The proper appreciation of the period surveyed in the foregoing Book is of perhaps greater importance than that of any other part of this History. We have seen, in the three preceding Interchapters, what it was that prevented Greek, Roman, and Mediæval criticism respectively from attaining completeness, and how the preventives worked. We saw further, in the last pages of the First Volume, in what condition literature, and at least the possibilities of the criticism of literature, were left at the beginning of the Renaissance. And now we have seen what additions the Renaissance made—not, indeed, in detail, to literature itself, for that belongs to another story than ours, but what additions it made—to the criticism of literature. In mere bulk these additions were very considerable. The extant critical writing of these hundred years (or rather of the last seventy of them), excluding mere rhetorical schoolbooks, probably exceeds, and very largely exceeds, the total of classical and mediæval work on the subject which we possess, even inclusive of schoolbooks. For the very first time Criticism, not as a sort of half accidental and more than half shame-faced extension of Rhetoric, but in and for itself, received a really large share of the intellectual attention of the period.

Moreover, the advantages possessed by Renaissance critics (as we partly also saw in the place referred to) were likewise very great. Men were beginning really to know and really to understand antiquity; they had the whole body of mediæval literature complete, finished, ready for their appreciation; and they or their contemporaries were daily and yearly building up great literatures in all the principal countries of Europe, except Germany, and not wholly despicable literatures there and elsewhere. The excuse of the want of comparison, which had been valid for Greece, less valid but still partly so for Rome, and valid again, though for different reasons, in the Middle Ages, was dwindling and disappearing every day. There was no want of interest in the subject; there was no want of examples, both encouraging and warning, of method.

Nor is it possible to deny that the actual accomplishment of the time was very considerable likewise. When a century finds a certain department of intellectual activity almost uncultivated; when it leaves that subject in a state of active cultivation; and when, further, two following centuries are content to opine almost wholly in the sense to which it has generally inclined,—that century can hardly be said to have wasted its years. Accomplishment—very remarkable and solid accomplishment—it can certainly boast. It must be the business of this Interchapter to examine the nature and (partly at least) the value of that accomplishment, now that we have fully surveyed its items, and frankly admitted a certain general result.

In considering the critical achievement of Italy, the earliest in time, the most abundant in result, the most influential—in fact an abridgment, and no mean abridgment, of that of Europe—we cannot but see at once that there was a certain disadvantage accompanying the inevitableness and the general propriety of this Italian prerogative. No other country had so much learning; but, for this very reason, no other country was so certain rather to over- than to under-value the importance of ancient doctrine. No country had so perfect a literature, though other countries had literatures older, richer, and more vigorous; but this very perfection, while it might seem to provide a fertile field for criticism, had two dangers. The Italians were likely to look down upon, or simply to ignore, other literatures; and, from the failing, though slowly and not conspicuously failing, force of their creative power, they were likely to turn to logomachies and debating-society wrangles. Nay, there was a third peril. No country had so little properly mediæval literature as Italy; and none therefore was more certain to set the fashion of ignoring or slighting that mediæval performance which is so invaluable as a check and balance-redresser. And perhaps we might even add a fourth—that while French and English had got practically beyond the reach of mere dialect-jealousy, Italian had not; and that too much of the abundant interest in literature was throughout turned upon mere grammar and mere linguistics.

Perhaps for these reasons, perhaps for others, perhaps for none assignable except by superfluous guess-work, Italian criticism, active and voluminous as it was, settled very early into certain well-marked limits and channels, and almost wholly confined itself within them, though these channels underwent no infrequent intersection or confluence.

The main texts and patterns of the critics of the Italian Renaissance were three—the Ars Poetica of Horace, the Poetics of Aristotle, and the various Platonic places dealing with poetry. These latter had, as we have seen, begun to affect Italian thought, directly or by transmission through this or that medium, before the close of the fourteenth century; and the maintenance of the Platonic ban, the refutation of it, or the more or less ingenious acceptance and evasion of it, with the help of the Platonic blessing, had been a tolerably familiar exercise from the time of Boccaccio to the time of Savonarola. But Horace and Aristotle gave rules and patterns of much more definiteness. Of the writers of the abundant critical literature which has been partly surveyed, some directly comment these texts; others follow them with more or less selection or combination; many take up separate questions suggested by them; very few, if any, face the subject without some prepossession derived from them.

The very earliest regular criticism, as in Vida and the first books of Trissino, is either strictly grammatical and formal or else tends to expatiate further in the Horatian path of rather desultory practical hints for composition, these latter usually tending towards a more or less slavish “Follow the ancients.” But, from the time of Daniello onwards, more abstract views and questionings, especially in the direction of a sort of Eirenicon between Aristotle and Plato, begin to engage the attention of critics, sometimes as a prelude to study of formal Poetics, sometimes to the exclusion of this. The most thoroughgoing as well as about the ablest example of this latter kind is probably the Naugerius of Fracastoro, where this distinguished physician and physicist, himself a skilled versifier and even something of a poet, scarcely touches poets and poetry in the concrete more than he might in a dialogue on physics or metaphysics, and is entirely occupied with questions of the extremest “metapoetic,” or metacriticism.

