pretend to a mere colourless impartiality, in this survey; and after it
I think we may go back to the general question, may ask, Is this a great
or even a good critic? and may answer it in the negative. That Boileau
was important to his own time may be granted; that he was no ill
scavenger of certain sorts of literary rubbish may be granted; that he
gave help to those who chose to tread in the limited path to which
France was confining herself, so that they might tread it with somewhat
more grace, with much more of firmness and confidence than they would
otherwise have done—that, in short, he did for France something of the
same kind as that which Dryden did for England, may be granted. This is
not exactly a small thing. But before we call it a great one we must
look at the other side. Boileau did not, like Dryden, leave escapes and
safety-valves to the spirit that was too mighty for the narrower
channels of poetic style; he exhibited none of his contemporary’s
catholicity of mind and taste; he had none of his noble enthusiasms,
none of his constructive power and progressive flexibility in positive
critical estimate. The good that he did is terribly chequered by the
consideration that, in sharpening certain edges of the French mind, he
blunted and distorted others in a fashion which, after two hundred
years, has not been fully remedied. A great man of letters, perhaps; a
craftsmanlike “finisher of the law,” and no ill pedagogue in literature
certainly: but a great critic? Scarcely, I think.
Two writers at least, whom few would call lesser men of letters than
Boileau, and in whom some may see greater qualifications for criticism,
must be much more briefly dealt with, partly because in their case no
controversy is needed, partly because their actual contributions to
criticism form but a very small part of their work, and partly also
because neither aimed at for himself, or has received from posterity and
tradition, any very prominent place as a critic. [Sidenote: _La Bruyère
and Fénelon._] These are La Bruyère and Fénelon. It would not be correct
to say that either is in deliberate or conscious opposition to the
_législateur du Parnasse_. Their general conscious principles are much
the same as his; they are, like him, uncompromising defenders of the
Ancients, and though Fénelon has a private crotchet about poetic prose,
yet the non-essentiality of verse to poetry had been a general, if not a
universal, tenet with antiquity. But whether in consequence of that
impatience of despotism which those who love to mix literary and
political history have seen in the second generation of the _siècle de
Louis XIV._, as compared with the first; or from the fact that, as
compared with Boileau, they were much more of Greek,[380] and less of
purely Latin students; or simply as a result of what has been justly
attributed to both,[381] the predominance of the _sens propre_ over mere
observation of the _communis sensus_—it is certain that both, and
especially Fénelon, display much more individualism, and at the same
time much more catholicity. It may be added that they know more, and are
to some extent (though to no large one) free from that hopeless ignoring
of older French literature which was Boileau’s greatest fault.
-----
Footnote 380:
“Greek, the Alpha and Omega of all knowledge,” as Dr Folliott calls
it, is certainly not less so in criticism than elsewhere.
Footnote 381:
By M. Bourgoin in the interesting book cited above.
-----
La Bruyère’s[382] contribution is contained in the opening section, “Des
Ouvrages de l’Esprit,” of his famous _Caractères_. [Sidenote: _The “Des
Ouvrages de l’Esprit.”_] It is not very long; it is—according to the
plan of the work it is not merely entitled but obliged to be—studiously
desultory; and it is not perhaps improved by the other necessity of
throwing much of it into portraits of imaginary persons, who are
sometimes no doubt very close copies of real ones. But it contains some
open and undisguised judgments of the great writers of the past, and a
number of astonishingly original, pregnant, and monumentally phrased
observations of a general character. In fact I should not hesitate to
say that La Bruyère is, after Dryden, who had preceded him by twenty
years, the first very great man of letters in modern times who gave
himself to Criticism with a comparatively unshackled mind, and who has
put matter of permanent value in her treasuries without being a
professional rhetorician or commentator. [Sidenote: _General
observations._] We need not dwell on the famous overture _Tout est dit_,
for it is merely a brilliant example of the kind of paradox-shell or
rocket, half truth, half falsehood, which a writer of the kind explodes
at the beginning of his entertainment, to attract the attention of his
readers, and let them see the brilliancy of the stars that drop from it.
But how astonishing is it, in the 17th section, to find, two hundred
years and more ago, the full Flaubertian doctrine of the “single word”
laid down with confidence, and without an apparent sense that the writer
is saying anything new![383] No matter that soon after, in 20, we find
an old fallacy, ever new, put in the words, “Le plaisir de la critique
nous ôte celui d'être vivement touchés de très-belles choses.” If
criticism does this it is the wrong criticism—the criticism _à la_
Boileau, and not the criticism after the manner of Longinus. A man may
have spent a lifetime in reading “overthwart and endlong” (as the _Morte
d’Arthur_ says) in every direction of literature, in reading always
critically, and in reading for long years as professional reviewer, and
yet feel as keenly as ever the literary charm which age cannot wither
nor custom stale,—the “strong pleasure” of the beautiful word.
-----
Footnote 382:
Editions again innumerable; but none, I think, can compare with that
of M. Servois in the _Grands Écrivains de la France_ (Paris,
1865-1882).
Footnote 383:
“Entre toutes les différentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une seule
de nos pensées _il n’y en a qu’une_ qui soit la bonne,” &c.—_Ed.
cit._, i. 118.
-----
But how well he recovers himself, among other things, with the remarks
on the _Cid_, and the difference between the fine and the faultless at
30! with the declaration of independence immediately following in 31,
and practically drawing a cancel through the whole critical teaching of
Boileau! “Quand une lecture vous élève l’esprit, ... ne cherchez pas une
autre règle pour juger; il est bon.” How delicate his remarks in 37 on
the delicacy of touch, the illogical but impeccable concatenation, the
justice of phrase, of the best feminine writing! Not a few of his
observations are paraphrases or, as it were, echoes of Longinus himself,
whom he has assimilated as Longinus’ translator never could have done.
And if some further remarks on criticism in 63 seem to regard rather the
abuse than the nature of the art—if the famous “Un homme né Chrétien et
Français se trouve contraint dans la satire; les grands sujets lui sont
défendus,” is half a political grumble and half a paralogism, which was
to be accepted with fatal results in the next century—both this and
other things are redeemed throughout by the general independence and
freshness of the judgment, the vigour and decision of the phrase. In the
judgments of authors above referred to (which begin at 38 and continue
for some eight or nine numbers, to be resumed with special reference to
dramatists and dramas a little later), it is especially possible to
appreciate La Bruyère’s idiosyncrasy as a critic, the vivacity and power
of his natural endowments in this direction, and his drawback, arising
partly from sheer acceptance of prevailing opinion, and partly from the
fact that he is merely coasting the subject on his way to others.
In the joint or contrasted judgment of Terence and Molière the modern
man, according to his kind, may find something either to laugh or to be
irritated at. [Sidenote: _Judgments of authors._] Some would as soon
think of comparing the dribbling tap of a jar of distilled water to the
Falls of Schaffhausen. But La Bruyère practically shows himself as
conscious of the truth as his time would let him be when, allowing
Terence purity, exactness to rule, polish, elegance, character (_i.e._,
type-character), he ruins all by admitting that “il n’a manqué à lui que
d'être moins froid.” And if (as many did then, and some do now) he takes
that wrong view of style and language which permits them to accuse
Molière of “jargon,” of barbarism, he gives him fire, naïveté, a fount
of real pleasantry, exact representation (“imitation”) of manners,
imagery, and “the scourge of ridicule.” “What a man,” he says, “you
could have made of these two!” though how you can join fire and _froid_,
and what would have been left of Terence’s old-maidish neatness when
joined to such a husband, Heaven and Apollo only know! But we can see
very well that La Bruyère admires Molière because he does admire him,
and Terence because he is told to do so.
The conjunction, even in contrast, of Malherbe and Théophile has puzzled
some folk; but, as M. Servois points out, it is a mere matter of
chronology, and Boileau had done it before. And it is very noteworthy
that La Bruyère does not bear hardly on Théophile. The remark that Marot
seems more modern than Ronsard is perfectly well founded. And if there
is some oddity in his surprise that Marot, “natural and easy as he is,
did not make of Ronsard, so full of _verve_ and fire, a poet better than
either of them actually is,” it is much less odd, and much more acute,
than it looks at first sight. The judgment of Rabelais, a famous one, if
not wholly wide-eyed, keeps its eyes singularly wide open for so
artificial an age: and there is a whole volume in the double defence of
Montaigne against opposite criticisms, to the effect that he is too full
of thought for some men, and too natural in his mode of thinking for
others.
It is by no means certain that the unnamed author aimed at in 52 is
Molière, and the most fervent of “Cornelians” can hardly quarrel with
the judgment that Corneille is unequalled where he is good, but more
often unequal to himself. La Bruyère seems, though rather furtively, to
set the awful Unities at nought in this great dramatist’s favour; and he
is both just and happy in praising the variety of Corneille as compared
to the monotony of Racine. The whole article, which is a long one, is
distinctly on the Cornelian side, though far from unjust to Racine; and
one can well understand the disconcerting effect which it seems to have
produced on Voltaire.
On the whole, the only reasons for not ranking La Bruyère’s criticism
very high indeed are that there is so little of it, and that it is
obviously the work of a man to whom it is more a casual pastime than a
business—who has not thought himself out all along the line in it, but
has emitted a few observations. Still, those which express his
deliberate opinions are almost always sound, and only some of those
which he has adopted without examination are wholly or partially false.
The critical utterances of Fénelon[384] are much more voluminous, though
in part, at least, not quite so disinterested, and they are of a very
high critical interest and value. [Sidenote: _Fénelon. The_ Dialogues
sur l’Eloquence.] They are contained in two documents, the _Dialogues
sur l’Eloquence_ (which, though not known, is believed to be a work of
his early manhood, but was only published after his death by the
Chevalier Ramsay) and one of his very latest pieces, the _Mémoire sur
les Occupations de l’Académie Française_, sent in, to obey a resolution
of that body, in November 1713, with the much longer explanatory letter
of the next year thereon to Dacier.
-----
Footnote 384:
It is a pity that in the best modern account known to me, that of M.
Bourgoin, the question of Fénelon’s character and of his relations
with Bossuet is brought in. It is really quite extraneous to the
matter. Very favourable reference can be made to the notice by the
Cardinal de Bausset, prefixed to the most accessible edition of
Fénelon’s critical work (in _Œuvres Choisies_, Paris, Garnier, n.d.)
Bausset, who wrote, besides an extensive life of Fénelon, one of
Bossuet, and died in 1824, came before the Renaissance of criticism in
France: but he was no _perruque_.
-----
The first is conditioned—unfavourably it may seem for our purpose—by its
avowed limitation to _sacred_ eloquence. A young aspirant to the cloth
has fallen in love with a fashionable preacher, wishes a cooler friend
to share his enthusiasm, and, being rebuffed, elicits from that friend
by degrees a complete criticism of the rhetoric of the pulpit, and the
rules that should govern it. Since we have found discussions, even of
profane oratory, surprisingly barren in pure literary criticism of old,
this of sacred may seem still less promising. But though Fénelon’s
interest in the soul-curing part of the matter is constant and intense,
he does not allow it either to obscure or to adulterate his literary
censure. At first, in particular, the arguments of his “A” (the critical
friend who, no doubt, is Fénelon himself) not merely have nothing more
to do with the pulpit than with the bar or the Senate, but have little
if anything more to do with spoken than with written literature. The
disdainful description (at p. 5 _ed. cit._) of that epigrammatic or
enigmatic style, which is always with us, as _des tours de passe-passe_;
the excellent passage (ibid., 7-9) on Demosthenes, Isocrates, Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, and Longinus himself—on whom Fénelon speaks with far
more appreciation than Boileau, and probably with more knowledge than
Dryden; the bold attitude taken up at p. 18 on the question of the
perfect hero; the exaltation (perhaps the most noteworthy thing in the
whole) of “painting,” of bringing the visual image home to the reader,
at p. 35; the scorn of mere verbal fault-finding at p. 47; the ardent
panegyric of the literary greatness of the Bible at p. 69; and of the
Fathers at p. 86 _sq._—all these passages, which are almost pure gold of
criticism, have nothing special to do with the mere _métier_ of the
preacher. That Fénelon was neither perfect nor wholly beyond his time is
quite true. He has here a deplorable assault on Gothic Architecture
(which he repeats at greater length in the Academic letter, and for
which, if he had not been so good and great a man, one could wish the
stones of his cathedral to have fallen upon him), and his contempt
extends to mediæval literature. But the same doom is on the best of
archbishops and the most beautiful of girls: they can but give what they
have.
And Fénelon gives very much. The Memoir and Letter above referred to
were elicited by a demand on Academicians for proposals in regard to the
reorganising of the work of the Academy. [Sidenote: Sur les Occupations
de l’Académie Française.] Here, therefore, as in the other case, the
immediate purpose is special; but the general literary interests of the
critic again prevent it from being specialised in the dismal and deadly
modern sense. He does not fail to deal with the daily dreadful line of
the Dictionary; but he proposes, as supplements, divers things—a new
_Poetic_, a new _Rhetoric_, Chrestomathies from the Ancients on both
heads (things needed to this day), and above all, a complete Academic
edition of the great classics of France, with really critical
introduction and annotations, or at least a corpus of critical
observations on them.
