The _Advancement_[263] at least excuses _A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe from the earliest texts to the present day. Volume 2 (of 3), From the Renaissance to the decline of eighteenth century orthodoxy

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.”

-----

Footnote 264:

_Advancement of Learning_, Bk. II. iv.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.”

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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_.

-----

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.

-----

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.”

-----

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.

-----

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]

-----

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.

-----

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]

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

Footnote 277:

He may have taken this from the Italians.

-----

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.”

-----

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).

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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_.

-----

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_.

-----

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.

-----

Footnote 283:

Daniel had frankly defended _enjambement_.

-----

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]

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

Footnote 287:

M. Pellissier and others have taken this line.

-----

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]

-----

Footnote 288:

Some exception ought, perhaps, to be made for Pasquier: but not much.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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

-----------------------

“_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.

CHAPTER I.

FROM MALHERBE TO BOILEAU.

THE SUPPLANTING OF ITALY BY FRANCE—BRILLIANCY OF THE FRENCH

REPRESENTATIVES—MALHERBE—THE ‘COMMENTARY ON DESPORTES’—WHAT CAN BE

SAID FOR HIS CRITICISM—ITS DEFECTS STIGMATISED AT ONCE BY

REGNIER—HIS ‘NINTH SATIRE’—THE CONTRAST OF THE TWO A LASTING ONE—THE

DIFFUSION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CRITICISM—VAUGELAS—BALZAC—HIS

LETTERS—HIS CRITICAL DISSERTATIONS—OGIER AND THE PREFACE TO ‘TYR ET

SIDON’—CHAPELAIN: THE HOPELESSNESS OF HIS VERSE—THE INTEREST OF HIS

CRITICISM—THE ‘SENTIMENTS DE L’ACADÉMIE SUR LE CID’—PREFACES—‘SUR

LES VIEUX ROMANS’—LETTERS, ETC.—CORNEILLE—THE THREE ‘DISCOURSES’—THE

‘EXAMENS’—LA MESNARDIÈRE—SARRASIN—SCUDÉRY—MAMBRUN—SAINT-EVREMOND—HIS

CRITICAL QUALITY AND ACCOMPLISHMENT—HIS VIEWS ON CORNEILLE—ON

CHRISTIAN SUBJECTS, ETC.—ON ANCIENTS AND MODERNS—GUI PATIN: HIS

JUDGMENT OF BROWNE—TALLEMANT, PELLISSON, MÉNAGE, MADAME DE

SÉVIGNÉ—THE ‘ANA’ OTHER THAN MÉNAGE’S, ESPECIALLY THE

‘HUETIANA’—'VALESIANA'—‘SCALIGERANA’—AND ‘PARRHASIANA’—PATRU,

DESMARETS, AND OTHERS—MALEBRANCHE—THE HISTORY OF BOILEAU’S

REPUTATION—THE ‘ART POÉTIQUE’—ITS FALSE LITERARY HISTORY—ABSTRACT OF

IT—CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF IT—WANT OF ORIGINALITY—FAULTS OF

METHOD—OBSESSION OF GOOD SENSE—ARBITRARY PROSCRIPTIONS—BOILEAU’S

OTHER WORKS—THE ‘SATIRES’—THE ‘EPIGRAMS’ AND ‘EPISTLES’—PROSE: THE

‘HÉROS DE ROMAN’; THE ‘RÉFLEXIONS SUR LONGIN’—THE “DISSERTATION ON

'JOCONDE'”—A “SOLIFIDIAN OF GOOD SENSE”—THE PLEA FOR HIS PRACTICAL

SERVICES—HISTORICAL EXAMINATION OF THIS—CONCLUDING REMARKS ON HIM—LA

BRUYÈRE AND FÉNELON—THE “DES OUVRAGES DE L’ESPRIT”—GENERAL

OBSERVATIONS—JUDGMENTS OF AUTHORS—FÉNELON: THE ‘DIALOGUES SUR

L’ELOQUENCE’—'SUR LES OCCUPATIONS DE L’ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE'—AND ITS

CHALLENGE TO CORRECTNESS—THE ABBÉ D’AUBIGNAC—HIS ‘PRATIQUE DU

THÉÂTRE’—RAPIN—HIS METHOD PARTLY GOOD—HIS PARTICULAR ABSURDITIES AS

TO HOMER IN BLAME—AS TO VIRGIL IN PRAISE—AS TO OTHERS—THE READING OF

HIS RIDDLE—LE BOSSU AND THE ABSTRACT EPIC—BOUHOURS—ENCYCLOPÆDIAS AND

NEWSPAPERS—BAYLE—BAILLET—THE ETHOS OF A CRITICAL PEDANT—GIBERT—THE

ANCIENT AND MODERN QUARREL—ITS SMALL CRITICAL VALUE.

