EARLY ITALIAN CRITICS.
THE BEGINNINGS—SAVONAROLA—PICO, ETC.—POLITIAN—THE ‘MANTO’—THE ‘AMBRA’
AND ‘RUSTICUS’—THE ‘NUTRICIA’—THEIR MERITS AND DANGER—PETRUS
CRINITUS: HIS ‘DE POETIS LATINIS’—AUGUSTINUS OLMUCENSIS: HIS
‘DEFENCE OF POETRY’—PARADOXICAL ATTACKS ON IT BY CORNELIUS AGRIPPA,
LANDI, BERNI—VIDA—IMPORTANCE OF THE ‘POETICS’—ANALYSIS OF THE
PIECE—ESSENTIAL POVERTY OF ITS THEORY—HISTORICAL AND SYMPTOMATIC
SIGNIFICANCE—THE ALLEGED APPEAL TO REASON AND NATURE—THE MAIN STREAM
STARTED—TRISSINO—DIVISION OF HIS ‘POETIC’—HIS CRITICAL
VALUE—EDITORS, ETC., OF THE ‘POETICS’—PAZZI—ROBORTELLO, SEGNI,
MAGGI, VETTORI—THEORISTS: DANIELLO—FRACASTORO—FORMALISTS: MUTIO.
TOLOMEI AND CLASSICAL METRES—OTHERS: TOMITANO, LIONARDI, B. TASSO,
CAPRIANO—IL LASCA—BEMBO—CARO—VARCHI—MINTURNO—THE ‘DE POETA’—THE
‘ARTE POETICA’—THEIR VALUE—GIRALDI CINTHIO’S ‘DISCORSI’—ON
ROMANCE—ON DRAMA—SOME POINTS IN BOTH—ON SATIRE—PIGNA—LILIUS
GIRALDUS: HIS ‘DE POETIS NOSTRORUM TEMPORUM’—ITS WIDTH OF RANGE—BUT
NARROWNESS OF VIEW—HORROR AT PREFERENCE OF VERNACULAR TO LATIN—YET A
REAL CRITIC IN BOTH KINDS—SHORT ‘PRÉCIS’ OF THE DIALOGUES—THEIR
GREAT HISTORIC VALUE.
It is not necessary to discuss, or even to expose at any length, the
causes of the relative precocity of Italian Criticism in the
Renaissance. [Sidenote: _The beginnings._] They are practically all
contained in, and can by the very slightest expense of learning and
intelligence be extracted from, the fact that Italy was at once the
cradle of Humanist study of the Classics, and the only country in Europe
which possessed a fully developed vernacular. But for the greater part
of the fifteenth century attention was diverted from actual
criticism—except of the validating or invalidating kind—by the prior and
eagerer appetite for the discovery, study, and popularising, by
translation and otherwise, of the actual authors and texts. For a long
time, indeed, this appetite showed the usual promiscuity of such
affections; and it was scarcely till the time of Vittorino da Feltre
that much critical discrimination of styles was introduced. But these
and other kindred things came surely, and brought criticism with them,
though criticism still generally of the moral and educational kind. The
Boccaccian defence was taken up by various writers of note—Bruni,[19]
Guarino, Æneas Sylvius—and before the close of the fifteenth century two
of the greatest of Florentines had indicated in different ways the main
lines which Italian criticism was to take. These two were Savonarola and
Politian.
-----
Footnote 19:
Since I wrote this, an obliging correspondent, Mr P.G. Thomas of
Liverpool, has suggested actual quotation of a passage of Bruni’s on
prose style in his _De Studiis et Literis_. If I do not give this it
is, first, because indulgence in quotation here is as the letting out
of waters; and, secondly, because the tractate is translated in Mr W.
H. Woodward’s well-known and excellent book on _Vittorino da Feltre_
(Cambridge, 1897), where other matter of interest to us will also be
found.
-----
The tendency of each could be anticipated by any one who, though
actually ignorant of it, knew the characteristics of the two men in
other ways. [Sidenote: _Savonarola._] Fra Girolamo’s, of course, is
wholly ethical-religious, mainly neo-Platonic, but already presenting
the effect of Aristotelian details on the general Platonic attitude to
Poetry. Yet he is still scholastic in his general treatment of the
subject, and still adopts that close subordination of poetry to Logic
which is as old as Averroes and Aquinas, and which, odd as it may seem
to merely modern readers, is a very simple matter when examined.[20] He
disclaims, as usual, any attack on poetry itself, urging only the abuse
of poetry; but he follows Plato in looking more than askance at it, and
Aristotle in denying its necessary association with verse. The
Scriptures are the noblest poetry; all ancient poetry is doubtfully
profitable. In fact, he regards poetry altogether as specially liable to
abuse, and dubiously admissible into, or certainly to be expelled from,
a perfect community, such as that on which the fancy of the Renaissance
was so much fixed.
-----
Footnote 20:
The connecting and explaining link, sometimes omitted, is to be found
in _Rhetoric_—the close connection of which with Logic and Grammar is
no puzzle, while the connection of poetry with it was then an accepted
fact. It is rather dangerous to say that Savonarola, in connecting
poetry with logic, was “tending towards the elimination of the
Imagination in art.” The extremely equivocal nature of the word
“Imagination” (_v._ vol. i. pp. 120, 165) needs constantly
to be pointed out. In the ancient sense, Imagination is as much
connected with Logic as anything else; in the modern, Savonarola
probably never even thought of it.
-----
Savonarola’s remarks, which are contained in his four-book tractate, _De
Scientiis_,[21] are more curious than really important. Yet they derive
some importance from the great name and influence of their propounder,
from his position at the very watershed, so to speak, of time in Europe,
if not in Italy, dividing Middle Age from Renaissance, and from the fact
that they undoubtedly summarise that dubitative, if not utterly hostile,
view of literature in general, and of poetry in particular, which, as we
have seen,[22] was borrowed by the Fathers from the ancients, and very
much intensified by the borrowers. Fra Girolamo’s attitude is a rigidly
scholastic one; and to those who omit to take account of this, or do not
understand it, his view must seem wholly out of focus, if not wholly
obscure. Poetry is a part of Rational Philosophy; and therefore its
object must be _pars entis rationis_. It differs from Rhetoric in
working purely by Example, not Enthymeme. Its end is to induce men to
live virtuously by decent representations; and as the soul loves
harmony, it uses harmonic forms. But a poet who merely knows how to play
gracefully with feet only deserves the name as an old woman deserves
that of a pretty girl.[23] Still more preposterous is the habit of
calling poetry “divine.” Cosmos becomes chaos, if you admit that.