But, as usual, it is in the incidental remarks that the value of the
piece lies; and these make it, I do not hesitate to say, the most
valuable single piece of criticism that France had yet produced. Fénelon
shows his acquaintance with other modern languages; and pays a
particular compliment to Prior, who, it must be remembered, was about
this time occupying his rather uneasy post of Ambassador. He may be too
hasty in saying that the Italians and Spaniards will perhaps never make
good tragedies or epigrams, nor the French good epics and sonnets, as he
most certainly is too ignorant in saying that “after our ancient poets”
[a very few, mostly undistinguished persons, in the latter part of the
sixteenth century] had tried classical metres and failed, “we” [the
French of course] “had to invent measures suitable to our words.” But he
is astonishingly bold in his recurrence to Pléiade principles, and in
actually urging English as a good example on the point of taking from
neighbours any word found convenient. He says plumply “de telles
usurpations _sont permises_” (p. 103 _ed. cit._) Alas! in England
itself, and after two centuries, one uses this just liberty at personal
risk. His Rhetoric section partly repeats the _Dialogues_, and is
altogether more technical or professional than literary. [Sidenote: _And
its challenge to correctness._] But his Poetical section is full of
interest. It is marred by that not quite single-minded fancy for prose
poetry which has already been glanced at, and to which we shall have to
return. But the attack on rhyme is partly excused, and the, at first
sight, bewildering remark (p. 123) that “rhyme is of itself more
difficult than all the rules of Greek and Latin prosody” is rendered
intelligible, by a remembrance of the extremely arbitrary rules which
had by this time been imposed on the French rhymer. The paragraph on
Ronsard,[385] the best known piece of the whole, is admirable in its
tempering of sympathy with censure; and the acknowledgment of the
“opposite extreme” into which French for more than a century had
fallen,[386] is one of the great epoch-making sentences of criticism. Of
course it was not attended to; but for a hundred years and more French
literature bore ever-increasing testimony to its truth.
-----
Footnote 385:
P. 125 _ed. cit._
Footnote 386:
“L’excès choquant de Ronsard nous a un peu jetés dans l’extrémité
opposée; on a appauvri, desséché et gâté notre langue.” And he
proceeds, with much humour and more truth, to stigmatise the prim
following of grammar, the “substantive hand in hand with its
adjective,” the verb “walking behind with an adverb at its heels, and
an accusative in a place unalterable.” “C’est ce,” this great _locus_
continues, “qui exclut toute suspension d’esprit, toute surprise,
toute variété, et souvent toute magnifique cadence.” 1830 could say no
more; and often said it with less authority.
-----
The censure of French drama is injured, partly by certain prejudices of
the moralist and the theologian, and partly by less accountable
crotchets. On Molière in particular, though he cannot help admiring the
greatest of his contemporary countrymen, he is something from which we
had best turn our faces, putting likewise into the wallet at our backs
(and Time’s) the complaints of _la basse plaisanterie de Plaute_, and
the statement that _on se passe volontiers d’Aristophane_. The point is
the quantity of opinion which is not for Oblivion’s alms-bag. And,
abundant as this is in Fénelon, the quality of it is more remarkable
even than the quantity. He always prefers the study of author, and book,
and piece, and phrase, to the study of Kind and the manufacture of Rule.
Though he is in no sense an Anarchist, and may even have sometimes his
cloth rather too much in his remembrance, yet he remembers likewise, and
transfers to profane things, the sacred precept, “Prove all things: hold
fast that which is good.” The fatal fault of the extremest kind of
neo-classic criticism—the weak point in all of it—is the usual refusal
to “prove” the work, even to see whether it is good or not, if it fails
to answer at first blush to certain arbitrary specifications. Fénelon is
free from this: he has escaped from the House of Bondage.
We have for some time been occupied with the critical work of great men
of letters; we must now turn to that of four men who, if they had not
been critics, would hardly have been heard of in their own day, and
would certainly not be remembered by posterity out of their own
country—or perhaps in it. As it was, all the four exercised immense
influence, not merely in France but elsewhere, and three of them saw
their work promptly translated into English, and received with almost
touching deference in the country which had Dryden to look to for
criticism, nay, by Dryden himself. The order in which we may take them
shall be determined by that of the appearance of their principal
critical works. The _Pratique du Théâtre_ of François Hédelin, Abbé
d’Aubignac, appeared in 1657; the first _Réflexions_ of Rapin in 1668;
the _Entretiens d’Ariste_ of Bouhours in 1671; and the _Traité du Poème
Epique_ of Le Bossu in 1675. All four, it is to be observed, were
clerics of one sort or another, while Rapin and Bouhours were
schoolmasters, and Hédelin was at least a private tutor. Taken together,
they exhibit the hand-book and school-book side of the criticism of
which Boileau is the contemporary satiric expositor to the world; and
their criticism cannot properly be dissociated from his. As dates
sufficiently show, they do not in any sense derive from him; nor, to do
him justice, does he from them. The whole quintet, with others of less
importance, are all the more valuable exponents of the strong
contemporary set of the tide in the direction of hard-and-fast
“classical” legislation for literature.
It is among the few and peculiar laurels of the Abbé D’Aubignac to have
failed in more kinds of literature than most men try. [Sidenote: _The
Abbé D’Aubignac._] His tragedy of _Zénobie_ (1647) was the occasion of a
well-known epigram from the great Condé, which is not the less good for
its obviousness, and which, with equal ease and justice,[387] can be
adjusted to his criticism. He is more of an Aristotelian “know-nothing”
than La Mesnardière, and has very much less talent. Not content with the
_Pratique_ (which, as has been said, was really a belated contribution
to the cabal against Corneille), he attacked two of the great
tragedian’s later plays, _Sophonisbe_ and _Sertorius_, in his
_Dissertations en forme de Remarques_ (1663), and he had many years
earlier attempted to justify Terence against the strictures of Ménage.
The historian of criticism would have been grateful to him had he
confined himself to writing tractates “On the nature of Satyrs, Brutes,
Monsters, and Demons,”[388] _Relations du Royaume de Coquetterie_, and
novels like the rather well-named _Macarise_, or _the Queen of the
Fortunate Isles_. For these we could simply have neglected.
-----
Footnote 387:
_Zénobie_ boasted herself to be impeccably “regular.” The Prince
observed that he was much obliged to the Abbé for paying such
attention to Aristotle, but that he could not excuse Aristotle for
making the Abbé write such a tragedy. This famous _mot_, like others,
is of disputed attribution. It is sometimes given to the Prince de
Rohan-Guémené.
Footnote 388:
A work of youth which appeared as early as 1627. Hédelin was never
elected to the Academy; and in 1664 endeavoured to start a new one of
his own from a coterie which he, in imitation of Conrart, had formed.
But “Trajan was” _not_ “content,” wisely enough: and France was spared
a skim-milk Forty.
-----
The _Pratique_, unfortunately, we cannot neglect wholly, because of its
position as a symptom and an influence. [Sidenote: _His_ Pratique du
Théâtre.] In reading it,[389] the generous mind oscillates between a
sense of intolerable boredom, and a certain ruth at the obviously honest
purpose and industry that underlie the heaps of misapplied learning, and
season the gabble of foolish authority-citing. He begins by a
demonstration that all great statesmen have always patronised stately
games, of which scenic representation is one. Vulgar minds have nothing
to do with it (this was a slap at Castelvetro and his horrible doctrine
of pleasing the multitude, which is a real _lethalis arundo_ in the
sides of all these Frenchmen). He is, we are rather surprised to hear,
_not_ going to theorise. All the theory has been done, and done once for
all, by the ancients. What he wants to do is to apply this theory to all
the practical contingencies. And this he does through Unities and
Episodes, through Acts and Scenes, through Narration, Discourse,
Deliberation, everything, with sleuth-hound patience on his own part,
and requiring Job’s variety on that of his readers. He is sometimes
quite fair even to Corneille, he seems to be quite well-meaning; but he
cannot help his nativity of dulness, and at his very best he is a critic
of dramaturgy, not of drama.
-----
Footnote 389:
It forms the first volume of the Amsterdam edition, in 3 vols. (1715),
of Hédelin’s critical work. The second and third, which are together
about the size of the first, include the extensive and dismal
lucubrations on Terence, &c.
-----
René Rapin, hardly as one sometimes feels inclined to think and speak of
him, was a person of an entirely different order. [Sidenote: _Rapin._]
In fact, it is very much more on isolated and particular points than on
generals that he lays himself open to reproach, though it may be
retorted that the generals, which lead logically (as they usually do) to
such absurd particulars, are thereby utterly condemned themselves. It
was specially unfortunate for Rapin that his principles and precepts
were at once caught up in England by a man like Rymer,[390] and
expounded in coarse and blunted form to a people still green and
unknowing in critical matters. [Sidenote: _His method partly good._]
There is even much in his method which deserves high praise. It is very
noteworthy that, before he presumed to draw up (or at least to give to
the world) his _Réflexions_ on the _Poetics_ and on Poetry, on
Eloquence, on History, and on Philosophy, he had preluded by elaborate
examinations of the actual documents in the shape of “Comparisons”—“Of
Homer and Virgil,” “Of Cicero and Demosthenes,” “Of Thucydides and
Livy,” “Of Plato and Aristotle.” And though this sort of “cock-fight
comparison” (as the more vernacular writers of his own time in English
might have said) is “muchwhat” (as his translator Rymer actually does
say) of a mistake, unless pursued with the greatest possible care—though
it was already hackneyed in itself and constantly in need of extending,
supplementing, blending—yet it is at any rate infinitely superior to the
examination _in vacuo_, the rattling of dry bones and abstract kinds and
qualities, to which too many of his contemporaries confined themselves.
-----
Footnote 390:
Who translated (with a preface not virulently Rymerical, _v. infra_,
p. 392) Rapin’s _Reflections upon Poetry_ almost as soon as it
appeared. Rapin was a copious theologian, an elegant and fertile Latin
versifier. Of his critical works in French, the _Comparaisons_ noted
above were produced annually between 1668 and 1671, except the
“Thucydides and Livy,” which appeared ten years later. The _Réflexions
sur l’Eloquence_ date from 1672: those, more famous, on Poetics and
Poets, from 1674. His critical _Works_ were early collected, and the
complete collection appeared in English, by various hands, including
Rymer’s, in 2 vols. (London, 1706). The Amsterdam ed. of the original
(3 vols., 1709-10) contains, in addition, a small treatise, _Du Grand
et du Sublime_, which must not be neglected, and some others, together
with the _Comparaison de Pindare_ et _d’Horace_ of the architect
Blondel.
-----
Unfortunately Rapin himself was always, consciously or unconsciously,
tending towards this other method; and even in his comparisons—much more
in the extended survey of ancient and modern writers which he subjoins
to the _Réflexions_—he is still more constantly seduced by that
labelling criticism which we have traced long ago to the “canonising”
way of the Alexandrians, and for which we have said hard things of
Fronto and others. [Sidenote: _His particular absurdities as to Homer in
blame._] Yet further, both his general style of criticism, and his
prepossessions of this or that kind, constantly draw him into pitfalls
only less absurd than those in which Rymer himself wallows. I do not
remember that Rapin ever lays it down that a hero must not be a black
man; probably the French had not been afflicted—for I suppose they did
not make Syphax black—with any poet daring enough to start the question.
But he does other things which, though less conspicuously, are quite as
really silly. In the moral section[391] of his comparison between Homer
and Virgil he has too much of the Jesuit schoolmaster, with his
reverence towards boys, to mention that terrible scene between Zeus and
Hera which had already distressed the compatriots of Aristophanes and
Martial, and which remains one of the earliest examples of absolutely
perfect poetry in a particular kind. But he makes up for it. We have, of
course, the “wine-heavy, dog-eyed, hare-hearted” line to mourn over. How
undignified of Homer to make Achilles anxious about the preservation of
the body of Patroclus from corruption! How could Ulysses, with such an
excellent wife and such an amiable son, waste time with Calypso and
dangle after Circe, to whom the pudibund Rapin applies epithets which
_our_ Decorum prevents us from repeating, and for which he deserved to
be both shipwrecked and turned into a Gryll. Was it quite nice of Priam,
as a father, to wish all his children dead so Hector were alive?
Nausicaa is too shocking. A Princess’s face should _not_ show grace, the
Jesuit thinks,[392] to men in Ulysses’ condition.
-----
Footnote 391:
Chap. vii. In the preceding chapter there is one of those sentences
which ruin this kind of criticism, by and of themselves. “Games are of
the number of those actions which may occur in the lives of heroes.”
Most certainly: but one feels that Rapin said it simply because there
are games in Homer and Virgil, and that, if there had _not_ been, he
would probably have said, “Games are _not_,” &c.
