contribute more irregularly to our matter. [Sidenote: _Cervantes and
Calderon._] The chief critical documents furnished by the former are the
long poem of the _Viaje del Parnaso_, and not so much the world-famous
passage of the burning of the romances of chivalry in Don Quixote, as
the whole problem and purpose of that immortal book itself.[457] The
_Viaje_,[458] putting aside the debated question of its literary value,
is rather a disappointing book, in its allegory of the poetic ship, with
glosses for portholes, and tercets for sweeps, and its endless, but
rather pointless, citation, generally flattering, but sometimes the
reverse, of poets and poetic kinds. Both praise and blame appear to be
distributed very much on the principle of Miss Edgeworth’s Frank, when
he proposed to give the odd piece of tart to good Henry, who had mended
his bat, or to kind Edward, who had lent him his ball. As for the
burning question of the _libros de caballerías_, Cervantes was beyond
all question right in preferring _Amadis_ and _Palmerin_; but it must be
a very matter-of-fact reader who does not see that in fact he loved them
all, however he might laugh at them. Indeed, the scene itself (_D. Q._,
I. i. 6), though it ends in almost the whole library being left to the
untender mercies of the housekeeper and the niece, makes constant
exceptions both in favour of the romances themselves (including even
such a dubious example as _Tirante the White_) and of other pieces in
verse and prose from the _Diana_ to the _Araucana_. And when the subject
is taken up again much farther on (I. iv. 21) by the Canon of Toledo,
his severe strictures on the Romances as they are change suddenly into a
splendid panegyric of what they might be. This latter passage indeed
shifts into one of the most remarkable of Cervantes’ critical
deliverances, the attack (in rougher language than Lope’s own) on
“irregular” plays, and the famous and very curious passage in which,
immediately afterwards, the curate condemns the improbabilities of the
chronicle-drama in words almost precisely similar to those which Sir
Philip Sidney had used twenty years and more earlier, and adopts the
whole “preceptist” view, with a special reference to Lope’s own
compromises and a demand for rigid licensing of plots and romances
alike, according to the principles of taste and learning, of Tully
(_secundum Donatum_) and “eloquence.” One may entertain a passing doubt
whether the chances of _Don Quixote_ itself would have been altogether
happy under such a censorship; and in this there is probably more
following of the Italians[459] than deliberate critical preference. It,
however, and other things (the famous contention that epics may be
written in prose as well as in verse, though important from its actual
illustration in the _Don_ and its effect on Fielding, is in no sense
original, and as an opinion hardly more than an echo of Scaliger) no
doubt give Cervantes a certain status. But Calderon can hardly be said
to give us anything except the odd inconsistency (to be paralleled,
though in a different kind, with Lope’s) of his alternate ridicule and
patronage of the Gongorist style.
-----
Footnote 457:
Let it be remembered that the curious passage on which Pope dwells
(_Ess. Crit._, 267 _sq._) is _not_ Cervantic, but from the spurious
and intrusive work of the mysterious Avellaneda.
Footnote 458:
Enthusiastically Englished, with much apparatus, by the late James Y.
Gibson (London, 1883). It is closely modelled on the _Viaggio di
Parnasso_ of Cesare Caporali (1531-1601).
Footnote 459:
Or of their Spanish followers, such as Pinciano and Cascales. This
opinion, formed independently from reading of _Don Quixote_, agrees
with one of much more importance, that of Señor Menéndez himself. Nay,
Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly (_op. cit._, p. 237) roundly pronounces Cervantes
“the least critical of men.”
-----
This last name introduces us to another controversy, which, though
connected in the most intimate way with our subject, is a sort of
appendix to it, and one of those appendices which, in some cases, one
must ruthlessly cut short. [Sidenote: _Gongorism, Culteranism, &c._] The
quarrels over Lope (whom, by the way, Góngora himself savagely attacked)
were succeeded by the battle of _culteranismo_, again distinguished by
that curious see-sawing which, as we have seen, marks the Spaniards on
almost all critical points. Quevedo, for instance, and the
above-mentioned Gonzales de Salas, behave like those capricious knights
of Spenser’s, who were always changing sides in the battle, and running
tilt at the very champions by whose side they had lately charged.
[Sidenote: _Quevedo._] Quevedo in particular has a most extraordinary
record in this matter. I do not think that, in my limited reading of
Spanish, I have ever laughed more over anything than over his _Cuento de
Cuentos_,[460] and his _Catechism to help to translate the jargonizing
ladies_, where he addresses himself _Al caro, diáfano, transparente e
mediano Lector_, gives instructions in the best manner of precious
speech, and advises that a wife should call her husband _mi quotidio_,
and he her _su sempiterna_, while neither will dream of speaking of a
“gota _de agua_,” but will, of course, denominate it a _podagra_. Yet
Quevedo at other times did more than condescend to cultism, or
culteranism, as it seems to be indifferently called.
-----
Footnote 460:
In his _Works_. Bibl. de Ribadeneyra.
-----
[Sidenote: _Gracián._]
The great prose apostle of the cult, as Góngora was its poet, was
Balthasar Gracián, who has not a little for us in his famous _Agudeza y
arte de ingenio_,[461] the Bible of preciosity, with its motto, _En Nada
Vulgar_, and its doctrine (II. 49), that _La semejança es origen de una
immensidad conceptuosa tirar principio de agudeza sin limite_. His name
gives an opportunity of illustrating the difficulty of treating _cosas
de España_. [Sidenote: _The limitations of Spanish criticism._] I am not
aware of any living English authorities on Spanish literature who can be
placed above Mr David Hannay and Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly. Of these, the
first says[462] that it was Gracián’s “chosen function to be the critic,
prophet, and populariser of Gongorism”; the second,[463] that “No man
ever wrote ... with more scorn of Gongorism and all its work.” Who shall
decide when doctors of this degree disagree to this extent? I am, so far
as my very poor and imperfect knowledge of the texts goes, with Mr
Hannay: but that is not to the point.
-----
Footnote 461:
In his _Works_. 2 vols., Barcelona, 1748.
-----
What, I think, is to the point, and what I may say with some general
knowledge of criticism, if with little particular knowledge of Spanish,
is that the very nature of the subject invites, excuses, necessitates
such differences. The Spaniards, if I may be pardoned a rough and ugly
metaphor, never “digested themselves,” never either kept creation and
criticism separate, or waited for the one till the other had ceased.
_Naturaleza_ and _Agudeza_ jostle each other constantly in them, with a
result of truceless war. One may even wonder whether _cultismo_,
_culteranismo_, _conceptismo_,[464] coming as they did after the great
period of natural freedom, in Lope, and Tirso, and Cervantes at his
best, did not do far more than the harm that the much-abused
“Metaphysicals” did in English. The practice of Góngora and Gracián,
even of Calderon, not seldom belied the arguments of Tirso and of the
shadowy Turia and Sanchez. When a Luzán comes in such cases it is too
fatally easy for him to say, “Well! whatever the ancients did, they did
not do _this_! There is at any rate no _jerigonza_ in Aristotle or in
Horace!” And the Spaniards had no Milton, no Shakespeare to carry them
through, as ours carried us through the worst times. Their Cervantes in
his great work was of an “off” kind, as yet not fully recognised; their
Lope was too fluent, facile, voluminous, unconvincing; their Calderon,
with all his marvellous poetical and specially lyrical power, too
unequal and perhaps too rhetorical.
-----
Footnote 462:
_Later Renaissance_, p. 172.
Footnote 463:
_Hist. Spanish Lit._, p. 340.
Footnote 464:
I am very well aware that _culteranismo_ and _conceptismo_ are perhaps
not identical, and have been asserted to be quite different. But both
alike belong to the “better-bread-than-is-made-of-wheat” division of
writing.
-----
Above all, they had the misfortune to have no critic of real authority.
The _Arte Nuevo_ is partly clever enough “technical education,” partly
bookwork, partly ignoble or inartistic compromise: and if we compare
Tasso and Lope, at no such great distance of time, we can only be struck
by the enormous advantage of the Italian in serious critical weight. The
others, the Pincianos, the Gonzales de Salas, and the rest, were
persons, if not exactly of no mark or likelihood, at any rate of no
commanding and authoritative importance, like Ben Jonson and Dryden in
England, like Boileau in France. Even such comparatively slight
examination of the actual texts as I have been able to give has shown me
that many most interesting and independently striking _aperçus_,
passages, phrases may be taken from the Spanish critics. But I cannot
say that, even after duly perusing and perpending the admirably
competent and loving examination of Señor Menéndez, I have been able to
form any high opinion of Spanish seventeenth-century criticism as a
whole.
CHAPTER III.
GERMAN AND DUTCH CRITICISM.
THE HINDMOST OF ALL—ORIGINS—STURM—FABRICIUS—VERSION A.—VERSION B.—JAC.
PONTANUS—HEINSIUS: THE ‘DE TRAGŒDIÆ CONSTITUTIONE’—VOSS—HIS
‘RHETORIC’—HIS ‘POETICS’—OPITZ—THE ‘BUCH DER DEUTSCHEN POETEREI.’
It is not necessary to add much to what has been said in the first
chapter of the last Book on the subject of Erasmus, in order to indicate
the reasons why the growth of criticism in Germany, High and Low,[465]
was far more tardy, and for a long time far scantier, than even in
England; and why, when it came, it displayed a one-eyed character which
is not visible in any other of the great European countries.[466]
[Sidenote: _The hindmost of all._] Want of unity, religious and
political troubles, Grobianism and its opposite or companion
Pedantry—all had to do with this; but the principal hindrance was the
non-existence of any considerable German vernacular literature, and the
consequent inveteracy of the habit of writing in Latin. So long as this
lasted the Germans and Dutch might be and were commentators, scholars,
grammarians—but they could hardly be critics, because they still lacked
the comparative stimulus. And it is not a little noteworthy that the
earlier development of Criticism in the Low Countries as compared with
Germany, during our present period, at least coincided with a greater
development of Dutch vernacular literature, though this is a matter
which lies out of our direct route.
-----
Footnote 465:
I do not know any general-special books on the subject of this
chapter, except those of Blankenburg, and Gayley and Scott, _cit.
sup._
Footnote 466:
Of course Olmucensis (_v. supra_, p. 27) and Cornelius Agrippa (p. 28)
in strictness belong to the subject, as does Erasmus himself. But the
last is too cosmopolitan, and the two first too unimportant, to make
the abstraction of them from this place a great wrong to the _Teutsche
Nation_. Ulrich von Hutten wrote on versification, but not
importantly.
-----
There may easily be differences of opinion as to the persons, not mere
Humanists, who shall be selected as representing the beginning of German
criticism in modern times, in so far at least as the section of Poetics
is concerned. [Sidenote: _Origins._] The choice may lie between the
famous Johann Sturm, who touches on literary matters in his letters, who
wrote on Rhetoric, and whose pupil, late in his life, drew up a
commentary on the Epistle to the Pisos in 1576; Georgius Fabricius, of
Chemnitz, the first form of whose _De Re Poetica_ appeared in 1565; and
Jacobus Pontanus, whose real name was Spanmüller, whose book on the
subject was published thirty years later, but who, as he was then a man
of over fifty, and had long been a professor, had probably dealt with
the subject, if only in lectures, much earlier.[467]
-----
Footnote 467:
The _Disputationes de Tragœdia_ of Schosser (1559) are earlier than
any of these; but they seem to be pure commentary on Aristotle. I have
not been able to see them.
-----
Sturm’s interests were more in pædagogy than in poetry, and he does not
rank high as a critic: though there is no doubt that he helped to spread
devotion to books. [Sidenote: _Sturm._] It is not in his favour that, in
the teeth of both external and internal evidence, he fights[468] for the
name _De Arte Poetica_, on the special ground that the work of Horace is
an _Ars Perfecta_ (which, put its merits as high as you please, it most
certainly is _not_), and that it has all the six parts of poetry—fable,
character, _dianoia_, _lexis_, _melopœia_, and “sight.” For the rest he
has few general remarks, and is almost wholly commentatorial. His
Rhetorical writing yields little really critical: nor in his _Letters_
have I yet found half so much criticism as is extant in that single
letter of Ascham to him, which has been noticed above.[469]
-----
Footnote 468:
_Commentarii in Art. Poet. Horat._ (Strasburg, 1576). The compiler was
Johann Lobart. Sturm’s Rhetorical works are rather numerous, and range
from the _De amissa dicendi ratione_ (ibid., 1538) onwards.
Footnote 469:
P. 155.
-----
The other two were both men of very wide influence as teachers of
Poetics: and both underwent the process—complimentary but disfiguring,
and specially usual in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—of
having their work watered out, or boiled down, by others. [Sidenote:
_Fabricius._] I do not know, and I have not considered it _tanti_ to
spend much time or labour in the attempt to discover, the exact process
by which the small four books of the first edition of Fabricius’ _De Re
Poetica_[470] became the fat volume of seven, which presents itself
under the same title thirty years later.[471] [Sidenote: _Version A._]
It seemed better to give this time and labour to the reading of the
books themselves. Version A (as we may call that of 1565) is an early
example of the kind of _gradus_ which was particularly popular among the
northern nations, though, as we have seen from the work of Mazzone da
Miglionico,[472] it was by no means unknown in Italy. In his first book
Fabricius discusses quantity, metre, and diction in general, with
plentiful examples. Book II. is an elaborate table of locutions from the
Latin poets, listed under heads as thus:—
Amor tangit. Matrimonium promittere.
