CHAPTER III.
GERMAN AND DUTCH CRITICISM.
THE HINDMOST OF ALL—ORIGINS—STURM—FABRICIUS—VERSION A.—VERSION B.—JAC. PONTANUS—HEINSIUS: THE ‘DE TRAGŒDIÆ CONSTITUTIONE’—VOSS—HIS ‘RHETORIC’—HIS ‘POETICS’—OPITZ—THE ‘BUCH DER DEUTSCHEN POETEREI.’
It is not necessary to add much to what has been said in the first chapter of the last Book on the subject of Erasmus, in order to indicate the reasons why the growth of criticism in Germany, High and Low,[465] was far more tardy, and for a long time far scantier, than even in England; and why, when it came, it displayed a one-eyed character which is not visible in any other of the great European countries.[466] [Sidenote: _The hindmost of all._] Want of unity, religious and political troubles, Grobianism and its opposite or companion Pedantry—all had to do with this; but the principal hindrance was the non-existence of any considerable German vernacular literature, and the consequent inveteracy of the habit of writing in Latin. So long as this lasted the Germans and Dutch might be and were commentators, scholars, grammarians—but they could hardly be critics, because they still lacked the comparative stimulus. And it is not a little noteworthy that the earlier development of Criticism in the Low Countries as compared with Germany, during our present period, at least coincided with a greater development of Dutch vernacular literature, though this is a matter which lies out of our direct route.
-----
Footnote 465:
I do not know any general-special books on the subject of this chapter, except those of Blankenburg, and Gayley and Scott, _cit. sup._
Footnote 466:
Of course Olmucensis (_v. supra_, p. 27) and Cornelius Agrippa (p. 28) in strictness belong to the subject, as does Erasmus himself. But the last is too cosmopolitan, and the two first too unimportant, to make the abstraction of them from this place a great wrong to the _Teutsche Nation_. Ulrich von Hutten wrote on versification, but not importantly.
-----
There may easily be differences of opinion as to the persons, not mere Humanists, who shall be selected as representing the beginning of German criticism in modern times, in so far at least as the section of Poetics is concerned. [Sidenote: _Origins._] The choice may lie between the famous Johann Sturm, who touches on literary matters in his letters, who wrote on Rhetoric, and whose pupil, late in his life, drew up a commentary on the Epistle to the Pisos in 1576; Georgius Fabricius, of Chemnitz, the first form of whose _De Re Poetica_ appeared in 1565; and Jacobus Pontanus, whose real name was Spanmüller, whose book on the subject was published thirty years later, but who, as he was then a man of over fifty, and had long been a professor, had probably dealt with the subject, if only in lectures, much earlier.[467]
-----
Footnote 467:
The _Disputationes de Tragœdia_ of Schosser (1559) are earlier than any of these; but they seem to be pure commentary on Aristotle. I have not been able to see them.
-----
Sturm’s interests were more in pædagogy than in poetry, and he does not rank high as a critic: though there is no doubt that he helped to spread devotion to books. [Sidenote: _Sturm._] It is not in his favour that, in the teeth of both external and internal evidence, he fights[468] for the name _De Arte Poetica_, on the special ground that the work of Horace is an _Ars Perfecta_ (which, put its merits as high as you please, it most certainly is _not_), and that it has all the six parts of poetry—fable, character, _dianoia_, _lexis_, _melopœia_, and “sight.” For the rest he has few general remarks, and is almost wholly commentatorial. His Rhetorical writing yields little really critical: nor in his _Letters_ have I yet found half so much criticism as is extant in that single letter of Ascham to him, which has been noticed above.[469]
-----
Footnote 468:
_Commentarii in Art. Poet. Horat._ (Strasburg, 1576). The compiler was Johann Lobart. Sturm’s Rhetorical works are rather numerous, and range from the _De amissa dicendi ratione_ (ibid., 1538) onwards.
