those of England nearly a century earlier. Only then did France fall into a way, not by any means of perfection, but sufficiently suited to her genius to enable her to travel fast and far in it. It is a serious thing for Pléiade criticism that we have from it no thorough examination of any part of French literature. No doubt such examinations are not the strong point of Renaissance Criticism. But generally there is more approach to them in Italian, with the scattered remarks of the critics on Dante and Petrarch, with the controversies about the _romanzi_ in general and the _Orlando_ and _Gerusalemme_ in particular; there is more even in English, with the surveys, imperfect as they are, of the earlier Elizabethans over the past of poetry, with the literature of the “classical metres” quarrel, with the (no doubt later) remarks of Ben on Shakespeare and others. The fault of Pléiade Criticism, in short, is that it is at once too particularist and too little particular.[288]
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Footnote 288:
Some exception ought, perhaps, to be made for Pasquier: but not much.
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Crossing the Channel, as we lately crossed the Alps, we do not find a simple transmission of indebtedness. It would have been surprising, considering the strong intellectual interests of the Colet group, and the early presence in England of such a critical force as Erasmus, if this country had waited to receive a current merely transmitted through France from Italy. It is possible that, later, Gascoigne may have derived something from Ronsard, and it is quite certain that “E. K.'s” notes on the _Calendar_ show symptoms of Pléiade influence, even in the bad point of contempt, or at least want of respect, for Marot. But it is exceedingly improbable that Ascham derived any impulsion from Du Bellay: it is certain, as we have seen, that he knew Italian critics like Pigna directly; and it is equally certain that, either by his own studies or through Cheke, his critical impulses must have been excited humanistically long before the French had got beyond the merely _rhétoriqueur_ standard of Sibilet.
Hence, as well as for other reasons, English criticism develops itself, if not with entire independence, yet with sufficient conformity to its own needs. That practical bent which we have noticed in the French shows itself here also; but it is conditioned differently. We had, as they had in France, to fashion a new poetic diction; but it cannot be said that the critics did much for this: Spenser, as much as Coriolanus, might have said, “Alone I did it.” They did more _in re metrica_, and it so happened that they had, quite in their own sphere, to fight an all-important battle, the battle of the classical metres, which was of nothing like the same importance in French or in Italian. In dealing with these and other matters they fall into certain generations or successive groups.
In Ascham and his contemporaries the critical attitude was induced, but not altogether favourably conditioned, by certain forces, partly common to them with their Continental contemporaries, partly not. They all felt, in a degree most creditable to themselves (and contrasting most favourably with the rather opposite feeling of men so much greater and so much later as Bacon and Hobbes), that they must adorn their Sparta, that it was their business to get the vernacular into as good working order, both for prose and verse, as they possibly could. And what is more, they had some shrewd notions about the best way of doing this. The exaggerated rhetoric and “aureateness” of the fifteenth century had inspired them, to a man, with a horror of “inkhorn terms,” and, if mainly wrong, they were also partly right in feeling that the just and deserved popularity of the early printed editions of the whole of Chaucer threatened English with an undue dose of archaism.
Further, they were provided by the New Learning, not merely with a very large stock of finished examples of literature, but also with a not inconsiderable library of regular criticism. They did their best to utilise these; but, in thus endeavouring, they fell into two opposite, yet in a manner complementary, errors. In the first place, they failed altogether to recognise the continuity, and in a certain sense the _equipollence_, of literature—the fact that to blot out a thousand years of literary history, as they tried to do, is unnatural and destructive. In the second place, though their instinct told them rightly that Greek and Latin had invaluable lessons and models for English, their reason failed to tell them that these lessons must be applied, these models used, with special reference to the nature, the history, the development of English itself. Hence they fell, as regards verse, into the egregious and fortunately self-correcting error of the classical metres, as regards prose, into a fashion of style, by no means insalutary, as a corrective and reaction from the rhetorical bombast and clumsiness of the transition, but inadequate of itself, and needing to be counterdosed by the fustian and the familiarity which are the worse sides of Euphuism, in order to bring about the next stage. Lastly, these men looked too much to the future, and not enough to the past: they did not so much as condescend to examine the literary manner and nature even of Chaucer himself, still less of others.
