And a little later the Hijo says—
One is too apt to forget, in censuring eighteenth-century flippancy and superficiality in regard to the past, that all over Europe, more or less, this kind of childish stuff was still actually taught.
Luzán is at least not childish, though he betrays the insufficient historical examination and the hasty generalising which beset the whole school. Luzán. He devotes the principal attention of his folio,[727] after generalities avowedly taken from Muratori, to Epic and Tragedy, and while using complimentary words to Lope and Calderon, indicates, without doubt or hesitation, that his heart is with Corneille and Racine. It is true that he is himself—as all these Eighteenth-century “classics” are without exception, save the mere school dogmatists or the obstinate reactionaries like La Harpe—inconsistent. Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly[728] goes so far as to say that there is hardly a proposition in his book which is not contradicted elsewhere in it. But that he at least meant to be a neo-classic, a Unitarian, a Nicolaitan, there can be no doubt, nor any that he met with no markworthy or effectual resistance.
The rest of the Spanish criticism of the eighteenth century has, save for special students of Spanish literature, and perhaps even for them, very little interest; The rest uninteresting. and it is noticeable that, from this point, even the accomplished and indefatigable historian of the subject[729] practically breaks away from Spain itself, and gives a history of æsthetic ideas, not as they arose, and developed, and changed, and fell there, but rather as they went through these phases in Europe at large. The better known names of Spanish authors of the time, such as Isla and Feyjóo, have a certain right to figure here, but their literary critical work is only a part, and not a very important or interesting part, of the extension of the Aufklärung, especially in the forms which it assumed in France, to the most bigoted and conservative (except its sister Portugal) of European countries. This process, though perhaps necessary, is not in any department, political, religious, or other, particularly grateful to study; for Spain lost venerable and fascinating illusions—if illusions they were—to gain a very shallow, dubious, and second-rate civilisation and enlightenment. And this was almost more the case in literature than anywhere else.
Feyjóo’s Teátro Crίtico, a series of Essays published between 1726 and 1738, and his Letters, which after a short interval he began in 1742, and continued at intervals for eighteen years more, are more philosophical and “moral,” in the French sense, than literary. The rest uninteresting. But the “Spanish Hotel de Rambouillet”—the “Academy of good taste” which met about the middle of the century at the house of the Countess de Lemos—included not only Luzán, but another littérateur of high rank, Luis José Velasquez, Marquis of Valdeflores, with Nasarre y Ferriz, and others. The whole school was rather anti-national, but Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, their contemporary, did great service to Spanish literature by publishing the Origins, to which we have been indebted above,[730] and some by compiling a Rhetoric, traditional enough, but not specially “Gallo”-Classic. The famous Father Isla not only attacked the remnants of extravagant style, which had sought refuge in the Spanish pulpit, in Fray Gerundio, the one Spanish book of this time, which became a European possession, but left unpublished other critical work, especially in his poem of Ciceron, much of which is satirically critical of literature. Isla was probably more of a patriot than of a critic in his well-known attempt to claim Gil Blas for Spain, not merely in suggestion but in direct original. Nor should we omit to mention with honour, as members of that invaluable class of restorers of ancient literature which arose in almost all countries in the latter half of the century, Sedano of the Spanish Parnassus, Sanchez of the Poesias Anteriores al Siglo XV, and Sarmiento, the first general Historian of Old Spanish Poetry. Their work was, if a somewhat slow, a sure and certain antidote to the Gallicism of Moratin (Luzán’s chief successor) and others of the later time.[731]
Despite some exceptions (which only prove the rule rather more than is usual), and despite the immense dead-lift which at one time they gave, or helped to give, to criticism, the Germans have never been very good critics. Rise at last of German Criticism. There has always been too much in them of the girl in the fable who jumped on the floor to hunt mice, instead of attending to the more important business and pleasure of the occasion. And though that dead-lift which has been referred to began extremely early in the eighteenth century, its history belongs to our next volume. It is, indeed, less easy to effect the separation which our plan demands here than anywhere else; for hardly had German vernacular criticism begun to exert itself once more, after its long inertia since Opitz, than the double current of abstract æstheticism, and of study of Romantic literature, began to appear. But it would be impossible to omit from a gallery or panorama of Neo-classicism such a typical specimen of the perruque as Gottsched, such an eminent example of the “man who looks over his shoulder” as Gellert. And though we must leave substantive dealings with Bodmer, Breitinger, and their fellows and followers to that early division of the next volume in which, with leave of Nemesis, Germany will be compensated for the little pride of place she has hitherto enjoyed, it will be very proper here at least to mention the singular and interesting process of novitiate by which the Germans vindicated their character as the good boys of technical education; and, by sheer hard study and omnivorous reading, put the national abilities into a condition to turn out a Lessing and a Goethe.