Footnote 392:
“Cette Princesse oublie sa pudeur pour écouter sa compassion....” In
the rest of the clause the English translator softens the crudity of
the French _curiosité_. But it is still more pleasant to oppose to the
nasty niceness of the French Jesuit the words of the author of _The
Christian Year_: “_Nausicaa—cujus persona nihil usquam aut venustius
habet aut pudentius veterum Poesis_” (_Præl._ xii. vol. i. p. 195,
Oxford, 1844).
-----
Whereas with Virgil it is quite different. Everybody, including the
Gods, behaves “like persons of Quality.” [Sidenote: _As to Virgil in
praise._] Even in the case of _Dido dux et Trojanus_ there is no
violation of modesty,[393] which certainly seems either a little
Escobarish towards them, or a little severe to Circe and Calypso.
Indeed, we sometimes find ourselves rather lost with Rapin’s morality.
For, in another passage (Chap. XIII.), he actually discovers _un
artifice des plus délicats et des plus fins_ in Virgil’s taking away
Dido’s character, though History had made her a Lady of very good
repute.[394] For he did it to bring into contempt the Carthaginians who
were afterwards to become odious to Rome. “A nice marality!” indeed, as
my Lord Foppington observed of another matter, not so very long after
Rapin wrote this.
-----
Footnote 393:
_Mais la pudeur ni toutes les bienséances extérieures n’y sont point
blessées._
Footnote 394:
So the English: Fr. “femme de bien.” I like to read Rapin in both
versions, contemporary as they are, and antiphonal of the sentiment of
the time, in its two chief languages.
-----
Yet even here it is fair to observe that Rapin is at least trying to
make the two ends of his “reason” and his “reflection” meet: and so it
is always:—
“His reason rooted in unreason stands,
And sense insensate makes him idly wise.”
The consequences are patent on every page, and a chapter might be not
disagreeably filled with them. [Sidenote: _As to others._] Pegasus is
admirable, but the Hippogriff is the vain imagination of a sick brain:
Camilla touching, but Bradamante absurd. Achilles retires from the
Grecian army because he is discontented; Æneas goes to Italy because he
is pious; and Medea kills her children because she is revengeful—a
passage in which it is agreeable to perceive the obvious first draught
of “I love my love with an A.” As for the moderns, Du Bartas and Ronsard
had all the genius their age was capable of—a text for a sermon as long
as this Book. “Scarce aught can be understood” of the _Agamemnon_! In
fact, quotations[395] simply leap to the eye as one reads the page.
-----
Footnote 395:
These latter are mostly from the _Réflexions sur la Poétique_
(_Œuvres_, ii. 175 _sq._) It is quite at the beginning of these that
the unlucky charge against Dante of “wanting fire” (see i. 175 _note_)
occurs; it is followed later, and perhaps to some extent explained, if
not excused, by the further criticism that he has “l’air trop
profond,” “une ordonnance triste et morne.”
-----
It is more important, if less amusing, to inquire how a man, obviously
of much ability, extremely well informed, freer, it would seem, from
mere prejudice than most of his fellows, came in this way to be
constantly stumbling over blocks that the veriest blockhead might, one
would think, have avoided, and running against blank walls, of which a
blind man might, it should seem, have been aware. [Sidenote: _The
reading of his riddle._] Rapin is, perhaps, the main and appointed Helot
of the neo-classic system. That system, instead of assembling all the
great works of literary art, and giving an impartial hearing to each,
takes one or two ancient treatises, themselves necessarily based upon
but a partial examination, spins out of them a universal code, fills in
that code, where it is wanting, with analogies and with perilous
makeshifts of “decorum,” uniformity, and the like, and then proceeds to
apply the result back to the actual works of art. It is no wonder that,
even of the ancient division of these, hardly one escapes scot-free,
except those which were originally composed by men of great, but not the
greatest, genius, on a somewhat similar scheme. Elsewhere the
unfortunate critic is constantly catching himself in those bushes which
he has himself planted, and bruising himself against obstacles which he
has elaborately set up. In a general way he grants that Homer is the
greatest of poets; but the Fetiches of “Design” and “Decorum” extort
from him the sacrifice of this in detail, and the acknowledgment that
Homer is frequently most indecorous, and that large parts of him are out
of drawing. And so of all.
Le Bossu (to whom the English sometimes give a superfluous final _t_,
whom they generally defraud of his rightful “Le,” and whom in the main
they know only from the _locus classicus_ of Sterne)[396] reapproximates
to the Aubignacian level. [Sidenote: _Le Bossu and the Abstract Epic._]
But it is fair to say that his dulness arises from a different cause. He
is not, like Hédelin, a stupid man—he is distinctly the reverse—nor is
he spiteful. He is merely the hardiest and most thoroughgoing devotee of
a certain kind of abstract criticism. He does, of course, give us
chapters on some actual illustrations of Heroic or Epic; but they are
scarcely more necessary to his book than the picture-illuminations of a
poem or a novel. Being a writer of some _esprit_, he sometimes exercises
it in rather dangerous fictions—for instance, his imagined epic of
Meridarpax, where all the mouse-stories (mouse and lion, town and
country mouse, &c.) are worked in, would be most sprightly, if it did
not look sprightlier still as an exercise in laughing at his own side.
But by far the greater bulk, and the whole vertebration and solid
substance, of his argument are devoted to Epic in the Abstract. Design,
definition, and parts; good fables and bad fables; episodes; the
biology, so to speak, of the Action, the narration, the manners and
characters, not forgetting the Machines, and at last something on the
Thoughts and Expression—which have about one-ninth of the whole. In
short, if we have not exactly Epic _in vacuo_, we have it as a dried
preparation. The complexity, anti-sensuousness, and dispassionate
character of it are almost abashing; one feels at the end that, to
hanker after an actual poem, be it _Iliad_ or _Orlando_, has something
sinful—something of the lust of the flesh.
-----
Footnote 396:
_Tristram Shandy_, iii. 12. He was not always unknown among us.
Dryden, whether out of modesty, fashion, or humour, takes leave to
call him “the best of modern critics,” and he was translated in 1695.
The mistakes referred to above are all the worse because there was
actually a French writer named Bossut, a mathematician of distinction
in the eighteenth century.
-----
We have said that Le Bossu is rather a sprightly person of a
hyper-scholastic kind. [Sidenote: _Bouhours._] His brother Father,
Bouhours, is still more so; indeed, his famous inquiry, “Si un Allemand
peut-être bel-esprit?”[397] has got him rather into trouble with a
prevailing party, in and out of Germany. Beginning with the _Entretiens
d’Ariste et d’Eugène_ (1671), a collection of chiefly verbal criticism
on French writers, he continued it with other works in _belles lettres_
and theology, the most important of which, to us, is _La Manière de Bien
Penser dans les Ouvrages d’Esprit_ (1687).[398] The book, which is not
short, consists of four Dialogues between Eudoxe and Philanthe, “deux
hommes de lettres (as the author remarks in a phrase to which Time has
given a piquant new meaning) _que la science n’a point gâtés_.” Eudoxe,
as the name indicates, is the author’s mouthpiece—a judicious admirer of
the Ancients, who can yet tolerate such moderns as Voiture. Philanthe
(also a speaking name) is a partisan of florid modernity, who is,
however, so little of a “stalwart” that he gives up Ariosto, and
intrenches himself behind Tasso and Lope. In the First dialogue Eudoxe
censures (with abundant citation, as throughout the book) Equivoques,
Hyperboles, _pointes_, _concetti_, and, generally, thoughts that are
“not _true_.” The Second and Third, starting from Longinus and
Hermogenes, discuss the true and the false in Sublimity and Wit: and the
Fourth is mainly devoted to Obscurity. Bouhours (whose influence on
subsequent critics, especially on Addison, was very great) writes
agreeably, is free from rudeness and pedantry, and is altogether rather
a favourable example of the school of Good Sense, _quand même_. But, as
favourable examples of bad schools generally do, he damages his cause
more than less favourable ones, because its drawbacks are more obvious
and intrinsic. On his principles you must ostracise the best, the
noblest, the most charming, the most _poetic_ things in poetry. _Et
c’est tout dire._
-----
Footnote 397:
_Not_, as it is constantly quoted, _peut avoir de l’esprit_. It will
be observed that the difference is considerable.
Footnote 398:
My copy is the 2nd ed. of next year in 12mo.
-----
As we approach the close of the chapter, we come upon classes and masses
of work which is at once impossible to examine in particular and, as a
whole, elusive. In [Sidenote: _Encyclopædias and Newspapers._] 1687
appeared the _Jugements des Savants_[399] of Baillet, and ten years
later the still more famous _Dictionnaire Historique et Critique_ of
Bayle, who had preluded it, from a time antecedent to that of Baillet’s
publication, by _Nouvelles de la République de Lettres_, a regular
literary review. Long before this latter the _Journal des Savants_[400]
and the _Mercure Galant_[401] in France had provided criticism, good,
bad, and indifferent, with regular outlets for itself. And in both
kinds—that of the dictionary or encyclopædia, and that of the
periodical—the flood has never ceased, but has always increased since.
Fortunately for us the impossibility of treating all this is compensated
by the fact that such treatment, if possible, would be superfluous. But
of Bayle and Baillet at least something must be said particularly, and
something also of a remarkable and much less known continuator of the
latter.
-----
Footnote 399:
The standard edition is that of La Monnoye (7 vols. 4to, Paris, 1722,
with an 8th containing Ménage’s _Anti-Baillet_ &c.)
Footnote 400:
Jan. 1665—first weekly, then monthly. It became a government
publication in 1701. Gui Patin, in the March after its appearance, is
very angry (Let. DCLXV. iii. 517, _ed. cit. sup._) with it, and says
with voice prophetic of many injured ones to come, “nous verrons si
ces prétendus censeurs, _sine suffragio populi et Quiritium_, auront
le crédit et l’autorité de critiquer ainsi tous ceux qui n'écriront
pas à leur goût.”
Footnote 401:
1672-1820. Donneau de Visé was its first editor, and Thomas Corneille
its most distinguished writer.
-----
Bayle perhaps needed nothing but better taste, greater freedom from
prejudice, and a more exclusive bent towards purely literary criticism,
to be one of the great literary critics of the world. [Sidenote:
_Bayle._] But, unluckily for himself, he had contracted, through corrupt
following doubtless of the Latins (even such respectable persons as
Pliny) and of the scholars of the Renaissance, a sort of perpetual itch
and hankering after the indecent, which, to say nothing else, is as
teasing and as tedious in the long-run as an itch for sermonising and a
hankering after instruction. Equally tedious, and in much worse taste,
is the perpetual undercurrent—not seldom becoming a very obvious
top-flood—of sceptical girding and nagging at the Bible and at religion
generally. In both these respects Bayle was followed by Voltaire. But
Voltaire, though his own literary sympathies were perhaps not his
strongest, had some. Of purely literary sympathies Bayle seldom shows
much trace—by which it is not in the least meant that he is not a man of
letters himself, for he is an excellent one, and the reproaches which
have been addressed to his style are not of much importance. But it is
not literature that he really loves: it is “philosophy” of a kind, and
gossip of almost all kinds. His wits are always bright and alert, and
his learning, though associated with so many qualities opposed to those
of the mere pedant, and not impeccable, is pretty sound. He has the
curiosity, the acuteness, the erudition, the industry of the true
critic, but he has neither the enthusiasm, nor the disinterestedness,
nor the grasp.
In both these respects, as in others, Baillet is very much a diminutive
of him. [Sidenote: _Baillet._] In fact, brightness of wit has almost
disappeared; and though Ménage—himself no infallible guide—has been both
ill-mannered and hypercritical in the strictures of the _Anti-Baillet_,
there is no doubt that the _Jugements des Savants_ is a book not to be
used without verification on particular points. But this is almost a
property, or, at worst, an inseparable accident, of these _Collectanea_;
and a fair-minded reader cannot help admiring the extraordinary industry
with which Baillet executed his task, while appreciating the
significance of this record of a division of literature which, as we saw
at the close of the last volume, had, scarcely two centuries before, the
most meagre representation of all.[402]
-----
Footnote 402:
It can scarcely be necessary to give bricks of so large and rambling a
house. “Mr Borrichius témoigne aussi que le style [_of Ovid’s
Heroides_] est fort pur” is, and has to be, the kind of thing. Perhaps
such a glut of authorities may have insensibly nauseated men of
authority, and so Baillet may have worked both ways. He is good enough
to admit (v. 461) that “one cannot say this nation [the English] is
inferior even for Poetry to several others of the North,” and he has
heard of “Abraham Cowley, John Downe ou Jean Donne, Cleveland, Edmond,
[_sic_] Waller, Jean Denham, George Herbert, le Chancelier Bacon,
Shakespeare, Fletcher, Beaumont, Ben, Johnson, Suckling, Jean Milton,”
&c. It is open to Shaconians to contend that as the comma at “Edmond”
is undoubtedly superfluous, so is that at “Bacon,” and that
Baillet—the learned Baillet—meant to rank “le Chancelier
Bacon-Shakespeare” among poets.
