This, of course, is quite in accordance with the horror of a daring metaphor—of one which runs the risk of seeming “frigid”—which we find prevailing from Aristotle to Longinus, and even in both these great men. To us, most assuredly, the likening of the grass to the tresses of Mother Earth is not in the least absurd, but a very beautiful and poetical phrase, awaking, and adjusting itself aptly to, a train of equally poetical suggestion. But before very long the advice as to the choice of language takes the plain and simple form, “Strip the Ancients!” The poet is bidden to fit
to himself; he is to gird himself up to the “theft,” and drive the spoil on every occasion. He who trusts to his own wit and invention is unhesitatingly condemned and pitied. If you want to live, to have your works escape decay, you must “steal.” Vida repeats the very word over and over again, and without the slightest bashfulness or compunction. He is, however, good enough to admit that, if a new word is absolutely wanted to express something not in the ancients, it may be invented or borrowed—say from Greek—as the older Latins had themselves done. When one word is difficult to find or awkward if found, you must employ Periphrasis. Compounds are permitted to a certain extent (the weakness of Latin and its brood in this respect is well known), but never to a greater than that of two words. Perterricrepas is stigmatised by innuendo, though the word itself is Lucretian, and though there is absolutely no principle in the restriction. You are to tone down ill-sounding proper names, as Sicharbas into Sichæus. But in all cases your words are to be entirely subservient to the sense, though they may and should be suited to it—a doctrine which lends itself of course to extensive Virgilian illustration. And so the poem concludes with a peroration of some length, drawing ever and ever closer to, and at last ending in, the laudation of the unrivalled Maro.
Had it not been for the astonishing accuracy with which, as has been said, Vida actually anticipated the dominant critical taste of something like three hundred years, and the creative taste of about half that period, not many more lines than we Essential poverty of its theory. have given pages might have been devoted to him. That the poem as a composition is a sufficiently elegant piece of patchwork may of course be freely granted; and it deserves perhaps less grudging praise for the extreme fidelity and ingenuity with which it illustrates its own doctrines. But those doctrines themselves are, whether we look at them in gross or in detail, some of the poorest and most beggarly things to be found in the whole range of criticism. That the prescriptions are practically limited to those necessary for turning out the epic or “heroic” poem does not so much matter—though it is not entirely without significance. Vida’s idea of poetry is simply and literally shoddy.[40] That fabric—the fact is perhaps not invariably known to those who use the word—differs from others, not as pinchbeck differs from gold, or cotton from silk, but in being exclusively composed of already manufactured and worn textures which are torn up and passed afresh through mill and loom. And this is the process—and practically the sole process—which Vida enjoins on the poet, going so far as to pronounce anathema on any one who dares to pursue any other.
When it is examined in detail the proceeding may excite even more astonishment, which will be wisely directed not more to Historical and symptomatic significance. the original conception of it than to the extent to which, from what followed, it seems to have hit certain peculiarities in the æsthetic sense of mankind as regards poetry. We may easily go wrong by devoting too much attention to the fact of Vida’s individual selection of the poet to whom all other poets are bound jurare in verba. It is certain that, from his own day to this, Virgil has appealed to many tastes—and to some of the greatest—secure of his result of being pronounced altissimo poeta. Those who like him least cannot but admit that Dante and Tennyson among poets, that Quintilian and Scaliger—nay, that even Boileau—among critics, are not precisely negligible quantities. But the real subject—not merely of astonishment but of reasonable and deliberate determination to adopt a position of “No Surrender” in the denial of Vida’s position—is this selection of any poet, no matter who it may be, as not only a positive pattern of all poetic excellence, but a negative index expurgatorius of all poetic delinquency. Not Homer, not Dante, not Shakespeare himself, can be allowed the first position; and the main principle and axiom of all sound Criticism is, that not merely no actual poet, but no possible one, can be allowed the second. This kind of poetical predestination—this fixing of a hard-and-fast type, within which lies all salvation and without which lies none—is utter blasphemy against the poetical spirit. Not only will simple imitation of the means whereby one poet has achieved poetry not suffice to enable another to achieve it, but this suggestion is by far the least dangerous part of the doctrine. It will probably lead to the composition of much bad poetry, but it will not necessarily cause the abortion, or the mistaking when born, of any that is good. The damnatory clauses of the creed must have, and did have, this fatal effect.
Vida and those who followed him excused themselves, were accepted by their disciples, and have recently been eulogised by our newest Neo-Classics, as following Nature and Reason. The alleged appeal to Reason and Nature. That they said—perhaps that they thought—they followed both is unquestionable.[41] But as a matter of fact their Law of Nature—like the Articles of War in Marryat’s novel—was a dead letter, owing to the proviso, from the first more or less clearly hinted at and latterly avowed, that all of Nature that was worth imitating had already been imitated by the ancients. As for the appeal to Reason, it is a mere juggle with words; and it is astonishing that at this time of day any one should be deluded by it. What Reason prescribes Invocations to the Muses? What Reason insists upon beginning at the middle instead of at the beginning? What Reason is there in the preference of the pale académie of Drances to the Rembrandt sketch of the demagogue whom Ulysses cudgelled? of the shield of Æneas to the car of Achilles? of Sichæus to Sicharbas? What has Reason to say (more than she has to say against poetic transports altogether) against the exquisite and endlessly suggestive metaphor of “the tresses of the Mighty Mother” for the grass, with its wave, and its light, and its shadow, and the outline of the everlasting hills and vales as of the sleeping body beneath it? In all these cases, and in a hundred others, we may boldly answer “None and Nothing!” The true Reason—the Mind of the World—has not a word to say against any of these forbidden things, or in favour of any of those preferred ones.
But there is, let it be freely enough granted, a false Reason which has, no doubt, very much to say against the one and in favour of the other. The warped and stunted common-sense, the pedestrian and prosaic matter-of-factness, which is no doubt natural enough in a certain way to mankind, had made little appearance during the Middle Ages. These Ages may be called, if any one chooses, childish, they may be still more justly called fantastic; but they were never prosaic. It might be said of their Time-Spirit as of the albatross, that
But there was no doubt about the wings. With the Renaissance, prose, in the good sense no doubt as well as in the bad, returned; and as if to revenge itself for the universal employment of poetry during the Middle Ages themselves, it proceeded to lay hands even upon the poet. He might “transport”; with Longinus before them (if Vida had him not, his followers had), they could not very well deny this. But his methods of transporting must be previously submitted to a kind of inspectorship; and anything dangerous or unusual was strictly forbidden. His bolt was not to be “shot too soon nor beyond the moon”: he was most particularly not to be “of imagination all compact.” On the contrary, his imagination was to be alloyed with doses of the commonest common-sense. He might not even imp his wings save with registered feathers, and these feathers were to be neither too long nor too gay.