This kind of discussion, which is prominent in the whole body of critics from Daniello to Summo, is, with its extensions in the direction of the Theory of the Drama, the Theory of the Heroic Poem, &c., no doubt the most characteristic, and perhaps even the constitutive, feature of Italian criticism. It seems to have been that which most attracted foreign scholars, and stirred them up to emulation; it is very rarely omitted altogether by anybody, save the merest grammarians. In fact, it so impressed itself, during this period, upon the imagination, the memory, the intellectual habit, not merely of Italy but of Europe, that to this day critics who neglect it are looked at askance by many, if not by most, of their fellows.

Questions, however, more practical than these, yet not of quite such extreme practicality as the mere questions of grammar and dialect, of metric and composition, did actually occupy the Italians. About the middle of the century the lucubrations of Cinthio and Pigna on the question of the Romances and their relation to Epic and to the Aristotelian system, opened up the most promising prospect by far that had ever yet been disclosed to criticism. Had these inquiries been followed up—had they been extended from the Romance to the novella, which had already become such a feature of Italian vernacular literature—had Italy provided something not less vigorous, but more polished, than the English Interlude and romantic mystery of the Mary Magdalene type, or the French farce and sotie, so that a similar investigation might have been further extended to drama—there is no saying what might not have been achieved. But this was not permitted.

As a matter of fact, the times were not ready, nor the circumstances. The profitable promise of the discussion on the romanzi dwindled off into the mere logomachies or personalities of the Gerusalemme controversy, and into endless formula-making for the abstract Heroic Poem. But little trace of it is seen on the vigorous and independent mind of Castelvetro; less on the equally vigorous, still more independent, but perhaps rather more scholastic, mind of Patrizzi. For the former, Aristotle is still the special though not quite the exclusive battleground, or canvas, or whatever metaphor may be preferred; and he labours—as all these Italians do, in strange apparent, though perhaps not real, contrast to the vagueness and far-reaching sweep of their more abstract inquiries—under a difficulty, under a seeming impossibility, of getting beyond disjointed observations and comments on Aristotle, Homer, Dante, Petrarch, into a fruitful and satisfying critical study of any poem or poet. Scaliger drills the whole mob of formal and theoretical particulars into an orderly regiment, indulges in plentiful criticism of the verbal and occasional kind, attempts to take a (for him) complete historic survey, and achieves at least a quasi-tiebeam, a bastard unity, for his work by his all-pervading, uncompromising Virgil-worship, which gives a test for everything, an answer for everything, a standard always at hand. Patrizzi seems, with his double method of historical survey and argumentative inquiry, to have at last unbarred the very gates of the true path. But he does not proceed far along it; and astonishingly sound as well as original as are many of his conclusions, he hardly attempts to apply them to modern poetry, except in the Trimerone, where he is too much entangled in the special quibbles and squabbles of the controversy to which it belongs. All the rest—even interesting people like Minturno—sometimes peep over the wall, yet confine their actual walk within it.

Between all the schools, and from among the welter of the individuals, there arises, in the mysterious way in which such things do arise, and which defies all but shallow and superficial explanation, a sort of general critical creed, every particular article of which would probably have been signed by no two particular persons—perhaps by no one—but which is ready to become, and in the next century does become, orthodox and accepted as a whole. And this creed runs somewhat as follows:—

It is less the business of the historian, after drawing up this creed, to criticise it favourably or unfavourably, than to point out that it had actually, by the year 1600, come very near to formulated existence. We shall find it in actual formulation in the ensuing book; we have already seen it in more than adumbration, governing the pronouncements of a scholar and a man of genius like Ben Jonson thirty years later than the close of the sixteenth century. A full estimate of its merits and demerits must be postponed to the close of this volume. But it may be observed at once that it is, prima facie, not a perfect creed by any means. It has (and this, I think, has been too seldom noticed) a fault, almost, if not quite, as great on the a priori side as that which it confessedly has on the a posteriori. It does not face the facts; it blinks all mediæval and a great deal of existing modern literature. But, then, to do it justice, it does not pretend to do other than blink them. The fault in its own more special province is much more glaring, though, as has been said, it has, by a sort of sympathy, been much more ignored. There is no real connection between the higher and the lower principles of Neo-Classicism. There is not merely one crevasse, not easily to be crossed, in this glacier of Correctness; there are two or three. Let us, for argument’s sake, concede all the points in Fracastoro’s Naugerius, the Aconcagua or Everest of the school. Let us allow that to the real lover of poetry it skills not much whether he grants or denies all its propositions. But how are we to pass from these to the further group—to allow that Reason, Common-Sense, Nature, will govern the poet’s mediate and lower necessities? How from this, again, to the still other group of dramatic, heroic, miscellaneous requirements of the Correct? How from any of them to the entirely arbitrary warning clause that the ancients have actually or virtually anticipated everything?