-----
Curiously enough the want of judgment with which Baillet has been, and
to some extent may justly be, reproached shows itself exactly in the
most unlikely place. [Sidenote: _The ethos of a Critical Pedant._] His
opening volume on the nature, legitimacy, and so forth of Criticism,
though too prolix, collects an extraordinary number of just and valuable
things, and adds to them at least something of the author’s own. His
Character of a Pedantic, Chicaning, Malicious Critic (partly borrowed
from Le Bon, partly elaborated by himself) will be found at vol. i. p.
52., and has been justified by some seven generations of the persons it
describes. It is Pedantry “to pick low and little faults, and to excite
yourself over matters which are of no importance.” It is Pedantry “to
steal from an author and insult him at the same time; to tear
outrageously those who differ with you in opinion.” It is Pedantry “to
endeavour to raise the whole world against some one who does not think
enough of Cicero.” It is Pedantry “to take occasion by an author’s
mistake to endeavour to humiliate him and ruin his reputation.” It is
Pedantry “to send your author back in a haughty manner to the lowest
class, and to menace him with whip and ferule for an error in
chronology.” It is not merely Pedantry but Chicanery “to separate
phrases in order to give them another sense,” to “impute printers’
errors,” to “neglect or change punctuation.” We need not go on to
Baillet’s signs of “Malignity”: the cap is already a good cap, a very
good cap, and one need not go far to find some one to wear it.
A boiling down of this volume—which, so far as I know, has never been
executed—would be far superior to most general works on the subject with
which I am acquainted. Nor is Baillet’s distribution of his scheme
altogether a bad one. It is in the detailed carrying out (where one
would suppose that for a man of such industry the least part of the
difficulty lay) that he is most unsatisfactory. He neglects—in a manner
surprising from one of that still scholastically educated generation of
ecclesiastics, who were wont positively to abuse division and
subdivision—the most obvious and mechanical assistances of method. His
first sketch of subdivisions, though wanting succinctness, is not ill;
but he never really carries it out, and stuffs in its stead long
collections on “Precocious Persons,” “Authors in Disguise,” and “Les
_Anti_” (books of a polemic character with titles so beginning), which
belong only to the curiosities of Criticism. Further, he never seems to
have set out, in any of the divisions, with a preliminary list of the
authors he meant to handle, so that his omissions and inclusions are
equally surprising. And, lastly, he never seems to have worked out any
preliminary calculus of the amount of space which such authors as he
does admit proportionately deserve. But the extent of his knowledge is
astounding, and the way in which he communicates it not disagreeable.
Baillet’s unmethodical prosecution of his task was in this fortunate for
us that it induced a somewhat younger contemporary, Balthasar Gibert, to
take up the rhetorical-critical side of his work, and continue it in a
book[403] not very much known but of great value. [Sidenote: _Gibert._]
In strict date it belongs to the next century, and therefore to the next
Book, but we have always taken, and shall always take, liberty of
protracting or foreshortening our views as may be desirable; and this is
avowedly a supplement to Baillet, though limited in subject, allowing,
in consequence, fuller treatment of individuals, and displaying a good
deal more originality and judgment. Gibert excellently supplies
Baillet’s admitted insufficiency as to Longinus; he is very copious on
Hermogenes, who had been coming, from Sturm downwards, into more and
more estimation; and if in his accounts of the Italians he shows a
traditional rather than an adequately comparative estimate,[404] he is
sufficiently modern to give a quite considerable abstract of “M.
Mackenze” (_sic_), _i.e._, Sir George Mackenzie’s _Idea Eloquentiæ
Forensis Hodiernæ_. That he “but yaws neither” between Rhetoric and
Criticism is a point of no importance against him; and it is a valuable
document for the gradual transformation of the one into the other.
-----
Footnote 403:
_Jugements des Savants sur les auteurs qui ont traité de la
Rhétorique_ (3 vols., Paris, 1703-16). M. Bourgoin, I think, refers to
Gibert, but the book was first brought seriously to my notice by a
very kind private communication from Professor Scott of the University
of Michigan. Luckily it is in the British Museum; but it does not seem
easy to obtain a copy for oneself. Gibert taught for some half-century
in the Collége Mazarin, and was repeatedly rector of the University of
Paris. He wrote other books,—a formal “Rhetoric” _juxta Aristotelis
doctrinam_, strictures on Rollin, &c. Gibert is, it seems, appended to
some edd. of Baillet.
Footnote 404:
See, for instance, his reference to Patrizzi, who is evidently to him
rather _magni nominis umbra_ than anything tangible.
-----
We have to terminate this chapter, as we shall have to begin the
corresponding one in the next Book, by saying something on the
famous—the much too famous—Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns; but
the space which we shall give it on both occasions will appear
strangely, and perhaps scandalously, short to some readers. [Sidenote:
_The Ancient and Modern Quarrel._] Neither idleness nor caprice,
however, can be justly charged against the contraction. In the first
place, things generally known may be justifiably passed with slighter
notice in a continuous history, which has to deal with much that is very
little known. From all sides, and in all ways, the Battle of the
Ancients and Moderns is very well known indeed. It enjoys, and for more
than a generation has enjoyed, the advantage of occupying one of the
best monographs ever written. It engaged, on repeated occasions, the
attention of the best equipped and the most readable of all French, if
not of all, critics—Sainte-Beuve. It was arranged—not ill if not wholly
well—for popular English consumption by the expert skill of Macaulay. As
a result partly of Swift’s genuine literary sympathies, partly of his
more or less accidental connections, the commentators of one of the
greatest writers not only of England, but of the world, have been driven
to expound it: as have, for more essential reasons, those of more than
two or three great or interesting writers in France—Boileau, Perrault,
Fontenelle, and others. From all this almost everybody must have learnt
something about it, and to some of all this almost everybody can fairly
be referred if he wishes to learn more.
For the matter is not really of so much importance in the History of
Criticism as it may at first sight appear to possess. [Sidenote: _Its
small critical value._] These quarrels rarely do much critical good; for
the critical issues are almost always obscured in them, first by the
_animus_ and prejudice of the combatants, and then by the mere dust of
the fighting. But this particular combat did perhaps the least good of
all; and could have done the least good. It was indeed sufficiently
inevitable: for the sort of deification with which the whole of the
sixteenth century, and most orthodox authority in the earlier
seventeenth, had regarded antiquity, was sure to breed revolt. But it
led to no conclusion; it evolved no truth. Truth is not the daughter of
Ignorance; and it is really hard to say which party shows most ignorance
in this matter. The defenders of the Ancients knew, as a rule, next to
nothing of the Moderns; and the defenders of the moderns knew a great
deal too little of the ancients. La Motte knew no Greek if Perrault[405]
knew any; and with Boileau not only to all appearance was English
literature a blank sheet, but almost the whole sheet of French
literature before his own time was either blank or inscribed with
fantastic fallacies. Still, this is not a condition entirely or commonly
unknown in squabbles of this kind. The signal distinction and
disqualification of the advocates in this famous cause is that, as a
rule, neither any of the leaders, nor any of the juniors, had taken more
than the slightest trouble to get up, or at least to understand, his
_own_ brief. The Ancients are here in a little better case than the
Moderns; but they were not in so very much better case. Most of them
knew the Latin classics fairly well; and some of them (though by no
means all, or even many) had a fair, while a few had a good,
acquaintance with Greek.[406] But, with rarest, if with any exceptions,
they persisted in exaggerating, if not in contemplating solely, that
side of Classical Literature which has been and must be admitted to be
its principal side, but which is not the only one. They would not see—or
if they saw, they expressed positive distaste for—the vaguer, more
imaginative, more “Romantic” beauty of Greek, and in a less degree of
Latin. They never dreamt of turning the tables on their antagonists, as
they might have done to no inconsiderable extent, from this point of
view. And by holding up Design, Order, Decorum, and the rest, as
paramount conditions of literary excellence, they laid themselves open
to the most inconvenient retorts from well-equipped adversaries, and
even received some on the score of Homer, badly as their adversaries
were equipped as a rule.
-----
Footnote 405:
His _Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes_ (1688-98) is most
disappointing, even to fervent opponents of “the sect of the
Nicolaitans” and fervent lovers of the _Contes de ma Mère l’Oye_. That
he knew little and that his case was bad does not matter; but I at
least cannot find the _esprit_ which apologists plead.
Footnote 406:
J. Warton (_Adventurer_, No. 49) asserts, on the authority of Ménage,
that even Rapin was “totally ignorant” of Greek. M. does not quite say
this: but he does say that R. got his Greek quotations from
Tanneguy-Lefèvre, Madame Dacier’s father (_Ménagiana_, i. 175 of the
collected ed.)
-----
On the other hand, the Moderns were, for the most part, like men who
have Toledos by their sides and choose to fight with cabbage-plants. The
French ignored the English and sneered at the Italians and Spaniards
since the Renaissance, indulging the while in placid but contemptuous
ignorance or misrepresentation of everything before it out of Italy. The
English were prepared to admit that nobody had achieved sweetness in
English numbers before Mr Waller, apologised (except Dryden and Dryden
only in a few moments) for Shakespeare, and thought Chaucer a good funny
old savage.
Out of such a welter of blundering little good could come, and no good
came save one. It is, I believe, absolutely impossible to trace, in so
much as one single filament, the extension and deepening of critical
appreciation which began in the next century to the Quarrel of the
Ancients and the Moderns. But that quarrel did excite and feed the
critical spirit and appetite, and did give signs of an as yet half-blind
craving for the possession of critical knowledge.[407]
-----
Footnote 407:
Perhaps it is still desirable, though almost for the last time, to
observe that the omission of casual criticism in non-critical work is
intentional and necessary. Nowhere could more interesting examples of
it, from Molière downwards, be produced; but this is only a
temptation, not a reason.
-----
CHAPTER II.
THE ITALIAN DECADENCE AND THE SPANIARDS.
DECADENCE OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—PAOLO BENI—POSSEVINO: HIS ‘BIBLIOTHECA
SELECTA’—TASSONI: HIS ‘PENSIERI DIVERSI’—AROMATARI—HIS ‘DEGLI AUTORI
DEL BEN PARLARE’—BOCCALINI AND MINORS—INFLUENCE OF THE RAGGUAGLI—THE
SET OF SEICENTIST TASTE—SPANISH CRITICISM: HIGHLY RANKED BY
DRYDEN?—THE ORIGINS: VILLENA—SANTILLANA—ENCINA—VALDÉS—THE BEGINNING
OF REGULAR CRITICISM: HUMANIST RHETORICIANS—POETICS:
RENGIFO—PINCIANO—LA CUEVA—CARVALLO—GONZALES DE SALAS—THE
‘CIGARRALES’ OF TIRSO DE MOLINA—LOPE’S ‘ARTE NUEVO,’ ETC.—HIS
ASSAILANTS AND DEFENDERS—THE FIGHT OVER THE SPANISH DRAMA—CERVANTES
AND CALDERON—GONGORISM, CULTERANISM, ETC.—QUEVEDO—GRACIAN—THE
LIMITATIONS OF SPANISH CRITICISM.
That the Italians, who had some half of the last Book to themselves,
will not have a tithe of the present, is due, on the part of the
historian, neither to laziness, nor to love of contrast, nor to that
rather illogical and illegitimate generosity which decrees that “the
other citizen shall have his turn.” [Sidenote: _Decadence of Italian
Criticism._] The disproportion simply corresponds to the facts. Italy,
indeed, continued to devote herself with something like enthusiasm—or at
least with the _engouement_ of dilettantism and the doggedness of
pedantry—to critical studies. Some at least of the earlier writers of
the century—aftercrops of the sixteenth—still exercised considerable
influence: and for nearly the whole of the time the great Italians of
the former age—Scaliger, Castelvetro, and others—maintained an authority
which did not pass to France till the eighteenth itself was approaching.
But little was really added to the critical canon of the central
Peninsula. Paradoxers like Beni, eccentrics of different kinds like
Tassoni and Boccalini, respectable compilers like Possevino and
Aromatari, must occupy us and receive their due. But all these belong
more or less to the first quarter of the century. The second, third, and
fourth are much less fertile, and it is not till another meeting of the
ages that we shall come to another really remarkable group, consisting
of two at least painful literary historians, among the earliest of their
kind, in Crescimbeni and Quadrio, of a real though limited critic in
Gravina, and of a remarkable combination of erudition and insight in
Muratori. And these will properly be treated in the next Book, not in
this.
