In the present Interchapter we come to a sort of Omphalos of the whole projected History. Here and here only, up to the present day, do we find a Catholic Faith of criticism, not merely at last constituted, but practically accepted over the whole literary world. In ancient times, though it is not difficult to discern a creed of a not wholly dissimilar character, yet that creed was arrived at in roundabout fashion, and was never applied universally to poetry and prose as literature. In the Middle Ages there was no such creed at all. In the century which—or rather a certain aspect of it—will furnish us with the subject of the last Book of the present volume, the catholic faith still maintains, and even, as is the wont of such things, rather tightens, its hold as received orthodoxy; but there are grumblings, and threatenings, and upheavals on the one hand, and on the other the tendency to a dangerous latitudinarianism. In that which, with the permission of the fates, will, with the Dissidents of the Eighteenth, give the subject of the next volume, there is no parallel consensus even of a prevailing party. Take a dozen critics of any distinction, at different times and in different countries of the seventeenth century in Europe, and ask them to enunciate some general laws and principles of literary criticism. The results, if not slavishly identical, would be practically the same, putting aside particular and half unreal squabbles of Ancient and Modern and the like. Do the same at any time for the last hundred—certainly for the last seventy or eighty—years, and the result would be a Babel. If any two of the utterances did not betray direct contradiction, it would probably be because the speakers began at entirely different facets of the subject.

Whether this literary unanimity—which resembles the ecclesiastical unanimity, on the ruins of which it grew, not least in being a little unreal—was a good thing or a bad thing in itself, is one of those larger questions which we do not purpose to argue out here. The point for us is that it existed. It was compatible, as in the other case, with a good deal of minor difference: there might be literary Scotists and Thomists; there might even (as in the Ancient and Modern case) be a Great Schism of the most apparently important kind. But this was as a rule mere jangling; and the more serious of the Moderns generally tried to make out little more than that their favourites could claim as much, or more, of the graces which both esteemed, as the other people’s favourites possessed.

We have seen in the last Interchapter how something like this creed had been achieved—though not without a good deal of opposition, and hardly, in any case, with the result of authoritative and complete statement—in Italy, and to some extent borrowed thence, in other countries, before the end of the sixteenth century itself. The seventeenth did little more than crystallise it, lay stress on particular points, fill up some gaps, arrange, codify, illustrate. The absence of dissidence, except on the minor points, is most remarkable. In regard to Aristotle, in particular, there are no Patrizzis and hardly any Castelvetros. Men tack on a considerable body of Apocrypha to the canonical books of the Stagirite, and misinterpret not a little that he actually said. But they never take his general authority in question, seldom the authority of any ancient, and that of Horace least of all. The two great artificial conceptions of the elaborate “Unities” drama, with Acts and Scenes taking the place of the choric divisions, and of the still more artificial “Heroic Poem,” with its Fable, its Epic Unity, its Machines, and so forth, acquire in theory—if luckily, as, for instance, in England, by no means in practice—greater and greater dignity. It becomes a sort of truism that the drama is the most beautiful and ingenious, the heroic poem the noblest, thing on which the human mind can exercise itself. But they are difficult things, sir! very difficult things. Each is sharply isolated as a Kind: and the other Kinds are ranged around and below them. You never criticise any thing first in itself, but with immediate reference to its Kind. If it does not fulfil the specifications of that Kind, it is either cast out at once or regarded with the deepest suspicion.

Further, all the Kinds in particular, as well as Poetry itself in general, possess, and are distinguished by, Qualities which are, in the same way, rigidly demanded and inquired into. It is generally, if not quite universally, admitted that a poem must please: though critics are not quite agreed whether you are bound to please only so as to instruct. But you must please in the Kind, by the Quality, according to the Rule. There is no room for nondescripts; or, if they are admitted at all, they must cease to be nondescripts, and become Heroi-comic, Heroi-satiric, “Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,”^[538] or what not.