The means—sufficiently obvious, but not often resorted to save by those nations which have not “decayed through pride”—were those of abundant translation from the more forward vernaculars, as well as from the classics. Its school time. The German Sammlungen of the first half of the eighteenth century[732] are very interesting things. From French, from English, from the Latin writings of the previous century, they selected, and batched together, critical tractates which they thought might do them good, taking these to heart with Aristotle and Horace, with Boileau and Vida. That the assemblage had sometimes something of a “Groves of Blarney” character—that people like Camusat[733] find themselves jostling Pope and Addison among writers of Belles-Lettres, and Vossius and Casaubon among scholars, mattered not so very much. Manure, seed, patterns (to take various lines of metaphor) were what the German mind wanted; and it received them in plenty, and certainly not without good result.
There are some very good authorities[734] who do not see much difference between Gottsched and his adversaries of the Swiss school, Bodmer and Breitinger. Classicism at bay almost from the first: Gottsched. I am not able to agree with them. That there are characteristics in common nobody can deny,—that Gottsched is of the evening and Bodmer and Breitinger of the morning of the same day on the older arrangement, I do most sincerely think. And “the German Johnson”—so echt-deutsch and so little Johnsonian—is much too characteristic and agreeable a figure not to have some substantive place here. It is interesting no doubt—and it would give an excellent subject for one of the many not-to-be-written excursus of this history—that he, the analogue, to some extent, in Germany, of Johnson himself in England and of La Harpe in France, comes far earlier than these representatives of the neo-classicism which “makes an end” in countries far more accomplished in literature. But this is natural. The seventeenth century in Germany had but been one long fallow, producing nothing but not unfascinating weeds, like Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, or wildings like Grimmelshausen. But, as in other cases of fallow, the rains of heaven had descended, and the winds had blown, and the worms had done their work of breaking up, and the soil, if technically “foul,” was also fertile. Its production was necessarily mixed; but it was at any rate not subject to the desperate hook of the preceptist weeder, or to the traditional courses of the orthodox agriculturist. The German man of letters of 1700-1750 had the “Y” before him as few men of letters have had.
Gottsched took the classical branch of the letter unflinchingly, and quarrelled with others, like a good party man, as he realised that they were taking the Romantic. The Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst. His Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst[735] is frontispieced with a striking picture of Apollo, and the Muses, and Pegasus looking benignly at Bellerophon(?), whom he is just pitching off, and Mercury, probably flying, but in appearance rather tumbling, down the Holy Hill, with a copy of Horace in his hand, and a group of critics and poets and personified Kinds of poetry waiting to receive it in ecstatic attitudes at the bottom. It has three separate dedication-pages, in the largest print, to three fair ladies of the same family,—the high-born Countess and Lady, Lady Ernestine Wilhelmine, widowed Baroness von Plotho, born Reichsgräfinn von Manteufel, “my especially gracious Countess and Lady”; the high-born Countess Johanna Henrietta Constantia, born the same, “my especially gracious Countess”; and my ditto the high-born Countess Louisa Marianne, born the same,—not to mention a beautiful Ode, several Prefaces, an Introduction, and the full text, with translation in German Alexandrines, of the Ars Poetica itself. If writer and reader do not feel themselves safe under the convoy of all these charming spells and periapts, it is surely a pity.