_Scientia autem divina est cujus objectum Deus: non illa cujus objectum
exemplum._ The making of verses is only poetry _per accidens_; and as
for the Heathen poets, _magnus diaboli laqueus absconditus est_ in them.
He does not, he says, actually “damn” poetry; but the gist of his
tractatule is that poets as a rule quite misunderstand their function,
and that poetry had better keep its place, and abstain from silly, not
to say blasphemous, airs.
-----
Footnote 21:
Otherwise, _De Divisione et Utilitate Omnium Scientiarum_. I have read
this in the Wittemberg ed. of his _Philosophiæ Epitome_ (1596, 8vo).
The passages quoted and referred to will be found at p. 807 _sq._ of
this.
Footnote 22:
Vol. i. p. 380 _sq._
Footnote 23:
Or, “a pretty old woman that of a girl,” the position of the epithet
between the two nouns being ambiguous.
-----
Such a point of view was, of course, liable to be taken by persons alike
unlikely to assume the “know-nothing” attitude of the more ignorant
Catholics, the Philistine-Puritan attitude of Protestantism, or the
merely Platonic and non-Christian theory of some free-thinkers. It might
well seem to thoughtful lovers of literature that its very existence was
in danger when it was attacked from so many sides, and that it was
necessary to intrench it as strongly as possible. Nor were the materials
and the plan of the fortification far to seek. The suggestion has been
rather oddly discovered in the Geographer Strabo;[24] but authorities
much more germane to the matter were at hand. Boccaccio himself had, as
we have seen, both taken note of the danger and indicated the means of
defence: Maximus Tyrius and Plutarch, the one in a manner more, the
other in a manner less, favourable to poetry, had in effect long before
traced out the whole Camp of Refuge on lines suitable either to the
bolder or to the more timid defender of Poesy. The latter could
represent it as the philosophy of the young, as a sort of
_Kindergarten_-keeper in the vestibule of the higher mysteries, as not
necessarily bad at all, and possibly very good. The former could argue
for its equality with philosophy itself, as pursuing the same ends by
different means, and appealing, not in the least _in forma pauperis_, to
its own part of human nature.
-----
Footnote 24:
Geog. i. 11, 5, where he describes poetry as a rudimentary philosophy,
providing an introduction to life, and educating pleasantly. I do not
remember who _first_, or who successively, pointed this out before
Shaftesbury, _Advice to an Author_, Part I. sect. 3, note _sub fin._
But Castelvetro (_Op. Var._, p. 83), and Opitz (_v. inf._, p. 361),
among others, refer to it.
-----
It seems by no means improbable that this view was partly brought about
by that remarkable influencer both of early mediæval and of early
Renaissance thought, Dionysius the Areopagite. [Sidenote: _Pico, &c._]
Readers of Mr Seebohm’s _Oxford Reformers_[25] will remember the curious
and interesting extracts there given from Colet’s correspondence with
Radulphus, and the explanation of the Mosaic cosmogony as intended to
present the Divine proceedings “after the manner of a poet.” This view
Colet seems to have extracted partly from Dionysius himself, partly from
Pico della Mirandola, the most remarkable of Savonarola’s converts,
while time and place are not inconsistent with the belief that the
future Dean of St Paul’s may have come into contact with Fra Girolamo
himself. Now, this kind of envisagement of poetry, certain to turn to
spiritual account in spiritually minded persons like Colet and
Savonarola, and in mystically, if not spiritually, minded ones like
Pico, would, in the general temper of the Renaissance, of which all
three were early illustrations, as certainly turn to more or less
spiritualised philosophy—ethical, metaphysical, or purely æsthetic, as
the case might be. And we can see in it a _vera causa_ of that certainly
excessive, if not altogether mistaken, devotion to the abstract
questions, “What is a poet?” “What is poetry?” “What is drama?” and so
forth, which we perceive in almost all the Italian critics of the
mid-sixteenth century, and which is almost equally, if less originally,
present in their Elizabethan pupils and followers. If Colet himself had
paid more attention to literature, we cannot doubt that this is the line
which his own literary criticism would have taken; and as his influence,
direct or through Erasmus and More, was very great on English thought,
both at Oxford and Cambridge, it is not impossible that it may have been
exerted in this very way.
-----
Footnote 25:
More especially p. 46 _sq._ (2nd ed.) The influence of the _Somnium
Scipionis_ of Macrobius may also have been considerable.
-----
The other line (the line which, according to the definitions of the
present work, we must call the line of criticism proper), though it was
perhaps hardly in this instance traced with boldness and without
deflection, started under yet more distinguished auspices. [Sidenote:
_Politian._] The _Sylvæ_ of Politian consist, in the main, of a direct
critical survey of classical poetry couched in the, as we may think,
somewhat awkward form of verse, decked with all the ornament that could
suggest itself to the author’s rich, varied, and not seldom really
poetical fancy, and arranged with a view to actual recitation in the
lecture-room for the delight and encouragement of actual students.[26]
-----
Footnote 26:
Politian’s critical faculty shows to more advantage here than in his
attribution of the Epistles of the Pseudo-Phalaris to Lucian (see
Bentley’s immortal _Dissertation_). He had almost better—from the
literary point of view—have believed them genuine.
-----
Neither purpose nor method can be regarded as wholly favourable to
criticism. The popular _conférencier_ (for this term best expresses
Politian’s position) is sure to be rather more of a panegyrist or a
detractor, as the case may be, than of a critic; and the lecturer in
verse is sure to be thinking rather of showing his own rhetorical and
poetical gifts than of the strict merits and defects of his subject. But
if we take the _Nutricia_ or the _Rusticus_, the _Ambra_ or the _Manto_,
and compare any of them with the well-intentioned summary of the
_Labyrinthus_,[27] we shall see without the least unfairness, and fully
admitting the difference of ability and of opportunity in the two men,
the difference, from the critical point of view, of the two
stand-points.
-----
Footnote 27:
_V._ vol. i. p. 408.
-----
In the “Manto,” the first of the _Sylvæ_, the most important
characteristic of sixteenth-century Italian criticism proper, the
exaltation of Virgil, is already prominent. [Sidenote: _The_ Manto.]
Politian, indeed, was too much of a wit, and too much of a poet himself,
to let his Virgil-worship take the gross and prosaic form which it
assumed a little later in Vida. But he has proceeded a long way from the
comparatively uncritical (and yet so more critical) standpoint of Dante.