Such are the principles that we find in Vida, and such their inevitable result. Only let us once more repeat, not merely that he may well, in the admirable words of Lord Foppington, “be proud to belong to so prevailing a party” as the Neo-Classics of the following three centuries, but that he actually led and almost made that party himself.
A considerable time—more than a quarter of a century—had elapsed between Politian and Vida; but from the appearance of the latter’s book to the end of the century not more than three years on the average[42] passed without the appearance of a critical treatise of some importance. The main stream started. Every now and then a short lull would occur; but this was always made up by a greater crowd of writers after the interval. Such “rallies” of criticism (which occurred particularly during the fourth decade[43] of the century, about its very centre,[44] throughout the seventh,[45] eighth,[46] and ninth[47] decades, and just at the end[48]) were no doubt to some extent determined by the academic habits of the Italians, and the readiness with which members of the same academy, or different academies, took up the cudgels against each other. The individual exercises took various forms. A very large part of the work consists of commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics; another, closely connected, of set “Arts Poetic,” more ostensibly original; some deal with vulgar and some with “regular” poetry, while the concrete and comparative method is by no means neglected, though the abstract and theoretic is on the whole preferred. To attempt classification by kind would be a sacrifice of real to apparent method; and to trace the development of the same ideas in different writers would lead to inextricable confusion and criss-cross reference. We shall probably find it best to follow the rule which has been observed with rare exceptions throughout this History—that of giving the gist of particular books and the opinions of particular authors together, and leaving bird’s-eye views to the Interchapters.
Only two years after the appearance of Vida’s poem appeared the next critical Italian book of importance, the first instalment of Trissino’s Poetica. Trissino. The first instalment—for a singular interval took place between the beginning and the completion of this work. The first four parts were, as has just been said, published in 1529, when the main stream of Italian criticism had hardly begun to flow; the two last not till 1563, two years after the publication of Scaliger’s great work, and after a full generation (in the ordinary count) of active discussion of the matters.[49] Such conditions cannot fail to affect the homogeneity of a book. But still Trissino put it forth as one book in different parts, not, as he might very well have done, and as others actually did, as two books; and we are therefore entitled, and indeed bound, with the caution just given, to treat it as a whole. The handsome quartos,[50] well printed and beautifully frontispieced and vignetted, of the standard edition of Trissino’s Opere, are perhaps, taking them together, rather an ornament to the shelf than a plentiful provision of furniture for the mind. The disadvantages of versi sciolti have not often been shown more conspicuously than in the Italia Liberata, and the Sofonisba has little but its earliness and regularity to plead as a set-off to the general shortcomings of the modern classical Drama. The better repute of Italian comedy would hardly have arisen from such pieces as I Simillimi; and the Rime are most ordinary things. In our own division he is of some historical account; for it is impossible not to be grateful to the first publisher of the De Vulgari Eloquio, and that praise of earliness, which he has earned in more than one respect, must be extended to the first four parts of the Poetica. He boasts justly enough that nobody, save Dante and Antonio da Tempo, was before him, and that both of these had written in Latin.
Trissino does not, in his first instalment, busy himself with those abstract discussions which were soon to furnish the staple of Italian criticism. Division of his Poetic. He adopts Aristotle’s “Imitation” briefly without cavil or qualification; and then passes, in his First Part or “Division,” to the question of choosing your language, in which he generally follows Dante, but with an adaptation to the time. It is not with him a question of making an “Illustrious Vulgar Tongue,” an “Italian,” but of calling by that name one already adopted. In his further remarks on Diction he sometimes borrows, and often expands or supplements, the very words of Dante at first, and then passes to elaborate discussion, with examples, of the qualities of speech—Clearness, Grandeur, Beauty, Swiftness. Next he deals with what he calls the costume—character, ethos, suiting of style to person—with truth, artifice, and what he calls the “fashions”—that is to say, the alterations of quantity, &c., by dwelling, slurring, syncope, and the like. The arrangement of this First Division is not very logical; but, as we have seen, cross-division has been the curse of rhetorical-formal discussion of the kind from a very early period to the present day. The Second Division deals with pure prosody, the division of feet, shortening (rimozione), as in ciel for cielo, elision, cæsura, &c.; the Third with arrangement of verses and stanzas; the Fourth with the complete forms of Sonnet, Ballata, and Canzone, the sub-varieties of which were detailed with great care and plentiful examples.
Here what might more properly be called the First Part, consisting of these four divisions, ends; the long subsequent Second Part (made up of the Fifth and Sixth Divisions) has a separate Preface-dedication referring to the gap. These parts are not, like the others, divided into sections with headings; and, doubtless on the pattern if not of any one particular treatise, of the spirit of many which had gone between, they deal with general questions. The Imitation theory is handled at some length, and with citation of Plato as well as of Aristotle; the kinds of poetry are treated on a more general standard, and not with mere reference to the rules of constructing each. The larger part of the Fifth Division is given entirely to Tragedy: the Sixth begins with that Heroic Poem which was so much on the mind of the country and the century. But it ends chiefly on Figures—the formal heart of Trissino, long-travelled as it has been, fondly turning to its old loves at the last.