Footnote 469:
P. 155.
-----
The other two were both men of very wide influence as teachers of Poetics: and both underwent the process—complimentary but disfiguring, and specially usual in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—of having their work watered out, or boiled down, by others. [Sidenote: _Fabricius._] I do not know, and I have not considered it _tanti_ to spend much time or labour in the attempt to discover, the exact process by which the small four books of the first edition of Fabricius’ _De Re Poetica_[470] became the fat volume of seven, which presents itself under the same title thirty years later.[471] [Sidenote: _Version A._] It seemed better to give this time and labour to the reading of the books themselves. Version A (as we may call that of 1565) is an early example of the kind of _gradus_ which was particularly popular among the northern nations, though, as we have seen from the work of Mazzone da Miglionico,[472] it was by no means unknown in Italy. In his first book Fabricius discusses quantity, metre, and diction in general, with plentiful examples. Book II. is an elaborate table of locutions from the Latin poets, listed under heads as thus:—
Amor tangit. Matrimonium promittere. ” versat. ” ” inire. ” torquet. ” ” fallere. ” dat vulnus. ” ” odisse. ” mordet. ” torret.
Book III. provides the dull-witted versifier with store of _clichés_ of the same kind, but a little more elaborate; there being, for instance, dozens of phrases for embracing. And IV. is a sort of common place-book of short copies of verses on everything in Heaven and Earth.
-----
Footnote 470:
_De Re Poetica_, Lib. iv. (Antwerp, 1565).
Footnote 471:
Ibid., Lib. vii. (Leipsic, 1595).
Footnote 472:
_V. sup._, p. 107.
-----
Version B (which is dated long after Fabricius’ death in 1571) is not only much enlarged but differently arranged. [Sidenote: _Version B._] Book I. deals as before with Quantity and Feet; Book II. with the subject of A, Book III.; and the rest follow the same schemes,—III. B with tags on Ages, Seasons, Heavenly Bodies, &c.; IV. with epithets suitable to proper names; V. with ditto to common; VI. with a _pot-pourri_ of poetical faults and beauties, &c.; while VII. gives a sort of appendix on prosody and diction generally.
There is no need to say much on the inevitable critical result, the obvious critical value or valuelessness, of this. There is in A a reference to Scaliger’s _Poetic_, which had appeared a little before. As a matter of fact Scaliger and Fabricius between them provided the average late sixteenth-century man—sometimes even when he was a professed critic or poet, constantly when he was merely a person of ordinary culture—with a sort of joint poetical Thesaurus,—Scaliger doing the historical, critical, and (of its kind) philosophical business for him, and Fabricius keeping a general marine-store of materials, with precepts for their use.
The _Institutiones Poeticæ_ of Spanmüller [Pontanus] appeared first in 1594. [Sidenote: _Jac. Pontanus._] Its author is quoted, among other prophets of criticism, by the Spaniard Juan de La Cueva a dozen years later, and, independently of its original form, the book acquired, early in the seventeenth century, a large currency by being arranged (_concinnata_) in the _Sacrarum Profanarumque Phraseum Thesaurus_ of J. Buehler,[473] where it serves as theoretic handbook to another Gradus. Indeed Pontanus’ own work has all the characteristics of a decoction or abstract of Scaliger himself. And once more the same reflection applies. It is impossible not to see how powerful and (beyond mere school-work, in which they were no doubt invaluable[474]) how maleficent must have been the influence of such works on the critical temper of the generations influenced by them. La Bruyère’s _Tout est dit_—an ironical fling in its author’s mouth partly, no doubt, though perhaps not quite so even there—tended to become matter of breviary. Everything had been said and done; all the Kinds found out; all the phrases set down; all the poetry raised from shaft and vein and seam. You simply rearranged it like a child’s house of wooden bricks, according to patterns provided on the lid. The “Causes of Corrupted Arts” into which Vives inquired, “The Lost System of Speaking” which Sturm deplored, were all to be found, and found sufficiently, in the Ancients.
-----
Footnote 473:
_S. l._ 1633, and continually reprinted.