Paolo Beni, who has been spoken of in the last Book,[408] and who was a
man of nearly fifty when the sixteenth century closed, had nevertheless
nearly half his literary life to spend in the seventeenth, and published
the most noteworthy of his works at this time. [Sidenote: _Paolo Beni._]
We saw that he was a strong “Torquatist,” and an innovator in respect of
recommending prose for tragedy as well as for comedy. As he grew older
the iconoclastic tendency so developed in him that he may almost be
called the leader of Rebellion in the matter of the Ancient and Modern
Quarrel; for _questa lite_, as a contemporary of Beni’s calls it, had
been fought out in Italy long before it became a burning one in France
and England. Beni was a “modern” of the extravagant kind: and his two
chief critical manifestoes, after the Dissertation on Prose Drama, were
a _Comparatione di Homero Virgilio e Torquato_,[409] where the author of
the _Gerusalemme_ (which Beni prefers to call by its other title,
_Goffredo_) is exalted far above both the ancient Poets; and an
_Anti-Crusca_,[410] in which, with the futile courage of his opinions,
he gives no more quarter to Dante and Petrarch than to Homer and Virgil
on the score of language at least, and would apparently turn “modernity”
almost into “hodiernity.” This does not argue any great critical spirit:
and we find little in Beni—only the sort of Old Bailey advocacy, or
attack, which was rapidly coming to be the disgrace of criticism. There
is not “the real integrity and perfection of the fable” in the
_Odyssey_. Even Virgil cannot approach Tasso in regularity, nice
derangement of episodes, &c., &c. The most amusing thing about Beni is
the way in which he turns the batteries of the classics on themselves.
He does not attempt to make a new Poetic for Romances, nor does he take
his favourite poem on its own merits and extol it for them. The “parts,”
the “qualities,” the “rules” are practically adopted: and it is shown—or
at least asserted—that Tasso exhibits them all in greater perfection
than the ancients. This is the line afterwards taken by Addison with
_Paradise Lost_.
-----
Footnote 408:
_V. supra_, p. 107.
Footnote 409:
Padua, 1607.
Footnote 410:
Padua, 1612.
-----
The _Bibliotheca Selecta_ of Antonio Possevino, Jesuit negotiator and
teacher, is a good example of the kind of compiling work which the great
development of Criticism was imposing on at least some critics.
[Sidenote: _Possevino. His_ Bibliotheca Selecta.] From some points of
view it also may seem to belong rather to the last Book, for Possevino,
who retired from active work in many countries to his native land and an
old age of study in 1586, brought it out first at Rome in 1593. But he
made alterations and rearrangements in it afterwards, and the edition I
have used[411] was published, with his own approval and assistance, a
few years before his death, and well within the seventeenth century. It
is a mighty folio (or rather two in one) dealing with something like the
whole range of studies, and intended, it would seem, rather for teachers
than learners; but the First Book[412] has something, and the three last
much, to do with our subject. In these three Possevino successively
discusses History at enormous length[413] and with considerable
bibliographical information, Poetry[414] at somewhat less, and finally
the Art of Letter Writing, under the special title of “Cicero,” but with
reference also to Libanius and others. Possevino, as was in fact
inevitable from his profession and his purpose, is very much cumbered
about orthodoxy and morality, especially in the poetical department; but
he does not allow himself to be wholly guided by these considerations.
Scaliger’s _Poetic_ he calls _spissum sane opus_—a happy but rather
ambiguous epithet; quotes Gambara, Minturno, Cinthio, Pigna, and
Patrizzi as main authorities, and though he says that he will _not_
quote Castelvetro, as being on the Index, evidently means that he should
be read, though he duly prescribes Caro as an antidote. He has a good
selection of extracts, mighty lists of books and authorities, and an
inserted tract (two in fact) by Macarius Mutius on Poetry and Christian
Poetry, by which he sets much store, but in which little will be found
but rhetoric.
-----
Footnote 411:
2 vols. fol., Cologne, 1607.
Footnote 412:
_De Cultura Ingeniorum._
Footnote 413:
Lib. xvi., 150 folio pp.
Footnote 414:
“_De Poesi_ et Pictura” is the title to which he calls attention, but
to which he does not fully work up.
-----
Some of the most interesting and suggestive, if not the most regular,
criticism in this part of Italian literature is to be found in the
_Pensieri Diversi_ of Alessandro Tassoni.[415] [Sidenote: _Tassoni. His_
Pensieri Diversi.] The author of the _Secchia Rapita_ was not likely to
be dull in anything that he undertook: and his undertakings were of a
sufficiently various kind.[416] In his _Considerazioni_[417] on Petrarch
he treated that revered sonneteer and his sonnets as cavalierly as he
was to treat the sacred Heroic Poem in the _Secchia_: but this kind of
_frondeur_ spirit was nothing new in Italy. The _Pensieri_, in which
their author was candidly prepared to find people discovering
“extravagance and capriciousness,” are modelled on Aristotle’s
_Problems_, and Plutarch’s _Symposiacs_ and _Roman Questions_. They deal
with curious matters “such as are wont to come into the discourse of
Gentlemen and Professors of Literature,” a phrase where the “and” is
half complimentary and half the reverse. On perusing the contents we
find that gentlemen and professors of literature talk about the radical
humours, and the reason of the spots on the moon, and why it is that
ugly ladies are loved, and a very great many other interesting things.
They do it, moreover (at least Tassoni does it for them), in a very
interesting manner—that peculiar early seventeenth-century mixture of
learning, fancy, and humour which, in still greater measure, gives
Burton and Browne their quintessenced charm. If Tassoni had pushed that
question about the _donne brutte_ home, he might have rediscovered,
against his own age, the great secret of criticism; but of this we may
treat more properly in the Interchapter. It is not till the Tenth Book
of the _Pensieri_ that he attacks literature, save by incidence and
tangent; and then he plunges full into the Battle of the Ancients and
Moderns, devoting twenty-seven out of twenty-eight chapters to an
elaborate comparison of the two periods, in every class of art, science,
and literature itself. But he preserves his invincible quaintness by
going off in the twenty-eighth to a very elaborate study of the Hangman
(_Il Boia_), which readers of Joseph de Maistre should not fail to
compare with the _Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg_.
-----
Footnote 415:
4to, Venice, 1646. There are earlier and later editions. Tassoni, who
published this first, I believe, at Rome [Carpi?] in 1620, had
preluded it (Modena, 1608) with a smaller volume of _Quisiti_.
Footnote 416:
He meddled boldly with politics, and I have a little modern edition of
his _Filippiche contra gli Spagnuoli_, &c. (Ferrara: Le Monnier, n.d.)
Footnote 417:
Modena, 1609. I have not yet met with this.
-----
Tassoni deals with the general question in the same curious indirect and
ironical fashion in which he handles the charms of _bruttezza_, and the
reason why it was specially rude (let us say, though he does not) of
Spenser to call the husband of Hellenore Mal_becco_. He begins by
advancing, and even seeming to countenance, the “Modern” argument for
Progress, as being the law of nature and so decisive of _questa lite_.
But he very soon turns round, and gives reasons and instances for the
much sounder doctrine of Fluctuation—not merely in general, but in
regard to particular Arts. Therefore it is necessary to examine these
Arts; and then he does this. Once more he becomes a “Modern” in awarding
to his countrymen the palm of grammatico-critical studies. In Logic and
Philosophy generally, he thinks they can match the Latins, and though
they yield to the Greeks, may make some fight even with them. He will
pit Guicciardini, Comines, and Giovio against any of the ancients, which
is a little rash; putting Machiavelli with others in a second rank. And
on the modern side of Oratory he urges, with his unconquerable
unexpectedness, Peter the Hermit and John of Munster! But on the Poets
this unexpectedness of his turns to the disappointing. He gives us a
very unnecessary classification of Kinds, obviously in order that he may
quote his own _Secchia_ as a new kind, the Heroi-comic. But it is
interesting to find him dividing the _Commedia_ into “Heroi-satiric” for
the _Inferno_, Heroic mixed with Hymnic for the _Paradiso_, and a
division (not, as in the _Inferno_, a _blend_) of Heroic and Satiric for
the _Purgatory_. Except on this head of _questa lite_, in which he is a
notable forerunner of later disputants, Tassoni has little that is
positively critical. And if he shows on the one hand a singularly active
and inquiring spirit, such as may any day discover fresh and promising
outlooks, he shows us also the risk of mere fantastic “problem”-raising,
to which a century of active criticism was leading a century of
Academies.[418]
Tassoni’s Petrarch-blasphemies brought him into collision with Giuseppe
Aromatari, of whose original work, including his part in this
battle,[419] I do not know much. [Sidenote: _Aromatari._] But Aromatari
was responsible, many years later, for a remarkable encyclopædia or
_corpus_, which may very well follow the _Pensieri Diversi_ as a pendant
to Possevino’s work already mentioned, and as illustrating the learned
and scholastic side. It is entitled _Degli Autori del Ben Parlare_,[420]
and, if its grammatical and Rhetorical divisions had been succeeded by a
similar collection of Poetics, it would have gone far to cover, in a
certain peculiar and limited way, the entire field of criticism. As it
is, not a few of its documents extend in the poetic direction. Its first
volume gives the promise of an almost unique thesaurus, starting with
illustrative and comparative extracts from Hesiod, Lucian, Cicero,
Xenophon, &c., then giving the whole of Dante’s _De Vulgari Eloquentia_
in the Italian, and following this with Trissino’s _Castellano_,
Tolomei’s _Cesano_, a discourse of Varchi, and “Opinions” from Mutio,
Doni, Dolce, Citadini, and others, all on the subject of the Vulgar
Tongue. Other treatises, including Bembo’s, with less famous ones by
Alunno, Delminio, and others, follow; while two whole parts are given up
to Salviati’s _Avvertimenti della Lingua_ on Boccaccio. Not seldom the
grammatical matter touches points very important indeed to criticism, as
for instance in vol. vi., where Buonmattei enters on the question (made
a burning one in France by Malherbe) whether popular or literary usage
is to be the standard of correctness.
-----
Footnote 418:
Attention was first recalled to Tassoni in recent times by M.
Hippolyte Rigault in his _Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes_. But I
was not myself introduced to the _Pensieri_ by that excellent book,
and the things in them which seem to me most interesting are not quite
those which struck M. Rigault.
Footnote 419:
This is referred to, in the extract from Leone Allacci prefixed to the
1646 ed. of Tassoni, as _libellus Patavii editus_. Tassoni seems to
have replied under a pseudonym and pretty savagely (_magis aculeatis
dentibus_).
Footnote 420:
Eight volumes, in 16 parts, of a not small quarto (Venice, 1643). This
is one of the many books for the opportunity of studying which,
without burdening shelves and lightening purse, I am indebted to the
Library of the Faculty of Advocates.
-----
The Rhetorical part has the additional interest of combining ancient and
modern matter—of being, in short, a kind of compressed _Rhetorici Græci
et Latini_ with modern additions. [Sidenote: _His_ Degli Autori del Ben
Parlare.] Sometimes the texts are given simply in whole or
part—Aristotle, Longinus, Hermogenes being thus treated—while an
Introduction to Hermogenes by Giulio Camillo Delminio shows how strongly
the authority of that master was working, and how much it had to do with
the insistence on criticism by Kinds and Qualities. Sometimes a _catena_
of authorities on particular matters is given—as in the case of Tropes
and Figures, where the chain stretches from Quintilian to Mazzoni. Only
specialists, probably, will care to investigate profoundly the huge
commentary-paraphrase of Panigarola on Demetrius Phalereus, readjusted
to the purposes of sacred Oratory, though the book had a great vogue in
its day. But one turns with more interest to the work of Patrizzi on
Rhetoric, much less known as it is than his _Della Poetica_ and _Della
Storia_. It has, however, hardly any of the interest of the _Poetica_,
being almost entirely devoted to the _subjects_ of the orator, and
philosophical rather than literary in its handling. But this great
medley of Aromatari’s shows us, better perhaps than any single book
except Baillet’s, and nearly fifty years before it, the bulk and
importance of the position which the critical consideration of
literature was taking among literary studies.
The literary side of Boccalini’s _Ragguagli di Parnasso_[421] is less
than the political. [Sidenote: _Boccalini and Minors._] But the list of
seventeenth-century treatises in Italian on critical subjects is
long.[422] Some of them are difficult to procure out of Italy, and I
doubt whether many are worth the trouble of hunting down. I am sorry
that the work of Chiodino da Monte-Melone[423] has hitherto escaped me,
because of the extreme beauty of the name, which would seem to qualify
its author for the post of Chief Rhetorician to Queen Pintiquinestra.
Pellegrino, Fioretti, Zani, Querengo, Menzini have not been or shall not
be forgotten. But I have experienced, and fear again, the sort of
disappointment which occurs when, for instance,[424] one is told, of
Carlo Rinaldini,[425] that the third part of his _Philosophia
Rationalis_ “contains a tolerable Poetic.” One attacks the mighty
double-columned folio, and finds a purely scholastic treatise of the
familiar kind, beginning with _Poetice_, _Poeta_, _Poesis_, _Poema_ as
of old. It is impossible to say _Non debes quadrillare_ in this
fashion—the company is too ancient and venerable; but it is permissible
to decline to play, on the strength of having had enough of the game
already. There is a certain established conformity of propriety between
times and books. At no time can a frank commentary on Aristotle be out
of date or out of place; at this time the Poetics of Le Bossu and
Bouhours, faulty as they are, were at any rate responsive to the form
and pressure of the day. But such work as Rinaldini’s, however
respectable, has neither the intrinsic excellence which conquers time,
nor the fleeting but real grace of temporal congruity.