It would, however, be most uncritical, and entirely unjust to Gottsched, to assert or insinuate that his apparatus is mere matter of parade. Its chief idea. On the contrary, the preface to the second edition first enumerates as “the greatest connoisseurs and masters of Poetic,” Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Scaliger, Boileau, Bossu, Dacier, Perrault, Bouhours, Fénelon, Saint-Evremond, Fontenelle, La Motte, Corneille, Racine, Callières, Furetière, Shaftesbury, Addison, Steele, Castelvetro, Muralt, and Voltaire. For all of whom, except where (like Béat de Muralt, for instance) they have been reserved for reasons,[736] reference may be made to other pages of the present History. It afterwards specially alleges, as additional authorities, Riccoboni’s history of the Italian Stage, an anonymous Paragone della Poesia Tragica d' Italia con quella de Francia which I have not seen, Rapin, Brumoy [spelt Brumois], Hédelin, Rémond de Saint-Mard, an English anonymus[737] on The Taste of the Town, Ramsay, Pope, Casaubon, Heinsius, Voss, Rappolt, and Sebastian Regulus his Imitations of the First Book of the Æneis (which last I have not read and do not think I intend to read). In the Preface to the Third Edition his quarrel with the Swiss school breaks out. We shall see in future, I trust, what this school taught; it is here of chief, if not of only, import to know what, according to Gottsched, the “Zürichers” (i.e., those about Bodmer) did not teach and he did. “While I,” he says in mingled pride and indignation, “after treating of poetry in general, have dealt with all its Kinds, and given its own rules to each, so that beginners may turn them out impeccably, the Zürich poetic has nothing of the sort.” “Man would,” adds Gottsched incredulously and detesting, “thereout neither an Ode nor a Cantata, neither an Eclogue nor an Elegy, neither a Verse Epistle nor a Satire, neither an Epigram nor a Song of Praise, neither an Epic nor a Tragedy, neither a Comedy nor an Opera to make learn!”[738]
The Slurk-and-Pott objurgation which follows concerns us little. But the passage just quoted has real weight. For it shows how, to the absolute and half-incredulous horror of one party, and probably by the not entirely conscious or intentional purpose of the other, the battle of Rule-poetic against Appreciation-poetic had begun. To Gottsched the Art, or Science, or what-not, of Poetry is a huge schedule, which may be quite emptied of actual contents and yet retain its pre-established compartments and the rules for filling them; to his adversaries Poetry itself is a library, a treasury, a new world full of things and persons that cause, or do not cause, the poetic pleasure.
It would be unnecessary to analyse this not quite “the poor last” of Classical Poetics. Specimen details. It may be sufficient to say that Gottsched has his first or general and his second or particular book, the first dealing with the origin and growth of poetry, the character and taste of a poet, the species of poetic imitation, the Wonderful in poetry, the Admirable in poetry, and the like, the second with the usual Kinds in regular order. His occasional utterances are, at this stage of the history, of far greater importance. We find (p. 86) the sonnet classed with madrigals, rondeaux, and other “little things which are worth little.” The old German Heldengedichten are (p. 88), if not so good as Homer, Virgil, and Voltaire, yet not so bad as Marino, Ariosto, Chapelain, Saint-Amand, and Milton.[739] Later (p. 109), “Among Englishmen, who are specially inclined to excessive fantasy, Milton in his Paradise Lost has exhibited everything that man can possibly do in this kind of schwärmerei.” It is well to remember that the detested Zürichers were special admirers of Milton; but there is no reason to suspect Gottsched of being unduly biassed by this, either here or in the longer examination which he gives to Milton’s sins afterwards. He is almost as severe on Ariosto (p. 209), arguing with unruffled gravity that the discoveries of Astolfo (which he sums up as solemnly as a judge) are not probable, and finishing with the sad observation that the Italian’s fantasies are really more like a sick man’s dream than like the reasonable inventions of a poet.