On the more obvious faults of Italian criticism in detail—its extravagant Virgil-worship; its refusal (except in such rare and practically isolated cases as Lilius Giraldus’ knowledge of Chaucer and Wyatt, Patrizzi’s of Fauchet and his Old French subjects) to take any account of foreign modern literature; its coterie-squabbling and the rest, it would not be profitable to dwell much. But it is curious and instructive to notice how little appreciative criticism of contemporaries this active critical period gives. If you start a controversy of an ancient against a modern or a modern against a modern—of Homer against Ariosto, or of Ariosto against Tasso—there will be plenty of persons to take a hand. For a really appreciative study of any writer, modern or ancient, I do not know where to look. Men are so besotted, on the one hand, with their inquiries into general principles; on the other, with their sporadic annotations, that they cannot attempt anything of the kind.

Yet it would be an act of the grossest injustice and ingratitude to refuse or to stint recognition of the immense services that the Italians rendered to criticism at this time. It was, in their own stately word, a veritable case of risorgimento; and of resurrection in a body far better organised, far more gifted, than that which had gone to sleep a thousand years before.

In the year 1500 we may look over Europe and find criticism really alive and awake nusquam et nullibi—at best fast asleep, and dreaming a little with the dreams of Gavin Douglas or (had he lived a couple of years longer) of Savonarola, or of such more infantine persons as Augustine Käsenbrot. In 1600 criticism is a classed and recognised department of literature; Faustino Summo, in the very year, can quote authority after authority, refer—as to a sort of common law of the subject—to dicta and obiter dicta of nearly three generations of distinguished judges. And Italian criticism has colonised: its colonies, with the virtues of that kind, are showing characteristics sometimes quite different, though derived from those of the mother country, and are carrying the critical torch round the world. No matter for the moment whether the more perfect way has been reached, or the less perfect way declined upon. The time of “liking grossly,” of composing anyhow, has passed: that of critical study of the old, and critical reception of the new, has begun.

Never, therefore, shall I join in the anathema in which De Quincey^[285] has coupled Italian critics with Greek rhetoricians. In fact, the Italians suffer far more unjustly than the Greeks. Castelvetro and Patrizzi alone would be enough to clear their company handsomely: Capriano, Cinthio Giraldi, Minturno could put in quite sufficient bail on their own recognisances: yet others would leave the court more than recommended to mercy.^[286] I disagree with many of the principles of most of them; I wish that even those with whom I agree had opened their eyes wider, kept them more steadily on the object, and cared less about fighting abstract prizes, and more about appreciating the goods which the gods had given them in concrete literature. It was also a misfortune, no doubt, that no man of very distinct genius and whole-hearted devotion gave himself up to the business. Vida was a good kind of pedant, and Trissino at heart a philologist; Daniello, Capriano, and most of the rest, including even Minturno, down to Denores and Summo, persons of respectable talent merely; Fracastoro, a man of science; Cinthio, a novelist and miscellanist; Scaliger, a not quite so good kind of more deeply-dyed pedant; Castelvetro, a scholar, with the scholar’s quarrelsomeness; Patrizzi, a philosopher primarily; Torquato Tasso himself, a great poet, with, for a poet, a sensible and logical but curiously timid and hesitating mind. Not a few of them did great things for Criticism; all together they did a really mighty thing for her and for Literature: but they were not her sworn servants, as Lessing and Hazlitt, as Sainte-Beuve and Arnold, were later.

Let there be to them not the less but almost the more glory! It is something—nay, it is very much—to have created a Kind. Up to their time Criticism had been a mere Cinderella in the literary household. Aristotle had taken her up as he had taken all Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoricians had found her a useful handmaid to Rhetoric. Roman dilettanti had dallied with her. The solid good sense and good feeling of Quintilian had decided that she must be “no casual mistress but a wife” (perhaps on rather polygamic principles) to the student of oratory. Longinus had suddenly fixed her colours on his helmet, and had ridden in her honour the most astonishing little chevauchée in the annals of adventurous literature. The second greatest poet of the world had done her at once yeoman’s service and stately courtesy. And yet she was, in the general literary view, not so much déclassée as not classed at all—not “out,” not accorded the entrées.

This was now all over. The country which gave the literary tone and set the literary fashions of Europe had adopted Criticism in the most unmistakable manner—whether in the manner wisest or most perfect is not for the present essential. Rank thus given is never lost; at any rate, there is no recorded instance of a literary attainder for Kinds, whatever there may be for persons.