The causes of the transference of the course of critical empire,

northwards as well as westwards, from Italy to France, in the

seventeenth century, lie (except in so far as they will body themselves

forth in the plain tale of this course which follows) somewhat outside

the plan which has been traced for our History. [Sidenote: _The

supplanting of Italy by France._] They belong, in part at least, to that

“metacritic” and guesswork which we endeavour to exclude. Indeed, as

usually, and more than as usually, in such case, the old puzzle of “the

egg from the Owl, or the Owl from the egg?” besets us specially in this

division of the History of that Art for which some have had it that the

bird of Pallas is a specially suitable symbol. We can see the importance

of the establishment of the French Academy, when only the first third of

the century had passed, of the extraordinary influence of coteries like

that of the Hotel Rambouillet, of the coincidence of the towering

ambition of a youthful king and the concentrated force of his at least

partially reunited kingdom, with the existence of a remarkable knot of

great men of letters, including one critic of the most masterful, if not

quite the most masterly, type. But can there possibly be any causation

in this latter coincidence? Can we say why Conrart’s Academy, instead of

lasting for a time and then breaking up, became a national institution?

why the Rambouillet blue-stockings were more influential than those who

haunted Mrs Montagu’s peacock-room, or put rubbish into the Bath-Easton

vase? Only by guessing, or by arguing in stately circle about national

temperaments. And we endeavour to avoid both these things here.[292]

-----

Footnote 292:

I am not aware of any History of the subject of this Book as a whole:

nor even of any devoted to French seventeenth-century Criticism

extensively but exclusively. The nearest thing to this latter is M.

Bourgoin’s excellent _Les Maîtres de la Critique au 17ème Siècle_

(Paris, 1889), giving studies of Malherbe, Chapelain, Saint-Evremond,

Boileau, and La Bruyère. For the inevitable, though tedious, quarrel

of Ancients and Moderns, H. Rigault’s book on the subject (Paris,

1859) is, and is likely to remain, a standard. Monographs are, of

course, innumerable; and the very large proportionate space given in

the usual French literary histories to this period, makes these

specially pertinent. Two of the largest volumes of M. Petit de

Julleville’s book, for instance—with ample bibliographies—contain the

seventeenth century only.

-----

What is certain is, that while on the one hand Italy is scarcely less

addicted to criticism, and scarcely less fruitful of [Sidenote:

_Brilliancy of the French representatives._] critics, in the seventeenth

century than in the sixteenth, and while the authority of Scaliger,

Castelvetro, Minturno, Piccolomini, is felt[293] all over Europe, the

contemporary practitioners of the art exercise no such authority, and

are of almost the least importance. A page for every score that we gave

them in the last Book will nearly suffice in this. In France, on the

other hand, no part of the century is not full of the critical labour,

and no part is without critics to whom, whether we grant the epithets

“good” or “great” or not, we cannot possibly refuse those of

“important,” “influential”—in more than one or two cases even

“epoch-making.” In the first generation we have the half-revolution,

half-reaction of Malherbe, who, for good or for ill, determined the main

course of French poetry for two whole centuries, and great part of that

course for three. In the second we have the similar work in prose, of

Balzac by counsel and example, by example of Descartes and Pascal; the

contest over the _Cid_, and the purblind but still intentionally

business-like investigations of Hédelin-d’Aubignac; the constant debates

of the Academy: and, perhaps most important of all, the general

_engouement_ for literary discussion of pedant and fine gentleman, of

prude and coquette alike. From the third come the ambitious code-making

of Boileau; the squabble, tedious and desultory, but in intention at

least wholly critical, of the Ancients and Moderns; the immense

collections of Baillet and others; the work, not bulky but full of germ

and promise, of Saint-Evremond, Madame de Sévigné, Boileau, La Bruyère,

Fénelon. What century earlier (some may say, what century later) will

give us, in any country, a critical galaxy like this, where the stars

dart, in at least most cases, so many other rays besides those of

criticism?