The contents of the treatise or treatises, especially if we take them with Trissino’s attempts to introduce the Greek Omega and the Greek Epsilon into Italian spelling, his grammatical “Doubts,” and his later “Introduction to Grammar,” his dialogue Il Castellano, and so forth,[51] will show his standpoint with sufficient clearness. His critical value. It is almost purely formal in the minor, not to say the minim, kinds of form. He is indeed credited by some with a position of importance, in the history of the Unities. He is, they say, the first to refer to the observance of the Unity of Time as a distinction from “ignorant poets,”[52] giving therewith a disparaging glance at mediæval drama.[53] But this overlooks the fact that he is simply repeating what Aristotle says, with an addition much more likely[54] to refer to non-Humanist contemporaries than to the almost forgotten “mystery.” His theory of the Heroic Poem, like his practice in the Italia Liberata, is slavishly Aristotelian. The chief evidence of real development that I can find is in his treatment of Comedy, where the extremely rapid and contemptuous dismissal of the Master called imperatively for some supplement, considering the popularity of the kind in the writer’s own time and country. Possibly reinforcing Aristotle here with Cicero, and certainly using the famous Suave mari magno of Lucretius, he succeeds in putting together a theory of the ludicrous to which, or to some subsequent developments of it in Italy, Hobbes’s “passion of sudden glory” has been[55] not unjustly traced. The “sudden” seems indeed to be directly due to Maggi, a critic who will be presently mentioned with other commentators on the Poetics. And Maggi had published long before Trissino’s later Divisions appeared, though, it may be, not before they were written.[56]
The growth during the interval had been of three kinds, sometimes blended, sometimes kept apart. Editors, &c., of the Poetics. The first kind consisted of translations, editions, and commentaries of and on the Poetics; the second, of abstract discussions of Poetry; the third, of more or less formal “Arts” not very different from Trissino’s own. The first class produced later, in the work of Castelvetro, a contribution of almost the first importance to the History and to the Art of Criticism; and it could not but exercise a powerful influence. It belongs, however, in all but its most prominent examples (such as that just referred to, which will be fully discussed in the next chapter), rather to monographers on Aristotle than to general historians of Criticism, inasmuch as it is mainly parasitic. Pazzi. Before any book of original critical importance later than Trissino’s had been issued, in 1536,[57] Alessandro de’ Pazzi published a Latin translation of the Poetics, which for some time held the position of standard, and a dozen years later came three important works on the book—Robortello’s edition of 1548, Segni’s Italian translation of 1549, and Maggi’s edition of 1550—all showing the attention and interest which the subject was exciting, while, still before the later “Divisions” of Trissino appeared, Vettori in 1560 added his edition, of greater importance than any earlier one. Long before this the book had become a regular subject of lectures. Of these writers Robortello, and still more Vettori (“Victorius”), were of the greatest service to the text; Maggi, who was assisted by Lombardi, to the discussion of the matter.[58]
In the critical handling of these editors and commentators we find, as we should expect, much of the old rhetorical trifling. Robortello, Segni, Maggi, Vettori. For all their scorn, expressed or implied, of the Middle Ages, they repeat the distinctions of poetica, poesis, poeta, and poema[59] as docilely as Martianus, or a student of Martianus, could have done a thousand or five hundred years before, and they hand it on too as a sort of charmed catchword to Scaliger[60] and Jonson.[61] But brought face to face as they are with the always weighty, though by no means always transparently clear, doctrines of Aristotle, and self-charged with the duty of explaining and commenting them, they cannot, if they would, escape the necessity of grappling with the more abstract and less merely technological questions. Robortello,[62] like Maggi, though less elaborately, has a theory of the ludicrous. Both, and others, necessarily grapple with that crux of the katharsis which has not yet ceased to be crucial. Both, with Segni, discuss the Unity of Time and differ about it; though none of the three has yet discovered (as indeed it is not discoverable in Aristotle or Aristotle’s literary documents) the yet more malignant Unity of Place. Vettori would extend the cramp in time (not of course with the twenty-four hours’ limit) from tragedy to epic. Most of them have arrived at that besotment as to “verisimilitude” which is responsible for the worst parts of the Neo-Classic theory, and which, in the pleasant irony common to all entanglements with Duessas of the kind, makes the unfortunate lovers guilty of the wildest excesses of artificial improbability. And in all, whether they project their reflections on their text into more general forms or not, we can see the gradual crystallising of a theory of poetry, heroic, or dramatic, or general.
Nor was such theory left without direct and independent exposition during the period which we are considering. Theorists: Daniello. The first author of one is generally taken to be Daniello, whose Poetica appeared in 1536; and I have not discovered any earlier claimant. I do not quite understand how Mr Spingarn has arrived at the conclusion that “in Daniello’s theory of tragedy there is no single Aristotelian element,” especially as he himself elsewhere acknowledges the close—almost verbal—adherence of this early writer to the Stagirite. But it is probably true that Daniello was thinking more of the Platonic objections and of following out the Boccaccian defence, than of merely treading in the footprints of Aristotle. He is the first, since Boccaccio himself, to undertake that generous, if rather wide and vague as well as superfluous, “defence of poesy” which many Italians repeated after him, and which was repeated after them by our Elizabethans, notably by Sir Philip Sidney.
As his little book is somewhat rare, and as it has such good claims to be among the very earliest vernacular disputations of a general character on poetry in Italy, if not also in Europe, it may be well to give some account of it. My copy has no title-page, but dates itself by a colophon on the recto of the errata-leaf at the end, with a veto-privilege, by concession of the Pope, the seignory of Venice, and all the other princes and lords of Italy, advertised by Giovan Antonio di Nicolini da Sabio, Venice, 1536. It fills 136 small pages of italic type, and is in dialogue form, rather rhetorically but not inelegantly written, and dedicated by Bernardo Daniello of Lucca to Andrea Cornelio, Bishop-Elect of Brescia. Daniello does refer to Aristotle, and borrows (not perhaps quite intelligently) from him; but his chief sources are the Latins, and he sets or resets, with no small interest for us, that note of apology for the Poets against Plato which was to dominate Italian criticism, and after exercising some, but less, effect on French, to be strenuously echoed in England. There are some rather striking things in Daniello. He is sound enough on the mission of the poet as being to delight (though he is to teach too) and also to persuade—the ancient union of Poetics and limited Rhetoric evidently working in him. On the relations of poetry and philosophy he might be echoing Maximus Tyrius and Boccaccio, and very likely is thinking of the latter. But he strikes a certain cold into us by remarking that Dante (whom he nevertheless admires very much) was perhaps greater and more perfect as a philosopher than as a poet; and it does not seem likely that he was aware of the far-reaching import of his own words when he lays it down (p. 26) that Invention, Disposition, and Elocution being the three important things, the poet is not, as some think, limited to any special matter. If he had meant this, of course he would have come to one of those arcana of criticism which are even yet revealed, as matter of serene conviction, to very few critics. But he pretty certainly did not fully understand his own assertion; and indeed slurs it off immediately afterwards. After taking some examples from Dante and more from Petrarch, Daniello adopts (again prophetically) the doctrine that the Poet must practically know all arts and sciences, in order that he may properly deal with his universal subject. He is specially to study what is called in Latin Decorum and in Italian Convenevolezza. Tragedy and Comedy are to be rigidly distinguished. And so this curious First Blast of the Trumpet of sixteenth-century vernacular criticism is emphatic against the confusion which was to bring about the mightiest glories of sixteenth-century literature. A large part of the small treatise is taken up with examples, in the old rhetorical manner of qualities, “colours,” figures, &c. The whole of the latter part of the First Book consists of these, as does almost the whole of the Second, with an extension into verbal criticism of the passages cited as illustrating kinds, technical terms, and the like. Indeed the general considerations are chiefly to be found in the first forty or fifty pages; and it is really remarkable how much there is in this short space which practically anticipates in summary the ideas of most of the much more voluminous writers who follow.[63]
Fracastoro, physician, logician, and not ungraceful poet of the graceless subject of Syphilis, deals with both Plato and Aristotle in his dialogue Naugerius, and discourses deeply on the doctrine of Imitation, the Theory of Beauty, the Aristotelian conception of the poet as more universal and philosophical than the historian, and the Platonic objection to the intervals between poetry and truth. Fracastoro. This dialogue,[64] however (the full title is Naugerius sive de Poetica, its chief interlocutor being Andrea Navagero, the best follower of Catullus in Renaissance Latin[65]), tells a certain tale by its coupling with another, Turrius sive de Intellectione. It is wholly philosophical in intent and drift: it is perhaps the very “farthest”—comparatively early (1555) as is its date—of those Italian excursions, in the direction of making Criticism an almost wholly abstract and a priori subject, which balance the unblushing “Convey—do nothing but convey,” of Vida and his followers. One of its very earliest axioms (p. 324 ed. cit. infra) is that “qui recte dicere de hac re velit, prius sciat necesse est, quænam poetæ natura est, quidque ipsa poetica, tum et quis philosophi genius,” &c. It must be admitted that Fracastoro is among the very ablest and most thoroughgoing explorers of these altitudes. No one has more clearly grasped, or put more forcibly, than he has that compromise between Plato and Aristotle which has been and will be mentioned so often as characteristic of the Italian thinkers in this kind. Indeed, the fifty pages of his Dialogue are almost a locus classicus for the first drawing up of the creed which converted Sidney, and to which Milton, indocile to creeds as he was, gave scarcely grudging allegiance. It is full, too, of interest in deliverances on minor points—the difference between the orator and the rhetor (p. 343), the shaping of a particular kind of “orator” into a poet, his universality and his usefulness, the limits of his permitted fiction and the character of his charm. But Fracastoro is wholly in these generals: it is much if he permits himself a rare illustration from an actual poet.