” versat. ” ” inire.
” torquet. ” ” fallere.
” dat vulnus. ” ” odisse.
” mordet.
” torret.
Book III. provides the dull-witted versifier with store of _clichés_ of
the same kind, but a little more elaborate; there being, for instance,
dozens of phrases for embracing. And IV. is a sort of common place-book
of short copies of verses on everything in Heaven and Earth.
-----
Footnote 470:
_De Re Poetica_, Lib. iv. (Antwerp, 1565).
Footnote 471:
Ibid., Lib. vii. (Leipsic, 1595).
Footnote 472:
_V. sup._, p. 107.
-----
Version B (which is dated long after Fabricius’ death in 1571) is not
only much enlarged but differently arranged. [Sidenote: _Version B._]
Book I. deals as before with Quantity and Feet; Book II. with the
subject of A, Book III.; and the rest follow the same schemes,—III. B
with tags on Ages, Seasons, Heavenly Bodies, &c.; IV. with epithets
suitable to proper names; V. with ditto to common; VI. with a
_pot-pourri_ of poetical faults and beauties, &c.; while VII. gives a
sort of appendix on prosody and diction generally.
There is no need to say much on the inevitable critical result, the
obvious critical value or valuelessness, of this. There is in A a
reference to Scaliger’s _Poetic_, which had appeared a little before. As
a matter of fact Scaliger and Fabricius between them provided the
average late sixteenth-century man—sometimes even when he was a
professed critic or poet, constantly when he was merely a person of
ordinary culture—with a sort of joint poetical Thesaurus,—Scaliger doing
the historical, critical, and (of its kind) philosophical business for
him, and Fabricius keeping a general marine-store of materials, with
precepts for their use.
The _Institutiones Poeticæ_ of Spanmüller [Pontanus] appeared first in
1594. [Sidenote: _Jac. Pontanus._] Its author is quoted, among other
prophets of criticism, by the Spaniard Juan de La Cueva a dozen years
later, and, independently of its original form, the book acquired, early
in the seventeenth century, a large currency by being arranged
(_concinnata_) in the _Sacrarum Profanarumque Phraseum Thesaurus_ of J.
Buehler,[473] where it serves as theoretic handbook to another Gradus.
Indeed Pontanus’ own work has all the characteristics of a decoction or
abstract of Scaliger himself. And once more the same reflection applies.
It is impossible not to see how powerful and (beyond mere school-work,
in which they were no doubt invaluable[474]) how maleficent must have
been the influence of such works on the critical temper of the
generations influenced by them. La Bruyère’s _Tout est dit_—an ironical
fling in its author’s mouth partly, no doubt, though perhaps not quite
so even there—tended to become matter of breviary. Everything had been
said and done; all the Kinds found out; all the phrases set down; all
the poetry raised from shaft and vein and seam. You simply rearranged it
like a child’s house of wooden bricks, according to patterns provided on
the lid. The “Causes of Corrupted Arts” into which Vives inquired, “The
Lost System of Speaking” which Sturm deplored, were all to be found, and
found sufficiently, in the Ancients.
-----
Footnote 473:
_S. l._ 1633, and continually reprinted.
Footnote 474:
Let me not be supposed for one moment to depreciate Latin
verse-making. I hardly know (speaking from actual experience as a
school-master) a single study which is better for boys; and the
intelligent use of the gradus is a better discipline in observation,
critical selection, and method, than smatterings of a hundred
so-called “sciences.” But there is a time to put away childish things
as well as a time to use them.
-----
The solid qualities of the German race have not commonly distinguished
themselves in pure criticism, and to this day Lessing and Goethe are
rather captains without companies, and with at best a staff of
Schlegels, and suchlike, for lieutenants and ancients. Germans were,
however, to do something better, in this century of erudition, than the
mere preparation of fourth-form handbooks. Daniel Heinsius and Gerard
Voss may be regarded with some reason as the Jachin and the Boaz of the
temple of seventeenth-century Poetics. _The De Tragœdiæ Constitutione_
of the first, which appeared at Leyden in 1611,[475] is the succinctest
and best argued statement of the neo- and to a great extent
pseudo-Aristotelian view of Drama. The new _Institutes of Oratory_,[476]
and the much later _Poetical Institutes_[477] of the second, construct,
with a great deal of learning and a very considerable amount of good
sense, an entire neo-classical Rhetoric and Poetic. To both we must give
some attention.
-----
Footnote 475:
The copy of this which belongs to the University of Edinburgh has the
additional interest of having belonged to, and of having been given
by, Drummond of Hawthornden, and so of having been, not improbably, in
the hands of Ben Jonson.
Footnote 476:
_Commentariorum Rhetoricorum sive Oratoriarum Institutionum Libri
Sex_, 8vo, Dordrecht, 1609. But this was greatly enlarged in the 4to
of Leyden, 1643, which I use.
Footnote 477:
_De Artis Poeticæ Natura ac Constitutione_, 4to, Amsterdam, 1647.
-----
The _De Tragœdiæ Constitutione_ is beyond all doubt a very remarkable
book. [Sidenote: _Heinsius. The_ De Tragœdiæ Constitutione.] It is quite
short; only some 250 very small pages of very large print, so that there
are scarcely more than a hundred words in a page. But Heinsius writes as
one having authority; and we can read but little of him before it
becomes perfectly clear why that authority was accepted, for the rest of
the century at least, with more docility and less cavil than that of
almost any other critic. He takes the _Poetics_—as many, indeed most men
for more than half a century, had taken them—for gospel. But he neither
translates them on the one hand, nor wanders in the wilderness of
scrappy and desultory commentary on the other. Not merely does he
confine himself to that part of the book which concerns his actual
subject, but he renders this part in a fashion which may best be
described as a very rare, and very masterly, kind of lecturing. He
neither slavishly keeps nor prudishly avoids the actual words of his
author; his paraphrases are brief but lucid; he adds to Aristotle what
he thinks necessary[478] in the way of illustrations from the Greek
tragedians, citation from Horace, examples (by no means always
laudatory) from Seneca, and the like; but in such a fashion as never to
overload, or water down, the milk of the Aristotelian word. That he
always gives that milk quite “sincere” we cannot say; he emphasises the
“single revolution of the sun” more than he has any right to do, though
he does not do the same for the still more pestilent and apocryphal
Unity of Place. He may sometimes, or often in the disputable places (as
of “purgation” and so forth), miss the full meaning of Aristotle
according to the view of some judges, or impute a wrong one according to
others. But nobody, let it be repeated, can read him impartially without
seeing that he has soaked himself with the spirit of his author, has
equipped himself pretty thoroughly with the literature of his subject,
and, as a result, is speaking, as we said, with authority. There is no
clearer or more workmanlike exposition of the neo-classic, and not too
_neo_-classic, dramatic ideal than his.
-----
Footnote 478:
He has no room for much historical illustration, but what he says is
generally sound, though it is odd that in mentioning the _Christus
Patiens_ (which, of course, he attributes to Gregory Nazianzen) he
should not have noticed its _cento_ character, and though his remarks
on Muretus and Buchanan smack a little of the rival author of _Herodes
Infanticida_.
-----
Heinsius, like his successor Hédelin in France, and like Hédelin’s
successors Rymer and Dennis in England, was rash enough to forget that
though a critic is (thank Heaven!) not bound to write good poetry, he is
bound not to publish bad. [Sidenote: _Voss._] And he ventured on a
tragedy, _Herodes Infanticida_, and other things which did not meet much
quarter even from those who agreed with him in critical principles. Voss
was wiser, and confined himself to the pure erudition and comment of
which the two books referred to above are far from being the worst
examples. Indeed his unboastful scholarship, his immense reading, and
his untiring industry would seem to have fitted him quite exceptionally
for the duty; and he has actually given us in these two books, or rather
collections of books, the completest _Rhetoric_ and _Poetic_ of modern,
if not of any, times. Only two things more were needed to put these
books in a place even more unique; but Nature refused the one to Voss
personally, and the other was a thing almost unreasonable to require
from a Dutch savant of the seventeenth century. The first was positive
critical genius; and the second was an impartial appreciation of ancient
and modern literature.
[Sidenote: _His_ Rhetoric.]
The _Rhetoric_, which the author put out in its first form in 1606,
revising and enlarging it for at least thirty years, till it forms a
quarto of a thousand closely printed pages, has some seventy more of
minute index, but lacks the Table of Contents, or displayed syllabus of
section headings, for which we have so often had to be thankful in
Italian work. Voss evidently had the practice of the Roman Law
constantly before him, and he thus follows the method of the Latin
treatises in a way which makes it for the most part superfluous for us
to follow _him_, though he has plenty of modern instances and
applications. From the Fourth Book onwards, however, he deals with
Elocution and Style, chiefly of course by the way of Figures, yet,
according to his lights, in the most careful and exhaustive fashion. But
what is at once noteworthy and rather tell-tale is his unqualified
admiration for the Scaligers,—father and son. “That divine man,” “that
man, _ad unguem factus_,” that “emperor of the literary world,” that
“prince of the senate of criticism”; without some phrase of this kind he
seems unable to name them. And in fact the whole book is rather a huge
commentatorial digest of what they and others, from Aristotle downwards,
have said than anything more.
The _Poetical Institutions_ are somewhat more original, and they had
much greater influence. [Sidenote: _His_ Poetics.] The book consists
really of three separate works, a brief _De Arte Poetica_ of less than
ninety pages, of which Grotius, in a commendatory epigram prefixed to
some editions, says—
“non magnus dat tibi cuncta liber;”
of the _Institutiones_ proper in about four hundred; and of a _De
Imitatione_ which is rather shorter than the _Ars_. The first, as reason
and its title both import, is a purely general tractate, which, after
pointing out that Poetry has much in common with Oratory, and that
therefore much which concerns it has been said in the earlier book,
discusses all the old generalities about the origin, nature, moral
character, and so forth, of poetry, with expositions of most of the
_cruces_ and technical catchwords from Ψιλὸς λόγος down to _furor
poeticus_. Voss is here also very generally Scaligerian; he adheres to
the “natural” origin of poetry, love-songs, cradle-songs, &c., as
against the religious and the deliberately “imitative”; gives very wide
scope of subject to the poet, and defends him handsomely against his
enemies and detractors from Plato downwards, but is properly indignant
with naughty poets.[479]
-----
Footnote 479:
Our whole history has shown us the obsession of the _pius poeta_, the
_vir bonus_; but I think the uncompromising submission to it of the
later seventeenth and eighteenth century is as much due to the
influence of Voss as to that of any single mediate person.
-----
The _Institutions_ deal more directly with the question of Poetic Art,
and proceed by a series of section-headings in the form of Propositions,
which are then explained, commented, and defended. The first of the
Three Books deals with the matter common to all kinds of poetry; the
Second with the Drama; the Third with the Epic and the minor Kinds. All
this is old stuff rehandled. There is somewhat more originality in the
_De Imitatione_, which does not exactly correspond to any of the older
books, or parts of books, on that subject. Voss generally supposes the
question, “How is the poet to set about his work?” “How is he to apply
all these rules that we have given him?” and before very long we see
that he is really thinking of the wrong Imitation no less than Vida was.
He devotes himself (no doubt under the happier inspiration of
Quintilian) to discussing _how_ we are to imitate, how to read. But he
very soon slips into the inquiry, practical indeed but a little
undignified, “How are we to escape plagiarism?” to which one is tempted
to reply, “By not imitating in this sense at all.” That is not his
opinion. He thinks, if we may vary a well-known proverb, that the safe
way is to take all your eggs out of one basket. But you are never to
imitate bad words and thoughts; you must plan your work carefully
beforehand, correct carefully, invite criticism, but distinguish between
what is good and what is not. It is all very just in this way; but that
way has led us far from _furor poeticus_. We feel at the end of Voss’s
laborious and erudite book that we are indeed in the century of the
_Gradus_. And here, as in his other volume, we also feel that he has,
for good or for evil, caught up and uttered the gospel of
Neo-Classicism.
So far we have dealt only with Latin authors. The work of Heinsius is
mentioned, both in the text by the author, and by the introducer,
Augustinus Iskra, of the _Buch von der Deutschen Poeterei_[480] of
Martin Opitz. [Sidenote: _Opitz._] This interesting and agreeable little
book, though not exactly (as it has sometimes been incorrectly called)
the first[481] piece of German poetic in the vernacular, is entitled,
with the usual reserves, to the place of origin in _modern_ German
Poetics. It cannot be called prolix, for it only occupies sixty pages in
the recent reprint; but it is equally modest and business-like, and
helps to redeem from the utter absurdity of most of such appellations
(though it still remains absurd) the title of German Dryden which
somebody or other has given to Opitz. Augustine Iskra does not
exaggerate when he says—
“Altius scandes patria canendo
Barbyto, quam si Latium peritæ
Atticæ jungas, Syriæque Peithus
Noveris artem.”