-----

Footnote 293:

Felt rather than acknowledged, it is true. We by no means uncommonly

find hard words used of Scaliger, whose Homerophobia shocked orthodox

French critics of this time more than his Virgiliomania conciliated

them. Yet they owed him almost everything.

-----

It is possible—as the historian of such a subject as this could wish

that it were possible oftener—to do justice to Malherbe’s undoubtedly

prominent position in the history of criticism without wasting much

space on him. [Sidenote: _Malherbe._] The universally known phrase of

Boileau,[294] though containing an innuendo of the grossest critical

injustice, and led up to by a passage of astounding historical ignorance

or falsification, is yet substantially true. The stage of French poetry

which Malherbe started was a new stage; it was a stage not at once, but

before long, acquiesced and persevered in by all but the whole

population of the French Parnassus; and it cannot be said that seventy

years of almost unceasing effort have done more than partially

substitute a fresh one. Further, it is undoubtedly in favour of

Malherbe, though the compliment may seem a left-handed one, that he was

not a man of commanding genius in any way; that he left no important

critical work; that his creative work is very scanty, far from

consummate as a rule, and by no means all in the style he himself

approved; and that even the secondhand accounts which we have of his

doctrines are scrappy, vague, and indirect. For it is quite clear that a

man who exercises such influence, and exercises it practically at once,

in such circumstances, must have hit upon the right string, must have

coincided strangely with the general feeling, temper, aspirations, taste

of his countrymen. Our documents for these doctrines are an extensive,

but fragmentary, commentary on Desportes (the still more destructive and

characteristic handling of Ronsard seems either to be a myth or never to

have been preserved on paper), the _Life_ by Racan,[295] some phrases in

the _Letters_, the vivid and admirable attack of Regnier,[296] and the

remarks of writers in his own and the next generation.

-----

Footnote 294:

_Enfin Malherbe vint._ The edition in the _Grands Ecrivains_, by M.

Ludovic Lalanne (5 vols., Paris, 1862-69), is not only by far the

best, but in our case indispensable, as giving the full commentary on

Desportes.

Footnote 295:

The _Historiette_ of Tallemant (ed. Monmerqué, i. 236-278) is

apparently based upon a fuller version of Racan, and must be compared.

Footnote 296:

In the Ninth Satire (_v. infra_). Regnier was Desportes’ nephew, and

is said by the anecdotists (see last note) to have been incensed

against Malherbe, not merely by the latter’s literary opposition to

his uncle, but by a piece of gross rudeness of Malherbe’s to Desportes

in the latter’s own house, where Regnier himself had introduced him.

-----

All concur in showing Malherbe to us as, on the one hand, mainly a

verbal critic, and on the other, as verbal critics usually, but by no

means always or necessarily are, singularly unable to rise above the

word, or its nearest neighbour, the mere sense. Both these things made

him the natural enemy (though, for his earlier years at least, he was a

more or less disloyal follower) of the Pléiade. Their abundant

word-coinages and word-borrowings shocked him; he did not want, and

could not feel,[297] the poetic _souffle_ which they managed to give by

means, or in despite, of their vocabulary. Racan, a rather simple but

absolutely honest creature, confesses that his master _n’aimait du tout

les Grecs_, regarded Pindar especially as a maker of _galimatias_, liked

Statius and Seneca best of the Latins,[298] and (it was generous)

classed the Italians with the Greeks. On the other hand, in French, he

had at least the merit of knowing exactly what he wanted, and exactly

how to get it. He it was who first invented those rigid laws of rhyme,

which even French classicism never quite adopted—the proscription of the

different use of _a_ and _e_ in such rhymes as _ance_ and _ence_, _ent_

and _ant_; the rule against simples and compounds of them, and even

words which commonly go together, out of verse, as _père_ and _mère_. He

was equally rigid on the cæsura: and Racan is not to be suspected of

catering for laughers, though Tallemant might be, when he tells us that,

while actually in the death-struggle, Malherbe revived himself to tell

his nurse that she had used a word _qui n'ètoit pas bien Français_.