-----
Footnote 421:
Venice, 1612-13.
Footnote 422:
See Professors Gayley and Scott’s invaluable book so often cited, p.
447, a passage based on Blankenburg’s older _Zusätze_ (3 vols.,
Leipsic, 1796-98).
Footnote 423:
Venice, 1613.
Footnote 424:
Blankenburg is the sinner here.
Footnote 425:
Padua, 1681, pp. 1025-1088.
-----
The _Ragguagli di Parnasso_ themselves are of less importance to us for
their actual critical utterances (which, as has been said, were not
Boccalini’s first object) than for the extraordinary influence which
they exercised on the form of criticism throughout Europe for more than
a century. [Sidenote: _Influence of the_ Ragguagli.] Suggested more or
less directly by Lucian (whose enormous effect on modern European
literature, though of course never missed entirely by any competent
person, has never yet been fully allowed for) they hit the taste of the
day straight and full. Not merely did they start the whole fleet of
“Sessions of the Poets” and the like in England, but they had a great
influence on the English prose Essayists of the early eighteenth
century;[426] while in France even the severe Boileau paid them
unacknowledged royalty. It is no uncommon experience to find that books
which in this way create a kind of “rage” at one time, become chiefly
sources of boredom at another; but Boccalini certainly illustrates the
fact, in his literary portions at any rate. He deserves some credit for
having made current, if he did not invent, the famous story of the
choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. There is some critical
appropriateness in the fable of Tasso being refused admission by
Castelvetro on the alleged strength of Aristotle’s rules, of the
reprimand bestowed by Apollo on the philosopher, and of his excuse that
he never meant his observations for “rules” at all. To this the age
might have paid more attention than it did. But one finds thinness in
the fun of Justus Lipsius attacking Tacitus for impiety, and of Thrasea
and Priscus being warned, as they value their stoical characters, not to
go and see Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara too often.
-----
Footnote 426:
Henry Cary, Earl of Monmouth, translated the book in 1656.
-----
In the History of Taste as distinguished from that of Criticism the
important point of the _Seicento_ is of course that development of
floridity—of Marinism—which is associated in literary history with the
very term. [Sidenote: _The set of Seicentist taste._]But this
development was common to Italy with all Europe; and though the country
still exercised a sort of prerogative influence, “Marinism” is not so
much the mother as the elder, and not by so very much the elder, sister
of Gongorism in Spain, of the extravagances of the age before Boileau in
France, of the “metaphysical” fashion in England. It will be better to
treat these in the Interchapter, both in themselves and as fastening
“correctness,” by way of reaction, upon Europe.
Spain has never ranked very high in the general estimate as a
contributor to European criticism: and though this estimate has not been
too solidly founded, the _communis sensus_ seems here to have exercised
that mysterious power of appeal to the world-spirit which so often keeps
it from going hopelessly wrong.[427] [Sidenote: _Spanish
criticism—Highly ranked by Dryden?_] There is, however, one remarkable
piece of testimony which, if it were a little better authenticated,
would give Spanish critics a very high position as teachers. We shall
see in a future chapter that Dryden (as has indeed been generally,
though, until recent times, but vaguely, allowed) is himself one of the
great turning-points of the critical story of Europe. Now Spence says
that Bolingbroke told him that Dryden had assured _him_ that “he got
more from the Spanish critics alone than from the Italian and French and
all others together.” Unfortunately Spence speaks at second-hand; and
Bolingbroke, even if he really did say this, is always a Bardolphian
security. Moreover, Dryden, who was not at all in the habit of
concealing his indebtedness, but, on the contrary, seems to have “felt
an innocent warmth” of pleasure in mustering and marshalling his
authorities, quotes no Spanish authors. And the references (which are
fairly numerous) to Spanish plays in the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_
neither quote, nor necessarily show knowledge of, Spanish critics at
all. It has been thought that Dryden may have read Tirso de Molina’s
_Cigarrales_ (_v. infra_); and it has occurred to me that something in
his attitude may have been derived from Lope’s _Arte Nuevo de hacer
Comedias_. But I do not believe this to be at all certain, or even very
probable.[428]
-----
Footnote 427:
Spain can boast, however, perhaps the very best _History_ of its
criticism as a whole that any European language has—if not as yet the
only good one—in the _Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España_ of
Don Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (Ed. 2, 9 vols., Madrid, 1890-1896).
This is fortunate for me, inasmuch as I do not pretend to any
extensive familiarity with Spanish literature beyond the early poets,
and indeed do not read the language with very great facility. Besides
Señor Menéndez I have relied chiefly on the texts and comments
recently furnished (_v. inf._) by M. Morel-Fatio (who will, I hope,
continue in so good a road), on Ticknor, on the short but valuable
notices of this period in Mr Spingarn, _op. cit._, on those in my
friend Mr Hannay’s _The Later Renaissance_ (Edinburgh and London,
1898), and on Mr James Fitzmaurice Kelly’s _History of Spanish
Literature_ (London, 1898). I am particularly obliged to Mr Kelly for
a copy of the recent (undated) Spanish translation of his book, with a
few corrections, and a preface by Señor Menéndez himself. The Spanish
critic combines, with a just praise of the book, a mild remonstrance
as to the small space which Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly has given to this
very critical subject—a fact in which I own I myself had felt some
comfort. The silence of the specialist is the shield of the
expatiator. I have not failed, wherever I could, to verify all the
critical deliverances in the text, and examine almost all, if not all,
the books mentioned; but I do not know the _circumference_ of them as
I do elsewhere. And as I began this History on the principle of going
to the sources, I think myself bound to warn the reader of any case in
which I have been obliged to modify that principle.
Footnote 428:
This was written before M. Morel-Fatio had expressed the same view in
his _Les Défenseurs de la Comedia_ (_Bulletin Hispanique_, _ubi cit.
inf._) See also on the point Mr Ker’s _Essays of Dryden_, i. lxvi, and
the references in his index to Dryden’s mention of Spanish plays. Of
course the main interest of the matter lies in the much stronger
resemblances that exist between the great English and Spanish dramas
than between any other two national branches of the European theatre.
-----
Intrinsically, however, Spanish criticism before the eighteenth century,
though not extraordinarily rich nor furnishing any documents of extreme
importance, is interesting, and in one point almost supremely so, for
circumstances if not for contents. [Sidenote: _The Origins—Villena._]
The trail begins fairly early, though the scent is scattered at
uncommonly long intervals. A glance was made towards the close of the
first volume of this book at the actual beginnings. They were due to two
persons of the greatest distinction in the early fifteenth
century—Enrique, Marquis(?)[429] de Villena and Master of Calatrava, of
the blood royal both of Aragon and Castille, and Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza,
Marquis of Santillana. The _Arte de Trobar_[430] of the former, a
treatise on the Gay Science, was sent by him, a year before his death,
in 1434, to the latter; and Santillana himself touched criticism, or at
least Poetics, both in the Preface to his _Proverbs_, and still more in
a letter to the Constable (Dom Pedro) of Portugal, written about 1455,
not long before his own death, and containing observations not merely on
Poetry in general, but on early Spanish poets up to his own times. This
document was fortunately, and most wisely, prefixed by Sanchez to his
collection of the older Spanish poets, and is easily accessible in the
re-edition of Ochoa,[431] or in the Appendix to Señor Menéndez'
_History_, vol. ii.
-----
Footnote 429:
They say now that he was not only not (as used to be said) the premier
and only Marquis of Spain, but not a Marquis at all. _Non moror: non
sum invidus_—especially as the next monographer will probably restore
the Marquisate.
Footnote 430:
I have duly looked this up in what appears to be the only accessible
place (a place valuable for other documents), the _Orígenes de La
Lengua Española_, Madrid, 1737, of Mayáns y Siscar. It is merely a
tissue of troubadours’ names, scholastic citations, and minute details
of pronunciation and versification. Señor Menéndez has reprinted part
of it in the Appendix to his second volume.
Footnote 431:
_Poesias Castellanas anteriores al siglo_ xv. (Paris, 1842) pp. 13-17.
-----
The Marquis begins, after compliments, by the usual generalities about
poetry containing “useful things covered with a very pretty coverlet,
composed, distinguished, and scanned in certain number, weight, and
measure.” [Sidenote: _Santillana._] So “as fructiferous gardens abound
and give convenient fruits,” &c., &c., with Tully to give security. But
for all his own very pretty coverlet of rhetoric, the Marquis talks very
good sense. He is sure that verse is above prose, basing himself soundly
on Isidore of Seville and his proofs from Hebrew literature, with the
Greeks to follow, and Cassiodorus to back up Isidore. Then he comes to
modern times—to Petrarch and Robert of Naples, to Boccaccio and John of
Cyprus, quoting the _De Genealogia_ itself, and therefore, in a very
interesting way, gearing on Spanish criticism, even in these its
rudiments, to Italian, then not much less rudimentary. He divides styles
properly into “sublime,” “middle,” and “low,” liberally placing all
those who write in Greek or Latin in the first class. The middle
contains those who write in any vulgar tongue; the low those who merely
botch up romances and songs for the common people, without order or
rule. Dante wrote the _Commedia “elegantemente,”_ and Boccaccio composed
proses of _grand eloquencia_ in the manner of Boethius. Santillana then
shows himself well read in Provençal, French, and Catalan, as well as
Italian. He refers to the _Roman de la Rose_ and its authors, to
“Michaute” (Machault), Otho de “Crantzon” (Granson), “Alen Charrotier,”
whom, naturally, he much admires. He thinks the Italians surpass the
French in genius, the French the Italians in art. Then he turns to
Spain, and beginning with those who have written in the Provençal style,
comes to Gallegan, Castilian, &c., later, mentions the chief poets,
gives the metres in which they have written, and ends with a
(mis)quotation of Horace[432] and a shower of classical allusions—among
others to _aquellas dueñas que en torno de la fuente Elicon
incesantemente danzan_. For even then the modern confusion of the Mount
and the Fount had begun. The piece is, if not very advanced criticism,
at any rate an early and interesting critical glance over European
poetry in the Romance tongues.
-----
Footnote 432:
_Quem nova concepit olla_ servabit odorem. It may be observed that, on
the principles of Low Latin scansion from Commodian downwards, the
first four words will do well enough.
-----
Villena, as his title shows, and Santillana to some extent, had been
considering Catalan and Galician as the chief poetic media for
Spaniards; it is different with Juan del Encina, who, in 1496,[433]
prefixed an _Arte_ to his _Cancionero_ nearly half a century after
Santillana wrote, and almost as long after an earlier _Cancionero_, that
of Baena, the compiler of which does not seem to have been tempted to
criticism. [Sidenote: _Encina._] The nine chapters of this deal with the
origin of Castilian poetry, the distinction between the art of poetry
and the _arte de trobar_, while both _have_ an art; the necessities of
the _trobador_, feet, consonance and assonance, verses and couplets,
poetic “colours,” &c., and a general conclusion on writing and reading
poetry. The book shows a certain Italian influence which distinguishes
it from earlier work; but which, when that Italian influence had been
repeated in stronger dose, seemed to later generations insufficient and
out of date. Still, it is interesting, and earlier than anything of the
kind in vernacular Italian.
-----
Footnote 433:
I have used the somewhat later Grenville copy in the British Museum
Salamanca, 1509, fol.; and Señor Menéndez' reprint in the Appendix to
his second volume, which also contains one or two other early
documents.
-----
Another half-way house may be found in the interesting _Diálogo de La
Lengua_ or _de Las Lenguas_[434] of Juan de Valdés, which has even been
called “an important monument of literary criticism.” [Sidenote:
_Valdés._] It is rather, however, linguistic than literary, though the
author deserves to rank with other national heroes of the time for his
strenuous support of the vernacular, which he thought a more “corrupted”
representative of Latin than Italian, and respecting which he held the
odd but characteristically Renaissance notion that Greek, not Basque,
was its remoter ancestor. He mentions the romances and the _Celestina_.
-----
Footnote 434:
The plural was used in the version of Mayans y Siscar (_Origenes_, _v.
supra_), which was long the only one accessible. In 1860 a better text
appeared at Madrid with the singular, which Ticknor and Mr Kelly
approve. For any one who professes no Spanish scholarship to set
himself against these authorities may seem absurd. But in the book
itself _sub finem_ the author writes “habiendo considerado _estas tres
lenguas_,” and the changes are rung on Latin, Tuscan, and Spanish
throughout.
-----
But the regular course of technical and elaborate Spanish criticism does
not begin, after these long preliminary stages, till quite the close of
the sixteenth century. [Sidenote: _The beginning of regular Criticism.
Humanist Rhetoricians._] The earlier course of that century has indeed
supplied Señor Menéndez with a tolerably fair herd of humanist
rhetoricians to fill the ninety pages of his ninth chapter. The list is
headed by Antonio de Nebrija (Nebrissensis), _De Artis Rhetoricæ
compendiosa coaptatione ex Aristotele Cicerone et Quintiliano_, in 1529.