When this criticism passes the Alps, and we pass them with it, a curious difference is to be perceived. We leave the abstract side of the matter almost wholly behind us—the most abstract side perhaps wholly. A little of the Platonic generalities, relieved from the Platonic detraction, may be indulged in pro forma, and Vauquelin (in that odd familiarityfamiliarity with Deity which the French have always displayed) may image God as a gardener ordering the garden of Poesy with trim walks, and neatly planted beds, and hedges, which must not be trespassed on, or from, or through. But the French attention almost wholly deserts such things for the mediate generalities of kind and form; and is constantly tempted to desert these also for the still lower and more particular questions of language, prosody, and style. The fact is, that the circumstances have entirely changed. The Italians, though they may not know it, are in a state of declining vitality and creative force as regards actual literature; even Tasso is an “old man’s child” among their greatest. Besides, to do them justice, there is very little left for them to do with their mere means of language and the like. It is quite different with French and Frenchmen. If they are rashly neglectful (and Fauchet, Pasquier, and others are soon on the spot to vindicate them to some extent from this neglect) of their further past, there is some excuse for impatience of the past that is nearer; and it is even natural and human, though far from praiseworthy, that they should scorn the once charming formal devices which latterly, in most hands, have been so destitute of charm. But make allowance as we may for the causes, the facts remain. French criticism is much the least important of the three divisions which we have considered in the foregoing book. Not only does it begin late; not only does it fail to be very fertile; but its individual documents require a certain kindness to speak very highly of their virtues, and a good deal of blindness to conceal their shortcomings. I have protested above against a too low estimate of the critical value of the Défense et Illustration. Its critical interest is really great, and its critical importance really high; but this greatness and this importance are scarcely absolute. They belong to it as to one of our very first pieces of revolutionary criticism—one of the first in which the newly hatched and fledged critical spirit of Europe shows itself of falcon breed, and sets out to fight and destroy as well as to build nests and hatch young in its turn. The censure of the Défense is very mainly unjust, and its positive doctrine, though generous, and, in the circumstances, not insalutary, is vague, not very far-sighted, and, at the very best, extremely incomplete. What saves it is, first, the abundant and conclusive evidence that it gives of the critic being actually abroad in earnest, of the time of mere acquiescence and tradition having ceased, of there being writers who are determined to attack some kinds of writing and encourage others with their very best will and power; and, secondly, the generous and uncompromising championship of the vernacular, which is the greatest glory of the Pléiade, and which, followed in other countries, gave us the great modern literatures. Du Bellay has the credit of bringing criticism, if we may so speak, nearer to her true object than almost any Italian critic of his own century had done, though he does not himself either practise or prescribe the best way of getting at that object.

The criticism of his colleague, or master, Ronsard, is, as we have seen, injured by its small bulk, by its rather fragmentary character, by the fact that the most considerable piece of it has passed through another hand, and that we have only that hand’s own testimony for the faithfulness of the rehandling, and by not a little decided inconsistency. But it has the same militant, practical spirit as Du Bellay’s in quality, and more of it in proportional quantity. Moreover, it is extremely germinal. Those^[287] who contend that the classical French criticism of the seventeenth century was only the Pléiade criticism of the sixteenth, denying its masters, omitting some, if not always the worst, parts of their creed, narrowed in range, and perfected in apparent system, have a great deal to say for themselves. Nor can there be reasonable doubt that, though Du Bellay was the first to speak critically, the teaching was the teaching of Ronsard throughout. Of this teaching, the injunction to enrich the language by archaism, and dialect, and word-coining (even by reading the forgotten romances of Arthur), was the very best part, and the first to be discarded by the ingratitude of the rebellious disciples, Malherbe and those about him. The worst part, which was not discarded but retained, was the adoption of the Italian doctrines about the hybrid kind of “Heroic” or “Long” Poem. But in most points the criticism of Ronsard justifies itself by a real adherence, conscious or unconscious, to the practical ideals of the French.

These characteristics recur (to much greater advantage, because of its far greater bulk, and in spite of its flagrant desultoriness) in the work of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye. Here we have, put certainly not with much method, but with plenty of talent, and at no unsuitable length, the whole of the Italian teaching, in small points and in large, that had commended itself to the French mind up to this time, with such additions, adaptations, and corrections as vernacular needs had induced, or vernacular genius insisted on. We see in it, very decidedly, the obsession of the “long poem,” which France was not to outgrow for two centuries. We see the tendency to burden criticism with innumerable petty “rules” (or with attentions to “licence” nearly as burdensome), which was also to beset the nation. And in general we see also what it may not be improper (in connection with a school so fond of neologism and word-imitation) to call the “pottering” tendency, which was the worse side of Pléiade criticism. Vauquelin has really a great deal to say, and much of what he has to say is sensible. He escapes many errors of his forerunners, more of his successors, and it is comparatively seldom that one feels inclined to put an absolute black mark against any of his suggestions or cautions. But the whole is not only formless, but also invertebrate. Vauquelin does not, like some of the Italians, confine himself to grave and lofty generalisations on the highest questions affecting Poetry. He does not, like others, or these same at other moments, take an orderly survey of detail according to a coherent scheme. He simply has, as the cant phrase goes, “a few remarks to offer” on much more than a few points.