And always in these writers we find the old deviations, the old red herrings drawn across the scent. Fracastoro himself, reasonable as he is in many ways, falls into the foolish old fallacy that a good poet must be a good man, and the less obviously ridiculous but still mischievous demand from him of the all-accomplished acquirements once asked of the rhetorician.
Putting aside, for the moment, such rather later and much more important works as the Discorsi of Giraldi Cinthio, the De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum of his half-namesake Lilius Giraldus, and the two capital treatises of Minturno, one of which appeared after Trissino’s book, we may give a few words to two Italian tractates, the Versi e Regole della Nuova Poesia Toscanaof Claudio Tolomei (1539) and Muzio’s or Mutio’s Italian verse Arte Poetica, which was published with some other work in 1551.[66] Formalists: Mutio. Tolomei and classical metres. The last is noteworthy as an early example of the vernacular critical poem—a kind suggested by Horace, and illustrated later by Boileau and Pope, but certainly more honoured by its practitioners than in itself. Yet it would not be just to deny Mutio a high if rather vague conception of poetry, and, in particular, a most salutary conviction that the poet must disrealise his subjects. Tolomei’s book, on the other hand, challenges attention as probably the beginning of that pestilent heresy of “classical metres” which, arising in Italy, and tainting France but slightly (as was natural considering the almost unquantified character of the modern French language), fastened with virulence upon England, affected some of our best wits, and was within measurable distance of doing serious harm. The plague was so much at its worst with us that the chapter on Elizabethan Criticism will be the proper place for its discussion. But though Ascham himself thought it no plague at all, it was certainly one of the very worst of these “Italianations” to which he objected so violently; and Tolomei was its first prophet in the country of its origin.
Not a few names, some famous in European literature for other performances of their bearers, some almost unknown except to the student of this subject, fall into one or other of these classes, or, as very commonly happens, qualify in a undecided manner for two, or for all. Others: Tomitano, Lionardi, B. Tasso, Capriano. As early as 1545 Tomitano[67] had dwelt on the above-mentioned fallacy of the necessary learning of poets: Lionardi,[68] nine years later, in a pair of Dialogues expressly devoted to Poetic Invention, extended this in the widest and wildest manner, so that the poet becomes a perfect good-man-of-the-Stoics—an all-round and impeccable Grandison-Aristotle. The same idea and others were emitted by Bernardo Tasso, good father of a great son, who not only practised poetry to the vast extent of the Amadigi, but discussed it in a formal Ragionamento of the subject.[69] Later, Capriano[70] gave the more elaborate exaltation of poetry as a sort of Art of Arts, combining and subduing to its own purpose all forms of Imitation, and following up Vida’s superfine objections to Homer as trivial and undignified, and his rapturous exaltation of the “decency” of Virgil. This book, very short, is also rather important—more so than might be judged from some accounts of it. It is neither paged, nor numbered in folio, but does not extend beyond signature F ii. of a small quarto, with a brief appendix of Italian verse. There are eight chapters—the first discussing what things are imitable and what imitation is; the second vindicating for poetry the portion of supreme imitative art; the third dividing it into “natural” and “moral”; the fourth arguing that Epic or Heroic (not, as Aristotle thinks, drama) is the highest kind of “moral” poetry; the fifth containing, among other things, an interesting revolt against Greek; the sixth discoursing on number and sound; the seventh exalting the good poem above everything; and the eighth rapidly discussing the origin, rank, necessity, parts, force, end, &c., of Poetry. Capriano does not give himself much room, and fails, like most of these critics, in the all-important connection of his theories with actual work; but he must have been a man of no common independence and force of thought.[71]
More important than these to us, though less technically critical, and therefore in some cases commending themselves less to students of the subject from some points of view, are some poets and men of letters of the earlier and middle parts of the century who have touched critical subjects. Il Lasca. I should myself regard the Prologues[72] of Grazzini (“Il Lasca”)—in which he repeatedly and unweariedly protests against the practice of moulding Italian comedy upon Plautus and Terence, regardless of the utter change in manners, and so forth—as worth shelves full of “in-the-air” treatises. For this application of the speculum vitæ[73] notion, the idea of The Muses’ Looking-glass, which was obtained from Cicero through Donatus, was the salvation of the time, keeping Comedy at least free from the fossilising influences of the false Imitation. Although the unwary might reasonably take the author of the famous caution not to read St Paul for fear of spoiling style (there are at least half-a-dozen of the greatest pieces of style in the world to be found in the two Epistles to the Corinthians alone) as either a silly practitioner of undergraduate paradox or a serious dolt, yet the Della Volgar Lingua of Bembo[74] is by no possibility to be neglected in taking account of the critical attitude of Italy at the time. Bembo. It is of course too purist and “precious”; it “sticks in the letter” to a perilous extent; but there is real appreciation in it of what the writer can appreciate, and among the things that he can appreciate are good and great things. Caro. Annibale Caro has (and deserves) a bad name, not merely for the unfair manner in which he carried on his controversy with Castelvetro (see next chapter), but for the tedious logomachy of the controversy itself, which on his side, besides filling a regular Apologia and other pieces, overflows constantly into his letters.[75] Varchi. But this very controversy testifies to the zest and the undoubted sincerity with which literary matters were dealt with by the Italians, and it served further as a starting-point for the elaborate Ercolano[76] of Varchi, who in divers lectures, &c., also dealt with the more abstract questions of the nature of poetry, the status of the poet, and the like. In short, the documents on the subject have already reached the condition referred to by the warning given in the introductory chapter to the first volume of this book, that while in that volume we had to search for and discuss every scrap bearing on the subject, here large classes of document would have to be treated by summary and representation only.