And it is the peculiar glory of the Silesian poet that he not only sang
himself on the lyre of his country, but did his best to enable others to
do so. The spirit of genuine patriotism breathes in his dedication of
the booklet to the magistrates of his native town, Buntzlau; and that of
a modest scholarship (an adjective and substantive which make such an
agreeable couple that it is pity they should live so much apart) in the
opening of the book itself. He has not the least idea, he says, that you
can make a poet by rules and laws; nor has he any intention of doing
over again the work which Aristotle, Horace, Vida, and Scaliger have
done. [Sidenote: _The_ Buch der Deustchen Poeterei.] But he arrays
himself (to speak ecclesiastically) in a “decent tippet” of the old
stuff about Linus and Orpheus, with the Strabo passage all complete, and
a train of citations as to the nobility of the poet’s office and the
like. He comes in his fourth chapter to business. He actually quotes
Walther von der Vogelweide; and I do not think that he can be fairly
charged with that ὕβρις towards the ancient poetry of his country which
too frequently marks others in other countries. But he is evidently set
on the work of Reform—of substituting “smoothness of numbers” for the
“wild sweetness” of the folk-song. Wherein no doubt he was wrong. Not
that way did the counsels of perfection lie for the Higher Dutch; and
they have always had to come back to the woodnotes and the wood-Muses to
find poetic luck. But Opitz was entitled—was in his day almost bound—to
think differently. The interesting thing—much more interesting to us
than the details to which it led him, such as the patronage of the
Alexandrine, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, &c.—is
the particular source to which he turned for inspiration and guidance.
He knew, as has been said, the Italian critics, at least those in Latin,
and he probably knew the Italian poets (he cites Petrarch). But it is to
France, and specially to Ronsard, that he fondly turns. Now it need
hardly be said that in 1624 the influence of the Pléiade in its own
country, though not quite dead, was moribund; the correctness of
Malherbe, on the one hand, was doing its best deliberately to throttle
it, and the Italianated and Spaniolated extravagances which were
fashionable were choking it in another way. This is no doubt not the
only instance of a literary influence which is dead or dying in its own
country showing full vitality in another, but it is one of the most
remarkable. For, beyond question, the French influence—in successive
forms, but still French—reigned in Germany for some hundred and fifty
years; and it was Opitz who first brought it to bear.
-----
Footnote 480:
Printed at Brieg and published at Breslau in 1624; reprinted as the
first number of Niemeyer’s _Neudrucke des xvi^{ten} und xvii^{ten}
Jahrhunderts_, at Halle in 1886. The title of _Prosodia Germanica_,
which the later editions bore, does not seem to be the author’s own.
Footnote 481:
For instance, the very interesting _Grundlicher Bericht des Deutschen
Meistergesangs_ of Adam Puschmann, edited by Herr Jonas for the same
collection as No. 73 (Halle, 1888), is more than half a century older
than Opitz’s book, having appeared at Görlitz in 1571. But Puschmann,
a pupil of Hans Sachs himself, and active in the Masterschool, is only
looking back on that school, the rules and regulations of which he
lays down in the most approved fashion. “The face” of Opitz “meets the
morning’s breath.”
-----
His details, as has been said, are less interesting: yet they do not
lack interest. He begins by stickling for pure High German: and
certainly no one who, for his sins, has been condemned to read much of
late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century German—one of the ugliest
and most mongrel speeches in history, and quite astounding after the
musical sweetness of the best _Mittelhochdeutsch_—will owe him a grudge
for this. He protests against the mingle-mangle of foreign words which
was flooding the language, and even against the famous _-iren_ by which,
to the present day to some extent, Germans give a sort of spurious
naturalisation to such foreigners. He would have limits set (though he
does not forbid it altogether) to that odd custom of declining classical
names in German speech, which is also maintained to some extent, but
which sometimes made a mere Macaronic of sixteenth-century German. On
the other hand, it is curious to find him urging on Germans, who by
right were, and by practice long have been, among the busiest and most
successful of word-compounders, the _sonderliche anmuthigkeit_ of
compounds: and actually quoting the French as, next the Greeks, the
masters of such things.[482] Of course the historical student, even if
citations from Ronsard were not on the same page, would know at once
whence this comes. Still, there still remains the oddity of alleging the
undoubtedly awkward and exotic-sounding _chasse-nue_, _ébranle-rocher_,
and _irrite-mer_ as warrants and patterns for words like
_wolkentreiber_, _felsenstürmer_, and _meeraufreitzer_, which simply
seem to us natural-born, and to require no warranty but their own sound
and appearance.
-----
Footnote 482:
_Buch der Poet._, ed. cit., p. 29.
-----
But Opitz (of whom if any critic speaks disrespectfully, I fear that it
argues him uncritical) wrote not merely on the eve, but in the actual
stormy morning, of the Thirty Years’ War: and Germany had something else
to do for a long time besides listening to him. When matters settled
down again, the advice to attend to the French was rather unfortunately
“carried over” to a state of things in which French influence was still
less the influence for Germany. But this imitation, whether right or
wrong, found no important critical expression, and it would be losing
labour and space to devote either to German criticism in the last half
of the seventeenth century.
It is more remarkable that the real activity and accomplishment of Dutch
during the early part of the century did not lead to some development of
vernacular criticism. But to the best of my information[483] it did not.
The Dutch and the Germans, however, of course still continued to write
in Latin, to edit, to comment, to carry on that division of critical
work which, according to the laying out of our subject, lies, except at
particular seasons and for special ends, beyond the scope of this book.
Moreover, both Holland and some of the German Free-towns, but especially
the former country, became the adopted, as they were almost the natural,
homes of those beginners of judicial criticism, who have been noticed in
part at the conclusion of the French chapter of this Book. Bayle’s
_Nouvelles de la République de Lettres_ were Hollandish by domicile, as
was the _Bibliothèque Universelle_ of Le Clerc, while at Leipsic the
_Acta Eruditorum_ maintained the same principle of critical annals for
nearly a century. Bayle, as has been said before, was too much of a
partisan, and perhaps of a wit, for anything of his to have a judicial,
however much in some senses of the word it might have a critical,
character: but the less mercurial talents of Jean Le Clerc, which have
been characterised under the head of the _Ana_ (v. _sup._, p. 276), were
very well suited to the conduct of a critical record.
-----
Footnote 483:
I must here repeat, with additional emphasis, the caution and apology
which I put in as to Spanish. I do not know anything of _this_
language. I have been content to apply to Low Dutch the precept of a
great High Dutchman, _Entbehren sollst du_. But for our purpose I
believe it will be generally admitted that the renunciation is not
fatal, important Dutch critics having, almost to a man, written in
Latin.
-----
CHAPTER IV.
DRYDEN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
DEAD WATER IN ENGLISH CRITICISM—MILTON—COWLEY—THE PREFATORY MATTER OF
‘GONDIBERT’—THE “HEROIC POEM”—DAVENANT’S ‘EXAMEN’—HOBBES’S
ANSWER—DRYDEN—HIS ADVANTAGES—THE EARLY PREFACES—THE ‘ESSAY OF
DRAMATIC POESY’—ITS SETTING AND OVERTURE—CRITES FOR THE
ANCIENTS—EUGENIUS FOR THE “LAST AGE”—LISIDEIUS FOR THE FRENCH—DRYDEN
FOR ENGLAND AND LIBERTY—‘CODA’ ON RHYMED PLAYS, AND
CONCLUSION—CONSPICUOUS MERITS OF THE PIECE—THE MIDDLE PREFACES—THE
‘ESSAY ON SATIRE’ AND THE ‘DEDICATION OF THE ÆNEIS’—THE PARALLEL OF
POETRY AND PAINTING—THE ‘PREFACE TO THE FABLES’—DRYDEN’S GENERAL
CRITICAL POSITION—HIS SPECIAL CRITICAL METHOD—DRYDEN AND
BOILEAU—RYMER—THE ‘PREFACE TO RAPIN’—THE ‘TRAGEDIES OF THE LAST
AGE’—THE ‘SHORT VIEW OF TRAGEDY’—THE RULE OF TOM THE
SECOND—SPRAT—EDWARD PHILLIPS—HIS ‘THEATRUM POETARUM’—WINSTANLEY’S
‘LIVES’—LANGBAINE’S ‘DRAMATIC POETS’—TEMPLE—BENTLEY—COLLIER’S ‘SHORT
VIEW’—SIR T. P. BLOUNT—PERIODICALS: THE ‘ATHENIAN MERCURY,’ ETC.
The middle third, if not the whole first half, of the seventeenth
century in England was too much occupied with civil and religious broils
to devote attention to such a subject literary criticism. [Sidenote:
_Dead water in English Criticism._] Between the probable date of
Jonson’s _Timber_ (1625-37) and the certain one of Dryden’s _Essay of
Dramatic Poesy_ (1668) we have practically nothing substantive save the
interesting prefatory matter to _Gondibert_ (1650). [Sidenote: _Milton_]
Milton, the greatest man of letters wholly of the time, must indeed
during this time have conceived, or at least matured, that cross-grained
prejudice against rhyme, which is more surprising in him than even in
Campion, and which was itself even more open to Daniel’s strictures. For
not only is Milton himself in his own practice a greater and more
triumphant vindicator of rhyme than Campion, but Daniel’s strongest and
soundest argument, “Why condemn this thing in order to establish that?”
applies far more strongly to blank verse than to Campion’s artificial
metres. Custom and Nature, those greater Cæsars to whom Daniel so
triumphantly appealed, had already settled it, as they were to confirm
it later, that rhymed and unrhymed verse, each obeying the natural
evolution of English prosody, should be the twin horses to draw its car.
But Milton never developed his antipathy to rhyme (which in all
probability arose, mainly if not merely, from the fact that nearly all
the most exquisite rhymers of his time, except himself, were Cavaliers)
in any critical fashion, contenting himself with occasional flings and
_obiter dicta_.[484]
-----
Footnote 484:
The chief critical _loci_ in Milton are all among the best known
passages of his work. They are the peremptory anathema on rhyme in the
prose note added to _Paradise Lost_, in what Professor Masson has
settled to be the “Fifth Form of the First Edition”; the short Defence
of Tragedy, wholly on Italian principles but adapted to Puritan
understandings, prefixed to _Samson Agonistes_; the first description
of his own studies in _The Reason of Church Government_; the more
elaborate return upon that subject—a singular mixture of exquisite
phrasing and literary appreciation with insolent abuse—in the _Apology
for Smectymnuus_ (which is not, as some have thought, the same thing
as _The_ [Platonic] _Apology_) and divers clauses in the _Tractate of
Education_, especially the reference to “Castelvetro, Tasso, and
Mazzoni,” whom he credits with “sublime art,” and puts on a level with
Aristotle and Horace. We might add a few casual girds, such as that at
the supposed cacophony of Hall’s “Teach each” in the _Apology for
Smectymnuus_, which has been compared to Malherbe’s vellications of
Desportes (_cf. sup._, p. 245). A complete critical treatise from him
(if only he could have been prevailed upon to write in a good temper)
would have been of supreme interest: it is not so certain that it
would have been of supreme value, even if he had been in that temper.
-----
Another poet of the time, Cowley, ought to have given us criticism of
real importance. [Sidenote: _Cowley._] He had the paramount, if not
exclusive, literary interests which are necessary to a great critic; he
had the knowledge; and he was perhaps the first man in England to
possess the best kind of critical style—lighter than Daniel’s, and less
pregnant, involved, and scholastic than Jonson’s—the style of well-bred
conversational argument.[485] But he was a little bitten with the
scientific as opposed to the literary mania, and, in his own person, he
was perhaps too much of a Janus as regards literary tastes to be able to
give—or indeed to take—a clear and single view. There were, as in Lope,
two poets in Cowley, and each of these was wont to get in the way of the
other. The one was a “metaphysical” of the high flight, who at least
would, if he could, have been as intensely fantastic as Donne, and as
gracefully fantastic as Suckling. The other was a classical, “sensible,”
couplet-poet, who was working out Ben Jonson’s theories with even less
admixture of Romanticism than that which tinged Ben Jonson’s practice.
The entanglement of these was sufficiently detrimental to his poetry;
but it would have been absolutely fatal to his criticism, which must
either have perpetually contradicted itself or else have wandered in a
maze, perplexing as perplexed.
-----
Footnote 485:
He has practically given us nothing but a slight apology for sacred
verse (common in his time and natural from the author of the
_Davideis_); with a slighter seasoning of the also familiar defence of
poetry from being mere “lying,” in the Preface to the folio edition of
his Poems; some still slighter remarks on Comedy in that to _Cutter of
Coleman Street_; and hardly more than a glance at literary education
in his _Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy_.
In this last we may feel a sort of gust of the same spirit which
appears in his disciple Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society_ (_v.
infra_).
