Chapter III: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1)

LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER—THE MATERIAL IT OFFERS—THE FORMAL ARTS OF
RHETORIC AND OF POETRY—EXAMPLES OF INDIRECT CRITICISM: CHAUCER—‘SIR
THOPAS’—FROISSART—RICHARD OF BURY—PETRARCH—BOCCACCIO—HIS WORK ON
DANTE—THE ‘TRATTATELLO’—THE ‘COMENTO’—THE ‘DE GENEALOGIA
DEORUM’—GAVIN DOUGLAS—FURTHER EXAMPLES UNNECESSARY.

The contents of the two foregoing chapters should have in some sort prepared the reader for the character and limitations of the [Sidenote: _Limitations of this chapter._] third. If it were not part of the scheme of this work to leave no period of literary history unnoticed in relation to criticism, a straight stride might almost be taken from the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ to the earliest of the momentous and (from some points of view) rather unfortunate attempts which the Italian critics of the Renaissance made to bring about an _eirenicon_ between Plato and Aristotle, by sacrificing the whole direct product, and the whole indirect lesson, of the Middle Ages. Between Dante and this group of his compatriots two hundred years later, it is scarcely too much to say that there is not a single critic or criticism, either in Italy or in any other European language, possessing substantive importance. But this book endeavours to be a history, not merely of explicit literary criticism, but of implicit literary taste; and no period—not the dimmest gloom of the Dark Ages nor the most glaring blaze of the _Aufklärung_—is profitless as a subject for inquiry in that respect, even if the result be little more than the old stage-direction—_même jeu_.

In _Arts of Rhetoric_, with or without special or partial reference to Poetry, the two centuries, especially the fifteenth, are [Sidenote: _The material it offers._] indeed fairly prolific. Nothing could be more significant for the subjective side of Critical History than that gradual and at last undisguised identification of “Rhetoric” with “Poetry” itself, which is notorious alike in the hackneyed title of _grands rhétoriqueurs_ for the French poets of the fifteenth century, and the continual praise of Chaucer’s “rhetoric” by the English and Scottish writers of the same time. The _sacra fames_[593] of the whole two hundred years for Allegory—a hunger which was not in the least checked by the Renaissance, though the sauce of what it glutted itself on was somewhat altered—is another capital fact of the same kind; the renewed passion for changed kinds of Romance another; the ever-increasing interest in drama yet another still. These are the real materials for the student of criticism and taste at this time, and they are identical with the materials, for this period, of the student of literary history generally. In the strictly proper matter of our particular province we not merely may, but had best, confine ourselves to some short notice of the formal writings of the period, and some, rather fuller, of the literary opinions expressed by characteristic exponents of it, whether their claim to represent be derived from eminence, or from merely average, and therefore tell-tale, quality.

Footnote 593:

The “cursed appreciation,” as a modern wit has translated the phrase
in its most famous context.

Into the first it will not be necessary to enter at any length. The formal Latin Arts of Rhetoric of the fourteenth and fifteenth [Sidenote: _The Formal Arts of Rhetoric._]centuries exhibit nothing new, but observe with a touching fidelity the lines of Martianus, or Aphthonius, or Hermogenes, as the case may be. Moreover, such notice of them as is at all necessary will be better given in the next Book and volume, in connection with their immediate successors of the undoubted Renaissance. The chain of merely formal Rhetoric is unbroken till much later; as it had been little affected by the change from “Classical” to “Mediæval,” so it was not sensibly changed till “Renaissance” had definitely given way to “Modern.” The vernacular _Arts of Poetry_ are, in English of this period, non-existent; and, considering all things, they are heartily to be congratulated on their wisdom and foresight in not existing. In Italy they are of little moment, since Italian poetry had to a great extent taken its line once for all. In French and in German they both exist, and exhibit considerable individual quality. But that quality is emphatically for an age, and not of all time. The growth of the exquisitely graceful but dangerously artificial French poetry of _Ballade_ and _Chant Royal_, of _rondeau_ and _triolet_; the growth of the artificial, but rarely in the very least graceful, form-torturing of the _meister-singers_ were both accompanied and followed, as was natural and indeed inevitable, by abundance of formal directions for executing the fashionable intricacies. Some of the more noteworthy of these may be indicated in a note but—as has not always been, and will not always be the case with similar things—they require little or no discussion in the text. For the developments to which they related were not merely a little artificial in the bad sense, but they were also purely episodic and of the nature of curiosities. They had not, as even the most apparently preposterous acrobatics of the Latin rhythmic had, the priceless [Sidenote: _And of Poetry._] merit of serving as gymnastic to the new vernaculars—at best they only continued this gymnastic in the case of languages that were “grown up.” That they—at least the French division of them—furnished some exquisite moulds, into which the purest poetry could be thrown, is perfectly true. But Jehannot de Lescurel, and Charles d’Orléans, and Villon most of all, could have, and doubtless would have, produced that poetry in any form that happened to be popular at their time. Nay, as has been abundantly shown in France and England during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and a little earlier, the forms themselves will fit any poetry of any time. The ancient names, and the mediæval trimmings, and the modern sentiment of the _Dames du Temps Jadis_, are all equally at home in its consummate but artificial form; and that form is equally suitable to the _Voyage à Cythère_ and the aspiration for a grave on the breast of the Windburg. Defect there is none in this accommodating character: rather there is a great quality. But, in the special kind of merit, there is a differentiation from such things as the Greek chorus, the Latin elegiac, the Mediæval rhythmus, the mono-rhymed or single-assonanced _tirade_, the Spenserian, even the eighteenth-century, couplet, which carry their atmosphere and their time inseparably with them. And so we may turn to our testings of writers in whom the criticism “is not so expressed,” but who are not the less valuable to us for that.