He comes to details. Cicero had won the palms of sweetness from Nestor
and of tempestuous eloquence from Ulysses (a little vague this), but
Greece consoled herself in poetry. Ennius was too rude to give Latium
the glory of that. Then came Virgil. Even with the Syracusan reed
(_i.e._, in his Eclogues) he crushes Hesiod and contends with Homer.
Calliope took him in her arms as an infant, and kissed him thrice.
Manto, the guardian nymph of his native place, hailed his advent, and
summarised in prophetic detail his achievements in verse. Her town shall
enter the lists—secure of victory—with the seven competitors for Homer’s
origin. And then a whirlwind of magniloquent peroration (charged with
epanaphora,[28] that favourite figure of the sixteenth century) extols
the poet above all poets and all wonders of the world, past, present,
and to come.
-----
Footnote 28:
_Aut_ telo, Summane, tuo traxere ruinam,
_Aut_ trucibus nimbis aut iræ obnoxia Cauri,
_Aut_ tacitis lenti perierunt dentibus ævi.
_Dum_ ver tristis hyems, autumnum proferet æstas,
_Dum_que fluet spirans refluetque reciproca Tethys,
_Dum_ mixta alternas capient elementa figuras,
_Semper_ erit magni decus immortale Maronis,
_Semper_ inexhaustis ibunt hæc flumina venis,
_Semper_ ab his docti ducentur fontibus haustus,
_Semper_ odoratos fundent hæc gramina flores.
—_Manto_, 335-337, 342-348, p. 303, _ed. cit. inf._
-----
But Politian would have been faithful neither to those individual
qualities which have been noted in him, nor to that sworn service of
Greek which was the chivalry of the true Humanist, if he had thought of
depreciating Homer. [Sidenote: _The_ Ambra _and_ Rusticus.] The “Ambra,”
a poem longer than the “Manto,” and not much less enthusiastic, is
mainly devoted to a fanciful description of the youth of the poet, and a
verse-summary of the poems. Indeed the peroration (till it is turned
into a panegyric of Ambra, a favourite villa of Lorenzo) is a brilliant,
forcible, and _true_ indication of the enormous debt of all ancient
literature, science, and in fact life, to Homer, of the universality of
his influence, and of the consensus of testimony in his favour. The
“Rusticus” is rather an independent description and panegyric of country
life, as a preface to the reading of Virgil, Hesiod, and other bucolic
and georgic writers, than a criticism or comparison of them. [Sidenote:
_The_ Nutricia.] But the “Nutricia” is again ours in the fullest sense.
Its avowed argument is _De poetica et poetis_, and, in handling this
vast and congenial theme, Politian gives the fullest possible scope at
once to his genius, to his learning, and to that intense love for
literature without which learning is but as the Carlylian
“marine-stores.” In nearly eight hundred exultant hexameters,[29] the
vigour and fulness of which enable them to carry off without difficulty
the frippery of their occasional trappings, he traces the origin of
poetry, the transition from mere stupid wonder and the miseries of
barbarism to sacred and profane verse, the elaboration of its laws in
Judea by David and Solomon, in Greece by Orpheus, the succession of the
Greek and Latin poets in the various forms (it is noteworthy that
Politian is not at all copious on the drama) through the exploits of
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to the patronage of poetry by Lorenzo
himself.
-----
Footnote 29:
If anybody charges me with plagiarism from Mr Symonds’ “leaping,” I
had rather plead guilty than quibble. The metaphor is too obviously
the right and only one, for the peculiar motion of Politian’s verse,
to any one who has an ear. I keep, however, the order of the edition I
use (that of Signor Isidoro del Lugo, Florence, 1867), not the perhaps
more logical one of _Nutricia—Rusticus—Manto—Ambra_, which Mr Symonds
followed and which is that of Pope, _op. cit. inf._
-----
This is criticism leaning dangerously on the one side to panegyric, and
likely to be (though it is not actually) dragged to the other still more
dangerously by partisanship; but it is still criticism. [Sidenote:
_Their merits_] The liker does not “like grossly,” or in accordance with
mere tradition. He loves, as the American poet says, “not by allowance
but with personal love”; and he can give reasons for the love that is in
him. He seeks the poetic pleasure from the Muse; he obtains it from her;
and he savours it, not merely with eagerness, but with acutely sensitive
taste. Though he might not at some moments be averse to refining on the
character of poetry generally, as well as on the character of this
poetic pleasure, it is this itself that he seeks, finds, and rejoices
in. Part at least of the spirit of Longinus is on him; he is
transported, and he knows the power that transports.
At the same time, it must be difficult, for all but the extremest
Virgilians, to think that he does not err by way of excess in his
estimate of that poet; and it must be still more difficult, even for
them, not to perceive that the pitch, even if excusable in the
individual, is dangerous as an example. [Sidenote: _and danger._]
Followers will make-believe; they will give inept reasons to support
their made belief; and worst of all, by that fatal catachresis of
“imitation” which is always waiting upon the critic, they will begin to
think, and to say, that by simply copying and borrowing from Virgil and
other great ones you may go near to be thought not entirely destitute of
their so-much-praised charm. The danger very soon ceased to be a danger
only, and we find a victim to it in Vida; but before coming to him we
may divagate a little.
The _furor poeticus_ of Politian put him much beyond other Humanists in
critical respects. His contemporary and friend, [Sidenote: _Petrus
Crinitus: his_ De Poetis Latinis.] Petrus Crinitus,[30] was, if not
quite of the same caste as Politian, by no means of the mere ordinary
Humanist type. His kissing-verses, _Dum te Neæra savior_, are among the
best of their kind between Petronius and Johannes Secundus; and his
curious _pot-pourri_, _De Honesta Sapientia_, is quite worth reading,
though one may know most of its constituents well enough beforehand. Yet
the literary inquiries here are surprisingly few, and treated in no
critical spirit whatsoever, so that there is no disappointment in one
sense, though there may be in another, with his three books, _De Poetis
Latinis_. These consist of a large number of separate articles in more
or less chronological order, by no means ill-written in the
classical-dictionary fashion: _Genitus est_ here; _obiisse traditur_
there, and in such a year; _totum se dicavit poeticæ facultati_, and the
rest. The taste as expressed by preferences is not bad, and the
approaches (they are hardly more) to critical estimate, though very
obvious and mostly traditional, are sound enough and fairly supported by
quotation. But of original attempt to grasp and to render the character
of Latin poetry generally, or of any one Latin poet by himself, there is
hardly a vestige.
-----
Footnote 30:
My copy is the edition of Gryphius (Lugduni, 1554). Crinitus (Ricci or
Riccio) had dedicated it nearly fifty years earlier, and just before
his own death, I believe, to Cosmo Pazzi, Bishop of Arezzo, on
November 1, 1505.