-----
It is with Davenant’s Preface to _Gondibert_, in the form of a Letter to
Hobbes, and with Hobbes’s answer to it,[486] that England strikes once
more into the main path of European critical development. [Sidenote:
_The Prefatory matter of_ Gondibert.] And it is of capital importance
that, both the writers being exiled royalists, these documents were
written at Paris in the year 1650. There was much interest there in
English affairs, while, as we have seen, the habit of literary
discussion had, for more than a generation, become ingrained in
Frenchmen. When Davenant set himself to write _Gondibert_, he was doing
exactly what Chapelain and Desmarets and the rest were doing; and when
he and his greater friend exchanged their epistles, they were doing
exactly what all the French literary world had been doing, not merely,
as is commonly thought, from the time of the _Cid_ dispute, but from one
much earlier. Taking all things together, it was natural that the
subject should be the _Heroic Poem_, which had been a favourite of
Italian and French critics for some seventy years and more, but had been
little touched in England, though the conclusion of Ben’s _Discoveries_
shapes a course for it. Hints have been given before in this History
that in the opinion of its writer the “Heroic Poem” had much in common
with that entity which was long without a literary name, but which an
admirable humourist has now enabled us to describe scientifically as a
Boojum[487]—that is to say, it was not only something undiscoverable,
but something which had a malign and, indeed, destructive influence on
those who thought they had discovered it.
-----
Footnote 486:
Both these will be found in Chalmers’ _Poets_, vi. 349-372. Hobbes’s
_Answer_ is also in Molesworth’s ed. of the _Works_, iv. 443-458. It
is there followed by a short literary letter to Edward Howard of the
_British Princes_, the most egregious of Dryden’s egregious leash of
brothers-in-law. To these may be added the brief literary passage in
the chapter of “Intellectual Virtues” in the First Part of _Leviathan_
(ibid., iii. 58) and the “Brief” of the _Rhetoric_ (referred to
_supra_, vol. i. p. 40); ibid., vi. 416-510. I have a copy of the
first edition of this, anonymous and undated, but assigned to 1655-57
by bibliographers. It does not contain the shorter _Art of Rhetoric_,
which follows in Molesworth.
Footnote 487:
This Boojum, I fear, will disturb some of my friends. But I put him
under the protection of the Powder of Pimperlimpimp, and of the
Equinoctials of Queubus.
-----
The “Heroic Poem” was to be neither pure Romance nor pure Epic, but a
sort of medley between the two. [Sidenote: _The “Heroic Poem.”_] Or,
rather, it was to be a thing of shreds and patches, strictly epic (or at
least Virgilian-epical) in theory and rules, but borrowing from Romance
whatever it could, as our Elizabethans would say, “convey cleanly”
enough in the way of additional attractions. The shreds and patches,
too, were not purely poetical: they were not taken simply from Homer and
Virgil, nor even from Horace, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, and the rest down
to that Musæus whom Scaliger thought so superior to the Chian. A great
deal of ancient critical dictum was brought in, and as Aristotle and
Horace had said less about Epic than about Drama, they were to be
supplemented from others, especially by that treacherous and somewhat
obscure passage of Petronius which has been commented on in its place.
In fact the whole of this Heroic-Poem matter is a sort of satire on
criticism by Kinds, in its attempt—and failure—to discover a kind. If
the founders of the novel (who, indeed, in some notable cases were by no
means free from the obsession) had persisted in constructing it on the
lines of the Heroic Poem, it would indeed have been all up with Fiction.
To read Tasso (who, as we might expect, is not the least reasonable) and
others, from Ronsard and Du Bellay down to Desmarets and Le Bossu (both
of whom, let it be remembered, wrote some time after Davenant)—to find
even Dryden a Martha of “machinery,” and comforting himself with a
bright new idea of getting the _deorum ministeria_ out of the limited
intelligences of angels, so that you might not know at once which side
was going to win, as you do in the ordinary Christian Epic[488]—is
curious. Nay, it is more—humorous, with that touch of “the pity of it”
which humour nearly always has.
The ingenious knight, in explaining his performance and its principles
to his friend the philosopher, takes a very high tone. Homer, Virgil,
Lucan, and Statius are passed successively in review, and receive each
his appropriate compliment, put with dignified reserves, especially in
the two latter cases. [Sidenote: _Davenant’s_ Examen.] Only two moderns
are admitted—Tasso of the Italians—“for I will yield to their opinion
who permit not Ariosto—no, not Du Bartas—in this eminent rank of the
heroicks, rather than to make way by their admission for Dante, Marino,
and others”[489]—and Spenser of our own men. But Tasso is roundly taken
to task for his fairy-tale element, Spenser for his allegory and his
archaism. And the faults of all from Homer downwards are charged against
“the natural humour of imitation.”[490]
-----
Footnote 488:
See the _Discourse on Satire_—Scott (in the edition revised by the
present writer) (London, 1882-93), xiii. 24 _sq._, or Ker (_ed. cit.
post_), ii. 33 _sq._
Footnote 489:
I do not smile so much as some may over “no, not Du Bartas.” But
though oases are far from rare in what may seem, to those who know it
not, this thirsty land of criticism, I hardly know a more delightful
“diamond of the desert” than the refusal to admit somebody else lest
you should have to admit Dante, and the subsequent “Dante, Marino,
_and others_.” When the eye is weary of italic print, or of a too
closely packed quarto page, or of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac,
in any type or _format_, it is pleasant half to shut it, and let the
dream of these “others” wave before one. I see that they must have
written in Italian; but other common measure, other link to bind them
both to the _Commedia_ and to the _Adone_, is yet to seek for me.
Footnote 490:
Lest the last note should lead any one to think that I wish to make
inept and ignoble game of Davenant, let me observe that he can write
admirable things, worthy a son, in double sense, of Oxford. Could
anything be happier than this of Spenser: “His _noble and most artful
hands_”? The mere selection of the epithets is good, the combination
of them famously so.
-----
After a by no means despicable, but somewhat rhapsodical, digression on
this—it is to be observed that Davenant uses “Imitation” in the frank
modern sense—and an apology for it as “the dangerous fit of a hot
writer,” he gives reasons, partly no doubt drawn from Italian and French
sources, why he has made his subject (1) Christian, (2) antique but not
historical, (3) foreign, (4) courtly and martial, (5) displaying the
distempers of love and ambition. Then he expounds in turn his
arrangement of five books (to correspond to acts), with cantos to answer
to scenes,[491] his arguments, his quatrain-stanza. He asserts that “the
substance is wit,” and discusses that matter at some length, and with a
noteworthy hit at conceits, which reminds us that Davenant was _à
cheval_ between the First and the Second Caroline period. He indulges in
not unpardonable loquacity about his poetic aspirations, with a fresh
glance at the great poets of old, and brings in thereby, with some
ingenuity but at too great length as a finale, the old prefatory matter
of the _Arts Poetic_ about the importance and dignity of poetry in the
world, concluding exactly where most begin, with Plato and that “divine
anger” of his which some have turned to the “unjust scandal of Poesie.”
And so a pleasant echo of Sir Philip blends agreeably with the more
prosaic tone, and time, and temper of Sir William.
-----
Footnote 491:
This attempt to get Epic as close as possible to Drama—to work all the
kinds of Imitation back into one arch-kind—appears more or less
fitfully in the whole Neo-Classic school. And we shall never quite
understand the much discussed “Heroic Play,” till we take it in
conjunction with the “Heroic Poem.”
-----
Hobbes, as we should expect, is much briefer; and those bronze sentences
of his (though he had not at this time quite brought them to their full
ring and perfect circumscription) give no uncertain sound. [Sidenote:
_Hobbes’s Answer._] He is not, he says, a poet (which is true), and when
he assigns to _Gondibert_ “various experience, ready memory, clear
judgment, swift and well-governed fancy,” it is obvious enough that all
these might be there and yet poetry be absent. He divides the kinds of
poetry “swiftly” enough, and ranges himself with his customary decision
against those who “take for poesy whatsoever is writ in verse,” cutting
out not merely didactic poetry, but sonnets, epigrams, and eclogues, and
laying it down that “the subject of a poem is the manners of men.” “They
that give entrance to fictions writ in prose err not so much,” but they
err. And accordingly he begins the discussion of verse. He does not
quarrel with Davenant, as Vida would have done, for deliberately
eschewing Invocation; and rapidly comments on the plot, characters,
description, &c., of the poem. On the head of diction he would not be
Hobbes if he could or did spare a sneer at words of no sense, words
“contunded by the schools,” and so forth. And since he _is_ Hobbes,
there is piquancy in finding him at one with Walton in the objection to
“strong lines.” He is rather striking on a subject which has been much
dwelt on of late, the blunting of poetic phrase by use. And when he says
that he “never yet saw poem that had so much shape of art, health of
morality, and vigour of beauty and expression” as _Gondibert_—when, in
the odd timorousness he had caught from Bacon, he adds, that it is only
the perishableness of the modern tongues which will prevent it from
lasting as long as the _Æneid_ or the _Iliad_—let us remember that,
though criticism is one thing and compliment another, they sometimes
live in a rather illicit _contubernium_. At any rate, there _is_
criticism, and real criticism, in the two pieces; and they are about the
first substantial documents of it in English of which as much can be
said for many years.[492]
-----
Footnote 492:
There is, of course, critical matter in Howell’s _Letters_, and in a
score or scores of other places; but it is of the kind that we must
_now_ neglect, or select from with the most jealous hand.
-----
Thus, although two of these four were of the greatest of our writers,
the third an interesting failure of greatness, and the fourth far from
contemptible, they were in all cases prevented, by this or that
disqualification, from doing much in criticism.
Dryden, on the contrary, started with every advantage, except those of a
body of English criticism behind him, and of a thorough knowledge of the
whole of English literature. [Sidenote: _Dryden._] He was a poet nearly,
if not quite, of the first class: and though his poetry had a strong
Romantic spirit in virtue of its perennial quality, it took the form and
pressure of the time so thoroughly and so kindly that there was no
internal conflict. Further, he had what by no means all poets of the
first class have had, a strong, clear, common-sense judgment, and a very
remarkable faculty of arguing the point. And, finally, if he had few
predecessors in English, and perhaps did not know much of those few
except of Jonson, he was fairly, if not exactly as a scholar, acquainted
with the ancients, and he had profited, and was to profit, by the best
doctrine of the moderns.
[Sidenote: _His advantages._]
Moreover, from a certain not unimportant point of view, he occupies a
position which is only shared in the history of criticism by Dante and
(in some estimations, though not in all) by Goethe,—the position of the
greatest man of letters in his own country, if not also in Europe, who
is at the same time the greatest critic, and who is favoured by Fortune
with a concentration of advantages as to time and circumstance. His
critical excellence has indeed never been wholly overlooked, and, except
by the unjuster partisanship of the early Romantic movement in England,
generally admitted with cheerfulness.[493] The want, however, of that
synoptic study of the subject, which it is the humble purpose of this
book to facilitate, has too often prevented his full pre-eminence from
being recognised. It may even be said that it is in criticism that
Dryden best shows that original faculty which has often been denied him
elsewhere. He borrows, indeed, as freely as everywhere: he copies, with
a half ludicrous deference, the stock opinions of the critics and the
criticasters in vogue; he gives us pages on pages of their pedantic
trivialities instead of his own shrewd and racy judgments. But, despite
of all this, there is in him (and with good luck we may perhaps not fail
to disengage it) a vein and style in “judging of Authours” which goes
straight back to Longinus, if it is not even independent of that great
ancestry.[494]
-----
Footnote 493:
Of the great critical men of letters of 1800-1850 only Leigh Hunt—the
least of them—was just to Dryden; even Hazlitt is inadequate on him.
Among our _preceptistas_ of the same or a little later date, Keble
(_Præl._ v.) mildly perstringes Dryden’s inconsistency (“_male sibi
constat D._”), but rather as poet than as critic. Garbett, his
successor and opponent, a great admirer of Dryden’s style, and one who
expresses just regret at the want of common knowledge of it, is very
severe (_Præl._ x.) on his want of philosophical profundity and
sincerity. But the reverend Professor had found nearly as much fault
on this score with Longinus.
Footnote 494:
Dryden made no mistake about Longinus. He calls him, in the _Apology_
prefixed to _The State of Innocence_, “the greatest critic among the
Greeks after Aristotle,” cites him often, and parades and uses a long
passage of the Περὶ Ὕψους in the Preface to _Troilus and Cressida_.