In the next generation, which gives us Gascoigne, Webbe, Puttenham, and Sidney, the same tendencies are perceived; but the Euphuist movement comes in to differentiate them on one side, and the influence of Italian criticism on the other. The classical metre craze has not yet been blown to pieces by the failure of even such a poet as Spenser to do any good with it, the fortunate recalcitrance of the healthy English spirit, and at last the crushing broadside of Daniel’s _Defence of Rhyme_. But it does no very great practical harm: and prose style is sensibly beautified and heightened. Some attempts are made, from Gascoigne downwards, to examine the actual wealth of English, to appraise writers, to analyse methods—attempts, however, not very well sustained, and still conditioned by the apparent ignorance of the writers that there was anything behind Chaucer, though Anglo-Saxon was actually studied at the time under Archbishop Parker’s influence. Further, the example of the Italian critics deflects the energy of our writers from the right way, and sends them off into pretty Platonisings about the proud place due to poetry, the stately status of the singer, and other agreeable but unpractical aberrations. This tendency is much strengthened by the Puritan onslaught on poetry generally and dramatic poetry in particular. In all this there is a great deal of interest, and many scattered _aperçus_ of great value. Gascoigne’s little treatise is almost priceless, as showing us how English prosody was drifting on the shallows of a hard-and-fast syllabic arrangement, when the dramatists came to its rescue. Sidney, wrong as he is about the drama, catches hold of one of the very life-buoys of English poetry in his praise of the ballad. Daniel’s _Defence_ puts the root of the rhyme-matter in the most admirable fashion. But we see that the classics are exercising on all the men of the time influences both bad and good, and in criticism, perhaps, rather bad than good; that the obsession of Latin in particular is heavy on them; and that the practice, both Latin and Greek, of what we have called beginning at the wrong end lies heaviest of all.
Nothing will show this more curiously than the words in which Sidney anticipated (and perhaps suggested) Ben’s censure of Spenser’s diction as to the _Shepherd’s Calendar_, especially if we remember that this was said by a personal friend and by an ardent lover of poetry. That there is something to be said against the dialect of the _Calendar_ all reasonable critics will allow. As a poetic language it is, at its best, but a preliminary exercise for the glorious medium of _The Faerie Queene_; it is awkwardly and in some cases incorrectly blended; and, above all, the _mere_ rusticity—the “hey-ho” and the rest—is a dangerous and doubtful expedient. But observe that Sidney says nothing of this kind. He “looks merely at the stop-watch.” Theocritus did not do it; Virgil did not do it; Sannazar did not do it; therefore Spenser must not do it. That his own elevation of a mere modern like Sannazar to this position of a lawgiver of the most tyrannic kind—of an authority not merely whose will is law, not merely whose prohibition is final, but whose bare abstention from something taboos that something from the use of all mankind for ever and ever,—that this did not strike Sidney as preposterous in itself, and as throwing doubt on the whole method, is wonderful. But even if he had stopped at Theocritus and Virgil, he would have been wrong enough. Here once more is the False Mimesis, the _prava imitatio_. Not only is the good poet to be followed in what he does, but what he does not do serves as a bar to posterity in all time from doing it.
There is another point in which Sidney and Ben are alike, and in which they may even seem to anticipate that general adoption of “Reason,” of “Good Sense” as the criterion, which the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed as their own, and which some recent critics have rather kindly allowed them. Sidney’s raillery of the romantic life-drama, Ben’s reported strictures on the sea-coast of Bohemia, and his certain ones on “Cæsar did never wrong,” &c., express the very spirit of this cheap rationalism, which was later to defray a little even of Dryden’s criticism, almost the whole of Boileau’s, and far too much of Pope’s. The ancients, to do them justice, are not entirely to be blamed for this. There is very little of it in Aristotle, who quite understands that the laws of poetry are not the laws of history or of science.[289] But there is a great deal of it in Horace: and, as we shall see, the authority of the great Greek was, during the three centuries which form the subject of this volume, more and more used as a mere cloak for the opinions of the clever Roman. Meanwhile, such books as those of Webbe and Puttenham, such an ordeal by battle as that fought out by Campion and Daniel, even such critical _jaculata_ as those of Meres and Bolton,[290] were all in different ways doing work, mistaken sometimes in kind, but always useful in general effect.
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Footnote 289:
Yet even he does condescend to it too much in his notices of “objections” towards the end of the _Poetics_.