-----
It is not at all improbable that _Poetics_ in one form or another, both
Italian and “Tedescan,” may exist in MSS. of this period: [Sidenote:
_Augustinus Olmucensis: his_ Defence of Poetry.] there is certainly
work, even in print, of which very little notice has been taken
hitherto. For instance, a few months ago my friend Mr Gregory Smith saw
in a catalogue, bought, and very kindly lent to me, a _Dialogus in
Defensionem Poetices_, printed at Venice in 1493, and written by a
certain Augustinus Moravus Olmucensis.[31] This writer’s family name in
vernacular appears to have been Käsenbrot; and he was one of the early
German Humanists whose most famous chiefs were Reuchlin earlier, Conrad
Celtes and Eobanus Hessus later, who achieved much tolerable verse, and
in the _Epistolæ Obscurorum_ one immortal piece of prose, but who were
whelmed in the deluge of the Reformation struggles, and accomplished
little of the good which they might have done to Germany. The
_Dialogus_—which has the perhaps not quite accidental interest of having
appeared in the year between the writing of Savonarola’s somewhat
dubious backing of Poetry, and the first printing of Boccaccio’s
uncompromising and generous championship thereof—cannot be said to be of
much intrinsic importance. The author gives, or rather adopts, the
definition of Poetry as “a metrical structure of true or feigned
narration, composed in suitable rhythm or feet, and adjusted to utility
_and_ pleasure.” But his text is rather rambling. A parallel with
Medicine (the piece seems to have been written at Padua, which helps it
to its place here) is not very well worked out, and the latter part is
chiefly occupied with rather dull-fantastic allegorisings of the stories
of Tiresias, the Gorgons, the geography of Hades, and so forth. Still it
is a sign, and welcome as such.
-----
Footnote 31:
A fellow-citizen and contemporary printer generally appears in
biographical dictionaries under the heading “Olmucensis.” The history
of Olmütz, by W. Müller (Vienna, 1882), has not come in my way, so I
do not know whether Augustinus appears there. The _Dialogus_ is duly
in Hain, but has not, I think, been much noticed by literary
historians.
-----
Another Transalpine may be admitted here, for reasons of time rather
than of place, to introduce two undoubted Italians. [Sidenote:
_Paradoxical attacks on it by Cornelius Agrippa, Landi, Berni._] It is
customary to mention the name at least of Cornelius Agrippa,[32] if not
exactly as a critic, at any rate as being a denouncer, though no mean
practitioner, of literature. It is perhaps a just punishment for his
blasphemy that no one who only knew this would dream that the adept of
Nettesheim was as good a man of letters as he is. It constitutes the
fourth chapter of the _De Vanitate Scientiarum_ (1527), and is a mere
piece of hackneyed railing at the art which _aures stultorum demulcet_,
which is _architectrix mendaciorum et cultrix perversorum dogmatum_,
which is _pertenuis et nuda, insulsa, esuriens, famelica_. Alas! if some
tales are true, Cornelius (who really was a clever man) found that
Occultism could starve its votaries as well as Poetry. His attack is, in
fact, nothing but an instance of that measles of the Renaissance (nor of
the Renaissance only) paradox-quackery; and it has no solid foundation
whatever. The later (1543) _Paradossi_ of Ortensio Landi[33] exhibit
more frankly the same spirit, but in regard to individuals, especially
Aristotle, rather than to poetry and literature generally. And it is
probably not absent from Berni’s _Dialogo contra i Poeti_[34] (1537, but
written earlier), in which Poetry is dismissed by this agreeable poet as
suitable enough pastime for a gentleman, but out of the question as a
regular vocation or serious business.
-----
Footnote 32:
I have used the _Opera_, 2 vols., Lugduni, 1531, 8vo. The passages
cited will be found at ii. 14 _sq._
Footnote 33:
For Landi or Lando, see an interesting paper by Mr W. E. A. Axon, in
vol. xx. of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature.
Footnote 34:
This, which is very amusing, opens the ed. of Berni’s _Opere_ in the
Sonzogno collection (Milan, 1888).
-----
But we must return to serious persons. Of the critical texts to which we
pay chief attention in this book, there are not a few which are of far
higher critical value than Vida’s _Poetics_.[35] [Sidenote: _Vida._] But
it may be doubted whether even the similarly named treatises of
Aristotle and of Horace have had a greater actual influence; and I at
least am nearly certain that no modern treatise has had, or has yet had
a chance of having, anything like so much. In the recently renewed study
of Renaissance Criticism there has been, naturally enough, a repetition
of a phenomenon familiar on such occasions—that is to say, the
deflection of attention from pretty well-known if half-forgotten
material to material which had been still more forgotten, and was hardly
known at all. Daniello, Minturno, and the rest had, since the
seventeenth century, rested almost undisturbed; even Castelvetro and
Scaliger had more or less shrunk to the position of authorities, of some
importance, in regard to ancient criticism. But Vida, owing to the
unmistakable though unacknowledged borrowing of Boileau, the franker
discipleship of Pope, and the inclusion of a very characteristic
translation by Pitt among the usual collections of “British Poets,” had
taken rank once for all. It is true that it was a rank somewhat of the
museum order, but it existed. Now, the critics who followed him and
refined upon him have been disinterred, and are enjoying their modest
second vogue; and he is comparatively neglected, though a judicious
American[36] has put him in modern dress once more between his master
Horace and his pupil Boileau.
-----
Footnote 35:
For the Latin I use Pope’s _Selecta Poemata Italorum_ (2 vols.,
London, 1740), i. 131-189, and the anonymous _Poemata Selecta
Italorum_ (Oxford, 1808), 207-266; for Pitt’s Englishing, Chalmers’s
_Poets_, xix. 633-651. The original is Rome, 1527, 4to.
Footnote 36:
Prof. A. S. Cook (Boston, 1892).
-----
Of three things, however, the one is absolutely incontestable as a fact,
and the other two are not easily, I think, to be gainsaid by competent
authority. [Sidenote: _Importance of the_ Poetics.] The first is, that
Vida anticipates in time even the earliest of the prose critics of the
new Italian school by some couple of years, while he anticipates the
main group of these critics by more than twenty. The second is, that
though no doubt he took some impulse from Politian and other Humanists,
he is practically the first to codify that extravagant Virgil-worship
which reigned throughout the Neo-Classical dispensation. The third is
that, not merely in this point but in others, he seems, by a sort of
intuition, to have anticipated, at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, almost the whole critical orthodoxy of the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth. It is this which makes the translation of
him by Pitt so interesting; because the translator is, for once, no
traitor, but _plus royaliste que le roi_—fanatically imbued with the
principles, and equipped to the finger-tips with the practice, of his
original. But for the purposes of the scholar that original itself must
of course be taken.