It has been already said that this provisional, tentative, and somewhat ineffectual character is characteristic, and prophetically characteristic, of the school. The Pléiade did not, like Ronsard’s slightly younger contemporary Spenser and his followers in England, set French poetry once for all on the path on which, with whatever minor changes, it was henceforth to go. Some thirty or forty years of never wholly successful experiment were succeeded by an unjust supplanting, and by another thirty or forty of random tentatives, corresponding in some ways to those of England nearly a century earlier. Only then did France fall into a way, not by any means of perfection, but sufficiently suited to her genius to enable her to travel fast and far in it. It is a serious thing for Pléiade criticism that we have from it no thorough examination of any part of French literature. No doubt such examinations are not the strong point of Renaissance Criticism. But generally there is more approach to them in Italian, with the scattered remarks of the critics on Dante and Petrarch, with the controversies about the romanzi in general and the Orlando and Gerusalemme in particular; there is more even in English, with the surveys, imperfect as they are, of the earlier Elizabethans over the past of poetry, with the literature of the “classical metres” quarrel, with the (no doubt later) remarks of Ben on Shakespeare and others. The fault of Pléiade Criticism, in short, is that it is at once too particularist and too little particular.^[288]

Crossing the Channel, as we lately crossed the Alps, we do not find a simple transmission of indebtedness. It would have been surprising, considering the strong intellectual interests of the Colet group, and the early presence in England of such a critical force as Erasmus, if this country had waited to receive a current merely transmitted through France from Italy. It is possible that, later, Gascoigne may have derived something from Ronsard, and it is quite certain that “E. K.'s” notes on the Calendar show symptoms of Pléiade influence, even in the bad point of contempt, or at least want of respect, for Marot. But it is exceedingly improbable that Ascham derived any impulsion from Du Bellay: it is certain, as we have seen, that he knew Italian critics like Pigna directly; and it is equally certain that, either by his own studies or through Cheke, his critical impulses must have been excited humanistically long before the French had got beyond the merely rhétoriqueur standard of Sibilet.

Hence, as well as for other reasons, English criticism develops itself, if not with entire independence, yet with sufficient conformity to its own needs. That practical bent which we have noticed in the French shows itself here also; but it is conditioned differently. We had, as they had in France, to fashion a new poetic diction; but it cannot be said that the critics did much for this: Spenser, as much as Coriolanus, might have said, “Alone I did it.” They did more in re metrica, and it so happened that they had, quite in their own sphere, to fight an all-important battle, the battle of the classical metres, which was of nothing like the same importance in French or in Italian. In dealing with these and other matters they fall into certain generations or successive groups.

In Ascham and his contemporaries the critical attitude was induced, but not altogether favourably conditioned, by certain forces, partly common to them with their Continental contemporaries, partly not. They all felt, in a degree most creditable to themselves (and contrasting most favourably with the rather opposite feeling of men so much greater and so much later as Bacon and Hobbes), that they must adorn their Sparta, that it was their business to get the vernacular into as good working order, both for prose and verse, as they possibly could. And what is more, they had some shrewd notions about the best way of doing this. The exaggerated rhetoric and “aureateness” of the fifteenth century had inspired them, to a man, with a horror of “inkhorn terms,” and, if mainly wrong, they were also partly right in feeling that the just and deserved popularity of the early printed editions of the whole of Chaucer threatened English with an undue dose of archaism.

Further, they were provided by the New Learning, not merely with a very large stock of finished examples of literature, but also with a not inconsiderable library of regular criticism. They did their best to utilise these; but, in thus endeavouring, they fell into two opposite, yet in a manner complementary, errors. In the first place, they failed altogether to recognise the continuity, and in a certain sense the equipollence, of literature—the fact that to blot out a thousand years of literary history, as they tried to do, is unnatural and destructive. In the second place, though their instinct told them rightly that Greek and Latin had invaluable lessons and models for English, their reason failed to tell them that these lessons must be applied, these models used, with special reference to the nature, the history, the development of English itself. Hence they fell, as regards verse, into the egregious and fortunately self-correcting error of the classical metres, as regards prose, into a fashion of style, by no means insalutary, as a corrective and reaction from the rhetorical bombast and clumsiness of the transition, but inadequate of itself, and needing to be counterdosed by the fustian and the familiarity which are the worse sides of Euphuism, in order to bring about the next stage. Lastly, these men looked too much to the future, and not enough to the past: they did not so much as condescend to examine the literary manner and nature even of Chaucer himself, still less of others.

In the next generation, which gives us Gascoigne, Webbe, Puttenham, and Sidney, the same tendencies are perceived; but the Euphuist movement comes in to differentiate them on one side, and the influence of Italian criticism on the other. The classical metre craze has not yet been blown to pieces by the failure of even such a poet as Spenser to do any good with it, the fortunate recalcitrance of the healthy English spirit, and at last the crushing broadside of Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme. But it does no very great practical harm: and prose style is sensibly beautified and heightened. Some attempts are made, from Gascoigne downwards, to examine the actual wealth of English, to appraise writers, to analyse methods—attempts, however, not very well sustained, and still conditioned by the apparent ignorance of the writers that there was anything behind Chaucer, though Anglo-Saxon was actually studied at the time under Archbishop Parker’s influence. Further, the example of the Italian critics deflects the energy of our writers from the right way, and sends them off into pretty Platonisings about the proud place due to poetry, the stately status of the singer, and other agreeable but unpractical aberrations. This tendency is much strengthened by the Puritan onslaught on poetry generally and dramatic poetry in particular. In all this there is a great deal of interest, and many scattered aperçus of great value. Gascoigne’s little treatise is almost priceless, as showing us how English prosody was drifting on the shallows of a hard-and-fast syllabic arrangement, when the dramatists came to its rescue. Sidney, wrong as he is about the drama, catches hold of one of the very life-buoys of English poetry in his praise of the ballad. Daniel’s Defence puts the root of the rhyme-matter in the most admirable fashion. But we see that the classics are exercising on all the men of the time influences both bad and good, and in criticism, perhaps, rather bad than good; that the obsession of Latin in particular is heavy on them; and that the practice, both Latin and Greek, of what we have called beginning at the wrong end lies heaviest of all.