Footnote 290:
These judgments might of course be reinforced enormously by extracts from letters and poems commendatory, as well as from substantive examples, of Elizabethan literature, prose or verse. But this is just one of the points in which the constantly increasing pressure of material makes abstinence, or at least rigid temperance, necessary as we come downwards. Some very notable passages in creative works—Shakespeare’s remarks on drama among the more, and Ben’s on “men’s and women’s poets” among the less—are glanced at elsewhere: Webster’s famous “catalogue _dé_raisonné” (yet not wholly so) of his great companions, and his odd confession of inability to manage “the passionate and weighty _nuntius_,” tempts fuller notice. But one must refrain.
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On the general Elizabethan position, as we have seen, Jonson himself made no great advance: in fact, he threw fresh intrenchments around it and fresh forces into its garrison. We may even, contrary to our wont in such cases, be rather glad that he did not enter upon a more extensive examination of his own contemporaries, because it is quite clear that he was not at the right point of view for making it. But it does not follow from this that he was not a critic, and a great critic. No one who was not this could have written the Shakespeare and the Bacon passages—in fact, in the former case, only a great magnanimity and a true sense of critical truth could have mixed so generous an acknowledgment with the candid avowal of so much disapproval. And, as we have said above, even where Ben was wrong, or at least insufficient, his critical gospel was the thing needed for the time to come, if not for the actual time. By a few years after his own death—by the middle of the century, that is to say—seventy years and more of such a harvest as no other country has ever had, had filled the barns of English to bursting with the ripest crops of romantic luxuriance—its treasure-houses with the gold and the ivory and the spices—if sometimes also with the apes and the peacocks—of Romantic exploration and discovery. There was no need to invite further acquisition—the national genius, in Ben’s own quotation, _sufflaminandus erat_. It was his task to begin the sufflamination: and he did it, not perhaps with a full apprehension of the circumstances, and certainly with nothing like a full appreciation of what the age, from its “_Tamerlanes_ and _Tamerchams_” onwards, had done; but still did it. In his most remarkable book we see the last word of Elizabethan criticism, not merely in point of time, but in the other sense. Ben is beyond even Sidney, much more Webbe and Puttenham, not to mention Ascham and Wilson, in grasp; while, if we compare him with the Continental critics of his own time, he shows a greater sense of real literature than almost any of them. But, at the same time, he has not occupied the true standing-ground of the critic; he has not even set his foot on it, as Dryden, born before his death, was to do. In him, as in all these Renaissance critics, we find, not so much positive errors as an inability to perceive clearly where they are and what their work is.
Passing from the performances of the several countries[291] to the general critical upshot of the century, as we passed to those performances from the survey of individual works, we have already secured one perception of result. Criticism is once more constituted; it is constituted indeed much more fully, if by no means more methodically, than has ever been the case before. By the time of our last Italian writer, Faustino Summo (Vauquelin is accidentally, and Ben Jonson not so accidentally, later in the other countries, but neither represents a stage so really advanced), Criticism has, besides its ancient books of the Law, quite a library of modern prophets, commentators, scribes. The strings of authorities, so specially dear to the coming century, can be produced without any difficulty whatsoever: and however much these authorities may differ on minor points, their general drift is unmistakable. Isolated dissenters like Patrizzi may make good their own fastnesses; but the general army hardly troubles itself to besiege or even to mask them, it goes on its way to conquer and occupy the land. Of the constitution established, or shortly to be established, in the conquered districts, some sketch has been given, but a caution should here once more be interposed against taking the word “established” too literally. Still, all the dogmas of the Neo-Classic creed, its appeal to the ancients and its appeal to Reason or Nature or Sense, its strict view of Kinds, its conception of Licence and Rule, its Unities, are more or less clearly evolved. And fresh particulars—such as its sharp reaction from the allowance and even recommendation of terms of art, archaisms, &c., which had been partly adopted by some Italians and warmly championed by the Pléiade—are at hand. Indeed, the business of the seventeenth century is, according to the title which we have ventured to take for the next book, much more to crystallise what is already passing out of the states of digestion and solution—to codify precedent case-law—than to do anything new.
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Footnote 291:
It has seemed better to reserve Sturm, Fabricius, and the few other critics of sixteenth-century Germany, till the next Book, for reasons there to be exposed. The reasons for similarly putting off the Spaniards have already been touched upon: and the minor nations do not press.