Moreover, great as are the volume and the intensity of Italian attention to criticism in the years between 1535 and 1560, the Devil’s Advocate may, without mere cavilling, cast disparagement upon most of its expressions. The dealings of the scholars with the subject are no doubt to a certain extent accidental or obligatory; they might have bestowed, and in fact actually did bestow,[77] at least equal pains on texts not directly, or not at all, concerning criticism. The work of Tolomei is merely an example of those Puckish tricks which something sometimes plays on the human intellect; that of Muzio a dilettante exercise mainly. The treatises of the others from Daniello to Varchi hover between abstract discussion, which sometimes approaches twaddle, dilettante trifling which makes the same approach on another side, and an estimable, but for literature at large comparatively unimportant, guerilla about the virtues and qualities, the vices and defects, of the Italian language—a language which had already seen its very best days, and was settling down to days very far from its best. The three authors to whom we shall now come, and who will occupy us to the end of this chapter, escape, in one way or another, the brunt of all these grudgements. Minturno supplies us with the most wide-ranging and systematic handlings of poetry in its general, and of “regular” and “vulgar” poetry in their particular, aspects that had yet been produced, Giraldi Cinthio with some of the most original critical essays, Lilius Giraldus with a survey of the poetical, and to some extent the literary, state of Europe in his time, for the like of which we may look in vain before and not too successfully since.
Antonio Sebastiano, called Minturno (which is stated—I know not with what correctness—in a MS. note in my copy of the Arte Poetica to be merely an “academic” surname), is a good example of that combination of scholastic thoroughness and diligence with wider range of study which honourably distinguishes the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but which, save in rare instances, went out in the later years of the last-named age, and has too seldom been recovered since. Minturno. In 1559 he produced a De Poeta and in 1563 an Arte Poetica, one of which, as the respective titles imply, is written in Latin and the other in Italian, but which are by no means replicas of each other with the language changed. Both were printed at Venice; and though they came from different presses, they range very well together, both being in a smallish quarto, but with very close type, so that the 560 odd pages of the De Poeta and the 450 odd of the Arte contain between them a vast amount of matter. The plans of the two treatises—which are allotted naturally according to their language, the Latin to poetry in general and to classical verse, the Italian to its own kind—are not strikingly but slightly different. The De Poeta, which is addressed to Ettore Pignatelli, Duke of Bivona, takes the time-honoured form of a symposium or dialogue, the persons being the poet Sannazar (who is always introduced by his Latin names of Actius Syncerus) and his friends, and the scene the famous Villa Mergellina. Indeed, Minturno seems to have written the book at Naples, whence he dates it a year before that of its appearance. In the later work he himself is the principal speaker, his antagonists or interlocutors being Vespasiano Gonzaga in the First book, Angelo Costanzo in the Second, Bernardino Rota in the Third, and Ferrante Carafa in the Fourth. The dialogue-form, it may also be mentioned, is less, and that of the formal treatise more, prominent in the Arte.
Both volumes have the invaluable accompaniment of side-notes—an accompaniment which not only makes the writer’s point more easily intelligible to the reader, but prevents the writer himself from straying. The De Poeta. But the De Poeta is not furnished with either Contents or Index, while the Arte is liberally provided with both. This, in the first case, is to be regretted, not merely because the book is much the longer of the two, but because the indulgences of the dialogic form are more fully taken in it. After a suitable beginning (with a fons and a platanus and other properties), the subject is opened with a panegyric of poetry. The origins of literature were in verse; all nations practised it. A more sensible line is taken (it will be understood that the interlocutors of course take different views, and one judges by the general drift) on the subject of the all-accomplishment of the poets, than is the case with some of the writers above mentioned; but Minturno points out (which is no doubt true enough) that poetry in a manner “holds all the Arts in fee,” can draw upon and dignify all. On the connection of verse with poetry he holds a middle position, close to that of Aristotle himself, and not very different from that long after taken up by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria. He will not pronounce verse essential to poetry, but evidently thinks that poetry would be extremely foolish to dispense with its practically inseparable companion. The consecrated procession of poets from Amphion and Orpheus to Homer and even Virgil is set a-going as usual. Then the discussion, after a little skirmishing, settles down at p. 22 to the question of Imitation; and, amid much scholastic subdivision of its kinds and manners, the delight produced by this is very strongly insisted on. Next, the Platonic onslaught is discussed, and urged or repelled by turns; the defence being clearly the author’s side, and maintained with considerable vigour, and with plentiful examples from Homer and Virgil both. The line taken, however, leads Minturno to lay stress on the instructive power of poetry. The poet’s purpose will, he holds, govern his imitation, and direct it so as to excite admiration in the reader or hearer. This is possibly the source of the next-century endeavour to elevate Admiration to the level of Pity and Terror themselves.[78] Hence Minturno is constrained to share the idea of the necessarily virtuous character of the poet: and, except that he never separates the delectare from the prodesse altogether, he hugs the dangerous shore of the hérésie de l’enseignement too closely in his endeavour to escape the Platonic privateers. By degrees the discussion glides into the comparison of Epic and Tragedy, and the question whether Poetry is a matter of Art or of Inspiration—and decides that it is both. And the First Book ends with the pronouncement that a good poet must be a good man, but that he may sometimes deal with not-good things.
The Second begins with one of the demonstrations (which to us seem otiose, but which were very important, not merely to the ideas of the age, but as bulwarks against the Puritan and Utilitarian objections of all times) that the poets, especially Homer and Virgil, are masters, whether necessarily or not, of all the liberal arts and of philosophy as well. When we remember the Philistine anti-poetics of Locke much more than a century after Minturno’s time—nay, the still existing, if lurking, idea that “great poet” must be (as somebody asserts that it is or was in Irish slang) synonym for “utter fool”[79]—we shall not bear too hardly on our author. But this discussion, in its turn, is bid to “come up higher.” What is to be the Institutio Poetæ? What is he to do and learn that he may in turn (p. 102) “delight, teach, transport.”[80]
In all cases the admiration of the reader or hearer (p. 104) must follow. But it will be obtained not quite in the same way as by the orator, and with a difference in the different kinds of poetry. The parts of a poem, too, are dealt with in a more or less Aristotelian manner, but with large additions and substitutions, in view of the greater range of literature that Minturno has before him, and of the desire specially to bring in Virgil, of whom our critic, though not quite such a fanatical partisan as Vida and Scaliger, is a hearty admirer (see for instance p. 135). All the “parts” have more or less attention in this book, both with reference to the different “kinds,” especially epic and “heroic,” and also with regard to those general principles of poetry which Minturno never forgets. The Third Book of nearly 100 pages is directly devoted to tragedy; and Minturno pursues in reference to this the same plan of following, but with a certain independence and a great deal of expatiation, in Aristotelian footsteps. He still lays great stress on Admiration; and it is really curious that in thus forestalling, no doubt, Corneille’s teaching, he has by anticipation hit at Racine and the doucereux in a phrase[81] which has been fairly guessed to have supplied Milton with a famous one[82] of his own. He does not pay so much attention to the crux of the katharsis (on which most of these critics necessarily dwell more or less) in this treatise as in the Arte (v. infra).