-----

Footnote 297:

The French critics, however, have perhaps taken too literally his

reported blasphemy, that he did not value a good poet above a good

player at ninepins. Malherbe was a Norman—that is to say, a

parcel-Englishman—and may well have had something of that English

humour of disparaging his own matters which is so incomprehensible to

the French.

Footnote 298:

The version in Tallemant adds that he _dis_liked Virgil. He also

scoffed at the idea of “number” (rhythm) in prose.

Footnote 299:

Ed. Lalanne, iv. 249-473. There is an elaborate and standard monograph

on this by M. Brunot, _La Doctrine de Malherbe_ (Paris, 1891); but, as

in other cases, I am obliged to postpone the comment to the text.

-----

It is, however, in the Commentary on Desportes,[299] and there only,

that we have the real Malherbe at first hand for our purpose. [Sidenote:

_The_ Commentary on Desportes.] It is a very remarkable piece, and the

first of the kind in modern times;[300] though Gellius and Macrobius no

doubt set a certain pattern for it in ancient. Nor am I acquainted with

anything more thorough in the particular species; the modern Zoilus, as

a rule, is equally inferior to Malherbe in thoroughness, acuteness, and

learning. More than 200 pages—a large page and a small type—are occupied

in M. Lalanne’s edition (the only one) with the citations and remarks,

the former being rigidly confined to the line or two (rarely more) that

Malherbe annotated. It would be almost worth while to reprint[301] the

original volume as it exists scored by the critic’s hand, and I do not

know that it would be at all unfair to Desportes; for it is not the

author who comes worst out of the exposure.

-----

Footnote 300:

There are things of Castelvetro’s in the _Opere Varie_ not wholly

dissimilar; but these were then unpublished.

Footnote 301:

I have sometimes wondered whether the fact that, according to the

Racan-Tallemant anecdote, Malherbe only “struck through” his copy of

Ronsard without annotating it, is not an involuntary testimony to the

Prince of Poets. Malherbe, for all his rancour and narrowness, was no

fool; and he must in his mind have anticipated a famous later sentence

about the eagle floating

“Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men.”

Desportes is not exactly an eagle, and Malherbe has better game with

him, but still not the best of the game.

-----

Whatever may be said against Malherbe, he cannot be accused of verbiage.

He constantly contents himself with a single word—_bourre_ (“padding”),

_cheville_ (“expletive”), or simply _note_ or _nota_, which expresses,

much more forcibly, the “Will the reader believe,” or “It will hardly be

credited” of our less succinct Aristarchs. It is curious how sensitive

Malherbe’s ear is to certain suggestions of real or fancied cacophony,

or absurdity, in juxtaposition of different words. There is no doubt

that the French habit of delivering verse in a sort of recitative or

singsong, running the syllables very much together, putting strong

emphasis on certain vowels and slurring others, makes things like the

famous “vaincu Loth” and “vingt culottes,” “vieillard stupide” and

“vieil as de pique” less of mere childishness with them than with us.

Malherbe seems to have a perfect obsession of this kind, especially in

the direction of alliterated syllables. Thus he annotates the harmless

line—

“Si la foi plus certaine en une âme non feinte”—

_n’en, nu, n’a_;

and, still more in the style of the two later jokes—

“Mais vous, belle tyranne, aux Nérons comparable”—

_Tira nos nez_!

Indeed, he never loses an opportunity of blackmarking this collocation

of letters in different words, a point to which the later Latin

rhetoricians had perhaps made the French specially attentive, but notice

of which, except in the rarest cases, would be thought unworthy of

anybody but a schoolboy (or a comic journalist of not the highest class)

in England.