This general view may seem unorthodox to those who put faith in the notion—to be found in some books of worth, as well as of worship—that there was a “Romantic revolt” in the beginning of the seventeenth century—that there was even a kind of irruption or recrudescence of mediæval barbarism, and that the pronounced and hardened classicism of the later century was a fresh reaction—a case of Boileau à la rescousse! The texts, and the facts, and the dates, do not, to my thinking, justify this view of history, in so far, at least, as criticism is concerned. The crystallising of the classical creed goes on regardless of Euphuism, earlier and later, in England, of Marinism in Italy, of Culteranism and Conceptism in Spain, of the irregular outburst of similar tastes in France, which marks the reign of Louis XIII. As we have seen, Ogier, in the last named country, at the very moment of striking a blow for Romantic drama, admits that the critics are against him; and we have also seen how they were. In England, Sidney, at the beginning of the great Elizabethan period, holds out hands to Jonson at the end. The very Spanish Romantics, when they come to consider the matter critically, make an unblushing transaction between conscientious theory and popular practice: and such an Italian iconoclast as Beni is classical, in the very act and process of belittling the classics.

At the same time, this accepted faith of Criticism, when we come to examine it, is a very peculiar Catholicity. Uncompromisingly Aristotelian in profession, its Aristotelianism, as has been recognised by an increasing number of experts from the time of Lessing downwards, is hopelessly adulterated. Many of the insertions and accretions are purely arbitrary: others come from a combination of inability to forget, and obstinate refusal frankly to recognise, the fact that the case is quite a different case from that which Aristotle was diagnosing. But, by the time at least when the creed became triumphant, a new Pope, a new Court of Appeal, has been foisted in, styling itself Good Sense, Reason, or even (though quite Antiphysic) Nature. That this anti-Pope, this Antiphysis, was partly created by the excesses of the Euphuist-Gongorist movements, need not be denied; but this is comparatively irrelevant. We have traced above, in almost all their principal exponents, the curious, and sometimes very ludicrous, attempt to conciliate that furor poeticus which the ancients had never denied, with those dictates of good sense which the ancients were presumed to have accepted and embodied. A professed satirist could evolve, in his happiest moments, nothing more comic than the eirenicon of Mambrun,^[539] or, rather, than his clinical examination of the poet in fury, and his observation of the poet in his right mind.

The survey of the development of this phenomenon, or group of phenomena, in different countries, requires less minuteness than was needed in the last Interchapter, because the central stage of the movement is both of less importance and of less complexity than the beginnings of it: but it is essential to the scheme of these Interchapters, and to that of the whole book, that some such survey should be given.

In Italy, as we have seen, the results of the period were almost insignificant—a fact no doubt connected with, though in no sense necessarily caused by, the declension of the Italian creative genius after Tasso. We have, it may be hoped, established, by the slow but irresistible process of reciting the actual history, the truth that no constant ratio exists between periods of creation and periods of criticism—that they may go hand in hand, or that one may follow the other, or that both may fail to put in any important appearance, as Fate and metaphysical aid may determine. This, for Italy, was a period of the last kind, though not one of its very worst examples. The Italians continued both to play at criticism in their Academies, and to accumulate solid though second-hand work in such laboratories as those of Aromatari. They fought out the half-mock battle of the Ancients and Moderns, as became them, before other nations meddled with it: and they still maintained, for long, though not for the whole time, that position of supremacy, as masters in title to Europe, which the great achievements of the preceding century had given them. But they added nothing to their claims, and by degrees the supremacy passed from them.^[540]