The Fourth Book, even longer than the Third, is, like it, entirely devoted to one subject; and the change of modern as compared with ancient view is shown strongly by the fact that this subject is Comedy. The admirers of Plautus and Terence, the countrymen of Ariosto and Machiavelli, could not, indeed, be expected to turn from Comedy with the disdainful shoulder of Aristotle; but such elaborate treatment as this shows the hold which the subject had obtained. Yet it is ominous that Minturno devotes especial attention to the subject of types; though, in accordance with his usual practice, he gives much space to a general treatment of the Ludicrous and its sources. There is also a good deal of curious detail in this Book as to costume and theatrical arrangements generally. The Fifth turns to Lyric, and sets forth its different kinds, including Satire among them. And the Sixth deals with Diction and Prosody, the section allotted to the latter being comparatively short and interspersed between two on Style, proceeding of course a good deal by Figures, though not in the most cut-and-dried manner, and illustrated (as indeed are all the later Books) by abundant and unceasing quotation. It may be observed that, as perhaps might be expected, the dialogue-character disappears in them more and more, and the book takes the form of a simple exposition by one or other of the personages. This change prepares us for the arrangement of the Arte.
This book, as dates given and to be given show, was published subsequently to the appearance of Scaliger’s Poetic, and may have been to some extent influenced by it; but I do not think that Minturno, who mentions Trissino and Bembo and Tolomei, ever refers to it, and he does not give one the idea of a man who would conceal debts. The Arte Poetica. In fact, his work upon the same subject had been completed earlier. In this he has necessarily to go over some of the same ground; but, as noted above, he repeats very little. He starts with a general definition of poetry as an imitation of various manners and persons in various modes, either with words or with harmonies or with “times” separately, or with all these things together, or with part of them. Other ternaries follow, as matter, instrument, and mode; manners, affections, and deeds; suprahuman, human, and infrahuman; personages; words, music, and “times”; epic, scenic, and melic; prose, verse, and mixed narrative. These distinctions are put forth in an orderly manner, but succinctly and without the discussion which is a feature of the general parts of the De Poeta, Minturno evidently thinking that he has sufficiently cleared the ground in that work. After some further exposition of forms, &c., the handling is more specially directed to Epic (i.e., narrative generally), and its parts and conditions are expounded, still with a certain swiftness, but at greater length than before. And once more the treatment concentrates itself—this time upon Romance. The origin of the name and thing is lightly touched, and then the great question is broached,[83] “Is Romance poetry?” Minturno will not refuse it the name; but he cannot admit that it is the same kind of poetry as that of which Aristotle and Horace have spoken. The contrarieties of Romance and Heroic poetry are then carefully examined; and while much praise is given to Ariosto, some fault is found with him, and the mantle of the Odyssey is especially refused him. In fact, Minturno holds generally that the Romance is a defective form of poetry, ennobled by the excellence of some of its writers—a sort of middle position which is very noteworthy. But he hardens his heart against the irresistible historical and inductive argument which the defenders of the Romance had already discovered, and will have it that the laws of poetry are antecedent to poetic production (p. 32). And for his main style of narrative poetry he returns to Epic or “Heroic” proper, and discusses it on the old lines of Plot, Character, Manners, Passions or Affections, &c., always with modern examples from the great Italian poets. He also makes the very important, but very disastrous, suggestion that the Christian religion provides all the necessary “machinery” of Heroic,—a suggestion which was elaborately followed out by Tasso and by Milton and by many a lesser man, and which Dryden had thought of following, though he luckily did not.[84]
The Second Book takes up Drama in the same manner, but—as was always made legitimate by the parasitic character of at least Italian Tragedy—with much more reference to ancient and less to modern writers. The Third Book deals with Lyric, the same inclusion of Satire which we have noticed in the De Poeta being made; and the Fourth with Poetic Diction, Prosody, &c., still on the lines of the earlier treatise, but with entire adaptation to the Italian subject. The latter books, as is natural, are much more meticulous in their arrangement, descending, with complete propriety, to the minutest details of rhyme and metre, as well as, where necessary, of grammar. But Minturno never loses an opportunity of ascending to the higher and more general considerations—the nature of harmony, the origin and quality of rhyme, &c., the characters of kinds, and even, to some extent, of authors. It is characteristic of him to give an elaborate discussion of the Italian alphabet letter by letter from the poetical point of view, and to strike off from this to a consideration of the relations of Italian, Latin, and foreign modern languages, the general methods of elevating style, and the question whether there ought to be completely separate diction for poetry and prose.
It is the presence of this contrast, or combination, in him which, as much as anything else, has determined more attention in this place to Minturno than to some other authors before noticed. Their value. In combination of thoroughness and range he seems to me to hold a position both high and rather solitary. He has not quite the elaborate system of Scaliger, but then he is much less one-eyed; he is less original—has less diable au corps—than Castelvetro, but he is far less eccentric and incalculable. His unfeigned belief in the noble and general theories of poetry and the poet is set off by his sedulous attention to particulars, as his attention to particulars is by his escapes of relief into the region of generalisation, and by his all-important addition of “transport” to “teach” and “delight.” He has not reached—he has in fact declined—the historical antinomianism of Patrizzi (v. next chap.); but that was inevitable, since this view was in part a reaction from the movement which he represented, in part a development of theories contemporary with himself. And his attitude in regard to the Romanzi is a significant sign of the turn of the tide. Earlier, and in the neo-classics quand même later, the fact that a thing differs in kind from the accepted forms of poetry is proof that it is not poetry at all. Minturno cannot go this length. It is poetry inferior in kind, he still insists; but the excellence of those who have adopted it saves it, no matter to what extent. The concession is fatal. If Balbus builds a wall contrary to the laws of nature and architecture, it will not be an inferior wall; it will tumble down, and not be a wall at all. If he works a sum on the principle that two and two make five, his answer will be hopelessly wrong. But if the wall stands, if the sum comes right, the laws, the principles, cannot be wrong, though they may be different from others. The infallible and exclusive Kind-rules of the ancients are doomed to be swept away through the little gap in the dam that Minturno has opened.