Are we to regret, or not, that Chaucer did not leave us an _Art of Rhetoric_ instead of a _Treatise on the Astrolabe_? Probably not. [Sidenote: _Examples of Indirect Criticism: Chaucer._] He would hardly have felt what is called in religious slang “freedom” to say what he undoubtedly might have said on Applied Rhetoric and on Pure Rhetoric, though it would have been very agreeable to hear him. He would probably not have told us anything new. In any kind of formal writing he would probably have displayed that not in the least irrational orthodoxy which he displays on most subjects. But there is perhaps no writer—at least no writer of anything approaching his greatness—who, abstaining from deliberate and expressed critical work, has left us such acute and unmistakable critical byplay, such escapes of the critical spirit. If the sly hit at his namesake of Vinsauf, which has been already glanced at[594], stood alone, it would show us “what a _critic_ was in Chaucer lost”—at least to the extent of lying _perdu_ for the most part. But this is not the only example of the kind by any means, even in apparent chance-medleys: while in the _Rhyme of Sir Thopas_[595] we have what is almost a criticism in form, and what certainly displays more critical power than ninety-nine out of a hundred criticisms in fact.

Footnote 594:

_V. supra_, p. 412.

Footnote 595:

I must apologise to those who hold that Chaucer never rhymed -_y_ and
-_ye_ for ascribing _Sir Thopas_ to him. But I really cannot give it
up as Chaucerian.

That this celebrated and agreeable fantasy-piece is in any sense an onslaught on Romance, as Romance, is so fond a thing that it is sufficient to discredit the imaginations, or the intelligence, of those who entertain it. Dulness never will understand, either that those who are not dull can laugh at what they love, or that it is possible for a man to see faults, and even serious faults, in writers and writings on whom and on which, as wholes, he bestows the heartiest admiration. From the outset of his career the critic has to make up his mind to be charged with “ungenerous,” or “grudging,” or “not cordial” treatment of those whom he loves with a love that twenty thousand of his accusers could not by clubbing together equal, and understands with an understanding of which—not of course by their own fault but by that of Providence—they are simply incapable.

Of this touch of foolish nature the inference from _Sir Thopas_ that Chaucer disliked, or despised, or failed to sympathise with, [Sidenote: Sir Thopas.] Romance, is one of the capital instances. To remember that the author of the _Rhyme_ was also the author of the _Knight’s Tale_, and the _Squire’s Tale_, and _Troilus_, that he was the translator of the _Romance of the Rose_, might of itself suffice to keep the wayfaring man straight in this matter; but those who can understand what they read have not the slightest need of such a memory. There have been parodies[596] of Romance which incurred the curse of blasphemy: there is one in particular, not very many years old, which, in the energetic and accurate language of Mr Philip Pirrip, “must excite Loathing in every respectable mind.” But _Sir Thopas_, even to those who have not read many of its originals and victims, much more to those who are well acquainted with them, and who rejoice in them exceedingly and unceasingly, can never put on any such complexion. The intense good-humour and the absolutely unruffled play of intelligence, the complete freedom from (what appears for instance capitally in the example just glanced at) political, national, social _animus_, and the almost miraculous fashion in which the caricature strikes at the corruptions, but never at the essential character, of the thing caricatured, settle this once for all.

Footnote 596:

Not _Rebecca and Rowena_. I think it barely desirable to insert this
note because quite recently a person, not demonstrably insane, called
that exquisite piece of Romantic humour “distressing,” or some such
word.