That it passed to France is an accepted truth, and like most, though not all, accepted truths, this has so much of the real quality that it is idle to cavil at it. That it has been abused there can be little doubt—or could be little if people would take the small trouble necessary to ascertain the facts. I do not know who first invented the term “Gallo-Classic,” which, to judge by those Röntgen rays which the reader of examination-papers can apply, has sunk deep into the youthful mind of this country. It is a bad word. I have taken leave to call it “question-begging, clumsy, and incomplete,” before now; and I repeat those epithets with a fresh emphasis here. It begs the question whether “Italo-Classic” would not, in its own kind, be the properer term: it is clumsy because the two parts of it are not used in the same sense; and it is incomplete because it does not intimate that much beside French influence, and that a very peculiar and sophisticated kind of Classical influence, went to the making of the thing. But there was French influence: and for some three-quarters of a century France was the head manufactory in which Italian, Classical, and other ideas were torn up and remade into a sort of critical shoddy with which (as with other French shoddy in that and other times) Europe was rather too eager to clothe itself. Some pains have been taken in the foregoing Book to put the reader in a position to appreciate the real rise, progress, and history of French criticism of the Neo-classic^[541] type. The survey, whatever difference may exist as to its justice in matter of opinion, will not, I think, be found erring in matters of fact: and it will show that the position usually accorded to Boileau requires some reconsideration. But Boileau was undoubtedly the greatest man of letters who, holding these views, devoted himself specially and definitely to the expression of them; and, for good or for ill, his name is associated with the movement. I agree with Keats,^[542] who here, as in so many other matters, came right by genius. Those of us who do not possess this royal key can, at any rate, if we choose to take the trouble, come right by knowledge.

The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns—though we have spoken hard words of it—might look like revolt against the tyranny of Despréaux, and it undoubtedly spread seeds of the more successful revolution which followed; but the more one studies it, the more one sees that the revolt was in the main unconscious. As we have partly shown, and as might be shown much more fully, the Moderns were, as a rule, just as “classical” in their ideas as the Ancients. They were as incapable of catholic judgment; they were even more ignorant of literature as a whole: they were at least as apt to introduce non-literary criteria; they were as much under the obsession of the Kind, the Rule (cast-iron, not leaden), the sweeping generalisation. Too commonly the thing comes to this—that the man who can conjugate tupto will not hear of anything which lessens the importance of that gift, and that the man who cannot conjugate tupto will not hear of any virtue attaching to it.

Most other countries require little notice here. The Germans make practically no figure; the Dutch confine themselves to classical study and the popularisation of reviewing; and the Spaniards, with characteristic indolence, refuse to work out the interesting problem presented to them by the recalcitrance of their national drama to the consecrated ideas of the general creed. England is of more importance. I have tried to show that it is of very much more; but this importance belongs entirely to one man. This one man in his time played many parts: and as the main aim of literature is to give pleasure, and to produce original sources thereof, we cannot perhaps say that his critical part was the greatest. But we may almost say that it was the most important. We can imagine English literature without the poetry of Dryden: it would be wofully impoverished, but somebody would take up the burden, probably before Pope. Certainly Pope would take it up, though with much more to do. But English criticism, and, what is more, European criticism of the best and most fruitful kind, would have had, if Dryden had been absent, to seek some totally new source: and it is impossible to tell where that source would have been found. There is no precedent—Lilius Giraldus and Patrizzi between them might have produced one in Italy, but it is of the highest significance that they did not—for Dryden’s peculiar way of shaking different literatures and different examples of literature together, of indicating the things that please him in all, and of at least attempting to find out why they please him. It is this, not his parade of Rules, and his gleanings from the books, that makes his critical glory: and it is this in which, among critics up to his own time, he is alone.

Yet even he does parade “rules”; even he does belaud Rapin, and Le Bossu, and even Rymer; even he would have been, no doubt, quite as ready to take the oath to Boileau as he was nobly determined not to take it to William. His genius is recalcitrant to the orthodoxy of the time; but something else in him accepts it. It is not for nothing that he never published that word of power which dissolves all the spells of Duessa—“Had Aristotle seen our plays he might have changed his mind.”