The references are conveniently collected in Mr Ker’s index (_v.
inf._)
-----
This vein is perceptible[495] even in the slight critical essays which
precede the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, though of course it is much more
evident in the _Essay_ itself. [Sidenote: _The Early Prefaces._] In the
preface to the _Rival Ladies_ (written, not indeed when Dryden was a
very young man, but when, except for _Juvenilia_, he had produced
extremely little) we find his critical path clearly traced, and still
more in the three years later Preface to _Annus Mirabilis_. The
principles of this path-making are as follows: Dryden takes—without
perhaps a very laborious study of them, but, as has been said already,
with an almost touching docility in appearance—the current theories and
verdicts of the French, Italian (and Spanish?) critics whom we should by
this time have sufficiently surveyed. He does not—he never did to the
date of the glorious Preface to the _Fables_ itself—dispute the general
doctrines of the sages from Aristotle downwards. But (and this is where
the Longinian resemblance comes in) he never can help considering the
individual works of literature almost without regard to these
principles, and simply on the broad, the sound, the unshakable ground of
the impression they make on him. Secondly (and this is where the
resemblance to Dante comes in), he is perfectly well aware that
questions of diction, metre, and the like are not mere catchpenny or
claptrap afterthoughts, as ancient criticism was too apt to think them,
but at the root of the pleasure which literature gives. Thirdly (and
this is where, though Aristotle did not deny the fact, the whole
criticism of antiquity, except that of Longinus, and most of that of
modern times, swerves timorously from the truth), he knows that this
delight, this transport, counts first as a criterion. Literature in
general, poetry in particular, should, of course, instruct: but it
_must_ delight.[496]
-----
Footnote 495:
Dryden’s critical work, which until recently was accessible with ease
only in Scott’s elaborate edition of his works, or in Malone’s less
bulky, but still bulky and not excessively common, edition of the
Prose, has recently been given, with quite admirable editorial matter,
by Professor Ker (2 vols., Oxford, 1900). I wish he had included one
or two more things, especially the _Heads of an answer to Rymer_; but
it must be admitted that the authenticity of these, though I think not
doubtful, is not absolutely certain, and the correct text still less
so. See note on Rymer _infra_, and my edition of Scott, xv. 378 _sq._,
for text and history.
Footnote 496:
_Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy._ Scott, _ed. cit._, xi. 295:
Ker, i. 113.
-----
The “blundering, half-witted people,” as in one of his rare bursts of
not absolutely cool contempt[497] he calls his own critics, who charged
him with plagiarising from foreign authors, entirely missed these
differences, which distinguish him from every foreign critic of his day,
and of most days for long afterwards. He may quote—partly out of that
genuine humility and generosity combined which make his literary
character so agreeable; partly from an innocent parade of learning. But
he never pays for what he borrows the slavish rent, or royalty, of
surrendering his actual and private judgment.
-----
Footnote 497:
Preface to _Miscellanies_, ii.; Scott, _ed. cit._, xii. 295; Ker, i.
263. I wish that Dryden were alive for many reasons: not least because
he would certainly pay the debt that he owes to my friend Mr Ker
_magnificentissime_. No one has vindicated him better against the
half-witted blunderers. But I am not quite so much inclined as even Mr
Ker is to father his critical _style_ on Chapelain and La Mesnardière,
Sarrasin and Scudéry, or on Corneille himself. It is not till
Saint-Evremond, perhaps even till Fénelon, that I can find in French
the indescribable _omne tulit punctum_ as in him. And both, are his
inferiors.
-----
In the Preface to the _Rival Ladies_ the poet-critic takes (as indeed he
afterwards himself fully acknowledged) a wrong line—the defence of what
he calls “verse” (that is to say, rhymed heroic couplets, not blank
verse) for play-writing. This was his mistress of the time; he rejoiced
in her caresses, he wore her colours, he fought for her beauty—the
enjoyment authorising the argument. But as he has nothing to say that
has not been better said in the _Essay_, we may postpone the
consideration of this. There is one of the slips of fact which can be
readily excused to (and by) all but bad critics,—and which bad critics
are chiefly bound to avoid, because accuracy of fact is their only title
to existence—in his mention of “Queen” _Gorboduc_ and his addition that
the dialogue in that play is rhymed; there is an interesting sigh for an
Academy (Dryden, let it be remembered, was one of the earliest members
of the Royal Society); and there is the well-known and very amiable,
though rather dangerous, delusion that the excellence and dignity of
rhyme were never known till Mr Waller taught it, and that John Denham’s
_Cooper’s Hill_ not only is, but ever will be, the exact standard of
good writing. But he knows Sidney and he knows Scaliger, and he knows
already that Shakespeare “had a larger soul of poesy than any of our
nation.” And a man who knows these three things in 1664 will go far.
The Preface to _Annus Mirabilis_[498] is again submissive in form,
independent in spirit. Dryden obediently accepts the prescription for
epic or “Heroic” poetry, and though he makes another slip of fact (or at
least of term) by saying that Chapman’s _Homer_ is written in
“Alexandrines or verses of six feet” instead of (as far as the _Iliad_
is concerned) in the fourteener, he is beautifully scholastic on the
differences between Virgil and Ovid, the Heroic and the Burlesque, “Wit
Writing” and “Wit Written.” But he does it with unconquerable
originality, the utterance of his own impression, his own judgment,
breaking through all this school-stuff at every moment; and also with a
valuable (though still inadequate) account of “the Poet’s
imagination.”[499]
-----
Footnote 498:
I have not thought it necessary to encumber the page with references
in the case of the shorter Essays, where any one can discover the
passages cited, whether he uses Scott, Malone, the originals, or Mr
Ker’s special collection, with no more labour than is good for him and
deserved by them. In the case of the longer pieces the references will
be given at least sufficiently often to make the locating of the
others easy, without turning the lower part of the page into a kind of
arithmetical table.
Footnote 499:
As including Invention, Fancy, and Elocution, but in itself merely
considered as synonymous with “Wit.” It was probably from this that
Addison (see below) started that Imagination theory of his which has
been so much overrated.
-----
Yet another point of interest is the avowed intention (carried out in
the poem, to the disgust or at least distaste of Dr Johnson) of using
technical terms. This, one of the neoclassic devices for attaining
propriety, was, as we have seen, excogitated in Italy, and warmly
championed by the Pléiade; but it had been by this time mostly
abandoned, as it was later by Dryden himself.
[Sidenote: _The_ Essay of Dramatic Poesy.]
The _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ is much better known than it was only a
couple of decades ago,[500] and it is perhaps superfluous to say that it
is a dialogue in form, and that the interlocutors are Dryden himself
(Neander), his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard (Crites), Sir Charles
Sedley (Lisideius), and Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius). The two last, though
at the time the wildest of scapegraces, were men of distinct poetic gift
and varied literary faculty. And Howard, though no great poet, and
possessing something of the prig, the coxcomb, and the pedant in his
composition, was a man of some ability, of real learning of a kind, and
of very distinct devotion to literature.
-----
Footnote 500:
When the present writer began his revision of Scott’s _Dryden_ in the
year 1881 there were no separate editions of the _Essay_ since the
originals. There are now, of annotated issues of it, either by itself
or with more or less of its author’s related work, no less than five
known to me,—those of Mr Thomas Arnold (Oxford, 1886), Mr Strunk (New
York, 1898), Mr Low (London, n. d.), Mr Nichol Smith (Glasgow, 1900),
and Professor Ker’s. The study of English literature in schools and
colleges has been much abused, very foolishly talked about by some of
its advocates, and no doubt not always wisely directed. But it is at
least something to be said for it that it has made such a masterpiece
as this known to probably a hundred persons for every one who knew it
twenty years ago.
-----
The _Essay_ was first published in 1668, but had been written, according
to Dryden’s statement in his Preface to Lord Buckhurst, “in the country”
(at his father-in-law Lord Berkshire’s seat of Charlton near
Malmesbury), when the author was driven out of London by the Great
Plague three years before. [Sidenote: _Its setting and overture._] He
had, he says, altered some of his opinions; but it did not much matter
in an Essay “where all I have said is problematical.” The “Address to
the Reader” promises a second part dealing with Epic and Lyric, which
never appeared, and of which only the Epic part is represented by later
works. This is a pity, for while we have treatises on Drama and Epic _ad
nauseam_, their elder and lovelier sister has been, “poor girl!
neglected.” It begins with a picturesque setting, which represents the
four interlocutors as having taken boat and shot the bridge, attracted
by the reverberation of the great battle with the Dutch in the early
part of June 1665, when Admiral Opdam’s flag-ship was blown up. Eugenius
augurs victory from the gradual dying away of the noise; and Crites
observes (in character) that he should like this victory better if he
did not know how many bad verses he should have to read on it. Lisideius
adds that he knows some poets who have got _epinikia_ and funeral
elegies all ready for either event, and the dialogue proceeds for some
time in the same way of literary banter, especial set being made at two
poets (one of whom is certainly Wild, while the other _may_ be Flecknoe)
with incidental sneers at Wither(s) and Cleveland. At last Crites brings
it to something like the quarrel of Ancient _v._ Modern. Eugenius picks
up the glove, but consents, at Crites’ suggestion, to limit the
discussion to dramatic poetry,[501] and so the “dependence” is settled.
-----
Footnote 501:
One of the very earliest evidences of the interest in dramatic
criticism felt in England, immediately after the Restoration, must be
Pepys’ note that on September 1, 1660, when he was dining at the
Bullhead, there “rose ... a dispute between Mr Moore and Dr Clerke—the
former affirming that it was essential to a tragedy to have the
argument of it true, which the Doctor denied.” The question, on the
very English terms of another dinner and a bet, was to be settled by
Pepys himself three days later. He does not tell us whether he read up
for it; but on the 4th he decided for the Doctor (_Diary_, ed.
Wheatley, i. 233).
-----
Eugenius thinks that though modern plays are better than Greek or Roman,
yet those of “the last age” (1600-1660) are better than “ours.”
[Sidenote: _Crites for the Ancients._] As for epic and lyric, the last
age must yield. And all the quartette agree that “the sweetness of
English verse was never understanded or practised” by our fathers, and
that some writers yet living first taught us to mould our thoughts into
easy and significant words, to retrench the superfluities of expression,
and to make our rhyme so properly a part of the verse that it should
never mislead the sense. Lisideius having (with the consent of the
company, subject to a slight scholastic objection from Crites) defined
or described a play as “A just and lively image of human nature,
representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to
which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind,” Crites
takes up his brief for the ancients. His speech is a set one, extolling
the classical conception of drama, and especially the modern-classical
Unities,
but rather a panegyric than an argument, and particularly weak in
this—that it takes no critical account of the modern drama at all.
Except Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” not a single
modern dramatic writer of any country is so much as named.
Eugenius, though his discourse is livelier, falls into something the
same fault, or at least the counterpart of it. [Sidenote: _Eugenius for
the “last age.”_] He rallies the ancients unmercifully, and has very
good game of the stock plots and characters in Terence; but his
commendation of the moderns has a disappointing generality, and he lays
himself rather open to the good-humoured but forcible interruption of
Crites that he and Eugenius are never likely to come to an agreement,
because the one regards change as in itself an improvement, and the
other does not.
Still, Lisideius gives a new turn to the discussion by asking Eugenius
why he puts English plays above those of other nations, and whether we
ought not to submit our stage to the exactness of our next neighbours.
[Sidenote: _Lisideius for the French._] Eugenius in reply commits the
further and especial defence of the English to Neander, and Lisideius
begins his part as eulogist of the French. For some forty years, he
says, we have not had leisure to be good poets. The French have: and, by
Richelieu’s patronage and Corneille’s example, have raised their theatre
till it now surpasses ours, and the rest of Europe. Who have kept the
Unities so well? Who have avoided “that absurd thing,” the English
tragi-comedy, so completely? In tragedy they take well-known stories,
and only manageable parts of them, while Shakespeare crams the business
of thirty or forty years into two hours and a half. They make only one
person prominent, they do as much as possible behind the scenes, keep
dying off the stage altogether, and never end their plays with a
conversion, or simple change of will. Nobody, with them, appears on the
stage, unless he has some business there: and as for the beauty of their
rhyme, why, that is “already partly received by us,” and it will, no
doubt, when we write better plays, “exceedingly beautify them.”
To him, Neander—that is to say—Dryden himself.
There is a reminder (though the matter is quite different) of Daniel,
and a comforting augury for English criticism, in the swift directness
with which “the new critic” (as a Webbe of his own day might have called
him) strikes at the heart of the question. [Sidenote: _Dryden for
England and Liberty._] The French are more regular, he grants, and our
irregularities are, in some cases, justly taxed. But, nevertheless, he
is of opinion that neither our faults nor their virtues are sufficient
to place them above us. For Lisideius himself has defined a play as a
lively imitation _of nature_. And these beauties of the French stage are
beauties, not natural, but thoroughly artificial. Before Molière, where
are the humours of French comedy, save, perhaps, in _Le Menteur_ and a
few others? Elsewhere they work in comedy only by the old way of
quarrels and reconciliations, or by the conventions of Spanish
intrigue-drama. “On which lines there is not above one play to be writ:
they are too much alike to please often.”
Then, as to tragi-comedy. What is the harm of this? why should Lisideius
“imagine the soul of man more heavy than his senses?” The eye can pass,
and pass with relief, from an unpleasant to a pleasant object, in far
less time than is required on the stage. He must have stronger arguments
before he concludes that compassion and mirth destroy each other: and in
the meantime he will hold that tragi-comedy is a more pleasant way than
was known to the ancients, or any moderns who have eschewed it.