Nothing will show this more curiously than the words in which Sidney anticipated (and perhaps suggested) Ben’s censure of Spenser’s diction as to the Shepherd’s Calendar, especially if we remember that this was said by a personal friend and by an ardent lover of poetry. That there is something to be said against the dialect of the Calendar all reasonable critics will allow. As a poetic language it is, at its best, but a preliminary exercise for the glorious medium of The Faerie Queene; it is awkwardly and in some cases incorrectly blended; and, above all, the mere rusticity—the “hey-ho” and the rest—is a dangerous and doubtful expedient. But observe that Sidney says nothing of this kind. He “looks merely at the stop-watch.” Theocritus did not do it; Virgil did not do it; Sannazar did not do it; therefore Spenser must not do it. That his own elevation of a mere modern like Sannazar to this position of a lawgiver of the most tyrannic kind—of an authority not merely whose will is law, not merely whose prohibition is final, but whose bare abstention from something taboos that something from the use of all mankind for ever and ever,—that this did not strike Sidney as preposterous in itself, and as throwing doubt on the whole method, is wonderful. But even if he had stopped at Theocritus and Virgil, he would have been wrong enough. Here once more is the False Mimesis, the prava imitatio. Not only is the good poet to be followed in what he does, but what he does not do serves as a bar to posterity in all time from doing it.

There is another point in which Sidney and Ben are alike, and in which they may even seem to anticipate that general adoption of “Reason,” of “Good Sense” as the criterion, which the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed as their own, and which some recent critics have rather kindly allowed them. Sidney’s raillery of the romantic life-drama, Ben’s reported strictures on the sea-coast of Bohemia, and his certain ones on “Cæsar did never wrong,” &c., express the very spirit of this cheap rationalism, which was later to defray a little even of Dryden’s criticism, almost the whole of Boileau’s, and far too much of Pope’s. The ancients, to do them justice, are not entirely to be blamed for this. There is very little of it in Aristotle, who quite understands that the laws of poetry are not the laws of history or of science.^[289] But there is a great deal of it in Horace: and, as we shall see, the authority of the great Greek was, during the three centuriescenturies which form the subject of this volume, more and more used as a mere cloak for the opinions of the clever Roman. Meanwhile, such books as those of Webbe and Puttenham, such an ordeal by battle as that fought out by Campion and Daniel, even such critical jaculata as those of Meres and Bolton,^[290] were all in different ways doing work, mistaken sometimes in kind, but always useful in general effect.

On the general Elizabethan position, as we have seen, Jonson himself made no great advance: in fact, he threw fresh intrenchments around it and fresh forces into its garrison. We may even, contrary to our wont in such cases, be rather glad that he did not enter upon a more extensive examination of his own contemporaries, because it is quite clear that he was not at the right point of view for making it. But it does not follow from this that he was not a critic, and a great critic. No one who was not this could have written the Shakespeare and the Bacon passages—in fact, in the former case, only a great magnanimity and a true sense of critical truth could have mixed so generous an acknowledgment with the candid avowal of so much disapproval. And, as we have said above, even where Ben was wrong, or at least insufficient, his critical gospel was the thing needed for the time to come, if not for the actual time. By a few years after his own death—by the middle of the century, that is to say—seventy years and more of such a harvest as no other country has ever had, had filled the barns of English to bursting with the ripest crops of romantic luxuriance—its treasure-houses with the gold and the ivory and the spices—if sometimes also with the apes and the peacocks—of Romantic exploration and discovery. There was no need to invite further acquisition—the national genius, in Ben’s own quotation, sufflaminandus erat. It was his task to begin the sufflamination: and he did it, not perhaps with a full apprehension of the circumstances, and certainly with nothing like a full appreciation of what the age, from its “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams” onwards, had done; but still did it. In his most remarkable book we see the last word of Elizabethan criticism, not merely in point of time, but in the other sense. Ben is beyond even Sidney, much more Webbe and Puttenham, not to mention Ascham and Wilson, in grasp; while, if we compare him with the Continental critics of his own time, he shows a greater sense of real literature than almost any of them. But, at the same time, he has not occupied the true standing-ground of the critic; he has not even set his foot on it, as Dryden, born before his death, was to do. In him, as in all these Renaissance critics, we find, not so much positive errors as an inability to perceive clearly where they are and what their work is.