The Discorsi[85] of Giraldi Cinthio—famous author of Novelle, and now much less famous, but perhaps not much less remarkable, producer of the chief Italian horror-tragedy, the Orbecche—supply a very interesting supplement-contrast to Minturno, whose earlier work they preceded by but a few years, and whom they provided with a theory of Romance to protest against. Giraldi Cinthio’s Discorsi. The exact date of the most interesting of them, and the question of property or plagiarism in their contents, have been the subject of one of those tedious “quarrels of authors” which are thickening upon us, but which we shall avoid as far as possible. On Romance. Cinthio and a certain pupil of his, Giovanbattista Pigna, published in the same year (1554) books on the “Romances”—i.e., poems like Ariosto’s. Authorities decide in favour of the novelist, who asserts that his book was written in 1549, while each asserted that he had furnished the other with ideas; but it really does not matter. The point is, that on one of the two, and very probably on both, there had dawned the critical truth, which nobody had seen earlier, and on which Minturno himself would have pulled down “the blanket of the dark” once more if he could. Cinthio, it seems, first struck out the true line, and Pigna later developed it in still greater detail. Aristotle did not know Romance, and therefore his rules do not and cannot apply to it; while Italian literature generally is so different in circumstances from Greek that it must follow its own laws. Then Cinthio takes Ariosto and Boiardo, as Aristotle himself had taken the poets that were before him, and formulates laws from them. He does not ostracise the single-action and single-hero poem, the Aristotelian epic. But he adds the many-actioned and many-heroed poem like Ariosto’s, and the chronicle-poem of successive actions by one party, of which there are examples from Statius downward (and of which, we may add, the Odyssey itself is really an example). For these two latter, which he rightly regards as both Romantic, he and Pigna (who is more specially Ariostian) gave rules accordingly, and Cinthio even illustrated his by a poem on Hercules. Both, but especially Pigna, despite their revolutionary tendencies in certain ways, cling to the ethical point of view, and maintain, perhaps a little hardily, that the modern romantic writers actually surpass the ancients in this respect.
In their main contention Cinthio and Pigna were no doubt right, and much in advance of their time. On Drama. The reply of Minturno that Poetry may adapt itself to the times, but cannot depart from its own fundamental laws, is clearly a petitio principii. In his less important Discorso on the Drama Cinthio is hardly at all rebel to Aristotle—indeed it is very important to observe that even in the Romance Essay he has none of the partisan and somewhat illiberal anti-Peripateticism which we find later in Bruno and others. There he goes on the solid ground that Aristotle did not know the Kind for which he does not account—that he was no more blamable than, as we may say, supposing that he had given a definition of mammalia which excluded the kangaroo. In the Drama Cinthio had not been brought face to face with any similarly new facts. Italian tragedy, his own included, was scrupulously Senecan, if not quite scrupulously Aristotelian, in general lines. Italian comedy followed Plautus and Terence only too closely; and though Cinthio’s lines of criticism (strengthened by the Ciceronian-Donatist theory of the speculum vitæ) led him, like Il Lasca and others, to insist on the different circumstances of Italian literature here also, they necessitated no new lawmaking as in the case of the Romanzi.
Both Discorsi are full of ingenious aperçus, sometimes followed out—sometimes not. Some points in both. For instance, when Cinthio (i. 24) cites his three examples of writers who have treated their heroes from childhood upwards contrary to the Aristotelian principles, he instances Xenophon in the Cyropædia as well as Statius and Silius Italicus. The instance does not in his expressed remarks, but it might very well in his own or others’ thoughts, lead to the consideration that whether verse is or is not essential to poetry, it is certainly not essential to Romance—with all the momentous and far-reaching consequences of that discovery. Again he seems (i. 82) to have appreciated, with a taste and sense rare in his age, the impropriety of mixing up Christian and Pagan mythology. And the same taste and sense appear, as a rule, in the minuter remarks (p. 100 sq.) on verse and phrase, and even on those minutest points not merely of verbal but of literal criticism which the Italians, more sensible than some modern critics, never despised, though they may sometimes have gone to the other extreme. In fact, the last half, and rather more, of the Discorso is not so much concerned with the Romances as with poetic diction and arrangement in general, or even with these matters as concerns literature both in prose and in verse.
The dramatic Discorso, or rather Discorsi (for we may throw in a third piece on Satiric Composition), is much shorter than that on the Romances, being necessarily less controversial, and therefore, as has been said, less original. But Cinthio’s independence of mind does not desert him even here. He is said to have been the first Italian who dared, in the Orbecche before mentioned, to disregard the Senecan practice[86] (so tedious in all modern imitations of it, and so crushingly exhibited in our own earliest tragic attempts) of beginning with an entire scene, or even act, of monologue. But, as often happens, his licences in some directions invite condonation by a tighter drawing of the reins elsewhere. He is credited (or debited) with the first reference in modern literature to the Unity of Time: and though it is well always to accept these assertions of priority with a certain suspension of judgment, it may be so. It is at any rate certain that he does out-Aristotle Aristotle in regard to this Unity, upon which, as is well known, the Stagirite lays very little stress. But he makes some amends by relaxing the proscription of the happy ending, so long as the proper purging effects of pity and terror are achieved. He also to some extent relaxes the extremest stringency of the old rule about trucidations coram populo. There may be death on the stage: but generally the bienséances of domestic life should be preserved there. On one point, in which Cinthio has had assigned to him the position of anti-Aristotelian origin, I venture to differ as to the interpretation of the Poetics themselves, not merely from Mr Spingarn but from Professor Butcher.[87] The later Neo-Classics, and especially the French, may have made rank too absolute a qualification of the tragic Hero. But I must say that I think they had their justification from Aristotle himself, and that Cinthio is at worst but dotting the i's of the Stagirite as to σπουδαῖοι and χρηστοί. His extreme admiration of the choruses of Seneca (in justification whereof he cites Erasmus) is not wholly unwarranted. Few modern readers, unfortunately, know the stately beauty of these artful odes: though of course his preference (p. 81) of them to “all the Greeks” is wrong, and was probably occasioned by the very small attention which most Renaissance writers paid to Æschylus. The elaborate distinctions which he, like others, seeks to draw between Tragedy and Comedy from artificial points of view are to some extent justified by the very absence of such distinctions in Aristotle. They thought it their duty to supply what they did not find.
The Discourse, or rather Letter (for it bears both titles, and in scale and character rather deserves the latter name) on Satire is confessedly supplementary to the other Discorsi, and may be at least connected with the fact that the indefatigable author had himself attempted a satiric piece, Egle. On Satire. He lays stress on the special connection of the Satire with the cult of Bacchus, takes into consideration the poetical as well as the scenic form, mentions the mixed or Varronian variety, and even extends his view to the Bucolic or Pastoral proper. But there are only some five-and-twenty pages, and the thing seems to have been really composed at “request of friends.”