Next, and closely connected, as to single-plot _v._ plot + underplot.
Why is the former to be preferred to the latter? Because it gives a
greater advantage to the expression of passion? Dryden can only say that
he thinks “their” verse the “coldest” he has ever read, and he supports
this by a close and pleasant beating-up-the-quarters of _Cinna_ and
_Pompey_, “not so properly to be called plays as long discourses on
reason of state”; of _Polyeucte_, “as solemn as the long stops on an
organ,” of their mighty tirades and _récits_. “Whereas in tragedy it is
unnatural for any one either to speak or listen long, and in comedy
quick repartee is the chiefest grace.” Yet again “they” are praised for
making only one person considerable. Why? If variety is not mere
confusion, is it not always pleasing?[502]
The question of narrative against represented action is treated with
less boldness, and, therefore, with less success: but he comes to the
sound, if not very improving, conclusion that, if we show too much
action, the French show too little. He has an interesting rebuke,
however, here to Ben Jonson, for reprehending “the incomparable
Shakespeare.”[503] And he rises again, and makes a capital point, by
citing Corneille’s own confession of the cramping effect of the Unities,
enlarging whereon himself, he has an admirable exposure of the utterly
unnatural conditions which observance of these Unities brings about.
Then, after some remarks on prosody and the earlier use of rhyme in
English—remarks partly true, partly vitiated by imperfect knowledge—he
undertakes to produce plays as regular as theirs and with more variety,
instancing _The Silent Woman_. Of this he is proceeding to a regular
_examen_ when Eugenius requests a character of the author: and Neander,
after a little mannerly excuse, not only complies with this request, but
prefixes similar characters of Shakespeare and Fletcher.
-----
Footnote 502:
Here, to glance at the matter of Dryden and the Spaniards (_v. sup._,
p. 332, and _inf._, on Spence), is a _possible_ reminiscence of Lope’s
_Arte Nuevo_, 178-180—
_Que aquesta variedad deleyta mucho:
Buen exemplo nos da naturaleza,
Que por tal variedad tiene belleza._
Footnote 503:
Scott, xv. 337; Ker, i. 75.
-----
The first of these is universally, the second and third should be pretty
well known. [Sidenote: Coda _on rhymed plays, and conclusion_.] It must
be sufficient to say here that nothing like even the worst of the three
(that of Beaumont and Fletcher, which wants the adequacy and close grip
of the other two) had previously been seen in English, and not many
things in any other language, while to this day, with all faults, the
character of Shakespeare is one of the _apices_ of universal criticism.
The characters are followed by the _examen_—also admirable and quite new
in English, though with more pattern elsewhere. And he ends with a short
peroration, the keynote of which is, “I ask no favour from the French.”
Lisideius is going to reply; but Crites interrupting, diverts the
discussion to a particular point already glanced at—the use of rhyme in
plays. He (sensibly enough) declines to investigate very carefully
whether this was a revival of the old English custom or an imitation of
the French, but attacks its legitimacy with the usual, obvious, and
fairly sound argument that since no man without premeditation speaks in
rhyme, he ought not to do it on the stage, anticipating the retort,
“neither does he speak blank verse” by urging that this at any rate is
“nearest nature” or less _un_natural. Neander, taking up the glove for
“his _new_-loved mistress,” practically admits the weakness of his case
by first advancing the very argument as to blank verse which Crites has
disallowed by anticipation. The rest of his answer is a mixture of true
and not so true, of imperfect knowledge and ingenious argument,
constantly open to reply, but always interesting as a specimen of
critical advocacy. He represents himself as pursuing the discourse so
eagerly that Eugenius had to remind him that “the boat stood still,” and
that they had come to their destination at Somerset stairs. And with a
pleasant final patch of description the dialogue closes.
In reading it we should keep in mind what he says a quarter of a century
later to the same correspondent,[504] that he was at this time seeking
his way “in a vast ocean” of criticism without other help than the
pole-star of the ancients and the rules of the French stage amongst the
moderns. [Sidenote: _Conspicuous merits of the piece._] He has given the
reading of the pole-star to Crites, and has pointed out the dangers of
mere dead-reckoning by it. He has put into the mouth of Sedley (with a
touch of malice which that ingenious good-for-nothing must have noticed,
and which it is to his credit that he did not resent) a similar reading
of the bearings of the different French lights, and has shown how little
they assisted the English mariner—indeed, how some of them actually led
to rocks and quicksands, instead of warning off from them. In the mouth
of Buckhurst, and in his own, he has put the patriotic apology,
inclining it in the former case towards laudation of the past, and in
the latter to defence of the present: and he has allowed divers
excursions from the immediate subject—especially that on “verse,” or
rhymed heroics, as a dramatic medium. One of the chief of the many
merits of the piece is precisely this, that at the time Dryden had read
less than at a later, and was less tempted to add quotations or
comments. He was following chiefly a very safe guide—Corneille—and he
bettered his guide’s instruction. It may be said boldly that, up to the
date, nothing in the way of set appreciation—no, not in Longinus
himself—had appeared equal to the three characters of Shakespeare,
Jonson, and Fletcher; while almost greater still is the constant
application of the “leaden rule,” the taking of book, author, kind, _as
it is_, and judging it accordingly, instead of attempting to force
everything into agreement or disagreement with a prearranged schedule of
rules.
-----
Footnote 504:
In the _Discourse on Satire_. Scott, xiii. 3; Ker, ii. 17.
-----
After the publication of the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, Dryden (English
literature can hardly give too many thanks for it) had more than thirty
well-filled years of life allowed him; and to the very last, and at the
very last, criticism had its full share of his labours. [Sidenote: _The
Middle Prefaces._] The “Prefaces of Dryden” never fail to give valuable
matter; and we shall have to notice most, if not all of them, though the
notices may be of varying length. The immediate successor and, in fact,
appendix to the _Essay_, the _Defence_ thereof, was only printed in one
edition, the second, of _The Indian Emperor_, and is very far from being
of the best. Sir Robert Howard was, as has been said, a man conceited
and testy, as Shadwell’s nickname for him in _The Sullen Lovers_, Sir
Positive Atall, hints. He seems to have been nettled by his part of
Crites, and replied with some heat in a Preface to his own play, _The
Duke of Lerma_. Dryden, who never quite learned the wisdom of Bacon’s
_dictum_, “Qui replicat multiplicat,” and who at this time had not yet
learnt the easy disdain of his later manner, riposted (1668) with more
sense but with not much more temper. The piece (which was practically
withdrawn later) contained, besides not too liberal asperities on Sir
Robert’s own work, a further “defence of Rhyme,” not like Daniel’s,
where it should be, but where it should not. It is redeemed by an
occasional admission, in Dryden’s usual and invaluable manner, that he
is quite aware of the other side, and by an unhesitating assertion of
the primacy of Delight among the Objects of Poetry.
In none of the next three or four of the pieces do we find him quite at
his best. For some few years, indeed, the popularity of his splendid, if
sometimes a little fustianish, heroics, the profits of his connection
with the theatre (which, added to other sources of revenue, made him
almost a rich man in his way), and his association with the best
society, seem to have slightly intoxicated him. He saw his error, like
other wise men, all in good time, and even the error itself was not more
than human and pardonable.
The Preface to _An Evening’s Love_ promises, but for the time postpones,
an extension of the criticism of “the last age,” and intersperses some
valuable remarks on the difference between Comedy and Farce, between Wit
and Humour, with a good deal of egotism and some downright
arrogance.[505] The _Essay of Heroic Plays_ prefixed to _The Conquest of
Granada_ (1672) is as yet unconverted as to rhyme on the stage; but
contains some interesting criticism of Davenant’s essays in the kind,
and a curious defence (recurred to later) of supernatural “machinery.”
The main gist of the Preface, besides its defence of the extravagances
of Almanzor, is an elaborate adjustment of the Heroic Play to the rules
of the much-talked-of Heroic Poem. But though there is a good deal of
self-sufficiency here, it is as nothing to the drift of the Epilogue to
the second part of the play, and of an elaborate Prose “Defence” of this
Epilogue. Here Dryden takes up the position that in “the last age,” when
men were dull and conversation low, Shakespeare and Fletcher had not,
while Jonson did not avail himself of, access to that higher society
which delighted to honour him, Dryden. Divers flings at the “solecisms,”
“flaws in sense,” “mean writing,” “lame plots,” “carelessness,”
“luxuriance,” “pedantry” of these poor creatures lead up to a statement
that “_Gentlemen_ will now be entertained with the foibles _of each
other_.” Never again do we find Dryden writing like this; and for his
having done it at all Rochester’s “Black Will with a cudgel” exacted
sufficient, as suitable, atonement in the Rose Alley ambuscade, even
from the lowest point of view. From a higher, he himself made an ample
apology to Shakespeare in the Prologue to _Aurungzebe_, and practically
never repeated the offence.
-----
Footnote 505:
“I have further to add that I seldom use the wit and language of any
romance or play which I undertake to alter; because my own invention,
as bad as it is, can furnish me with nothing so dull as what is
there.” These invocations of Nemesis are seldom unheard by the acute
ears of that satiric Goddess.
-----
The curious _State of Innocence_ (1677) (a much better thing than rigid
Miltonists admit) is preceded by an equally curious _Apology of Heroic
Poetry_, in which, yet once more, we find the insufficient sense in
which Imagination (here expressly limited to “Imaging”) was used; while
the Preface to _All for Love_ (1678) is a very little ill-tempered
towards an anonymous lampooner, who was, in fact, Rochester. _Troilus
and Cressida_ (1679) was ushered by a set preliminary _Discourse on the
Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_. No piece illustrates more remarkably
that mixed mode of criticism in Dryden, to bring out which is our chief
design. On a canvas, not it must be confessed of much interest, woven
out of critical commonplaces from Aristotle and Longinus down to Rymer
and Le Bossu, he has embroidered a great number of most valuable
observations of his own, chiefly on Shakespeare and Fletcher, which
culminate in a set description of Fletcher as “a limb of Shakespeare”—a
thing happy in itself and productive of happy imitations since. The
Preface to the translation of Ovid’s _Epistles_ (1680) chiefly consists
of a fresh defence of that ingenious writer (for whom Dryden had no
small fancy), and the Dedication to Lord Haughton of _The Spanish Friar_
(1681) is mainly notable for an interesting confession of Dryden’s
changes of opinion about Chapman and Du Bartas (Sylvester rather), and a
sort of apology for his own dallying with these Delilahs of the theatre
in the rants of Almanzor and Maximin.
But that to the _Second Miscellany_, five years later, after a period
chiefly occupied with the great political satires, ranges with the
_Essay_, and not far below the _Fables_ Preface, among Dryden’s critical
masterpieces. The thing is not long—less than twenty pages. But it gives
a coherent and defensible, if also disputable, theory of translation, a
singularly acute, and, it would appear, original contrast of the _faire_
of Ovid and of Claudian, more detailed studies of Virgil, Lucretius
(singularly good), Horace, and Theocritus, and the best critical
stricture in English on “Pindaric” verse. After it the note of the same
year on Opera, which ushered _Albion and Albanius_, is of slight
importance.
The Dedication of the Third Miscellany (specially named _Examen
Poeticum_, as the second had been sub-titled _Sylvæ_) contains some
interesting protests against indiscriminate critical abuse, the final
formulation of a saying sketched before (“the corruption of a poet is
the generation of a critic”), illustrated from Scaliger in the past and
(not obscurely though not _nominatim_) from Rymer in the present; and,
among other things, some remarks on prosody which might well have been
fuller.
Between this and the Fables, besides some lesser things,[506] there
appeared two of the longest and most ambitious in appearance of Dryden’s
critical writings, the _Essay_ [strictly _Discourse_] _on Satire_
prefixed to the _Juvenal_, and the _Dedication of the Æneis_, with,
between them, the first writing at any length by a very distinguished
Englishman of letters, on the subject of pictorial art, in the shape of
the _Parallel of Poetry and Painting_ prefixed to the translation of Du
Fresnoy _De Arte Graphica_. [Sidenote: _The_ Essay on Satire _and the_
Dedication of the Æneis.] All, being Dryden’s, are, and could not but
be, admirably written and full of interest. But the _Juvenal_ and
_Virgil_ Prefaces are, in respect of permanent value, both intrinsically
and representively injured by an excess of critical erudition. The time
was perhaps not yet ripe for an honest and candid address straight to
the English reader. The translator was bound to recommend himself to
classical scholars by attention to the paraphernalia of what then
regarded itself as scholarship (“other brides, other paraphernalia” no
doubt), and to propitiate wits, and Templars, and the gentlemen of the
Universities, with original or borrowed discourses on literary history
and principle. Dryden fell in with the practice, and obliged his readers
with large decoctions of Rigaltius and Casaubon, Dacier and Segrais,
which are at any rate more palatable than the learned originals, but
which make us feel, rather ruefully, that boiling down such things was
not the work for which the author of _Absalom and Achitophel_ and of
_The Essay on Dramatic Poesy_ was born.