The temper and the faith in which Vida writes are made manifest by the
very beginning of his poem—an invocation to the Muses woven of
unexceptionable _gradus_-tags, and deftly dovetailed into a dedication
to the luckless Dauphin Francis, who had then taken his father’s place
as Charles the Fifth’s prisoner at Madrid, and to whose captivity the
poem is modestly offered as a solace or pastime. [Sidenote: _Analysis of
the piece._] These invocations accomplished _more majorum_, Vida
proceeds to occupy his First Book with a sort of general clearing of the
ground. He is ready to teach the secret of all kinds of poetry; but the
poet must very carefully inquire what are the kinds to which he himself
is best adapted and best inclined. Commissioned work is dubious, unless
under a king’s command. But there is more than this: the poetic child
must be carefully nursed in the arts suitable to his great calling. He
must be as carefully guarded from the taint of vulgar and incorrect
speech; and must be regularly initiated into Poetry—Latin first,
especially Virgil, and then Greek, especially Homer. A short historical
sketch of poetry follows; but it, like everything else, is brought round
to the deification of the Mantuan. Hence Vida (who must be pronounced
rather long in weighing anchor) diverges to a good-natured intercession
with parents and teachers not to have the boys whipped too much, telling
a moving legend of an extremely pretty[37] boy who was actually whipped
to death, or at least died of fear. Emulation, however, is quite a good
stimulus; and by degrees work will be loved for itself. But original
poetical production must not be attempted too young; there must be time
for play; the rudiments of metre and so forth must be thoroughly learnt;
and, above all, _non omnes omnia_ must be constantly kept in mind. It is
better to begin with pastorals and minor subjects; solitude and country
life are very desirable circumstances. And so Book I. closes with a
fresh invocation of the spirit of poetry and a fresh celebration of its
power.
-----
Footnote 37:
_Insignis facie ante alios_, ed. Oxon., p. 215.
-----
After this rather ample prelude the author somewhat unreasonably (seeing
that the delay has been his own doing), but in coachmanlike fashion,
says _Pergite! Pierides_, and proposes to unfold the whole of Helicon to
coming ages. The first disclosure is scarcely novel. You must invoke
Jove and the Muses; nor will one Invocation do. When in doubt always
invoke.[38] Next you should, without holding out bombastic promises,
allure your reader by a modest but sufficient description of the subject
of your poem. So far the method of turning the practice of the ancients
into a principle is impartially adjusted to Homer and Virgil alike; but
after a few score verses the partisan appears. The beginnings of the
_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the plunging into the midst of things with
the wrath of Achilles, and the sojourn with Calypso, instead of the rape
of Helen (why not of Hesione?) or the launching from Troy, are duly
praised. But the elaborate Homeric descriptions—as that of the car—are
boggled at; the introduction of Thersites shocks Vida (Drances seems a
far nobler figure), and the pettiness of the subjects of some of the
Homeric similes would never suit the magniloquence of the Latian
Muse.[39] In Virgil, on the other hand, he can see no fault; even the
demand of Venus for arms to clothe her bastard son, which had given
qualms to admirers of old, does not disturb Vida at all; and his poem
seems to be slipping by degrees into a mere _précis_ of the _Æneid_,
that each trait actually found in Virgil may be registered as a pattern
to poets generally. He wrenches himself free for a moment to inculcate
the following of nature; but presently lapses into an elaborate
demonstration of the beautiful way in which the Mantuan _does_ follow
nature. In short, though now and then to “save his face” an illustration
is drawn _honoris causa_ from Homer, this Second Book on the
_ordonnance_ of the poem is, till it ceases with a panegyric of Leo X.,
little more than a descant _On the Imitation of Virgil_.
-----
Footnote 38:
For a very interesting and characteristic view of this “invoking” in
the next generation, see Castelvetro, _Op. Var._, _ed. cit. inf._, pp.
79-99.
Footnote 39:
“Drances ... consiliis non futilis auctor,
Dives opum, pollens lingua et popularibus auris.
... Neque enim in Latio magno ore sonantem
Arma ducesque decet tam viles decidere in res.”
It is interesting to hear the watchword “Low!” so early.
-----
It cannot be said that the Third Book offers much difference in this
respect—though the idolatry of Virgil is in parts a little more
disguised. It is, again _more majorum_, devoted to Diction, and, the
Muses having been invited to cross the stage once more, our Mentor first
reprobates Obscurity. But though you must not be obscure, you may and
should be Figurative, and not a few of the best known of our ancient
acquaintances the Figures—Metaphor, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, and so
forth—are introduced and commended, or sometimes discommended. It is
extremely noteworthy that the warnings-off include one far from ugly
conceit—
“Aut crines Magnæ Genetricis gramina dicat.”
This, of course, is quite in accordance with the horror of a daring
metaphor—of one which runs the risk of seeming “frigid”—which we find
prevailing from Aristotle to Longinus, and even in both these great men.
To us, most assuredly, the likening of the grass to the tresses of
Mother Earth is not in the least absurd, but a very beautiful and
poetical phrase, awaking, and adjusting itself aptly to, a train of
equally poetical suggestion. But before very long the advice as to the
choice of language takes the plain and simple form, “Strip the
Ancients!” The poet is bidden to fit
“exuvias veterumque insignia”
to himself; he is to gird himself up to the “theft,” and drive the spoil
on every occasion. He who trusts to his own wit and invention is
unhesitatingly condemned and pitied. If you want to live, to have your
works escape decay, you must “steal.” Vida repeats the very word over
and over again, and without the slightest bashfulness or compunction. He
is, however, good enough to admit that, if a new word is absolutely
wanted to express something not in the ancients, it may be invented or
borrowed—say from Greek—as the older Latins had themselves done. When
one word is difficult to find or awkward if found, you must employ
Periphrasis. Compounds are permitted to a certain extent (the weakness
of Latin and its brood in this respect is well known), but never to a
greater than that of two words. _Perterricrepas_ is stigmatised by
innuendo, though the word itself is Lucretian, and though there is
absolutely no principle in the restriction. You are to tone down
ill-sounding proper names, as Sicharbas into Sichæus. But in all cases
your words are to be entirely subservient to the sense, though they may
and should be suited to it—a doctrine which lends itself of course to
extensive Virgilian illustration. And so the poem concludes with a
peroration of some length, drawing ever and ever closer to, and at last
ending in, the laudation of the unrivalled Maro.