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There is not only this important advance in at least poetical theory to be considered, but also an advance still more important, though as yet not formally marshalled and regimented, in the direction of critical practice—of the application directly, to books old and new, of the critical principles so arrived at. We have seen that, for good and sufficient reasons, there was not so very much of this in classical times proper, and that there was so little of it as to be almost nothing in the Middle Ages. It did not seem necessary, in the concluding chapters of the first volume, to multiply proofs of this, as they could have been multiplied, merely to display acquaintance with mediæval literature. To take two fresh ones here, each famous for other reasons, the well-known reference of Wolfram von Eschenbach at the end of the _Parzival_ to the “unrightness” of Chrestien de Troyes’ version, and the godly wrath which made “Kyot” set things in better order, contains no literary criticism at all; the matter, according to the usual mediæval habit, is looked upon as a question of truth or falsehood, not of good or bad literary presentment. And when the equally well-known but anonymous scribe wrote jubilantly on the _Cursor Mundi_,
“This is the best book of all,”
it is as certain as anything can be that he was not thinking, as he might fairly have thought, of the not small skill in compilation and narration displayed in that mighty miscellany, but merely that it contained a great deal of useful instruction and pleasant history. In the notices of books and writers which accumulate during our present period this is more and more ceasing to be the case; it has in fact ceased to be so from almost the beginning.
Such an estimate as that given by Ascham as Cheke’s of Sallust simply could not have suggested itself to any mediæval mind; the Humanist practice of the fifteenth century had—quite early in the sixteenth—made it natural enough, at least as regards ancient writers. And it was constantly becoming more and more common as to moderns. The Italians, in a limited and scholastic fashion, had begun it long before as to Dante; they continued it in regard to Boccaccio and Petrarch; they were spurred on to practise it more and more, first by the immense popularity of the _Orlando_, and then by the rival (and deliberately urged as rival) charms of the _Gerusalemme_. Compare for one moment the survey of books and authors which we quoted or summarised from the _Labyrinthus_ in the last volume with that which we have analysed from Lilius Giraldus in this—the whole point of view, the whole method of handling, is altered. In France and England more specially, attempts, clumsy, limited, subject to whatever epithet of qualification any one pleases to apply, as they may be, are made to take a backward historical view of poetry at least; and when great work such as Ronsard’s or Spenser’s is produced, there is a real, if rudimentary, attempt made to judge it critically. By the time that we reach Ben Jonson—who no doubt has a strong tinge of the seventeenth century superinduced, by nature as well as time, on his sixteenth-century nativity—such _aperçus_ almost of the highest critical kind in their species, as those on Bacon and Shakespeare, are possible to at least the higher intellects,—it needs but a step to the very highest kind, such as that of Dryden on the same Shakespeare. That what we have called the crystallisation of a critical creed affects these estimates not always for the best is not of real importance—the point is that we have at last got them.
These are great things, but, still postponing criticism on this criticism as a whole, we may point out one or two drawbacks in it which already appear, and which are quite independent of individual inclination on the vexed questions of Classic or Romantic, Practice or Rule, Subject or Expression.
The first is that, to some extent unavoidably, but to a greater extent than that excuse will cover, the criticism which we have reviewed is criticism of poetry only. Most of it is quite openly and avowedly so. _Poetica_, _Poetice_, _De Poetica_, _Della Poetica_, _Della Vera Poetica_, _Art Poétique_, _Art of Poetry_, _Apology for Poetry_—these are the very titles of the books we have been discussing. When prose comes in at all, except on rare and mostly late occasions, it is only on questions more abstract or less abstract connected with poetry—“Whether Tragedy and Comedy may be written in Prose,” “Whether Verse is necessary to Poetry,” and the like. If poetry in ancient days was, though it received plenty of attention, sometimes injuriously postponed to oratory, it certainly now has its revenge. Oratory itself, though occasionally handled, obviously is so as a sort of legacy from the ancients themselves, from a sort of feeling that it would not be decent to say nothing about a subject on which Aristotle, and Cicero, and Quintilian have said so much. The formal Letter, being rather a favourite Italian institution, is not quite neglected; it receives some attention among ourselves from Ben. Whether History can or must give subjects for poetry is keenly debated; but the question is approached entirely from the side of interest in Poetry, not in History. At the very close of our period, we find so great a prose writer as Bacon doubting the solvency of vernacular prose; a little earlier we find Montaigne taking note of it chiefly, if at all, in regard to matter, Pasquier hardly taking notice of it at all.