Footnote 474:
Let me not be supposed for one moment to depreciate Latin verse-making. I hardly know (speaking from actual experience as a school-master) a single study which is better for boys; and the intelligent use of the gradus is a better discipline in observation, critical selection, and method, than smatterings of a hundred so-called “sciences.” But there is a time to put away childish things as well as a time to use them.
-----
The solid qualities of the German race have not commonly distinguished themselves in pure criticism, and to this day Lessing and Goethe are rather captains without companies, and with at best a staff of Schlegels, and suchlike, for lieutenants and ancients. Germans were, however, to do something better, in this century of erudition, than the mere preparation of fourth-form handbooks. Daniel Heinsius and Gerard Voss may be regarded with some reason as the Jachin and the Boaz of the temple of seventeenth-century Poetics. _The De Tragœdiæ Constitutione_ of the first, which appeared at Leyden in 1611,[475] is the succinctest and best argued statement of the neo- and to a great extent pseudo-Aristotelian view of Drama. The new _Institutes of Oratory_,[476] and the much later _Poetical Institutes_[477] of the second, construct, with a great deal of learning and a very considerable amount of good sense, an entire neo-classical Rhetoric and Poetic. To both we must give some attention.
-----
Footnote 475:
The copy of this which belongs to the University of Edinburgh has the additional interest of having belonged to, and of having been given by, Drummond of Hawthornden, and so of having been, not improbably, in the hands of Ben Jonson.
Footnote 476:
_Commentariorum Rhetoricorum sive Oratoriarum Institutionum Libri Sex_, 8vo, Dordrecht, 1609. But this was greatly enlarged in the 4to of Leyden, 1643, which I use.
Footnote 477:
_De Artis Poeticæ Natura ac Constitutione_, 4to, Amsterdam, 1647.
-----
The _De Tragœdiæ Constitutione_ is beyond all doubt a very remarkable book. [Sidenote: _Heinsius. The_ De Tragœdiæ Constitutione.] It is quite short; only some 250 very small pages of very large print, so that there are scarcely more than a hundred words in a page. But Heinsius writes as one having authority; and we can read but little of him before it becomes perfectly clear why that authority was accepted, for the rest of the century at least, with more docility and less cavil than that of almost any other critic. He takes the _Poetics_—as many, indeed most men for more than half a century, had taken them—for gospel. But he neither translates them on the one hand, nor wanders in the wilderness of scrappy and desultory commentary on the other. Not merely does he confine himself to that part of the book which concerns his actual subject, but he renders this part in a fashion which may best be described as a very rare, and very masterly, kind of lecturing. He neither slavishly keeps nor prudishly avoids the actual words of his author; his paraphrases are brief but lucid; he adds to Aristotle what he thinks necessary[478] in the way of illustrations from the Greek tragedians, citation from Horace, examples (by no means always laudatory) from Seneca, and the like; but in such a fashion as never to overload, or water down, the milk of the Aristotelian word. That he always gives that milk quite “sincere” we cannot say; he emphasises the “single revolution of the sun” more than he has any right to do, though he does not do the same for the still more pestilent and apocryphal Unity of Place. He may sometimes, or often in the disputable places (as of “purgation” and so forth), miss the full meaning of Aristotle according to the view of some judges, or impute a wrong one according to others. But nobody, let it be repeated, can read him impartially without seeing that he has soaked himself with the spirit of his author, has equipped himself pretty thoroughly with the literature of his subject, and, as a result, is speaking, as we said, with authority. There is no clearer or more workmanlike exposition of the neo-classic, and not too _neo_-classic, dramatic ideal than his.
-----
Footnote 478:
He has no room for much historical illustration, but what he says is generally sound, though it is odd that in mentioning the _Christus Patiens_ (which, of course, he attributes to Gregory Nazianzen) he should not have noticed its _cento_ character, and though his remarks on Muretus and Buchanan smack a little of the rival author of _Herodes Infanticida_.