Had it not been for the astonishing accuracy with which, as has been
said, Vida actually anticipated the dominant critical taste of something
like three hundred years, and the creative taste of about half that
period, not many more lines than we [Sidenote: _Essential poverty of its
theory._] have given pages might have been devoted to him. That the poem
as a composition is a sufficiently elegant piece of patchwork may of
course be freely granted; and it deserves perhaps less grudging praise
for the extreme fidelity and ingenuity with which it illustrates its own
doctrines. But those doctrines themselves are, whether we look at them
in gross or in detail, some of the poorest and most beggarly things to
be found in the whole range of criticism. That the prescriptions are
practically limited to those necessary for turning out the epic or
“heroic” poem does not so much matter—though it is not entirely without
significance. Vida’s idea of poetry is simply and literally shoddy.[40]
That fabric—the fact is perhaps not invariably known to those who use
the word—differs from others, not as pinchbeck differs from gold, or
cotton from silk, but in being exclusively composed of already
manufactured and worn textures which are torn up and passed afresh
through mill and loom. And this is the process—and practically the sole
process—which Vida enjoins on the poet, going so far as to pronounce
anathema on any one who dares to pursue any other.
-----
Footnote 40:
Some would plead for “mosaic.” But the mosaic worker works his tiny
cubes _himself_—he does not steal them ready made and arranged.
-----
When it is examined in detail the proceeding may excite even more
astonishment, which will be wisely directed not more to [Sidenote:
_Historical and symptomatic significance._] the original conception of
it than to the extent to which, from what followed, it seems to have hit
certain peculiarities in the æsthetic sense of mankind as regards
poetry. We may easily go wrong by devoting too much attention to the
fact of Vida’s individual selection of the poet to whom all other poets
are bound _jurare in verba_. It is certain that, from his own day to
this, Virgil has appealed to many tastes—and to some of the
greatest—secure of his result of being pronounced _altissimo poeta_.
Those who like him least cannot but admit that Dante and Tennyson among
poets, that Quintilian and Scaliger—nay, that even Boileau—among
critics, are not precisely negligible quantities. But the real
subject—not merely of astonishment but of reasonable and deliberate
determination to adopt a position of “No Surrender” in the denial of
Vida’s position—is this selection of _any_ poet, no matter who it may
be, as not only a positive pattern of all poetic excellence, but a
negative _index expurgatorius_ of all poetic delinquency. Not Homer, not
Dante, not Shakespeare himself, can be allowed the first position; and
the main principle and axiom of all sound Criticism is, that not merely
no actual poet, but no possible one, can be allowed the second. This
kind of poetical predestination—this fixing of a hard-and-fast type,
within which lies all salvation and without which lies none—is utter
blasphemy against the poetical spirit. Not only will simple imitation of
the means whereby one poet has achieved poetry not suffice to enable
another to achieve it, but this suggestion is by far the least dangerous
part of the doctrine. It will probably lead to the composition of much
bad poetry, but it will not necessarily cause the abortion, or the
mistaking when born, of any that is good. The damnatory clauses of the
creed must have, and did have, this fatal effect.
Vida and those who followed him excused themselves, were accepted by
their disciples, and have recently been eulogised by our newest
Neo-Classics, as following Nature and Reason. [Sidenote: _The alleged
appeal to Reason and Nature._] That they said—perhaps that they
thought—they followed both is unquestionable.[41] But as a matter of
fact their Law of Nature—like the Articles of War in Marryat’s novel—was
a dead letter, owing to the proviso, from the first more or less clearly
hinted at and latterly avowed, that all of Nature that was worth
imitating had already been imitated by the ancients. As for the appeal
to Reason, it is a mere juggle with words; and it is astonishing that at
this time of day any one should be deluded by it. What Reason prescribes
Invocations to the Muses? What Reason insists upon beginning at the
middle instead of at the beginning? What Reason is there in the
preference of the pale _académie_ of Drances to the Rembrandt sketch of
the demagogue whom Ulysses cudgelled? of the shield of Æneas to the car
of Achilles? of Sichæus to Sicharbas? What has Reason to say (more than
she has to say against poetic transports altogether) against the
exquisite and endlessly suggestive metaphor of “the tresses of the
Mighty Mother” for the grass, with its wave, and its light, and its
shadow, and the outline of the everlasting hills and vales as of the
sleeping body beneath it? In all these cases, and in a hundred others,
we may boldly answer “None and Nothing!” The true Reason—the Mind of the
World—has not a word to say against any of these forbidden things, or in
favour of any of those preferred ones.
-----
Footnote 41:
Cf. _Poet._, ii. 162. _Semper nutu rationis eant res._
-----
But there is, let it be freely enough granted, a false Reason which has,
no doubt, very much to say against the one and in favour of the other.
The warped and stunted common-sense, the pedestrian and prosaic
matter-of-factness, which is no doubt natural enough in a certain way to
mankind, had made little appearance during the Middle Ages. These Ages
may be called, if any one chooses, childish, they may be still more
justly called fantastic; but they were never prosaic. It might be said
of their Time-Spirit as of the albatross, that
“Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.”
But there was no doubt about the wings. With the Renaissance, prose, in
the good sense no doubt as well as in the bad, returned; and as if to
revenge itself for the universal employment of poetry during the Middle
Ages themselves, it proceeded to lay hands even upon the poet. He might
“transport”; with Longinus before them (if Vida had him not, his
followers had), they could not very well deny this. But his methods of
transporting must be previously submitted to a kind of inspectorship;
and anything dangerous or unusual was strictly forbidden. His bolt was
not to be “shot too soon nor beyond the moon”: he was most particularly
_not_ to be “of imagination all compact.” On the contrary, his
imagination was to be alloyed with doses of the commonest common-sense.
He might not even imp his wings save with registered feathers, and these
feathers were to be neither too long nor too gay.
Such are the principles that we find in Vida, and such their inevitable
result. Only let us once more repeat, not merely that he may well, in
the admirable words of Lord Foppington, “be proud to belong to so
prevailing a party” as the Neo-Classics of the following three
centuries, but that he actually led and almost made that party himself.
A considerable time—more than a quarter of a century—had elapsed between
Politian and Vida; but from the appearance of the latter’s book to the
end of the century not more than three years on the average[42] passed
without the appearance of a critical treatise of some importance.