-----
Footnote 506:
Lesser, but far from negligible; for the _Character of Saint-Evremond_
is both personally and critically interesting, and the critical
biographies of Lucian and Plutarch lead straight to Johnson.
-----
As for the _Parallel_, it is of course interesting as being nearly our
first Essay, and that by a master hand, in a kind of criticism which has
later given excellent results. [Sidenote: _The Parallel of Poetry and
Painting._] But Dryden, as he most frankly admits, did not know very
much about the matter, and his work resolves itself very mainly into a
discussion of the principles of Imitation in general, applied in an
idealist manner to the two arts in particular. Again we may say, “Not
here, O Apollo!”
We have nothing left but the _Preface to the Fables_, the extraordinary
merit of which has been missed by no competent critic from Johnson to Mr
Ker. [Sidenote: _The_ Preface to the Fables.] The wonderful ease and
urbanity of it, the artfully varied forms of reply to the onslaughts of
Collier and others, are not more generally agreeable than are, in a
special division, the enthusiastic eulogy of Chaucer (all the more
entertaining because of its lack of mere pedantic accuracy in places),
and the interesting, if again not always rigidly accurate, scraps of
literary history. It winds up, as the _Essay_ had practically begun, a
volume of critical writing which, if not for pure, yet for applied,
mixed, and sweetened criticism, deserves to be put on the shelf—no
capacious one—reserved for the best criticism of the world.
We have seen, over and over again, in individual example; have already
partially summed more than once; and shall have to re-sum with more
extensive view later, the character and the faults of the critical
method which had been forming itself for some hundred and fifty years
when Dryden began his critical work. [Sidenote: _Dryden’s general
critical position._] It would be absurd to pretend that he was entirely
superior to this “Spirit of the Age”—which was also that of the age
behind him, and (with rare exceptions) of the age to come for nearly a
hundred years. But, although it may be paradoxical, it is not absurd at
all, to express satisfaction that he was not so entirely superior. He
was enabled by his partial—and, in so far as his consciousness went,
quite sincere—orthodoxy, to obtain an access to the general hearing in
England, and even to influence, long after his death, important literary
authorities, as he never could have done if he had set up for an
iconoclast. Furthermore, it was not yet time to break these idols.
Apollo winked at the neo-classical ignorance and heresy because it was
useful. We are so apt—so generously and excusably apt—to look at the
Miltons without considering the Clevelands, that we forget how
absolutely ungoverned, and in some cases how near to puerility, the
latest Elizabethan school was. We forget the slough of shambling verse
in which true poets, men like Suckling in drama, men like Lovelace in
lyric, complacently wallowed. The strait waistcoat was almost necessary,
even after the fine madness, much more after the madness not so fine, of
mid-seventeenth-century verse, and, in a less degree, prose. And so,
when we find Dryden belittling the rhymes of _Comus_ and _Lycidas_,[507]
shaking his head over Shakespeare’s carelessness, unable with Chapman,
as Ben had been with Marlowe, to see the fire for the smoke, we need not
in the least excite ourselves, any more than when we find him dallying
with the Dowsabels of Renaissance school-criticism. In the first place,
the thing had to be done; and in the second place, his manner of doing
it went very far to supply antidote to all the bane, as well as to
administer the “corsives,” as they said then, in the mildest and most
innocuous way possible.
-----
Footnote 507:
“In his _Juvenilia_ ... his rhyme is _always_ constrained or
forced.”—_Discourse on Satire._
-----
[Sidenote: _His special critical method._]
Dryden’s moly, an herb so powerful that—herein excelling its original—it
not only prevented men like Addison from becoming beasts like Rymer, but
had the virtue of turning beasts into men,—of replacing the neo-classic
jargon by the pure language of criticism,—was that plan of actual
comparison and examination of actual literature which is not merely the
_via prima_ but the _via sola_ of safety for the critic. By his time
there was assembled a really magnificent body of modern letters, in
addition to classical and mediæval. But nobody in the late seventeenth
century, except Dryden, really utilised it. Italy and Spain were sinking
into premature senility. The French[508] despised or ignored all modern
literatures but their own, and despised and ignored almost equally their
own rich and splendid mediæval stores.
-----
Footnote 508:
Chapelain might like the early romances (_v. supra_, p. 260). But here
Boileau was the spokesman of France.
-----
Dryden’s freedom from this worst and most hopeless vice is all the more
interesting because, from some of his utterances, we might have expected
him not to be free from it.[509] That theory of his as to Mr Waller;
that disastrous idea that Shakespeare and Fletcher were low people who
had not the felicity to associate with gentlemen,—might seem likely to
produce the most fatal results. But not so. He accepts Chaucer at once,
rejoices in him, extols him, just as if Chaucer had taken lessons from
Mr Waller, and had been familiar with my Lord Dorset. Back his own side
as he may in the duel of the theatres, he speaks of the great lights of
the last age in such a fashion that no one has outgone him since. He
cannot really take an author in hand, be he Greek or Latin, Italian or
French or English, without his superiority to rules and systems and
classifications appearing at once, however he may, to please fashion and
fools, drag these in as an afterthought, or rather (for Dryden never
“drags” in anything save the indecency in his comedies) draw them into
the conversation with his usual adroitness. And he is constantly taking
authors in hand in this way,—we are as certain that this, and not
twaddling about unities and machines, was what he liked doing, as we are
that he wrote comedies for money, and satires and criticism itself for
love. Now this,—the critical reading without theory, or with theory
postponed, of masses of different literatures, and the formation and
expression of genuine judgment as to what the critic liked and disliked
in them, not what he thought he ought to like and dislike,—this was what
was wanted, and what nobody had yet done. Dryden did it—did it with such
mastery of expression as would almost have commended a Rymer, but with
such genuine critical power and sympathy as would almost have carried
off the absence of merits of expression altogether. He established (let
us hope for all time) the English fashion of criticising, as Shakespeare
did the English fashion of dramatising,—the fashion of aiming at
delight, at truth, at justice, at nature, at poetry, and letting the
rules take care of themselves.
-----
Footnote 509:
They have deceived the very elect, _e.g._, M. Rigault, who in not
altogether unnatural amazement at the dictum, “Spenser wanted only to
have read the rules of Bossu,” classes (_Q. des A. et des M._, p. 311)
Dryden as an _ancien enragé_. But M. Rigault is at a wrong angle in
most of the English part of his book,—so much so as to strike a chill
into any one who has to criticise a foreign literature, lest, lacking
the grace of the Muses, he too go astray.
-----
Perhaps in no single instance of critical authorship and authority does
the great method of comparison assist us so well as in the case of
Dryden and Boileau. [Sidenote: _Dryden and Boileau._] This comparison is
absolutely fair. The two were almost exact contemporaries; they
represented—so far at least as their expressed and, in both cases, no
doubt conscientious, literary creed went—the same sect. _Enfin Malherbe
vint_ is an exact parallel, whether as a wonderful discovery or a partly
mischievous delusion, to the exploits on our numbers by Mr Waller. Both
were extremely powerful satirists. Both, though not comparable in
intrinsic merit, were among the chief men of letters of their respective
countries. Both had a real, and not merely a professional or affected,
devotion to literature. Both applied, with whatever difference of
exclusiveness and _animus_, a peculiar literary discipline, new to the
country of each. And in the case of both—it has been decided by a
consensus of the best judges, with all the facts before them up to the
present time—there was an insufficient looking before and after, a
pretension to limit literature to certain special developments.
We have seen what, in carrying out the scheme which was in effect the
scheme of both, were the defects of Boileau. Let us see what, in
contra-position to them, are the merits of Dryden.
That, though he makes mistakes enough in literary history, these
mistakes are slight in comparison with Boileau’s, matters not very much;
that, though his satiric touch was more withering even than the
Frenchman’s, he has no love of lashing merely for the sport, and never
indulges in insolent flings at harmless dulness, suffering poverty, or
irregular genius; that, though quite prone enough to flatter, he
declined to bow the knee to William of Orange, while Boileau
persistently grovelled at the feet of William’s enemy,—these things
matter even less to us. The fact, the critical fact, remains that the
faults of his time and his theory did the least harm to Dryden of all
men whom we know, while they did the most to Boileau. And the reason of
the fact is more valuable than the fact itself. Boileau, as we have
seen, has not left us a single impartial and appreciative criticism of a
single author, ancient or modern. Dryden simply cannot find himself in
presence of a man of real genius, whether he belongs to his own school
or another, without having his critical lips at once touched by Apollo
and Pallas. He was sadly ignorant about Chaucer,—a board-school child
might take him to task; but he has written about Chaucer with far more
real light and sympathy than some at least of the authors of the books
from which the board-school child derives its knowledge have shown. His
theory about Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson was defective; but he has
left us criticisms of all three than which we have, and are likely to
have, no better. About the ancients he borrows from both ancients and
moderns; but it is remarkable that while Boileau’s borrowings are his
best, Dryden’s are infinitely his worst part. So the consequence is that
while Boileau is merely a _point de repère_, a historical document which
men simply strive to bring to some relation with the present and the
future, Dryden is and will remain at once a source and a model for ever.
And he is these because he had the wisdom to ask himself the question,
“Do I think this good or bad?” and the wit to answer it, instead of
asking and answering the other, “Is it good or bad according to this or
that scheme and schedule?”
We have, in short, in Dryden the first very considerable example in
England, if not anywhere, of the critic who, while possessing fairly
wide knowledge of literature, attributes no arbitrary or conventional
eminence to certain parts of it, but at least endeavours to consider it
as a whole; of the critic who is never afraid to say “Why?”; of the
critic who asks, not whether he ought to like such and such a thing, but
whether he does like it, and why he likes it, and whether there is any
real reason why he should not like it; of the critic, finally, who
tries, without prepossession or convention, to get a general grasp of
the book or author, and then to set forth that grasp in luminous
language, and with a fair display of supporting analysis and argument.
Dryden, of course, is far—very far—from being a faultless monster of
criticism. The application of his own process to his own theory will
discover in it many mistakes, independent of the imperfect knowledge
which has been already admitted, of the inconsistencies which are more
of a virtue than of a defect, and of the concessions to tradition and
fashion which are almost wholly unfortunate. Nay, more, it may be
granted that Dryden did not escape the dangers of the process itself,
the dangers of vagueness, of desultoriness, of dilettantism. But he has
the root of the matter in him. He knows that art exists to give
pleasure, and when he says “I am pleased with this,” he insists on
strong reasons being given to show that he ought not to be so. He admits
also—nay, insists on—nature, variety, individuality. He will
“connoisseur no man out of his senses,”[510] and refuses to be so
connoisseured by any, while he will give good reasons for his own and
others’ pleasure. These are the marks of the true and catholic
criticism; and Dryden has them.
-----
Footnote 510:
A phrase of Blake’s.
-----
Let us pass from him directly to one who has them not. There are few
English critics who require to be dealt with at once more carefully and
more faithfully than does Thomas Rymer. [Sidenote: _Rymer._] He has
become a name, and to become a name is to be at least on the way to
becoming a legend, if not a myth. Moreover, as his legend is (for good
reasons) far from a favourable one, it has been made more legendary by
those generous or wayward revolts against it which are not uncommon. It
has even been held proper, for some time, to shake the head of
deprecation over Macaulay’s “the worst critic that ever lived.”
Moreover, Rymer is by no means very accessible—in his critical works, of
course, for we speak not here of the _Fœdera_. Whether these were
originally published in very small numbers; whether the common-sense of
mankind rose against them and subjected them in unusual proportions to
the “martyrdom of pies”; or whether (by one of Time’s humorous revenges)
the copies have been absorbed into special collections relating to that
_altissimo poeta_ whom Rymer blasphemed, I cannot say. But it is certain
that very good libraries often possess either none or only a part of
them, and that on the rare occasions on which they appear in catalogues
they are priced at about as many pounds as they are intrinsically worth
farthings. I think I have seen notices of Rymer which evidently confused
_The Tragedies of the Last Age_ (1678) with _A Short View of Tragedy_
(1693).[511] Besides these two, Rymer, independently of smaller things
and reissues, had produced, earlier than the earlier, in 1674, a preface
to his own translation of Rapin’s _Reflections_, which completes the
trinity of his important criticism. No one of the three is long; in
fact, _The Tragedies of the Last Age_ is a very tiny book, which, short
as it is, seems to have exhausted the author before he could carry out
half his scheme.
-----
Footnote 511:
The fact is that the two are parts of the same book; and that a
_second_ edition of the first appeared in 1692, just before the
_first_ of the second next year.
-----
A careful and comparative reading of all three has given me a settled,
and I think a just, conception of Rymer as of a man of remarkable
learning for his age and country, but intensely stupid to begin with,
and Puck-led by the _Zeitgeist_ into a charcoal-burner’s faith in “the
rules.” [Sidenote: _The_ Preface to Rapin.] In the _Preface_[512] he is
less crabbed than in the two booklets; and, though he already uses the
would-be humorous hail-fellow-well-met colloquialism characteristic of
the lower Restoration style, and employed even by such a man of letters
as L’Estrange and such scholars as Collier and Bentley, he does not push
it to the same lengths of clumsy ass-play as later. He thinks that
“poets would grow negligent if Critics had not a strict eye on their
miscarriages,” yet he admits that this eye sometimes squints, and
compares some critics to “Wasps that rather annoy the Bees than terrify
the drones.” Then he skims the past, noticing Castelvetro, Malherbe, and
others, but thinks that till lately “England was as free from Critics as
from Wolves,” Ben Jonson having all the critical learning to himself.