If we knew (as unluckily we do _not_ know) whether the Host and the company stopped _Sir Thopas_ because they disliked the type, or because the example was a parody, it would be a great help to us; but it is scarcely a less help to perceive clearly that its critical character would have been enough to put them out of conceit with it. Few people really do like criticism; fewer still like real criticism. And the criticism of _Sir Thopas_, though disguised, is very real. Everybody, whether he knows the metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries or not, can see the joke of the seemly nose; the far country of Flanders; the rebuke to the maidens, who had much better have been sleeping quietly than fussing about the beautiful knight; the calm decision of that knight that an elf-queen—nobody less—must be the object of his affections; the terrible wilderness, where buck and hare ramp and roar, and seek whom they may devour; the extraordinarily heroic exertions, which consist merely in pumping the unhappy steed; the fair bearing, which consists in running away with celerity and success. But nobody who does not know the romances themselves in their weakest examples, such as _Sir Eglamour_ or _Torrent of Portugal_, can fully appreciate the manner in which the parody is adjusted to the original. Not the deftest and most disinterested critic of any day could single out, by explicit criticism, the faults “before the Eternal” of the feebler and more cut-and-dried romance, more clearly or more accurately than Chaucer has, by example, in this tale. The stock epithet and phrase; the stock comparison; the catalogue (he had himself indulged pretty freely in the catalogue); the pound of description to an ounce of incident; the mixture of the hackneyed and the ineffective in the incident itself,—all these things this mercilessly candid friend, this maliciously expert practitioner, exposes with the precision of an Aristotle and the zest of a Lucian.

Yet the whole is done by implication and unexpounded example, not in the very least by direct criticism. Had it occurred to him, or pleased him, he could no doubt have censured all these faults in as businesslike and direct a manner as his Parson (or rather his Parson’s original) censures the moral, social, and fashionable shortcomings of the age. But he certainly did not do this, and probably he never thought of doing it.

Cross the Channel (though indeed it was not always necessary to do this) and take Chaucer’s greatest contemporary among French [Sidenote: _Froissart._] writing men. It has been said, by that very agreeable biographer of Froissart whom England (mindful of his early loyalty, and characteristically neglectful of his later infidelity) lent to France, that he “was not a man of letters.”[597] It may be so: but if it be, he was certainly one of the most literary not-men-of-letters that the world has ever seen. Not only is he admittedly one of that world’s most charming prose-writers, but it has long been known that the notion of him (if it ever existed among the intelligent) as of a good garrulous old person who wrote as the birds sing, is utterly erroneous. At one time he could make a mosaic of borrowed and original writing—the borrowings often in the very words of the original, the original adjusted to them with an art that nobody but Malory has ever approached, and that even Malory shows rather in general management than in style. At another, and at another again, he could, whether with or against the grain, laboriously recast this mosaic into the most widely different forms. His very desultoriness is calculated; he is criticising the romances by imitation when he makes a _chassé-croisé_ to the story of Orthon from the victory of Aljubarrota, from the battle of Otterburn to the evil receipt for a green wound adopted by Geoffrey Tête-Noire, and the remarkably sensible, just, kindly, and gentlemanly remarks of that dying brigand to his fellow-outlaws.

Footnote 597:

_Froissart._ Par Mary Darmesteter (Paris, 1894), p. 19.

But he is not a man of prose letters only. He is a poet, to the tune of some thirty thousand verses in the long-lost and late-won _Méliador_ alone, to the tune of, I suppose, about as many more in his familiar, or at least long accessible, minor poems. He is deft at all the intricate popular forms of the day—at _pastourelles_ as at _chansons royaux_, at _virelais_ as at _rondelets_. He possesses its learning; and can not only appeal to the common tales of Troy and Thebes and Alexander, not only refer to ancient mythology with the semi-pagan docility which long puzzled students, and seems to puzzle some still, but be even at home with Enclimpostair, and Pynoteus, and Neptisphelè. In a certain sense he is a man of letters, a man of books, all his life, and very much more than Chaucer is. With all his patronisings by great people and his sojourns among them, he is nothing like the man of affairs that Master Geoffrey was.

And yet, in a sense also, Madame Darmesteter’s phrase is intelligible and almost justifiable. It is indeed hardly fair to base this construction on his scanty and not in the least literary reference to Chaucer, whom he does not even, like Eustache Deschamps[598], call a great translator. In Froissart’s happy early English time Chaucer had done probably little work, and certainly none of his best: in that melancholy revisiting, no more of the blaze of the sun of Cressy and Poitiers, but of the glimpses of the moon that was to set in blood at Pontefract, he was probably too old and too disgusted to make inquiries about such matters. But the absence of the strictly literary interest in one who not merely had so much literary genius, but was so constantly reading and writing, is pervading and incessant. This interest is absent not merely where it might well have been present, but where its presence seems almost indispensable. Froissart’s style of poetry invites the widest, and (except that it is rather too methodical, not to say mechanical) the wildest, liberty of divagation, of dragging in anything that really interested him. In the most recondite allegorising of the _Prison Amoureuse_ he expostulates[599] with Desire for not coming to his aid, and giving him the victory, by the same sort of clever outflanking attack as that which Chandos executed at the Battle of Auray, and of which he kindly gives some details. He names books in the usual manner of Romance; he will go so far as to praise them; but he never discusses them. In the well-known passage[600] of the _Espinette Amoureuse_, when he asks his beloved the name of the romance she is reading, she does indeed tell him that it is _Cléomadès_ (Did he mention the same to Chaucer?), with the commendation that it is “well made and dittied amorously,” and she asks him to lend her another (it is the _Bailiff of Love_[601] that he hits upon),