It was perhaps a little dangerous for Malherbe to be so prodigal of the

words “pedantry” and “stupidity” as he is; while time and use have

sometimes made his peremptory judgments look rather foolish. For

instance, Desportes had used _poumons_ in the plural, as we have

practically always used “lungs” in English. “On ne dit,” says our usher,

with an almost audible bang of the ferule on the desk,—“On ne dit point

qu’un homme ait des poumons: et ne m’allègue pas qu’il y a plusieurs

lobes au poumon, car tu serais un sot.” Poor posterity! It has been (in

France) tolerably docile to Malherbe, but it has in this respect

undoubtedly written itself down an ass—or perhaps him. For no Frenchman

now would hesitate to use the word in the plural. He is constantly

objecting to _consommer_ in the sense of _consumer_; he ejaculates (with

the sort of indignant bark which we hear so often from him and from

critics of his kind) on

“Et pensant de mes faits l'étrange frénésie”

“Je ne sais si c’est allemand ou anglais: mais je sais bien que ce n’est

pas français”; stigmatises (surely with injustice?) _trop injuste Amour_

as a _mauvais vocatif_, and shows his own want of poetic imagination and

poetic sympathy by scouting as bad the beautiful epithet _amoureuse_ in

“Enflammant l’air d’amoureuse clarté,”

for which some of us would excuse Desportes many worse things than he

has actually done. On the other hand, the mere grammarian comes out in

his note on

“Où de tant de beauté ton œil eut jouissance

Que le seul souvenir chasse au loin ma souffrance,”—

“_Le seul souvenir de quoi?_”

I should rather like to give more of this; but the reader will no doubt

say _Sat prata_. [Sidenote: _What can be said for his criticism._] We

must not be too hard on it. In the first place, it is (as criticism of

the Zoilus kind is by no means always) transparently honest criticism.

Malherbe does not garble; he does not foist his own misconception, not

to say his own stupidity, on his author, and then condemn him for it; he

does not, like Boileau, fling offensive and contemptuous epithets

broadcast without anything to support them. Further, there can be not

the very slightest doubt that such an office as his could, at the time,

be very usefully filled. The French sixteenth century, like our own, had

poured, and the early French seventeenth century had, also like our own,

begun to pour, a vast and rather indiscriminately selected reinforcement

of word and phrase and image into the language. All this wanted sorting,

arranging—in some cases, though no doubt not in so many as Malherbe

thought, rejecting and clearing out. The mere French grammar, which

Vaugelas was soon to write, had not been written; and the Arts Poetic in

existence were, as we have already seen, either technical and

higgledy-piggledy, or like that of Vauquelin (which appeared just as

Malherbe was beginning his crusade, and of which it would not be

uninteresting to have a copy annotated by him as he annotated

Desportes), almost as higgledy-piggledy, and much vaguer, on all

technical points except some of the crotchets of the Pléiade. Indeed,

the best justification for Malherbe is the French poetical history of

the next thirty or forty years. He may claim some, though but little, of

the merit of such different poets as Corneille and Voiture; the defects,

where they really existed, of Boileau’s victims can seldom or never be

charged upon him, and might sometimes have been avoided by listening to

his precepts.

This, I think, is fairly generous as well as just; generosity may now

make her bow and leave justice unfettered; but justice herself need not

go beyond that admirable pronouncement of Regnier, which has been

already referred to. [Sidenote: _Its defects stigmatised at once by

Regnier._] The great satirist, the passionate poet, could hardly have

needed a personal grievance to spur him on to the composition of his

Ninth Satire, though the generosity of his character might have induced

silence had not Malherbe broken their friendship. The address to

“Rapin[302] le favori d’Apollon et des Muses”[303] begins by graceful

compliments, but turns soon and sharply on

“Ces resveurs dont la Muse insolente

Censurant les plus vieux, arrogamment se vante

De reformer les vers.”

-----

Footnote 302:

Not to be confounded with the critic and versifier, René Rapin, who

was not born till after Regnier’s death, and whom to call “favourite,

&c.,” would indeed have been a dreadful thing to do; still less with

the historian Rapin de Thoyras, who was a generation later again. This

Rapin was Nicolas, part author of the glorious _Satire Menippée_,

victor in the burlesque contest of the Flea (see Southey’s _Doctor_),

a good versifier in Latin, and no ill one in French, though he was of

the (in France not very numerous) partisans of classical metres. He

died in 1608, not long after the date of this satire.