Passing from the performances of the several countries^[291] to the general critical upshot of the century, as we passed to those performances from the survey of individual works, we have already secured one perception of result. Criticism is once more constituted; it is constituted indeed much more fully, if by no means more methodically, than has ever been the case before. By the time of our last Italian writer, Faustino Summo (Vauquelin is accidentally, and Ben Jonson not so accidentally, later in the other countries, but neither represents a stage so really advanced), Criticism has, besides its ancient books of the Law, quite a library of modern prophets, commentators, scribes. The strings of authorities, so specially dear to the coming century, can be produced without any difficulty whatsoever: and however much these authorities may differ on minor points, their general drift is unmistakable. Isolated dissenters like Patrizzi may make good their own fastnesses; but the general army hardly troubles itself to besiege or even to mask them, it goes on its way to conquer and occupy the land. Of the constitution established, or shortly to be established, in the conquered districts, some sketch has been given, but a caution should here once more be interposed against taking the word “established” too literally. Still, all the dogmas of the Neo-Classic creed, its appeal to the ancients and its appeal to Reason or Nature or Sense, its strict view of Kinds, its conception of Licence and Rule, its Unities, are more or less clearly evolved. And fresh particulars—such as its sharp reaction from the allowance and even recommendation of terms of art, archaisms, &c., which had been partly adopted by some Italians and warmly championed by the Pléiade—are at hand. Indeed, the business of the seventeenth century is, according to the title which we have ventured to take for the next book, much more to crystallise what is already passing out of the states of digestion and solution—to codify precedent case-law—than to do anything new.

There is not only this important advance in at least poetical theory to be considered, but also an advance still more important, though as yet not formally marshalled and regimented, in the direction of critical practice—of the application directly, to books old and new, of the critical principles so arrived at. We have seen that, for good and sufficient reasons, there was not so very much of this in classical times proper, and that there was so little of it as to be almost nothing in the Middle Ages. It did not seem necessary, in the concluding chapters of the first volume, to multiply proofs of this, as they could have been multiplied, merely to display acquaintance with mediæval literature. To take two fresh ones here, each famous for other reasons, the well-known reference of Wolfram von Eschenbach at the end of the Parzival to the “unrightness” of Chrestien de Troyes’ version, and the godly wrath which made “Kyot” set things in better order, contains no literary criticism at all; the matter, according to the usual mediæval habit, is looked upon as a question of truth or falsehood, not of good or bad literary presentment. And when the equally well-known but anonymous scribe wrote jubilantly on the Cursor Mundi,

it is as certain as anything can be that he was not thinking, as he might fairly have thought, of the not small skill in compilation and narration displayed in that mighty miscellany, but merely that it contained a great deal of useful instruction and pleasant history. In the notices of books and writers which accumulate during our present period this is more and more ceasing to be the case; it has in fact ceased to be so from almost the beginning.

Such an estimate as that given by Ascham as Cheke’s of Sallust simply could not have suggested itself to any mediæval mind; the Humanist practice of the fifteenth century had—quite early in the sixteenth—made it natural enough, at least as regards ancient writers. And it was constantly becoming more and more common as to moderns. The Italians, in a limited and scholastic fashion, had begun it long before as to Dante; they continued it in regard to Boccaccio and Petrarch; they were spurred on to practise it more and more, first by the immense popularity of the Orlando, and then by the rival (and deliberately urged as rival) charms of the Gerusalemme. Compare for one moment the survey of books and authors which we quoted or summarised from the Labyrinthus in the last volume with that which we have analysed from Lilius Giraldus in this—the whole point of view, the whole method of handling, is altered. In France and England more specially, attempts, clumsy, limited, subject to whatever epithet of qualification any one pleases to apply, as they may be, are made to take a backward historical view of poetry at least; and when great work such as Ronsard’s or Spenser’s is produced, there is a real, if rudimentary, attempt made to judge it critically. By the time that we reach Ben Jonson—who no doubt has a strong tinge of the seventeenth century superinduced, by nature as well as time, on his sixteenth-century nativity—such aperçus almost of the highest critical kind in their species, as those on Bacon and Shakespeare, are possible to at least the higher intellects,—it needs but a step to the very highest kind, such as that of Dryden on the same Shakespeare. That what we have called the crystallisation of a critical creed affects these estimates not always for the best is not of real importance—the point is that we have at last got them.

These are great things, but, still postponing criticism on this criticism as a whole, we may point out one or two drawbacks in it which already appear, and which are quite independent of individual inclination on the vexed questions of Classic or Romantic, Practice or Rule, Subject or Expression.