After praise of Aristotle and a short notice of his actual author, he
then proceeds to consider the history of English poetry independently.
As for Chaucer, “our language was not then capable of any heroic
character,” nor indeed was the most polite wit of Europe “sufficient for
a great design.” Spenser had “a large spirit, a sharp judgment, and a
genius for Heroic poetry perhaps above any that ever wrote since
Virgil,” but “wanted a true idea,” and was misled by Ariosto. “They who
can love Ariosto will be ravished with Spenser, but men of juster
thoughts,” &c. His stanza is “nowise proper for our language.”
-----
Footnote 512:
Vol. ii. pp. 107-130 of the 1706 edition of Rapin in English. At p.
113 Rymer says that he will not here examine the various qualities
which make English fit above all other languages for Heroic Poesy,
“the world expecting these matters learnedly and largely discussed in
a particular treatise on that subject.” This apparently important
announcement is marginally annotated “Sheringham.” I suppose this was
Robert S., a Norfolk man (as his name imports), of Caius College, and
Proctor at Cambridge just before the Commonwealth ejection. He is
described (see _Dict. Nat. Biog._) as an “excellent linguist,” but
seems to have been more of an antiquary than of a man of letters. As
the _D. N. B._ says nothing of any such work as Rymer glances at, I
suppose the world was disappointed of it by his sudden death in May
1678, four years after Rymer wrote.
-----
Davenant and Cowley are criticised with politeness, but not very
favourably; the faults of both, as well as their designs, were what
Rymer was capable of understanding, and neither provokes him to any
rudeness on the one hand or stupidity on the other, though there is an
occasional ripple betraying an undercurrent of asperity. Then, after
some more general remarks, he takes the accepted test of the Description
of Night, and applies it with mixed commendation to Apollonius Rhodius,
with rather independent criticism to Virgil, slightingly to Ariosto, and
rather cavillingly to Tasso, with a good deal of censure to Marino, and
with more to Chapelain, with about as much to Père Le Moyne, and then
with very considerable praise to that passage of Dryden’s in the
_Conquest of Mexico_ to which Wordsworth was afterwards nearly as unjust
as Rymer himself to far greater things.[513] And with this rather
patronising “Well done our side!” he stops.
-----
Footnote 513:
I do not think that Rymer ever _intended_ to be rude to Dryden, though
his clumsy allusions to “Bays” in the _Short View_ naturally rubbed
the discrowned Laureate the wrong way for a time.
-----
Had Rymer done nothing more than this in criticism it would indeed be
absurd to call him our best critic, but it would be still more absurd to
call him our worst. There is fair knowledge, there is fair common-sense
judgment; the remarks on Chaucer are merely what might be expected, and
on Spenser rather better than might be expected; the detailed censure is
correct enough; and though there cannot be said to be any great
appreciation of poetry, there is interest in it. Above all, if the piece
stood alone, we should hardly think of detecting in it even a murmur of
the pedantic snarl which is the one unpardonable sin of a critic.
In _The Tragedies of the Last Age_ Rymer _ruit in pejus_. [Sidenote:
_The_ Tragedies of the Last Age.] He had in the interval received some
praise, which is always bad for an ill-conditioned man and dangerous for
a stupid one; he had conceived the idea of being bee as well as wasp;
and he undertook to show Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare and Jonson,
their errors, though as matter of fact he lost his wind in belabouring
the twins, and had to leave the others till he had taken fifteen years’
breath. He shows himself at once in a mood of facetious truculence and
self-importance. _He_ is not going to emulate “the _Remarks_ and eternal
triflings of French Grammaticasters.” But he is going to set the
“quibble-catching” of his countrymen right, and to put an end to “the
Stage-quacks and Empirics in poetry” who despise the rules. “Fancy leaps
and frisks, and away she’s gone; while Reason rattles the chain, and
follows after,” in which flight Rymer, as often, does not seem to
perceive that he is not exactly giving Reason and himself the _beau
rôle_. Then he sets to work on three plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. In
_Rollo_ there is nothing to move pity and terror, nothing to delight,
nothing to instruct.[514] In _A King and No King_ Panthea actually
suggests kissing![515] Arbaces is so bad that he really made Rymer think
of Cassius—a withering observation which foretells what the critic was
going to say about Shakespeare, though on this occasion he was too
exhausted to say it.
-----
Footnote 514:
Rymer’s elaborate directions for removing the Romantic offence of this
play, and adjusting it to Classical correctness and decorum, are among
the most involuntarily funny things in criticism (pp. 19-24).
Footnote 515:
Rymer knew something of Old French. How horrified he would have been
if he had come across the lines in _Floriant et Florete_ (2904, 2905)—
“Si samble qu' enfes voit disant
'Baise, baise, je voil baisier!”
-----
He said it fifteen years later with no uncertain voice. The one
redeeming feature of the _Short View_ is its remarkable, if not quite
impeccable, learning. [Sidenote: _The_ Short View of Tragedy.] Rymer
really knows something about “Provencial” poetry, though he confuses it
(and thereby made Dryden confuse it) with old French, and actually
regards Philippe Mouskès—not even a Frenchman but a Fleming—as a
“troubadour.” Still, his knowledge is to be praised, and his ignorance
forgiven. Less forgivable, but still not fatal, are the singular want of
method with which he flings the result of his learning, pell-mell with
his own remarks, on the reader, and (in a yet further degree of
culpability) the vulgar jeering of his style. But all this might still
pass. His mistakes are much less, and his knowledge much greater, than
those of any critic of his age. Others have lacked method; and Bentley
was quite, Collier very nearly, as coarsely rude. On some general
points, such as the utility of the chorus in keeping playwrights to the
rules, he is not unintelligent. He is a great admirer of dumb-show, and
thinks that many of the tragical scenes, not merely in Shakespeare, but
in Jonson, would go better without words.
More than half the little book[516] is occupied with a display of his
learning—first in some general remarks on the drama, and then in a
history of it which is, with all its mistakes, better informed than
anything of the kind earlier. And then Rymer falls on _Othello_. He
grants it “a phantom of a fable.” But it is a very bad phantom.
Ridiculous that Desdemona should love a blackamoor at all; more
ridiculous that she should be attracted by his stories of adventure;
most that Othello should be made a Venetian general—and so on
throughout. But the characters are worse. Rymer simply cannot away with
Iago; and this on grounds exquisitely characteristic, not merely of him
but of the whole system, of which he is the _reductio ad absurdum_. It
is not nearly so much Iago’s _theriotes_ by which Rymer is shocked, as
his violation of the type and the general law. “He would pass upon us a
close, dissembling, false, insinuating rascal instead of an
open-hearted, frank, plain-dealing soldier—a character constantly worn
by them for some thousand years in the world.”[517] Again, “Philosophy
tells us it is a principle in the nature of Man to be grateful....
Philosophy must be [the poet’s] guide,”[518] therefore Iago is a
poetical impossibility. Rymer knows that historically all men are _not_
grateful: but never mind. The Type! the Type! the Type![519] One need
hardly go farther, but in going we cannot, in one sense, fare
worse.[520] “Godlike Romans” (as Mr Dryden had already called them) are,
in _Julius Cæsar_, “put in fools’ coats and made jack-puddings of,”
which, says Tom justly, “is a sacriledge.” Brutus and Cassius “play a
prize, a tryal of skill in huffing and swaggering like two drunken
Hectors.” In Tragedy Shakespeare “appears quite out of his element; his
brains are turned; he raves and rambles without any coherence, any spark
of reason, or any rule to control him, and set bounds to his frenzy.”
Nor does Ben fare much better. He indeed “knew to distinguish men and
manners at another rate.” In _Catiline_ “we find ourselves in Europe, we
are no longer in the land of Savages,” sighs Rymer with relief. Still
Ben, too, “gropes in the dark, and jumbles things together without head
and tail;” he, though not “in the gang of the strolling fraternity,”
like Shakespeare, “must lie a miserable heap of ruins for want of
architecture;” he “sins against the clearest light and conviction” by
“interlarding fiddle-faddle comedy and apocryphal matters.” And so
forth.
-----
Footnote 516:
It has (excluding an appended extract from the Registers of the
Parliament of Paris about Mysteries) only 168 pages of perhaps 200
words each; and much of it is quotation. But it is far longer than
_The Tragedies of the Last Age_.
Footnote 517:
_Short View_, p. 94.
Footnote 518:
Ibid., p. 144.
Footnote 519:
It is curious to read the deliberately stupid misunderstanding of
Aristotle by which this is justified.
Footnote 520:
It may be not unamusing to give an instance or two of the way in which
Nemesis has made poor Tom speak truth unconsciously,—
“They who like this author’s writing will not be offended to find so
much repeated from him” [Shakespeare].—P. 108.
“Never in the world had any pagan Poet his brains turned at this
monstrous rate.”—P. 111.
“No Pagan poet but would have found some machine for her
deliverance.”—P. 134.
“Portia is ... scarce one remove from a _Natural_. She is the own
cousin-german ... with Desdemona.”—P. 156.
-----
That Rymer was utterly deaf to the poetry of _Othello_ and of _Julius
Cæsar_, that he thinks “the neighing of a horse or the howling of a
mastiff possesses more meaning” than Shakespeare’s verse, merely
demonstrates that he understood the language of the beasts and did not
understand that of the man. [Sidenote: _The Rule of Tom the Second._] It
disqualifies him for his business, no doubt, hopelessly and of itself.
But in the nature of the case we cannot quarrel with him for this
Judgment of God; and, on his own theory, mere poetry is of so little
consequence that it does not much matter. But where he is cast
hopelessly on his own pleadings, where he shows himself (as he has been
called) utterly stupid, is in his inability to understand the fable, the
characters themselves. He cannot see that the very points which he
blunderingly picks out are the _adunata pithana_ of his own
law-giver—the improbabilities or impossibilities made plausible by the
poet’s art; and that the excess of this or that quality in Iago, in
Desdemona, in Othello, is utterly lost in, or is unerringly adjusted to,
their perfect humanity. He is not bound to feel “the pity of it”—which
he quotes, much as the pig might grunt at the pearl. But he is bound, on
Aristotelian, no less than on the most extreme Romantic, principles, to
feel that universality which Dryden had ascribed a quarter of a century
before, and for all time to come. Therefore, for once, though no
Macaulayan, I venture to indorse my unimportant name on a dictum of
Macaulay’s. I have read several critics—I trust this book may show
sufficiently that this is no idle boast. I have known several bad
critics from Fulgentius to the Abbé d’Aubignac, and from Zoilus to
persons of our own day, whom it is unnecessary to mention. But I never
came across a worse critic than Thomas Rymer.[521]
-----
Footnote 521:
His best deed was to elicit from Dryden, in _Heads of an Answer to
Rymer_ (_Works_, xv. 390), the memorable observation that "if
Aristotle had seen ours [_i.e._, "our plays"] he might have changed
his mind." One may add that, if Dryden had worked these “Heads” out,
he might have solved the whole mystery of criticism as far as in all
probability it ever can be solved, or at the very least as far as it
could be solved with the knowledge of literature at his disposal.
-----
Between its King and its Helot, our Sparta of the last forty years of
the seventeenth century does not offer many persons for exornation, with
crown or with stripe, as the case may be. Sprat in the famous passage of
his _History of the Royal Society_; Phillips and Winstanley and
Langbaine in their attempts at literary history; Sir Thomas Pope Blount
in his other attempt at a critical summary of literature; Collier in his
moral _chevauchées_ against the ethical corruption of the Drama,—these
we may legitimately notice, but at no great length. Dennis, Gildon, and
Bysshe will come better in the next Book; and it is hoped that no reader
will be so insatiable as to demand the inclusion of Milbourn or of
Hickeringill.
The Sprat passage[522] is of the very first importance in the History of
English Literature, and has at last been recognised as being so.
[Sidenote: _Sprat._] In it the gorgeous, floriated, conceited style of
the earlier century is solemnly denounced, and a “naked natural style of
writing” enjoined. But Sprat is careful to point out that this was for
the purposes of the Society—for the improvement not of literature but of
science; and he does not attempt to argue it out at all from the
literary side. The pronouncement expresses the whole sense of the time;
it is epoch-making in the history of literary taste; but it does not
give itself out as literary criticism, though the spirit of it may be
seen in half the literary criticism that follows for nearly a hundred
and fifty years.
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Footnote 522:
History of the Royal Society, 4to, London, 1667, p. 111 _sq._ It may
be found conveniently extracted at vol. iii. pp. 271, 272 of Sir Henry
Craik’s _English Prose Selections_ (London, 1894).
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