This is unfortunate, because it tends further to perpetuate the mischievous absorption in Kinds, and to postpone the attainment of the position from which, though the difference between prose and poetry may be seen more sharply than ever, the common literary qualities of both, and the way in which they affect the delight of the receiver, are at last perceived. It is unfortunate, further, because it tends to prevent the enjoyment of the full advantages which the modern literatures are gradually giving to the critic in the very departments—the prose romance, the essay, and others—where ancient criticism suffered most from the absence of material.
Another drawback which it may seem captious, or ungenerous, or even childish, to urge, but which really has a great deal to do with the matter, is that, active as the period was in criticism, it did not produce a single very great critic practising on a great scale. Its four or five critics of greatest literary genius were (I exclude Bacon for reasons given, and Spenser hardly comes in) Ronsard, Du Bellay, Tasso, Sidney, and Ben Jonson. The two Frenchmen dealt with but a small part of the subject, and from but a special point of view; Tasso was mainly “fighting a prize,” and his own prize; Sidney’s was a very little tractate of general, if generous, protest, and entered into no applications; Ben’s critical remains are un-co-ordinated notes. On the other hand, of the specially critical writers, Scaliger on the strictly erudite and strictly classical side, Castelvetro in a sort of middle station, and Patrizzi as a voice crying in the wilderness, are perhaps the only three who rise distinctly above mediocrity. And, as has been pointed out already, Scaliger is too much of a pedant, Castelvetro is a mere commentator, and Patrizzi a philosopher militant, who carries on one of his campaigns in the province of criticism.
The disadvantages of this are twofold. Not merely do we get no brilliant and, at least in appearance and claim, authoritative exposition of the subject, like that of Boileau or that of Pope later on the dogmatic side, like those of Dryden and Johnson on the illustrative and exemplifying; but the whole critical system comes into existence by a process of haphazard accretion—by (to repeat a metaphor already used) an accumulation of individual judgments at common law. No doubt this gives a certain strength, a certain naturalness, to the creed when it is formed. It has not been foisted on the _communis sensus_—that _sensus_ has been inured and trained to it. The extraordinary toughness and vitality of the resultant is very likely due to this. But it caused also some of that inconsistency and apparent irrationality which a system of common law almost necessarily contracts as it grows: and it was more and more driven to throw over these inconsistencies and irrationalities that cloak of factitious Reason, or Sense, or Nature which, by the eighteenth century, becomes the mere threadbare disguise of a decrepit Duessa.
If, and when, we arrive at the close of that century, after a somewhat shorter halt and survey at the termination of the seventeenth, when the deaths of Boileau and Dryden made a real break—we shall have to complete this necessarily partial view of the whole Neo-Classic dispensation. We have seen it here in its Period of Origins, and, without endeavouring to add too many strokes to the picture, we may point to the fresh illustration of that principle which has been adumbrated (I fear, from some remarks of good critics, with insufficient perspicuity) at the close of the last volume. We saw that the tendency of Greek criticism was good, because, whether it was perfect criticism in itself or not, it was exactly the criticism needed yet further to perfect the perfections of Greek literature; and that much the same was the case in Latin. We saw that the quiescence of Criticism in Mediæval times permitted the gracious wilding of mediæval art to flourish unchecked and fill the waste places of the field. But here we see a new thing, hinted at before, the opposition, that is to say, of criticism to at least the best creation. Sidney’s dramatic criticism simply would, if it could, sweep Shakespeare from _rerum natura_, and he looks half askance at the work of his own familiar friend Spenser. Ben would put the “_Tamerlanes_ and _Tamerchams_” in the dustbin. To that untamable Romantic luxuriance which makes the glory of English literature at the time, which gives French most of its actual strength, and which, in failing measure, still supports the pride of Italy, the general tendency of Renaissance criticism opposes a perpetual “Thou shalt not.” It is not too much heeded—that would have been disastrous; but it is heeded to some extent, and that is salutary. A kind of check is put on the too wild curvetings, the too meteoric flights, of Pegasus. There was always the danger that _Jeronimo_ at the beginning and Cleveland at the end might have too truly expressed our own great age; that the odd word-coinage of the Pléiade, and the tasteless rococo stuff of French literature about 1640, might have done the same for France. Against this the critics raised unceasing voices; and, though the voices were sometimes those of geese, they really did something to save the Capitol.
BOOK V
THE CRYSTALLISING OF THE NEO-CLASSIC CREED
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“_It is not enough that Aristotle has said so, for Aristotle drew his models of tragedy from Sophocles and Euripides; and, if he had seen ours, might have changed his mind._”—DRYDEN.