But the only names of much interest that appear in it are those of the
famous Luis Vives, disciple of Erasmus and of Oxford, with his
anti-Ciceronianism, and with at least some admission (the passage is
quoted by Señor Menéndez at vol. iii. on p. 226 from the _De causis
Corruptarum Artium_), that it does not matter in what language a man
writes in so far as faults and impurities of diction and the duty of
avoiding them are concerned; and of the equally famous preacher Luis de
Granada, with his _Rhetorica Ecclesiastica_, a good deal later. Still,
the metrical _Rhetoric_ (1569) of Arias Montano, that “Lope of Latin
verse,” a piece of didactic much more spirited and really poetical than
Vida’s _Poetic_, on which no doubt it is modelled; and the vigorous if
mistaken scholasticism of Francesco Sanchez (“El Brocense”), in his
attempt to subject Rhetoric entirely to Logic, deserve some notice. So,
perhaps, does Alfonso Garcia Matamoros, who, though Señor Menéndez
conscientiously suspects him of not being very original, stumbled upon a
remarkable anticipation of Buffon in the definition _Est stylus habitus
orationis, a cujusque hominis natura fluens_. This is a slight but
distinct advance on the earlier one of Fox Morcillo, _De Imitatione_
(1544), which gives it as something _quæ vel pro ingenio cujusquam, vel
rei, quæ in questionem vocatur, ratione varietur_. These writers,
however, seem (except El Brocense, who dealt on more than one occasion
with the Horatian _Art_) to have given little or no attention to
Poetics, and in fact to have allowed themselves to drift a good deal to
leeward of the purely literary side of Rhetoric altogether. When the
ship bore up again for this side, the Spaniards, like everybody else in
Europe without exception, took the Italians for their schoolmasters; and
they might seem all the more certain to be docile pupils in that their
poetical practice—their practice indeed in all sorts of regular
writing—had long been under the same influence. Boscan had more or less
deliberately Italianated Spanish poetry[435] half a century before
Rengifo,[436] and Pinciano, and La Cueva, in the last decade of the
sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth, began to theorise.
At the same time there was a very important point of difference between
Spain and all other European nations, except to some extent England. In
the contents of the Cancioneros—perhaps not in actual form very old, but
stretching back by tradition and association to the very blending-time
of Goth, and Cantabrian, and Latin—and in the drama which had been so
rapidly maturing from Naharro to Lope de Vega, the Spaniards had two
mighty, popular, and intensely anti-"regular" forms of literary
composition. The critical “dependence” therefore—the point to be fought
out—was, “Which was to prevail?”
-----
Footnote 435:
After a conversation with Navagero which he has reported, and which
is, in its way, also a critical document.
Footnote 436:
Señor Menéndez refers to two _Poetics_ anterior to Rengifo, neither of
which I have seen. The first, by Miguel Sanchez de Lima (sometimes
called de Viana), Alcala, 1580, has a slight interest in the wording
of its title, “_El Arte Poética_ en romance castillano.” The
second—which from its date (1593) would seem to be a little later than
Rengifo, though the historian mentions it first—is Hierónymo de
Mondragon’s _Arte para componer en metro castillano_ (Saragossa,
1593).
-----
Mr Spingarn’s thesis, that translation of the _Epistle to the Pisos_ is
the invariable prelude of original critical work, completes its proofs,
as far as the Latin races are concerned, by the version of Espinel which
appeared in 1591, and was followed in the very next year by Rengifo’s
_Arte Poética Española_. [Sidenote: _Poetics. Rengifo._] Of the former
there is little to say, for though Espinel was a man of literary gift
(he was the author, it may be excusable to remind the reader, of _Marcos
de Obregón_, and so a slight, though only a slight, creditor of Le
Sage), he did not add anything original to his translation. The latter
has been sometimes rather unkindly spoken of by those who do not like
formal Arts of Poetry. Those, on the other hand, who have weak places in
their hearts for such things may give Rengifo shelter therein. He
reminds one at very first sight of his Italian originals in the comely
small quarto of his _format_—the book-size of all others which retains a
certain dignity without entirely forfeiting the benefit of the
Archpriest of Hita’s celebration of _dueñas pequeñas_: he has a
beautiful folding plate of a _Labyrinto_—one of the artificial forms
which are dear because they maddened the eighteenth century—and he gives
a large _Sylva_ or rhyming dictionary. I do not know that there is much
else to be said for him, but he is a symptom.[437] So, some twenty years
later is, on the other side, the severe Cascales,[438] who in his
_Tablas Poéticas_[439] lays it down that “if any part of a fable can be
changed without loss, this fable is not well managed.” There was a
contemporary of Cascales in a country which loved not Spain, neither was
loved of her, who would have changed you every part of every one of his
fables, and left the versions so that you could not tell which was the
better.
-----
Footnote 437:
The above paragraph was written from notes taken while reading Rengifo
at the British Museum. In subsequently reading Señor Menéndez on him I
was surprised to find the learned historian protesting against the
Labyrinth, and other such things, as having been foisted in _cir._
1700-1720, and referring to the editions of 1592 and 1606 as alone
genuine. But the British Museum copy is that of 1606! Let it by us
even be said to Rengifo’s credit that, like Sidney, he felt the charm
of old romance. See M. y P., p. 320.
Footnote 438:
“The inexorable Cascales,” as Señor Menéndez calls him in a passage
which I had not read when I wrote the text. Of Cascales, as of
Pinciano (_v. infra_), the Señor thinks far more highly than I do.
Both seem to me (though Cascales more than Pinciano) to be simply
uncompromising Aristotelians who borrowed from the Italians; but, like
most borrowers and imitators, hardened and emphasised what they
borrowed. Both were forced to allow little “easements” in regard to
the drama; but only such as are consistent with Aristotle’s text,
though not with some glosses on him. And Pinciano simply translates
the Aristotelian definition of tragedy, while Cascales, doubtless with
reference to the different heresies of Castelvetro and Giraldi, is
quite Athanasian in his doctrine that poetic verities are absolutely
unchangeable, and independent of custom and time.
Footnote 439:
The book appeared in 1616; but I have had to use the reprint of 1779.
I have not seen Mesa’s _Compendio de la Poética_ (Madrid, 1607) or
Carillo’s _Libro de Erudicion poética_.
-----
Some years after Rengifo came Pinciano, and ten years later the Spanish
attempt to rival Vida and Vauquelin in the _Ejemplar Poético_ of Juan de
La Cueva. [Sidenote: _Pinciano._] The two are opposed on the point which
was rapidly becoming the burning question of Spanish literary criticism,
but which was never thoroughly faced in Spain. The great national
drama—in main part, if not in every respect, Romantic to the core—was
making progress every day; but so was the theory that you were to follow
the ancients. Alfonso Lopez, otherwise “El Pinciano,” did the latter
diligently in his _Filosofía Antigua Poética_,[440] which, besides the
authorities indicated in the title, owed much to the Italian school.
-----
Footnote 440:
Madrid, 1596.
-----
Pinciano[441] is set extraordinarily high by the Historian of Spanish
criticism, who thinks him “the only humanist of the sixteenth century
who presents a complete literary system,” contrasts him (I own that this
gives me pause) with the “intolerable pedantries” of Castelvetro, and
calls him plumply “an excellent critic.” The quotations advanced,
though, according to Señor Menéndez' admirable custom with authors
difficult of access, they are plentifully given, will perhaps hardly
justify this praise. Pinciano thinks that “the soul of poetry is the
fable”; that metre is not necessary, though it “perfects imitation”;
that imitation itself must have verisimilitude; that poetry is superior
to metaphysic; that it ranges over all the arts and sciences; that it
gives things in a new form, makes them new to the world; that a
perfectly organised fable is like a perfectly organised animal; that it
is absurd for a hero to be born, grow up, become bearded, marry, &c.,
all in one piece. He prefers the probable-impossible to the
improbable-possible, disapproves of classical metres, and so forth—all
of which we have, I think, heard before. Señor Menéndez attributes to
him _altísimo entendimiento crítico_ for rejecting the common (and
certainly absurd enough) division of comedy and tragedy by the happy or
unhappy ending, and vesting the comic element in Ridicule. And he winds
up by constituting Pinciano, with Cascales and Gonzales de Salas, “the
luminous triad of our _preceptists_ of the good age.”
-----
Footnote 441:
The _Filosofía Antigua_ is extremely rare, and does not appear to be
in the British Museum either under “Pinciano” or under Lopez, his real
name. Fortunately there is a recent reprint (Valladolid, 1894), ed. by
Professor Don Pedro Muñoz Peña, which I duly possess. It may be
observed that bibliographers and librarians are particularly hard on
the laity in the Spanish department. It is surely needless to make one
hunt in vain for an author of world-wide reputation under his
world-name till one runs him to earth as _Gómez de_ Quevedo [_y_]
_Villegas_.
-----
Recurrence to, and study of, the book itself as given by Señor Peña will
not, I think, remove the doubts about this high estimate of the
_Filosofía_ which even Señor Menéndez' own quotations may have started.
It is a book of much learning, ingenuity, and labour, the somewhat
non-natural form of which (the recounting in letters to a certain Don
Gabriel by El Pinciano[442] of conversations between himself and two
friends, Hugo and Fadrique) may, like much else in it, be due to Italian
influence. That of such writers as Fracastoro is obvious in the
philosophical aloofness of the first Epistle-dialogue, _De la Felicidad
Humana_, in which the nature of virtue, the character of the Pagan
divinities, and many other solemn things are discussed, with some
curious ones, such as whether _nobleza_ can be predicated of Lais either
for her beauty or her eminence in an _oficio deshonesto_. It is Don
Gabriel’s answer which deflects the subject with some sharpness into
_una Arte Poética en romance_, and this, beginning in the next letter,
occupies the rest of the book. The divisions are pretty usual: first,
the general qualities of, and objections to, Poetry; then its nature,
its different kinds, the Fable, Poetic diction, metre, tragedy, and
comedy; dithyrambic, epic, minor poetry; and lastly, “Actors.” Pinciano
calls these divisions modestly enough _Fragmentos_, but no just
exception can be taken to them on the ground of scrappiness. The book is
methodical enough; its _aperçus_ (as, for instance, on _furor poeticus_
and poetic diction) are often acute, and its expression not seldom has
the quaint raciness of Spanish.[443] But it still “sticks in generals”;
it still holds those generals to have been settled once for all of old;
and it still gives no sign of any catholic examination of actual poetry.
-----
Footnote 442:
Señor Peña, himself a professor (_catedrático_) of Valladolid in
Rhetoric and Poetry, explains that this surname was taken by
distinguished _alumni_ of that University, and derived from the Roman
city (Pincia) supposed to have existed on the site. Few definite dates
or facts seem to be known about Alfonso Lopez, except that he was
physician to Mary of Austria, daughter of Charles V. and widow of
Maximilian II. during her life at Madrid from 1576 to 1603, and that
he wrote, besides the _Filosofía_ and other things, a poem on Pelayo,
_languide nec eleganter_, one regrets to hear.
Footnote 443:
As where Fadrique substitutes, for the stately old image of the honey
on the edge of a bitter cup, the familiar _come quien dora una
píldora_, “as one who gilds a pill,” ed. cit., p. 120.
-----
On the other hand, La Cueva,[444] though meticulous enough, and citing
with high reverence[445] not merely Aristotle and Horace, but Scaliger
himself, Vida, Minturno, Viperano, and others, is, on the drama at
least, and especially on comedy, an utter contemner of the ancient
doctrine. [Sidenote: _La Cueva._] My friend Mr Hannay’s pithy
statement[446] of this Spanish point of view has already commended
itself to good judges,[447] and it seems to sum up the whole matter.
“The theatre was to imitate nature and to please. Poetry was to imitate
the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic.” There had
been something of this in Castelvetro; there was more in the Spaniards,
and it was fatal to them as critics.
-----
Footnote 444:
_Ejemplar Poético_, first printed, and, I think, still only to be
found, in the _Parnaso Español_, Madrid, 1774, vol. viii.
Footnote 445:
See Spingarn, p. 146, who gives the passage.
Footnote 446:
_The Later Renaissance_, p. 39.
Footnote 447:
Cf. Spingarn, p. 233.
-----
[Sidenote: _Carvallo._]
Of the authors of this group with whom I am myself acquainted, none
seems to me to stand higher than Gonzales de Salas on the
Aristotelian-Senecan side; while few exhibit rehashings of the common
stuff to be found in all the Italian books more strikingly than Carvallo
in his _Cisne de Apolo_.[448]
-----
Footnote 448:
(With a much longer title), Medina del Campo, 1602. The quaint title
is connected with a quainter fancy, that the poet is noble as such—a
“Knight of the Swan.” Señor Menéndez makes some use of Carvallo, but
admits that he is _pedagogo adocenado_, “a common dominie.”