Footnote 303:

I read my Regnier in two editions, both very desirable as books, and

of different merits otherwise. The one, that of Prosper Poitevin

(Paris, 1860), is very compact; and, besides other matter, has the old

commentary of Brossette, which is extremely interesting as expressing

the views of a disciple of Boileau on a poet whom, to do him justice,

Boileau could not but admire, though he characteristically belittled

him. The other, that of E. Courbet (Paris, 1875), has a text adjusted

in the scrupulous modern manner, and some important additions to the

biography.

-----

If we have given Malherbe the credit of being the first modern critic to

play the awful Aristarch with a contemporary in the true and full

Aristarchian manner, Regnier must deserve that of being the first poet

of genius in modern times to undertake a real _chevauchée_ in the

interests of the true criticism against the false. [Sidenote: _His_

Ninth Satire.] The Satire is not faultless; there is some divagation,

and an attempt (giving some countenance to the deplorable excesses, in

the opposite direction of insulting poverty, which Boileau and Pope

permit themselves) to set the profits and prosperity of Desportes

against the comparative neediness of Malherbe. But this neediness was

only comparative; and Regnier has the good taste never to name his

adversary, and to let the arrows find their mark without vulgar personal

abuse. The spirit of the piece is delightful; its straight hitting never

baulks the game; and the verse is often of the very first quality.

Read—I only wish I had room to quote—the passage, which only Juvenal and

Dryden have equalled, on Malherbe’s contempt alike of the Greeks and the

Pléiade (20-27); that on his elevation of the mere vernacular, as the

test of language, which follows; the denunciation of his arrogant

assumption of knowledge as being his own peculiar, which follows that;

and the famous diatribe of forty verses long, and with every other verse

a triumph, which scoffs at the anxiety—

“Prendre garde qu’un _qui_ ne heurte une diphtongue,”

which labels the whole proceeding—

“C’est proser de la rime et rimer de la prose;”

compares it to the tricks of rouging and dressing up in women, and

contrasts the natural beauties of poetry with all this powder and

pomatum.

The first hundred lines are the best part of the satire, and the

remainder is, to a certain extent, amplification and repetition. Yet it

is good art, and good sense, not merely in the scattered phrases—

“Sans juger nous jugeons,”

and

“Votre raison vous trompe, aussi bien que vos yeux,”

and

“O débile raison! où est ores ta bride,”

which hit at once the foible and the forte of the criticism of the

century; but in the final sting—

“Mais, Rapin, à leur gout si les vieux sont profanes,—

Si Virgile, le Tasse, et Ronsard sont des ânes—

Sans perdre en ces discours les temps que nous perdons,

Allons comme eux aux champs, et mangeons des chardons!”

One might write a whole essay on these wonderfully prophetic and (no

doubt to the writer half-unconsciously) many-sided[304] lines. After two

centuries Europe did “go to the fields”—and she found something better

to eat there than thistles.

-----

Footnote 304:

For instance, the _yoking_ of Virgil, Tasso, and Ronsard. This

Pisgah-sight of literature was what the Renaissance, and the whole

neo-classic period, almost invariably failed to attain.

-----

For the moment, as we have seen before in other cases, the voice crying

in the wilderness found only a wilderness to cry in. [Sidenote: _The

contrast of the two a lasting one._] Men could not mistake the vigour

and verve of Regnier’s verse, but they either disregarded his doctrine

or misunderstood it. Malherbe was their music-maker then; they

understood _him_.[305] In the contrast of these two we have practically

a contrast which subsists to the present day, and which we do not find

by any means so sharply accentuated in ancient criticism—that of the

critic who looks only at the stop-watch, and of the critic who looks

beyond it; of the critic of form and the critic of spirit. But the

curious thing is that for the last three centuries the antagonists have

behaved exactly like Hamlet and Laertes, or even like that puzzling pair

in the lower circles of the _Inferno_. They take from time to time each

other’s parts, each other’s weapons, and renew the contest with changed

persons, or at least rapiers. At first sight it may seem as if Malherbe

and, after him, Boileau were simply insisting on form and expression; as

if Regnier, and those who at longer intervals have followed him, were

those who say that “all depends upon the subject.” But a more accurate

acquaintance with the History which is to follow will show us that this

is far from being the case. Malherbe had so little opportunity of

shaping, or took such little trouble to shape, his critical ideas that

it is perhaps the safer way not to draw up any complete creed for him,

as M. Brunot and Mr Spingarn have done. But in Boileau, as we shall see,

there is a distinct attempt, which has been practically followed by all

of his side since, to prescribe expression, subject, spirit, and

everything—to insist not merely that the work shall be good, but that it

shall be good according to sealed patterns, in choice of subject as well

as in method, in method as well as in form, in form as well as in

language.