-----
Heinsius, like his successor Hédelin in France, and like Hédelin’s successors Rymer and Dennis in England, was rash enough to forget that though a critic is (thank Heaven!) not bound to write good poetry, he is bound not to publish bad. [Sidenote: _Voss._] And he ventured on a tragedy, _Herodes Infanticida_, and other things which did not meet much quarter even from those who agreed with him in critical principles. Voss was wiser, and confined himself to the pure erudition and comment of which the two books referred to above are far from being the worst examples. Indeed his unboastful scholarship, his immense reading, and his untiring industry would seem to have fitted him quite exceptionally for the duty; and he has actually given us in these two books, or rather collections of books, the completest _Rhetoric_ and _Poetic_ of modern, if not of any, times. Only two things more were needed to put these books in a place even more unique; but Nature refused the one to Voss personally, and the other was a thing almost unreasonable to require from a Dutch savant of the seventeenth century. The first was positive critical genius; and the second was an impartial appreciation of ancient and modern literature.
[Sidenote: _His_ Rhetoric.]
The _Rhetoric_, which the author put out in its first form in 1606, revising and enlarging it for at least thirty years, till it forms a quarto of a thousand closely printed pages, has some seventy more of minute index, but lacks the Table of Contents, or displayed syllabus of section headings, for which we have so often had to be thankful in Italian work. Voss evidently had the practice of the Roman Law constantly before him, and he thus follows the method of the Latin treatises in a way which makes it for the most part superfluous for us to follow _him_, though he has plenty of modern instances and applications. From the Fourth Book onwards, however, he deals with Elocution and Style, chiefly of course by the way of Figures, yet, according to his lights, in the most careful and exhaustive fashion. But what is at once noteworthy and rather tell-tale is his unqualified admiration for the Scaligers,—father and son. “That divine man,” “that man, _ad unguem factus_,” that “emperor of the literary world,” that “prince of the senate of criticism”; without some phrase of this kind he seems unable to name them. And in fact the whole book is rather a huge commentatorial digest of what they and others, from Aristotle downwards, have said than anything more.
The _Poetical Institutions_ are somewhat more original, and they had much greater influence. [Sidenote: _His_ Poetics.] The book consists really of three separate works, a brief _De Arte Poetica_ of less than ninety pages, of which Grotius, in a commendatory epigram prefixed to some editions, says—
“non magnus dat tibi cuncta liber;”
of the _Institutiones_ proper in about four hundred; and of a _De Imitatione_ which is rather shorter than the _Ars_. The first, as reason and its title both import, is a purely general tractate, which, after pointing out that Poetry has much in common with Oratory, and that therefore much which concerns it has been said in the earlier book, discusses all the old generalities about the origin, nature, moral character, and so forth, of poetry, with expositions of most of the _cruces_ and technical catchwords from Ψιλὸς λόγος down to _furor poeticus_. Voss is here also very generally Scaligerian; he adheres to the “natural” origin of poetry, love-songs, cradle-songs, &c., as against the religious and the deliberately “imitative”; gives very wide scope of subject to the poet, and defends him handsomely against his enemies and detractors from Plato downwards, but is properly indignant with naughty poets.[479]
-----
Footnote 479:
Our whole history has shown us the obsession of the _pius poeta_, the _vir bonus_; but I think the uncompromising submission to it of the later seventeenth and eighteenth century is as much due to the influence of Voss as to that of any single mediate person.
-----
The _Institutions_ deal more directly with the question of Poetic Art, and proceed by a series of section-headings in the form of Propositions, which are then explained, commented, and defended. The first of the Three Books deals with the matter common to all kinds of poetry; the Second with the Drama; the Third with the Epic and the minor Kinds. All this is old stuff rehandled. There is somewhat more originality in the _De Imitatione_, which does not exactly correspond to any of the older books, or parts of books, on that subject. Voss generally supposes the question, “How is the poet to set about his work?” “How is he to apply all these rules that we have given him?” and before very long we see that he is really thinking of the wrong Imitation no less than Vida was. He devotes himself (no doubt under the happier inspiration of Quintilian) to discussing _how_ we are to imitate, how to read. But he very soon slips into the inquiry, practical indeed but a little undignified, “How are we to escape plagiarism?” to which one is tempted to reply, “By not imitating in this sense at all.” That is not his opinion. He thinks, if we may vary a well-known proverb, that the safe way is to take all your eggs out of one basket. But you are never to imitate bad words and thoughts; you must plan your work carefully beforehand, correct carefully, invite criticism, but distinguish between what is good and what is not. It is all very just in this way; but that way has led us far from _furor poeticus_. We feel at the end of Voss’s laborious and erudite book that we are indeed in the century of the _Gradus_. And here, as in his other volume, we also feel that he has, for good or for evil, caught up and uttered the gospel of Neo-Classicism.