That, however, there was, at any rate in the earlier part of the time, much blind, and even a little conscious revolt against classicism, independent of the Ancient and Modern quarrel, is not to be wholly denied. I have hinted doubts as to the correctness of regarding the Euphuist-Metaphysical extravagances in England, Marinism in Italy, Gongorism in Spain, and the fantastic and “precious” fancies which mark the reign of Louis XIII. and the Fronde in France, as either deliberate reactions against classicism, or abortive births and false dawns of Romance. They are in almost every case direct results of the Romantic or mediæval side of the earlier Renaissance—last things, not first. But, by the end of the century, they were almost everywhere got well under; though in Spain, their greatest stronghold, it was not till the eighteenth century itself was some way advanced that Luzán administered the critical miséricorde, or, if we must use the language of the country, played despeñador to them. Any other interpretation of the phenomena seems to me to distort them and make them unintelligible, while the procession of the Metaphysical from the Spenserian stage, of Marinism from Tasso, of Gongorism from the great Spanish age, and of the French extravagants from the Spaniards and Marino, working not a little on the Pléiade itself, is natural, historical, and consistent with logic. But these very facts prepare and lead up to the triumph of Neo-Classicism.

By dint, however, of these actions and interactions, there was actually evolved, towards the end of the century, a sort of false Florimel or Duessa, who was called Taste. She was rather a Protean Goddess, and reflected the knowledge or the want of it, the real taste or the want of it, possessed by her priests and worshippers. The Taste of Dryden and the Taste of Rymer are two totally different things; there is even a very considerable difference between the taste of Hédelin and the taste of Bouhours. But in all save the very happiest minds the Taste of this time, as far as Poetry is concerned almost wholly, and to a great extent as regards prose, is vitiated by all manner of mistaken assumptions, polluted by all manner of foolish and hurtful idolatries. There is the Idol of the Kind which has been noticed; the Idol of the Quality; the Idol of Good Sense, the most devouring of all.^[543] It is agreed, and agreed very pardonably, that it is not well to write

But the baser folk go on from this—and all but the very noblest have some difficulty in preventing themselves from going on—to think that a man should not write

There is a sense, and a very proper sense, that, in a certain general way, style must suit subjects: that you ought not to write to a Child of Quality, aged five, as you would do to Queen Anne, aged fifty.^[544] But this topples over into the most absurd limitations, so that, a little later than our actual time, we shall find Pope taking modest credit to himself with Spence for that, though Virgil in his Pastorals “has sometimes six or eight lines together that are epic,” he had been so scrupulous as “scarce ever to have two together, even in the Messiah.” Indeed it is hardly possible to find a better reductio ad absurdum of Neo-Classicism than this. You lay down (as we saw long ago that Servius did lay it down), from a general induction of the practice of a particular poet, such and such a rule about Virgil’s styles in his various works. Then you turn this individual observation into a general rule. And then you go near to find fault with the very poet from whom you have derived it because he does not always observe it—as if his unquestionable exceptions had not as much authority as his supposed rules. Nor is there any doubt that this fallacy derives colour and support from the false Good Sense, the Pseudo-Reason. The induction from practice is hitched on to Reason so as to become a deduction and a demonstration, and once established as that, you deduce from it anything you like. Meanwhile Good Sense, as complaisant to the critic as stern to the victim of his criticism, will approve or disapprove anything that you choose to approve or disapprove, will set her seal to any arbitrary decision, any unjust or purblind whim, and can only be trusted with certainty to set her face invariably against the highest poetry, and often against certain kinds not so high.^[545]

The result of all this is that, with the exception of Dryden and somewhat later Fontenelle (see next Book), hardly any critics of the time achieve, with any success, the highest function of the true critic of literature, the discovery and celebration of beautiful literary things. It is not their business, or their wish, to set free the “lovely prisoned soul of Eucharis.” If Eucharis will get a ticket from the patronesses of the contemporary Almack’s, and dress herself in the prescribed uniform, and come up for judgment with the proper courtesy, they will do her such justice as Minerva has enabled them to do; but if not, not. Sometimes (as in the case of the immortal Person of Quality who took the trouble to get Spenser into order^[546]) they will good-naturedly endeavour to give her a better chance, poor thing! But they will never kiss the Daughter of Hippocrates on the mouth, and receive the reward thereto appropriated.^[547]