[Sidenote: _The main stream started._] Every now and then a short lull
would occur; but this was always made up by a greater crowd of writers
after the interval. Such “rallies” of criticism (which occurred
particularly during the fourth decade[43] of the century, about its very
centre,[44] throughout the seventh,[45] eighth,[46] and ninth[47]
decades, and just at the end[48]) were no doubt to some extent
determined by the academic habits of the Italians, and the readiness
with which members of the same academy, or different academies, took up
the cudgels against each other. The individual exercises took various
forms. A very large part of the work consists of commentaries on
Aristotle’s _Poetics_; another, closely connected, of set “Arts Poetic,”
more ostensibly original; some deal with vulgar and some with “regular”
poetry, while the concrete and comparative method is by no means
neglected, though the abstract and theoretic is on the whole preferred.
To attempt classification by kind would be a sacrifice of real to
apparent method; and to trace the development of the same ideas in
different writers would lead to inextricable confusion and criss-cross
reference. We shall probably find it best to follow the rule which has
been observed with rare exceptions throughout this History—that of
giving the gist of particular books and the opinions of particular
authors together, and leaving bird’s-eye views to the Interchapters.
-----
Footnote 42:
Mr Spingarn’s useful chronological table gives twenty-five books by
nearly as many different authors for the seventy-three years. Nor does
this list pretend to be exhaustive; for instance, it omits
Robortello’s _Longinus_ (1554), and the important _De poetis nostrorum
temporum_ of Lilius Giraldus.
Footnote 43:
Dolce’s (1535) translation of Horace; Pazzi’s (1536) of Aristotle;
Daniello’s _Poetica_ (1536), and Tolomei’s _Versi e Regole_ (1539).
Footnote 44:
Robortello’s ed. of _Poetics_ (1548), and Segni’s translation (1549);
Maggi’s ed. (1550); Muzio’s _Arte Poetica_ (1551); Giraldi Cinthio’s
_Discorsi_ (1554).
Footnote 45:
Minturno’s Latin _De Poeta_ (1559); Victorius’ Aristotle’s _Poetics_
(1560); Scaliger’s own _Poetics_ (1561); the completion of Trissino
(1563); Minturno’s Italian _Arte Poetica_ (1564), and Castelvetro’s
_Poetics_ (1570).
Footnote 46:
The work of Piccolomini and Viperano.
Footnote 47:
That of Patrizzi, Tasso, and Denores.
Footnote 48:
That of Buonamici, Ingegneri, and Summo.
-----
Only two years after the appearance of Vida’s poem appeared the next
critical Italian book of importance, the first instalment of Trissino’s
_Poetica_. [Sidenote: _Trissino._] The first instalment—for a singular
interval took place between the beginning and the completion of this
work. The first four parts were, as has just been said, published in
1529, when the main stream of Italian criticism had hardly begun to
flow; the two last not till 1563, two years after the publication of
Scaliger’s great work, and after a full generation (in the ordinary
count) of active discussion of the matters.[49] Such conditions cannot
fail to affect the homogeneity of a book. But still Trissino put it
forth as one book in different parts, not, as he might very well have
done, and as others actually did, as two books; and we are therefore
entitled, and indeed bound, with the caution just given, to treat it as
a whole. The handsome quartos,[50] well printed and beautifully
frontispieced and vignetted, of the standard edition of Trissino’s
_Opere_, are perhaps, taking them together, rather an ornament to the
shelf than a plentiful provision of furniture for the mind. The
disadvantages of _versi sciolti_ have not often been shown more
conspicuously than in the _Italia Liberata_, and the _Sofonisba_ has
little but its earliness and regularity to plead as a set-off to the
general shortcomings of the modern classical Drama. The better repute of
Italian comedy would hardly have arisen from such pieces as _I
Simillimi_; and the _Rime_ are most ordinary things. In our own division
he is of some historical account; for it is impossible not to be
grateful to the first publisher of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_, and that
praise of earliness, which he has earned in more than one respect, must
be extended to the first four parts of the _Poetica_. He boasts justly
enough that nobody, save Dante and Antonio da Tempo, was before him, and
that both of these had written in Latin.
-----
Footnote 49:
But most of this latter part had been written in 1548-49, and all must
have been before 1550, when Trissino died. Even this, however, leaves
a twenty years’ gap, which Trissino attributes to the composition of
his great (or at any rate large) poem on the Goths.
Footnote 50:
2 vols., Verona, 1729.
-----
Trissino does not, in his first instalment, busy himself with those
abstract discussions which were soon to furnish the staple of Italian
criticism. [Sidenote: _Division of his_ Poetic.] He adopts Aristotle’s
“Imitation” briefly without cavil or qualification; and then passes, in
his First Part or “Division,” to the question of choosing your language,
in which he generally follows Dante, but with an adaptation to the time.
It is not with him a question of _making_ an “Illustrious Vulgar
Tongue,” an “Italian,” but of calling by that name one already adopted.
In his further remarks on Diction he sometimes borrows, and often
expands or supplements, the very words of Dante at first, and then
passes to elaborate discussion, with examples, of the qualities of
speech—Clearness, Grandeur, Beauty, Swiftness. Next he deals with what
he calls the _costume_—character, _ethos_, suiting of style to
person—with truth, artifice, and what he calls the “fashions”—that is to
say, the alterations of quantity, &c., by dwelling, slurring, syncope,
and the like. The arrangement of this First Division is not very
logical; but, as we have seen, cross-division has been the curse of
rhetorical-formal discussion of the kind from a very early period to the
present day. The Second Division deals with pure prosody, the division
of feet, shortening (_rimozione_), as in _ciel_ for _cielo_, elision,
cæsura, &c.; the Third with arrangement of verses and stanzas; the
Fourth with the complete forms of Sonnet, Ballata, and Canzone, the
sub-varieties of which were detailed with great care and plentiful
examples.
Here what might more properly be called the First Part, consisting of
these four divisions, ends; the long subsequent Second Part (made up of
the Fifth and Sixth Divisions) has a separate Preface-dedication
referring to the gap. These parts are not, like the others, divided into
sections with headings; and, doubtless on the pattern if not of any one
particular treatise, of the spirit of many which had gone between, they
deal with general questions. The Imitation theory is handled at some
length, and with citation of Plato as well as of Aristotle; the kinds of
poetry are treated on a more general standard, and not with mere
reference to the rules of constructing each. The larger part of the
Fifth Division is given entirely to Tragedy: the Sixth begins with that
Heroic Poem which was so much on the mind of the country and the
century. But it ends chiefly on Figures—the formal heart of Trissino,
long-travelled as it has been, fondly turning to its old loves at the
last.