-----

Footnote 305:

There was, however, a remnant. Even Balzac called him “Le tyran des

mots et des syllabes;” even Chapelain recognised (acutely enough) the

fact that his methods were rhetorical rather than poetical; even

Tallemant practically summed him up, once and for all, in the words,

“Il n’avait pas beaucoup de génie: la méditation et l’art l’ont fait

poëte.” But the majority and the hour were with him.

-----

There can be very little doubt that the private discussions which, as we

know from Racan, Malherbe used, for years before his death, to hold with

Racan himself and others, and the letters which he also exchanged with

younger men, had a very great deal to do with the wide development of

criticism in the second third of the century. [Sidenote: _The diffusion

of seventeenth century criticism._] The fact of this development is

certain; it is vouched for by the appearance of literary subjects in the

_Ana_, and in Tallemant’s _Historiettes_, by the foundation of the

Academy, by the _Cid_ quarrel, practically by almost everything we know

of the time that concerns literature. But we must deal, according to our

wont, with the matter _par personnages_. Of such personages we have, in

the first place, Vaugelas, Balzac, Ogier, and Chapelain, to whom we may

join Ménage, Gui Patin, Tallemant himself, and the far greater names of

Saint-Evremond and Corneille. Then we can take Boileau—at least in

reputation one of the culminating points or personages of our

history—and the less exclusively critical deliverances of La Bruyère, of

Fénelon, and of Malebranche; can give some account of the

Quarrel—tenacious of life, if scarcely vivacious—of the Ancients and

Moderns; diverge to the scholastic and somewhat dismal but important

performances of La Mesnardière and others, of Hédelin and Le Bossu,

Rapin and Bouhours, and end by some account of the miscellaneous

compilations and observations of journalists and _savants_. The matter

is abundant in all conscience; it is at least sufficiently varied, and

the real greatness of some at least of the persons concerned should save

it from being insipid.

We may all the better pass directly from Malherbe to Vaugelas[306]

because this is about the last place in this _History_ where we can give

special attention to _merely_ verbal and grammatical criticism.

[Sidenote: _Vaugelas._] In this Malherbe had at least the absolute, and

almost admirable, courage of his opinions. On the one hand he transfers

the prudery of the Ciceronians (_v. supra_, p. 12) to French, and will

not allow even an analogue such as _accroît_ on the strength of

_surcroît_. On the other he bars all the delightful Pléiade diminutives,

likes not technical terms, is so horrified at any indelicate suggestion

that his countrymen really need not have ridiculed our “sho[c]king,” and

has a whole black list of “plebeian” expressions. Everything is to be

“according to rule,” and the rule is to be drawn with as few exceptions

as possible—and with as few inclusions.

-----

Footnote 306:

Those who wish for something more on this subject, without attacking

Vaugelas for themselves, may be strongly recommended to the full and

excellent article of M. Brunot in Petit de Julleville (vi. 674-690),

one of the very best papers in the book.

-----

It is no wonder that Regnier opened the full broadside of his

magnificent poetical rhetoric against this system; and it is only a pity

that nobody less fantastic than Mlle. de Gournay—Montaigne’s _fille

d’alliance_, and almost the first as almost the oddest of

blue-stockings—took up the parable more practically against it. But the

set of the tide, as we have said, was with him. La Mothe le Vayer, a

little later, in his _Considérations sur l’Eloquence Française de ce

temps_ “transacts,” though he is on the whole on the side of liberty.

And _enfin Vaugelas vint_, the Savoyard[307] who was to teach France

French. His famous _Remarques_ did not appear till 1647, when he was

fifty-two, and only three years before his death, but the book expresses

work much older.[308]

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A history of criticism and literary taste in Europe from the earliest texts to the present day. Volume 2 (of 3), From the Renaissance to the decline of eighteenth century orthodoxy · 第 7 / 14 章

The _Advancement_[263] at least excuses the greatness thrust upon it in