So far we have dealt only with Latin authors. The work of Heinsius is mentioned, both in the text by the author, and by the introducer, Augustinus Iskra, of the _Buch von der Deutschen Poeterei_[480] of Martin Opitz. [Sidenote: _Opitz._] This interesting and agreeable little book, though not exactly (as it has sometimes been incorrectly called) the first[481] piece of German poetic in the vernacular, is entitled, with the usual reserves, to the place of origin in _modern_ German Poetics. It cannot be called prolix, for it only occupies sixty pages in the recent reprint; but it is equally modest and business-like, and helps to redeem from the utter absurdity of most of such appellations (though it still remains absurd) the title of German Dryden which somebody or other has given to Opitz. Augustine Iskra does not exaggerate when he says—
“Altius scandes patria canendo Barbyto, quam si Latium peritæ Atticæ jungas, Syriæque Peithus Noveris artem.”
And it is the peculiar glory of the Silesian poet that he not only sang himself on the lyre of his country, but did his best to enable others to do so. The spirit of genuine patriotism breathes in his dedication of the booklet to the magistrates of his native town, Buntzlau; and that of a modest scholarship (an adjective and substantive which make such an agreeable couple that it is pity they should live so much apart) in the opening of the book itself. He has not the least idea, he says, that you can make a poet by rules and laws; nor has he any intention of doing over again the work which Aristotle, Horace, Vida, and Scaliger have done. [Sidenote: _The_ Buch der Deustchen Poeterei.] But he arrays himself (to speak ecclesiastically) in a “decent tippet” of the old stuff about Linus and Orpheus, with the Strabo passage all complete, and a train of citations as to the nobility of the poet’s office and the like. He comes in his fourth chapter to business. He actually quotes Walther von der Vogelweide; and I do not think that he can be fairly charged with that ὕβρις towards the ancient poetry of his country which too frequently marks others in other countries. But he is evidently set on the work of Reform—of substituting “smoothness of numbers” for the “wild sweetness” of the folk-song. Wherein no doubt he was wrong. Not that way did the counsels of perfection lie for the Higher Dutch; and they have always had to come back to the woodnotes and the wood-Muses to find poetic luck. But Opitz was entitled—was in his day almost bound—to think differently. The interesting thing—much more interesting to us than the details to which it led him, such as the patronage of the Alexandrine, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, &c.—is the particular source to which he turned for inspiration and guidance. He knew, as has been said, the Italian critics, at least those in Latin, and he probably knew the Italian poets (he cites Petrarch). But it is to France, and specially to Ronsard, that he fondly turns. Now it need hardly be said that in 1624 the influence of the Pléiade in its own country, though not quite dead, was moribund; the correctness of Malherbe, on the one hand, was doing its best deliberately to throttle it, and the Italianated and Spaniolated extravagances which were fashionable were choking it in another way. This is no doubt not the only instance of a literary influence which is dead or dying in its own country showing full vitality in another, but it is one of the most remarkable. For, beyond question, the French influence—in successive forms, but still French—reigned in Germany for some hundred and fifty years; and it was Opitz who first brought it to bear.
-----
Footnote 480:
Printed at Brieg and published at Breslau in 1624; reprinted as the first number of Niemeyer’s _Neudrucke des xvi^{ten} und xvii^{ten} Jahrhunderts_, at Halle in 1886. The title of _Prosodia Germanica_, which the later editions bore, does not seem to be the author’s own.