-----
Gonzales de Salas,[449] on the contrary, strikes me as having shown
distinct and original critical power. [Sidenote: _Gonzales de Salas._] A
foreigner is not likely to be greatly disturbed, even if he be a better
Spanish scholar than I am, by the “palpable” darkness,[450] the
“accumulation of obscurity and troublesomeness” in style, with which
Señor Menéndez reproaches Salas. It is an odd thing, but might be
paralleled elsewhere, that the foreigner, who does not know what the man
_ought_ to have said in order to convey his meaning properly, can, in
nearly all languages, arrive at that meaning more easily than the
native, who is “put off” by eccentricity and barbarisms. Words, for
instance, like _lucifugas_ and _parasangas_, which Don Marcelino holds
up to special reproach, are to an Englishman, with his Virgil and his
Xenophon in his head, perhaps easier reading than some of the
bluest-blooded words of pure Spanish. The critic is further enraged by
Salas’s devotion to Seneca, whose _Troades_ he actually translated, with
observations and exercitations thereon. But (as students of English at
least should know) there is much Romantic virtue in your Seneca along
with his Classical vice. The curious thing about Gonzales is
that—fervent Aristotelian as he is in theory, and devotee of the ancient
theatre down to the Tragic Boot—he has singular “pluckings of apples by
the banks of Ulai,” strange glimpses of the truths which his countrymen
were the best situated of all men in Europe (with hardly the exception
of Englishmen) for seeing, but which as a rule they would not see. Both
Pinciano and Cascales had eulogised Nature or _Naturaleza_; but as the
foundress or foundation of Laws which Cascales at any rate would have as
those of the Medes and Persians. Gonzales, Aristotelian as he is, on the
other hand, says in so many words,[451] “You are not bound to follow the
ancients,” “Time and taste may improve and alter art.” Señor Menéndez
thinks this liberty a Spanish trait; but we find it in some Italians,
though not many, and we certainly do not find it in all or many
Spaniards, who are much rather inclined to divide their attentions, or,
as the impudent old Greek definition has it, “to keep the wife for
convenience and decency, the mistress for pleasure.” Gonzales, I think,
saw a higher law.
-----
Footnote 449:
_Nueva Idea de la Tragedia Antigua_, &c. Madrid, 1633.
Footnote 450:
_La misma lobreguez y el mismo desconsuelo_, M. y P., iii. 364.
Footnote 451:
In the passage quoted by M. y P., iii. 366, 367.
-----
These authors, however, and others who succeeded them, though worthy
wights and good workers in labouring the lea of Spanish criticism, in no
case possess the interest which attaches in all literatures to those who
are at once eminent in creation and careful in criticism. The place of
Corneille in French, of Jonson and Dryden in English, is taken, earlier
than any of these, by one of the great and three of the greatest writers
of Spain—Tirso de Molina, Lope, Cervantes, and Calderon.
The contribution of the “creator of Don Juan” to criticism is not large,
and it comes in an odd place, but it is of importance. In the curious
medley called _Cigarrales_ [say "tales of a country-house"] _de
Toledo_,[452] Tirso has included a play of his own, _El Vergonzoso en
Palacio_, and has given us a discussion of it by the company at p. 184
of the book. [Sidenote: _The_ Cigarrales _of Tirso de Molina_.] A
“presumptuous person” attacks the poet for “licentiously deserting” the
limits and laws of comedy. He has stated the strict Unities, and is
contrasting the action of the play with them, when he is interrupted by
a certain Don Alejo, who carries the war into the enemy’s quarters
bravely. Comedy must be ended in twenty-four hours, must it? It is quite
decent and probable, is it not, that a gallant shall fall in love with a
lady, court her, treat her, win her, and marry her all in a day? Where
are all the delightful accidents of love—the hopes and the despairs—to
go? A real lover must be proved by days and months and years of
constancy. Why may not comedy present to the eye what history presents
to the understanding—much time in little? The ingenuity of the
playwright consists [I abbreviate here a good deal] in making things
probable _as they are related_. The very difference of nature from art
is that the one, from its creation, cannot vary—a pear-tree always
producing pears, an ilex its own acorns, influenced only by soil,
climate, &c. But drama varies its own laws, and grafts tragedy on
comedy. And he then boldly sets Lope, to whom he gives the title of
_reformador de la comedia nueva_, as an example of modern art against
Æschylus and Euripides and Seneca and Terence, explaining the
dramatist’s declaration, _v. infra_, that he had deserted the ancients
to please the Popular taste, as due only to his natural modesty. This is
real plain speaking: and the speech is worthy of the author of the
_Burlador de Sevilla_ and the striking _Condenado por Desconfiado_.
-----
Footnote 452:
Madrid, 1624. Noted by Señor Menéndez (who has given the whole
passage, iii. 457-60) as a specially rare book. Fortunately the
British Museum, according to a wise habit of its own in such cases
(cf. Capriano), has two copies, and M. Morel-Fatio has included the
piece which concerns us in an invaluable collection (also including
Lope’s _Arte Nuevo_ and other things) of Spanish critical documents,
which he is issuing in the _Bulletin Hispanique_ of the Faculty of
Letters of Bordeaux, and republishing separately (Paris, Fontemoing;
Bordeaux, Feret, 1901-1902). The man who gives a text attains merit
which mere commentators and historians can never hope to have imputed
to them.
-----
Tirso’s apology for his great craftsfellow was not more superfluous than
his defence of him was bold and well framed. [Sidenote: _Lope’s_ Arte
Nuevo, _&c._] Not merely in the verse _Arte Nuevo de hacer
Comedias_,[453] but elsewhere, does Lope make the somewhat undignified
and pusillanimous, but, as we have said, widely entertained, excuse
referred to. Señor Menéndez himself can only plead (a little obviously,
perhaps) that “there were two men in Lope,” the great popular Spanish
poet, and the educated versesmith, full of academic tradition. Very much
the same mixture is seen in Dryden, from whom, as we shall see,
inconsistencies quite as great as Lope’s, and much more numerous, can be
quoted. But the contrast, I think, brings out the characteristic
weakness of the Spanish critical spirit. Its historian admits frankly
that there is a good deal in Lope that is “infantine.” I should add that
he seems to me never to have taken any side of criticism with
seriousness, whereas Dryden successively took many. Both had to confess
that they had been sometimes traitors to their own best ideals of
poetry, to please the multitude; but Dryden, at least, never committed
the blasphemy of condemning his own best things as Lope did, and
thanking God that he himself knew the precious “precepts,” according to
which he did _not_ write them. The simple fact seems to be that a man of
Lope’s extraordinary facility and fecundity could not be critical. In
the time that Dryden took to write _Alexander’s Feast_ the Spanish poet
would have done you an Epic, half-a-dozen plays, and minor poems enough
to fill a volume. Señor Menéndez himself avows that he cannot pretend to
be acquainted with all the critical remarks interspersed in Lope’s
enormous and never yet collected work: and who shall venture to rival
his extensive knowledge? But we shall probably not be rash in thinking
that any real doctrine, except on details of craft, would be hard to
extract from them. The man was a genius, but not a critical genius: and
it certainly was within the resources of a very humble critical faculty
to note, as it is his chief critical glory to have noted, in theory, as
he expressed it in practice, the fact that “Points of honour move all
people mightily” on the [Spanish] stage.[454]
-----
Footnote 453:
Also reprinted by M. Morel-Fatio in the issue noticed above.
Footnote 454:
_Los casos de la honra son mejores, Porque mueven con fuerça a toda
gente_—_A.N._, 327, 328. At least one of Lope’s innumerable works, the
_Laurel de Apolo_, written late in his life (1630), is busied with the
poets of his time in the fashion of Caporali and Cervantes, but, it
would seem, in a spirit of wholly uncritical panegyric.
-----
The tractate consists of not quite 400 hendecasyllabic lines, arranged
in irregular stanzas from five to fifty lines long, and blank except for
the last two lines of each stanza, which form a rhymed couplet. It has a
rather erudite air at first sight; but M. Morel-Fatio has ruthlessly
shown that almost all, if not all, the passages which give it this
appearance are translated literally from Robortello[455] or from
Donatus. It begins by a complimentary address to the Academy of Madrid,
which had, it seems, asked the poet for the treatise, and then passes
into the slightly ignoble apology-boast, already referred to, as to his
own knowledge of the _preceptos_ and the barbarism, the _rudeza_, of the
established and popular notion of drama. He defines comedy as imitating
actions and manners of men—not royal and lofty actions like tragedy, but
humble and plebeian—gives an exceedingly perfunctory sketch of Spanish,
and a much fuller one of ancient, drama, and then relapses into his
exercises and denunciations of
“La vil chimera deste monstruo cómico,”
with a promise to “gild” the error of the vulgar, and discover, if
possible, a sort of _via media_. But one is not surprised to find that
he has almost directly to blaspheme one of the very chief of his revered
_preceptos_ by admitting that
“Buen exemplo nos da naturaleza”
of the mixing of the tragic and the comic. So, too, like a new Naaman,
he bows in the House of Rimmon by admitting that the Unity of Time
_must_ be broken, though you are to hide the breach if you can. Minor
details of dramaturgy fill a large part of the piece, with an especial
recommendation of keeping the interest of the audience on the
tenterhooks. But he cannot finish (the finale includes a boast of having
written 483 comedies
“Con una que he acabado esta semána”)
without another ungracious fling at the “vulgarity” and the “barbarism”
of the Muse he serves, and a confession, in which some have seen humour,
that all the 483, “except six,” sin gravely against true art. Certainly
humour is not an unknown quality with Spaniards; but it cannot be said
that, if Lope uses it here, he uses it gracefully.
-----
Footnote 455:
_V. sup._, pp. 49, 50 note. It is fair to say that Lope quotes
Robortello.
-----
Still Lope, if not very critical himself, was the cause of some
noteworthy criticism from others. [Sidenote: _His assailants and
defenders._] From the lively controversy which arose over the character
of his work, Señor Menéndez has extracted some documents, so exceedingly
rare, that in one instance, at any rate, they consist of a unique copy
of a reply to a libel, the original of which has perished altogether.
This is the _Expostulatio Spongiæ_ (1618) (the original and lost attack
on Lope having been called _Spongia_), by a Julius Columbarius, who
seems to have been the shadow of several gentlemen at once, the chief of
them Lope’s friend, Francesco López de Aguilar. Appended to this is a
dissertation by Alfonso Sanchez, professor of Hebrew at Alcalá, in which
the clear method and universally intelligible Latin of the schools are
utilised to put part of the Romantic case, as it was seldom put before
the end of the eighteenth century. “Nature,” says Sanchez, “gives laws;
she does not accept them.” Spaniards are men, and, for the matter of
that, Roman citizens as well. And times change: and, for all our worship
of Cicero, he would be a dinner-bell[456] if he orated in the Theatre of
Alcalá. Let poetry follow the requirements of its time. Another of these
documents is the Apology for Spanish drama, prefixed to a collection of
plays by Valencian authors in 1616, and signed by Ricardo de[l] Turia, a
_nom de guerre_ not yet certainly identified, which is a special defence
of Spanish comedy (_i.e._, “drama”) as such.
-----
Footnote 456:
_Omnes dilaberentur._ Señor Menéndez (iii. 444) gives all the
important parts, both in Latin and Spanish. R. de[l] Turia, _infra_,
has been reprinted, but the marrow of him also will be found in the
_Historia_, as well as much else: for instance, an interesting
_Invectiva y Apologia_, by Francesco de la Barreda in 1622, which is
dignified by the words: “There was no greater dramatic-poetic written
in the seventeenth century”—a large statement. But Barreda is
certainly a staunch anti-Unitarian, and has well reached the important
doctrine that “Art is merely a careful observation of classified
[_graduados_] examples.” The whole dispute, in which the more or less
great names of the Argensolas, Artieda, Cristóbal de Mesa, and others,
figure, together with the subsequent one on _culteranism_, will be
found exhaustively treated in the tenth chapter of the _Historia_, and
more summarily, but still usefully, in Ticknor. Since most of the text
was written M. Morel-Fatio, in his _Défenseurs de la Comedia_ (_v.
sup._, p. 343), has subjoined Turia to Tirso, and a certain Carlos
Boyl to both, adding a notice of the Frenchman Ogier (_v. sup._, pp.
256, 257), who is already familiar to readers of these pages. Boyl,
one of the Valencian group above referred to, wrote in “romance” form
rules of the _comedia nueva_.
-----
In face of these remarkable utterances (which could be multiplied
greatly, and the answers to them supplied) it may seem hard, if not
altogether unjustifiable, to limit the importance of Spanish criticism,
as has been done above. [Sidenote: _The fight over the Spanish drama._]
But it has to be observed that all this was a merely passing, and in
great part a merely personal, literary dispute, which had no real
effect. While the great Spanish dramatists lasted, the drama was
popular, and men invented reasons to defend it. But they founded no
school, either acceptedly orthodox or strong-reasoned in its heterodoxy:
and, when the great age passed, instead of a sounder criticism, as in
Dryden’s case, founding itself upon the results, the formal and
petrifying neo-classicism of Luzán froze all these reasonings up, just
as Boileau had earlier frozen those of the Ogiers and the Saint-Sorlins
in France. If we could validate that connection between Dryden himself
and the Spanish critics, it would be something like a Missing Link: but
we cannot.