The good Gottsched, in fact, is an apostle not so much even of classicism as of that hopeless prosaism to which classicism lent itself but too easily.[740] Even Voltaire is not sufficiently wahrscheinlich for him; and he asks (pp. 183, 215) in agitated tones whether Herr Voltaire, who has elsewhere such sound ideas on the Highest of Beings, has not made a mistake in the magic scenes of the Henriade? He is, however, no friend to prosaic diction, and stoutly defends what he calls (p. 263) “good florid expression,”[741] giving some better examples, from poets like Amthor and Flemming, than those who regard the German seventeenth century as a mere desert might expect. So long as he can get these flights under the recognised Figures, and so long as they do not outstep “the rules of prudence” (273), all is well. But the outstepping, as may be guessed, is not very far off. He finds it, under the guidance of Bouhours, in Malherbe of all remarkable places, and naturally much more in Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein, as well as in Ariosto and Marino and Gracián,—being as severe on galimatias and “Phébus” as he had previously (and quite justly) been against that medley of German-French which Opitz had long before condemned. There is, in fact, a good deal of sense as well as of minuteness in Gottsched’s particular rules, both as to poetry in general and as to the Kinds. In dealing with these last he gives very extensive examples, and since these are taken from a division of poetry not much in most readers’ way, they are distinctly interesting. But we must not follow him into these details; nor is it at all necessary to do so. The neo-classic critic has at least the virtue of adhering to his own rules, and observing his own type, with Horatian strictness. There is little danger of finding in him a politic Achilles, a prudent youth, or an old man who is good-humoured and does not praise the past. Gottsched says of Epic and Romance, of Comedy and Tragedy, exactly what we should expect him to say, if not exactly what we may think he ought to have said. He cannot understand how Tasso could hope to “unite this Gothic taste of chivalrous books” (p. 682) with the Greek rules of Heroic poetry; and he makes so bold as almost to rebuke the great Voltaire for according the name of Heroic poem to the Lusiad and the Araucana. But there is a characteristic note in the words, “It is time to leave the historic-critic part and come to the dogmatic,” which, it seems, we shall find—all of it—in Aristotle, Dacier, and Le Bossu. It is, in a different relation, like Balzac’s passons aux choses réelles—“Never mind the Poems: come to the Rules!”
Gellert, a pupil of Gottsched, at any rate for a time, and a pretty poet in his own way, betrays that tendency to compromise, if not actually to capitulate, which we have seen in parts of French Classicism. Gellert: he transacts. His principal critical tractate[742] carries a confession in its very title, “How far the Use of the Rules extends in Rhetoric and Poetry,” and the confession is emphasised in the text. It comes to this—that the Rules are useful, but only generally so, and with a “thus far and no further.” It is evident that, when this point is reached, the Oppression of Gwenhidwy is on the eve of descending upon the land of Gwaelod, the dykes are bursting, and the sea is flowing in.[743] We saw just now Gottsched’s indignant horror at the idea of writing upon poetry without giving rules to anybody how he shall do anything. He must have been more horrified still, because there is an element of treacherous surrender instead of bold defiance in it, at this other view of the rules as not bad things in their way—to be followed when it is convenient and when you please, and broken or left behind when it is convenient, or when you please again. In fact, any such admission at once reduces the whole Neoclassic system to an absurdity. A law which may be obeyed or not exactly as people choose—a sealed pattern which is followed or not at the taste and fancy of the tailor or other craftsman—you surely cannot too soon repeal the first and throw the second into the dustbin. And this was, as we shall see, what Germany very speedily did.