Footnote 481:
For instance, the very interesting _Grundlicher Bericht des Deutschen Meistergesangs_ of Adam Puschmann, edited by Herr Jonas for the same collection as No. 73 (Halle, 1888), is more than half a century older than Opitz’s book, having appeared at Görlitz in 1571. But Puschmann, a pupil of Hans Sachs himself, and active in the Masterschool, is only looking back on that school, the rules and regulations of which he lays down in the most approved fashion. “The face” of Opitz “meets the morning’s breath.”
-----
His details, as has been said, are less interesting: yet they do not lack interest. He begins by stickling for pure High German: and certainly no one who, for his sins, has been condemned to read much of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century German—one of the ugliest and most mongrel speeches in history, and quite astounding after the musical sweetness of the best _Mittelhochdeutsch_—will owe him a grudge for this. He protests against the mingle-mangle of foreign words which was flooding the language, and even against the famous _-iren_ by which, to the present day to some extent, Germans give a sort of spurious naturalisation to such foreigners. He would have limits set (though he does not forbid it altogether) to that odd custom of declining classical names in German speech, which is also maintained to some extent, but which sometimes made a mere Macaronic of sixteenth-century German. On the other hand, it is curious to find him urging on Germans, who by right were, and by practice long have been, among the busiest and most successful of word-compounders, the _sonderliche anmuthigkeit_ of compounds: and actually quoting the French as, next the Greeks, the masters of such things.[482] Of course the historical student, even if citations from Ronsard were not on the same page, would know at once whence this comes. Still, there still remains the oddity of alleging the undoubtedly awkward and exotic-sounding _chasse-nue_, _ébranle-rocher_, and _irrite-mer_ as warrants and patterns for words like _wolkentreiber_, _felsenstürmer_, and _meeraufreitzer_, which simply seem to us natural-born, and to require no warranty but their own sound and appearance.
-----
Footnote 482:
_Buch der Poet._, ed. cit., p. 29.
-----
But Opitz (of whom if any critic speaks disrespectfully, I fear that it argues him uncritical) wrote not merely on the eve, but in the actual stormy morning, of the Thirty Years’ War: and Germany had something else to do for a long time besides listening to him. When matters settled down again, the advice to attend to the French was rather unfortunately “carried over” to a state of things in which French influence was still less the influence for Germany. But this imitation, whether right or wrong, found no important critical expression, and it would be losing labour and space to devote either to German criticism in the last half of the seventeenth century.
It is more remarkable that the real activity and accomplishment of Dutch during the early part of the century did not lead to some development of vernacular criticism. But to the best of my information[483] it did not. The Dutch and the Germans, however, of course still continued to write in Latin, to edit, to comment, to carry on that division of critical work which, according to the laying out of our subject, lies, except at particular seasons and for special ends, beyond the scope of this book. Moreover, both Holland and some of the German Free-towns, but especially the former country, became the adopted, as they were almost the natural, homes of those beginners of judicial criticism, who have been noticed in part at the conclusion of the French chapter of this Book. Bayle’s _Nouvelles de la République de Lettres_ were Hollandish by domicile, as was the _Bibliothèque Universelle_ of Le Clerc, while at Leipsic the _Acta Eruditorum_ maintained the same principle of critical annals for nearly a century. Bayle, as has been said before, was too much of a partisan, and perhaps of a wit, for anything of his to have a judicial, however much in some senses of the word it might have a critical, character: but the less mercurial talents of Jean Le Clerc, which have been characterised under the head of the _Ana_ (v. _sup._, p. 276), were very well suited to the conduct of a critical record.
-----
Footnote 483:
I must here repeat, with additional emphasis, the caution and apology which I put in as to Spanish. I do not know anything of _this_ language. I have been content to apply to Low Dutch the precept of a great High Dutchman, _Entbehren sollst du_. But for our purpose I believe it will be generally admitted that the renunciation is not fatal, important Dutch critics having, almost to a man, written in Latin.
-----