That, on the other hand, there is observable, throughout the century, a certain interpenetration of the older and more Romantic spirit—in the creative work chiefly, but even there dying down, in the critical overmastered from the first, and less and less perceptible,—this opinion will meet with no contradiction here, but, on the contrary, with the strongest support. All the eccentric phenomena, as they may be called, which have been noticed from Euphuism to Gongorism, are symptoms of this on the larger scale; and other things—the fancy of Chapelain himself for the Romances, the lingering attraction which Gongorism exercises even on such a man as Bouhours—confirm it. Yet even this was, as has been said, steadily dying down; and by the end of the century the old Phœnix was nearly in ashes, though the new bird was to take slow rebirth from them. I am myself inclined to think that the signs of Romantic leaning in Dryden belong to the new, not to the old, chapter of symptoms; and that in this way England, the last, save perhaps Spain, to give up, was the first to feel again for, the standard of Romanticism. But in this Dryden was in advance, not merely of all his countrymen, but of all Europe; and he did not himself definitely raise any flag of revolt. On the contrary, he always supposed himself to be, and sometimes was, arguing for a reasonable and liberal Classicism.

It was not in flippancy, but in logical connection with the present subject, that attention was drawn above^[548] to a certain aporia of Tassoni’s on the admitted lovesomeness, body and soul, of le donne brutte, and on the tricks which bruttezza and bellezza play to each other. If that ingenious poet and polemic had but pushed his inquiries a little further, and extended them in purview as well as lineally, he might have come to great things in criticism. It might, for instance, have struck him whether the accepted notions of literary beauty were not peculiarly like those of physical beauty, which were also those of his century. These laws laid it down that “from the chin to the pit betwixt the collar-bones there must be two lengths of the nose,” that the whole figure must be “ten faces high,” and that “the inside of the arm, from the place where the muscle disappears to the middle, is four noses”; while the careful calculators noted all the while with dismay that both the Apollo Belvidere and the Medicean Venus set these proportions at the most godlike defiance.^[549] He would (or he might) have observed that, just as when you have settled exactly what a bella donna must not have, there is apt to sail, or slip, into the room somebody with that particular characteristic to whom you become a hopeless slave, so, when you have settled the qualifications of the drama with the infallibility of Hédelin, and those of the Epic with the finality of Le Bossu, there comes you out some impudent production which is an admirable poem, while the obedient begettings of your rules are worthless rubbish. Tassoni, I say, might have done this; he seems to have had quite the temper to do it; but he did it not. It was doubtless with him, as with others, a case of Di terrent et Jupiter hostis—the gods of their world and their time forbade them.

But the angry gods were not wholly able to maintain their anger; and at the other end of the century, in that Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns which, for all its irritating ignorationes elenchi, did certainly assist in the discussion of general æsthetic problems, we find, among other glimpses, an advance, though only a partial advance, on this suggestion of the Pensieri. Perrault, who doubtless knew Tassoni (one of his brothers had translated the Secchia), has a curious passage on the diversity of the forms of feminine beauty. He had,^[550] he says, visited the gallery of a connoisseur who had collected portraits of the most famous beauties of Europe for a century past. There were not two of the same type of loveliness; and of the spectators there were not two who fixed on the same portrait as the most beautiful. But Perrault, though he has had this glimpse of the true path opened up to him, does not dare pursue it. He is as convinced as the rest of them that you can reduce ideas of beauty to a minimum which is always invariable, though you may add others which vary; and he is perfectly arbitrary in his admissions and exclusions of these latter. He hates Gothic architecture; it may be strongly suspected that he would fall far short of Chapelain in appreciating Romance, for all his fairy tales. His criticisms of the Ancients belie his theory itself; for he will not open his eyes to see the beauty of their peculiarity. His remarks on Homer are pitiable. My always estimable and not seldom admirable predecessor, Blair, was no doubt sadly “left to himself” when he selected,^[551] as the awful example of a man of bad taste, the person who said that Homer was no better than “some old tale of chivalry.” But Perrault, I fear, is a more terrible spectacle when he says that none of the Three Tragedians will bear comparison with Corneille (and I think I may claim the merit of not undervaluing Corneille), that nobody but professed scholars can read Aristophanes, and that Ovid is the inferior of Benserade. When we read these things—and except in Fontenelle, the eternal exception, they are to be found in every espouser of the Modern side, just as the corresponding absurdities are to be found in every defender of the Ancients—there is nothing to say but “This is all out of focus. Both of you see men as trees walking.”