From a critic who did so much it would be somewhat unreasonable to demand more. In fact, though Cinthio did not go so far along the high historic path of truth as did Patrizzi thirty years later, he set on that path a firm foot. For the moment, and in Italy, the romanzi were the true battle-ground; just as in England, for instance, that battle-ground was to be found a little later in the drama. At a period so early as this, and so close to the actual revolution of the Renaissance, it could hardly be expected that any one should reach the vantage-ground of a comprehensive survey of all literature, so as to deduce from it the positive and enfranchising, and not even from it the negative and disfranchising, laws of poetry. Not only had the vernaculars, with the exception of Italian itself, hardly furnished, at the time when Cinthio wrote, any modern literature fit to rank with the ancient—not only was it far too late, or far too early, to expect any one to give mediæval literature a fair chance with both—but men were still actually disputing whether the vernaculars had a right to exist. They were, like his namesake and clansman, to whom we come next, hinting surprise that any man of genius and culture should employ these vernaculars when he might write Latin, or, like one of his antagonists, Celio Calcagnini, aspiring to the disuse of vernacular for literary purposes altogether. In an atmosphere still so far from clear, with such heats and mists about, it is no small credit to Cinthio that, whether moved by mere parochial patriotism or by the secret feeling that sua res as a novelist was at question, or by anything else, he heard and caught at the dominant of the tune of criticism proper.
Pigna’s I Romanzi,[88] whatever we may think of the quarrel between him and Cinthio, is a book not to be mentioned without considerable respect, or dismissed with mention so merely incidental as that given to it above. Pigna. It is mainly, but not solely, a defence of Ariosto, and has not a few merits,—a just conception of the essentially Romantic nature of the Odyssey, a very careful and in the main sensible discussion of Prosody, and a widish comparison of instances. The main defect of it is the besetting sin of the whole three centuries with which this volume deals—the Obsession of the Kind. Instead of being satisfied with the demonstration (which he and Cinthio had reached) that Romance is not Epic, and is not bound by Epic laws, Pigna torments himself to show that Romance is Epic in this particular, not-Epic in that, and is alternately subject to and free from bondage: while some of his detailed investigations may raise smile, or sigh, or shrug, according to mood or temperament. Thus for instance he inquires (after a fashion which we shall find echoed in Ronsard) into the character of the objects—Lance, Horn, Ring—with which fatura (fairy agency) is usually associated, till we feel inclined to say, “O learned and excellent signor, the poet may put fatura in a warming-pan—if he pleases, and can do it poeticamente!” But the book is, on the whole, a good book: and Pigna deserves to rank with Cinthio and Patrizzi as one of the Three who, alone in this first modern stage, saw, if but afar-off and by glimpses, the Promised Land from which the ship of criticism was to be once more driven by adverse winds for centuries to come.
A document of exceptional importance for us is provided by the two curious dialogues De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum[89] of Lilius Gregorius Giraldus, written about 1548-50, and dedicated partly to Renée of Ferrara, the French Princess who for a time protected Marot and others, partly to Cardinal Rangoni. Lilius Giraldus: his De Poetis Nostrorum Temporum. Lilius, who was now in a good old age (he had been born in 1478), a Humanist of the better class, and a sincere Catholic possessed of sufficient independence of current ill-fashions to speak with severity of the verses of Beccadelli, would seem also to have been, at first- or second-hand, a man of very wide literary knowledge. His acquaintance with More[90] might be partly (as his very high estimate is certainly) conditioned by ecclesiastical partisanship; but he speaks of Wyatt long before Tottel’s Miscellany made that poet’s works publicly known, even in his own country, and, what is still more remarkable, of Chaucer.[91] Its width of range. Neither France nor Germany is excluded with the usual Italian uppishness,[92] though Giraldus cannot help slipping the word barbarus more than once off his tongue. And though Italy herself has, as we should expect, the lion’s share, yet the process of sharing is not pursued to that extreme of ridiculous arrogance which has been shown by the Greeks in their decadence, by the French in their Augustanism, and by the Italians themselves more than once.
But this real knowledge on Giraldus’ part, and the fairness of his spirit, only serve to accentuate the drift in the course and direction of this, the most important general summary of its kind that we meet between the Labyrinthus and the seventeenth century. But narrowness of view. Giraldus, though he does not absolutely exclude the vernaculars, is perfectly convinced that poetry, and indeed literature generally, means—first of all, and as far as its aristocracy goes exclusively—writing in Latin; nay, with him even translation from the classical languages is a more important thing than original composition in the vulgar tongue. Horror at preference of vernacular to Latin. His contempt of this latter is thinly though decently veiled in the passage on drama (ed. cit., p. 40), where, speaking of the writers of comedy, and rightly preferring Ariosto to Bibbiena, he says, “sed enim vernaculo sermone id plerique opus aggressi pauci mea sententia assecuti sunt;” speaks (with a sort of visible shake of the head, as over a good man lost) of Ariosto himself as one who “Latino carmine aliquando ludit, sed nunc totum se vernaculis tradidit, atque inter cetera furentem Orlandum dare curat in publicum;”[93] patronisingly remarks of Trissino’s projected Sophonisba, that if the whole of it is as good as the acts that the author recites, “erit, licet vernacula ipsa, Latinorum tamen non indigna lectione,” wonders at this George who “est ipse et Græce et Latine bene doctus, at nunc fere in vernaculis conquiescit,” and ends with an impatient “Verum de vernaculis jam satis,” and a mutter about tonsores sellulariique. He speaks still less ambiguously later (ibid., p. 85), where cobblers and other dregs of the people are added to barbers and mechanics in general (as a tail to a list headed by Boiardo, Pulci, Politian, and Lorenzo de' Medici!), and at last liberates his real feeling in a sentence, which many very excellent men in all European countries would have indorsed till nearly the end of the eighteenth century, “Ex quo nescioqui viri alioqui docti in eam hæresim incidere ut non modo vernaculas velint Latinis litteris æquare verum etiam anteponere, quin et id etiam litteris prodidere.” “Whence some persons, in other respects learned, have fallen into such a heresy that they not only choose to make the vernaculars equal with Latin, but even to set them above it—nay, they have actually given literary expression to the doctrine.” A terrible thing to Humanists, and, alas! one to which they have since had to make up their minds! Unfortunately, the two great classical languages now pay, and for some time to come are likely to continue paying, the penalty of this idle miscalculation and outrecuidance on the part of their mistaken partisans; and it is the first duty of all lovers of letters now to fight for their maintenance in due place.