The contents of the treatise or treatises, especially if we take them
with Trissino’s attempts to introduce the Greek Omega and the Greek
Epsilon into Italian spelling, his grammatical “Doubts,” and his later
“Introduction to Grammar,” his dialogue _Il Castellano_, and so
forth,[51] will show his standpoint with sufficient clearness.
[Sidenote: _His critical value._] It is almost purely formal in the
minor, not to say the minim, kinds of form. He is indeed credited by
some with a position of importance, in the history of the Unities. He
is, they say, the first to refer to the observance of the Unity of Time
as a distinction from “ignorant poets,”[52] giving therewith a
disparaging glance at mediæval drama.[53] But this overlooks the fact
that he is simply repeating what Aristotle says, with an addition much
more likely[54] to refer to non-Humanist contemporaries than to the
almost forgotten “mystery.” His theory of the Heroic Poem, like his
practice in the _Italia Liberata_, is slavishly Aristotelian. The chief
evidence of real development that I can find is in his treatment of
Comedy, where the extremely rapid and contemptuous dismissal of the
Master called imperatively for some supplement, considering the
popularity of the kind in the writer’s own time and country. Possibly
reinforcing Aristotle here with Cicero, and certainly using the famous
_Suave mari magno_ of Lucretius, he succeeds in putting together a
theory of the ludicrous to which, or to some subsequent developments of
it in Italy, Hobbes’s “passion of sudden glory” has been[55] not
unjustly traced. The “sudden” seems indeed to be directly due to Maggi,
a critic who will be presently mentioned with other commentators on the
_Poetics_. And Maggi had published long before Trissino’s later
Divisions appeared, though, it may be, not before they were written.[56]
-----
Footnote 51:
All these, with the _Poetica_ and the translation of Dante, will be
found in the second volume of the edition cited. I take the
opportunity of correcting an injustice to Trissino which I committed
at i. 417, and which was brought to my notice by a reviewer in the
_Athenæum_. “Giovan- [or Giam-] battista Doria” _does_ say, in his
dedication to the Cardinal de' Medici, that Dante wrote it in Latin,
adding, however, a clause of such singular obscurity that at first
sight one takes it as meaning that Dante _himself_ translated the book
into Italian. For discussion of this see Rajna’s ed. of the _De V.
E._, p. li _sq._
Footnote 52:
II. 95. Perhaps better “unlearned,” _indotti Poeti_.
Footnote 53:
Spingarn, p. 92.
Footnote 54:
_Et ancor oggi si fa._
-----
The growth during the interval had been of three kinds, sometimes
blended, sometimes kept apart. [Sidenote: _Editors, &c., of the_
Poetics.] The first kind consisted of translations, editions, and
commentaries of and on the _Poetics_; the second, of abstract
discussions of Poetry; the third, of more or less formal “Arts” not very
different from Trissino’s own. The first class produced later, in the
work of Castelvetro, a contribution of almost the first importance to
the History and to the Art of Criticism; and it could not but exercise a
powerful influence. It belongs, however, in all but its most prominent
examples (such as that just referred to, which will be fully discussed
in the next chapter), rather to monographers on Aristotle than to
general historians of Criticism, inasmuch as it is mainly parasitic.
[Sidenote: _Pazzi._] Before any book of original critical importance
later than Trissino’s had been issued, in 1536,[57] Alessandro de’ Pazzi
published a Latin translation of the _Poetics_, which for some time held
the position of standard, and a dozen years later came three important
works on the book—Robortello’s edition of 1548, Segni’s Italian
translation of 1549, and Maggi’s edition of 1550—all showing the
attention and interest which the subject was exciting, while, still
before the later “Divisions” of Trissino appeared, Vettori in 1560 added
his edition, of greater importance than any earlier one. Long before
this the book had become a regular subject of lectures. Of these writers
Robortello, and still more Vettori (“Victorius”), were of the greatest
service to the text; Maggi, who was assisted by Lombardi, to the
discussion of the matter.[58]
-----
Footnote 55:
Spingarn, p. 102.
Footnote 56:
The discussion occupies nearly four quarto pages, ii. 127-130.
Trissino, of course, does not neglect Quintilian’s handling of the
subject in _Inst._, vi. 3, and he quotes modern as well as ancient
examples.
Footnote 57:
Dolce had translated the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace into Italian the year
before.
Footnote 58:
Mr Spingarn has extracted from MS., and published as an appendix to
his book, an interesting review of these commentators and others, by
Leonardo Salviati, a successor of theirs in 1586, and too famous in
the Tasso controversy.
-----
In the critical handling of these editors and commentators we find, as
we should expect, much of the old rhetorical trifling. [Sidenote:
_Robortello_, _Segni_, _Maggi_, _Vettori_.] For all their scorn,
expressed or implied, of the Middle Ages, they repeat the distinctions
of _poetica_, _poesis_, _poeta_, and _poema_[59] as docilely as
Martianus, or a student of Martianus, could have done a thousand or five
hundred years before, and they hand it on too as a sort of charmed
catchword to Scaliger[60] and Jonson.[61] But brought face to face as
they are with the always weighty, though by no means always
transparently clear, doctrines of Aristotle, and self-charged with the
duty of explaining and commenting them, they cannot, if they would,
escape the necessity of grappling with the more abstract and less merely
technological questions. Robortello,[62] like Maggi, though less
elaborately, has a theory of the ludicrous. Both, and others,
necessarily grapple with that _crux_ of the _katharsis_ which has not
yet ceased to be crucial. Both, with Segni, discuss the Unity of Time
and differ about it; though none of the three has yet discovered (as
indeed it is not discoverable in Aristotle or Aristotle’s literary
documents) the yet more malignant Unity of Place. Vettori would extend
the cramp in time (not of course with the twenty-four hours’ limit) from
tragedy to epic. Most of them have arrived at that besotment as to
“verisimilitude” which is responsible for the worst parts of the
Neo-Classic theory, and which, in the pleasant irony common to all
entanglements with Duessas of the kind, makes the unfortunate lovers
guilty of the wildest excesses of artificial improbability. And in all,
whether they project their reflections on their text into more general
forms or not, we can see the gradual crystallising of a theory of
poetry, heroic, or dramatic, or general.
-----
Footnote 59:
Maggi in his commentary. See Spingarn, p. 27.
Footnote 60:
_V. infra_, p. 71.
Footnote 61:
_Discoveries_, _sub fin._ (iii. 419 of Cunningham’s 3 vol. ed.)
Footnote 62:
On him see also note _infra_, pp. 49, 50.
-----