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] 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.

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. 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]

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. 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]

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. 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] 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:—

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.

Version B (which is dated long after Fabricius’ death in 1571) is not only much enlarged but differently arranged. 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. 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.

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.

The De Tragœdiæ Constitutione is beyond all doubt a very remarkable book. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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—

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]

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. 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—

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. 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.

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.

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.

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. 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). 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]

Another poet of the time, Cowley, ought to have given us criticism of real importance. 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.

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. 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.

The “Heroic Poem” was to be neither pure Romance nor pure Epic, but a sort of medley between the two. 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. 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]

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.

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. 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]

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. 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.