A summary of the whole merits and defects of neo-classicism must again be postponed; though with no further prorogation than to the end of the next Book and the present volume. As for the special defects of this special period we have said enough; and we may conclude this Interchapter with a glance at its special merits. They are partly of a negative kind, but they certainly exist. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, there was no code of criticism at all; in the sixteenth century only a growing approach to one, though the approach had become very near at the last. Some outbreaks of heterodoxy—the last stand of Romance for the time—had, as usually happens, drawn the orthodox together, had made them sign a definite, or almost definite, instrument or confession. Just or unjust, adequate or inadequate, even consistent or inconsistent, as it may be, from the point of view of a very searching and all-inspecting logic, the neo-classicism of the late seventeenth century was a thing about which there could be no mistake. It knew its own mind about everything which it chose to consider, and valiantly shut its eyes to everything which it chose to ignore. For a time—a short time only, of course, for the triumph of a religion is always the signal for the appearance of a heresy—the majority of people had not much more doubt about what was the proper thing to believe in and admire in literature, than they had about the multiplication table. It became possible—and it was done, as we shall see, first in Italy, then elsewhere—to write real literary histories: it became still more easily possible to criticise new books on a certain basis of accepted postulates. And it is by no means certain that this provisional orthodoxy was not a necessary condition of the growth of the new study of Æsthetic, which, though it has done criticism harm as well as good, has certainly done it good as well as harm.

Nor is it possible to deny that there was something to admire in the creed itself. It was weakest—it was in fact exceedingly weak—on the poetical side; but the world happened to have accumulated a remarkably good stock of poetry in the last two centuries or so, and a fallow, or a cessation of manufacture, was not undesirable. Prose, on the other hand, had never been got into proper order in the vernaculars; and it was urgently desirable that it should be so got. The very precepts of the classical creed which were most mischievous in poetry were sovereign for prose. Here also they might hinder the development of eccentric excellence; but it was not eccentric excellence that was wanted. Unjust things have been said about the poetry of the Augustan ages; just things may be said against the criticism which mainly controlled that poetry. But it is hardly excessive to say that every precept—not purely metrical—contained in the Arts of Boileau and of Pope, is just and true for Prose. You may fly in the face of almost every one of these precepts and be the better poet for it; fly in the face of almost any one of them in prose, and you must have extraordinary genius if you do not rue it.

Even as to poetry itself some defence may be made. This poetry needed these rules; or rather, to speak more critically, these rules expressed the spirit of this poetry. The later and weaker metaphysicals in England, and fantasts in France, the Marinists and Gongorists in Spain and Italy, had shown what happens when Furor [vere] Poeticus ceases to ply the oars, and Good Sense has not come to take the helm. It is pretty certain that if this criticism had not ruled we should not have had good or great Romantic poetry; we should at best have had (to take England) a few more Dyers and Lady Winchelseas. But if it had not ruled we should have had a less perfect Pope and less presentable minorities of this kind, and have been by no means consoled by a supply of eighteenth-century Clevelands. Once more, the period has the criticism that it wants, the criticism that will enable it to give us its own good things at their own best, and to keep off things which must almost certainly have been bad.