The first is that, to some extent unavoidably, but to a greater extent than that excuse will cover, the criticism which we have reviewed is criticism of poetry only. Most of it is quite openly and avowedly so. Poetica, Poetice, De Poetica, Della Poetica, Della Vera Poetica, Art Poétique, Art of Poetry, Apology for Poetry—these are the very titles of the books we have been discussing. When prose comes in at all, except on rare and mostly late occasions, it is only on questions more abstract or less abstract connected with poetry—“Whether Tragedy and Comedy may be written in Prose,” “Whether Verse is necessary to Poetry,” and the like. If poetry in ancient days was, though it received plenty of attention, sometimes injuriously postponed to oratory, it certainly now has its revenge. Oratory itself, though occasionally handled, obviously is so as a sort of legacy from the ancients themselves, from a sort of feeling that it would not be decent to say nothing about a subject on which Aristotle, and Cicero, and Quintilian have said so much. The formal Letter, being rather a favourite Italian institution, is not quite neglected; it receives some attention among ourselves from Ben. Whether History can or must give subjects for poetry is keenly debated; but the question is approached entirely from the side of interest in Poetry, not in History. At the very close of our period, we find so great a prose writer as Bacon doubting the solvency of vernacular prose; a little earlier we find Montaigne taking note of it chiefly, if at all, in regard to matter, Pasquier hardly taking notice of it at all.

This is unfortunate, because it tends further to perpetuate the mischievous absorption in Kinds, and to postpone the attainment of the position from which, though the difference between prose and poetry may be seen more sharply than ever, the common literary qualities of both, and the way in which they affect the delight of the receiver, are at last perceived. It is unfortunate, further, because it tends to prevent the enjoyment of the full advantages which the modern literatures are gradually giving to the critic in the very departments—the prose romance, the essay, and others—where ancient criticism suffered most from the absence of material.

Another drawback which it may seem captious, or ungenerous, or even childish, to urge, but which really has a great deal to do with the matter, is that, active as the period was in criticism, it did not produce a single very great critic practising on a great scale. Its four or five critics of greatest literary genius were (I exclude Bacon for reasons given, and Spenser hardly comes in) Ronsard, Du Bellay, Tasso, Sidney, and Ben Jonson. The two Frenchmen dealt with but a small part of the subject, and from but a special point of view; Tasso was mainly “fighting a prize,” and his own prize; Sidney’s was a very little tractate of general, if generous, protest, and entered into no applications; Ben’s critical remains are un-co-ordinated notes. On the other hand, of the specially critical writers, Scaliger on the strictly erudite and strictly classical side, Castelvetro in a sort of middle station, and Patrizzi as a voice crying in the wilderness, are perhaps the only three who rise distinctly above mediocrity. And, as has been pointed out already, Scaliger is too much of a pedant, Castelvetro is a mere commentator, and Patrizzi a philosopher militant, who carries on one of his campaigns in the province of criticism.

The disadvantages of this are twofold. Not merely do we get no brilliant and, at least in appearance and claim, authoritative exposition of the subject, like that of Boileau or that of Pope later on the dogmatic side, like those of Dryden and Johnson on the illustrative and exemplifying; but the whole critical system comes into existence by a process of haphazard accretion—by (to repeat a metaphor already used) an accumulation of individual judgments at common law. No doubt this gives a certain strength, a certain naturalness, to the creed when it is formed. It has not been foisted on the communis sensus—that sensus has been inured and trained to it. The extraordinary toughness and vitality of the resultant is very likely due to this. But it caused also some of that inconsistency and apparent irrationality which a system of common law almost necessarily contracts as it grows: and it was more and more driven to throw over these inconsistencies and irrationalities that cloak of factitious Reason, or Sense, or Nature which, by the eighteenth century, becomes the mere threadbare disguise of a decrepit Duessa.

If, and when, we arrive at the close of that century, after a somewhat shorter halt and survey at the termination of the seventeenth, when the deaths of Boileau and Dryden made a real break—we shall have to complete this necessarily partial view of the whole Neo-Classic dispensation. We have seen it here in its Period of Origins, and, without endeavouring to add too many strokes to the picture, we may point to the fresh illustration of that principle which has been adumbrated (I fear, from some remarks of good critics, with insufficient perspicuity) at the close of the last volume. We saw that the tendency of Greek criticism was good, because, whether it was perfect criticism in itself or not, it was exactly the criticism needed yet further to perfect the perfections of Greek literature; and that much the same was the case in Latin. We saw that the quiescence of Criticism in Mediæval times permitted the gracious wilding of mediæval art to flourish unchecked and fill the waste places of the field. But here we see a new thing, hinted at before, the opposition, that is to say, of criticism to at least the best creation. Sidney’s dramatic criticism simply would, if it could, sweep Shakespeare from rerum natura, and he looks half askance at the work of his own familiar friend Spenser. Ben would put the “Tamerlanes and Tamerchams” in the dustbin. To that untamable Romantic luxuriance which makes the glory of English literature at the time, which gives French most of its actual strength, and which, in failing measure, still supports the pride of Italy, the general tendency of Renaissance criticism opposes a perpetual “Thou“Thou shalt not.” It is not too much heeded—that would have been disastrous; but it is heeded to some extent, and that is salutary. A kind of check is put on the too wild curvetings, the too meteoric flights, of Pegasus. There was always the danger that Jeronimo at the beginning and Cleveland at the end might have too truly expressed our own great age; that the odd word-coinage of the Pléiade, and the tasteless rococo stuff of French literature about 1640, might have done the same for France. Against this the critics raised unceasing voices; and, though the voices were sometimes those of geese, they really did something to save the Capitol.