“Car lire est un douls mestiers.”

But, though the comparing of critical opinions on literature has been not unknown as one of the primrose paths of the garden of Flirtation, they seem to have trodden it no farther.

Footnote 598:

Deschamps, a far more _exclusively_ bookish person than Froissart, and
one who has even left us, in his elaborate _Art de Dittier_, not the
least remarkable of the formal “Poetics” referred to above, is no more
of a critic in any true sense than Froissart himself—not nearly so
much as Sidonius or Eberhard.

Footnote 599:

_Œuvres de Froissart (Poésies)_, par A. Scheler, 3 vols. (Bruxelles,
1870), i. 303.

Footnote 600:

Ibid., p. 107 _sq._

Footnote 601:

_Cléomadès_ (which is possibly not unconnected with Chaucer’s
_Squire’s Tale_) whoso will may know and (if he be of my mind) rejoice
in (ed. Van Hasselt, Bruxelles, 1865). But, alas! we have not the
_Bailiff of Love_.

So in his prose. The _satura_ of the _Chroniques_ admits anything that interested either Froissart or the men of his time. In those strange midnight sessions of the Italianate Gascon Count of Foix—the lettered tyrant-sorcerer who would have been even more at home in Ferrara or Rimini than in Béarn—books were in great request; but nobody seems to have talked criticism. “So much the better for the Bearnese,” the reader may say; and he is welcome to an opinion which, at times, if not always, most people must have shared. But that is not the question. The question is, “Was this a critical age?” and the answer is, “If it had been, a man could not have been so bookish as Froissart was and yet be not critical in the least.” Nor could he, even if some private idiosyncrasy had accounted for his own attitude, have failed to reveal the presence of a different one in the time which he has drawn for us, more poetically no doubt than Boswell or Pepys, but with not a little of their unpremeditated, their even unconscious, fidelity.

The lesson taught by the two men, who occupy the summits of European literature at the very midmost of the period of this [Sidenote: _Richard of Bury._] chapter, will be confirmed whether we look earlier or later. It might seem almost impossible that the somewhat famous _Philobiblon_[602] of Richard of Bury (or Aungervyle), who made one of the greatest collections of books in the early part of the fourteenth century, and celebrated it in this little tract just before his own death and shortly after Chaucer’s probable birth, should not contribute something—improbable that it should not contribute very much—to our subject. As a matter of fact it contributes nothing at all. Almost the oldest Sacred Book (as distinguished from “sacred passages” in Cicero and others) of Bibliophily, it remains entirely outside of literary criticism. The good Bishop of Durham, indeed, does not devour all books with indiscriminating voracity. He is true to his order in candidly avowing no high opinion of law-books; but his reason—that they belong rather to Will than to Wit—shows us his point of view. From that point of view one book may be preferable to another, as being more useful, as dealing with a nobler subject, as boasting a more venerable authorship, as being perhaps rarer, more beautifully written or bound, older, newer, in better condition, but not, I think, at all as being better literature. The pleasant garrulity of the tractate; its agreeable onslaught upon woman, the natural enemy of books; its anecdotage; its keen sympathy with the Book as almost a living thing, and certainly one exposed to almost all the dangers of life, have made it, and will long make it, a favourite. It is sweet and pleasant: but it is not criticism.

Footnote 602:

Often printed: the best edition of the original Latin is, I believe,
that (with French version) of M. Cocheris (Paris, 1856). The late
Professor H. Morley gave one of the wide biographical excursus of his
_English Writers_ (iv. 38-58) to Bishop Richard, and included in it a
pretty full abstract of the _Philobiblon_ (or “Philobibl_i_on”).

The author of the _Philobiblon_ was a friend of Petrarch’s, and it may at first sight seem strange that Petrarch himself should [Sidenote: _Petrarch._] not be—should not indeed have been at the very beginning or this chapter—summoned to give evidence likewise. But the fact is that Petrarch has nothing to tell us in our context. He has indeed, as has been pretty universally recognised, nothing to do with the Middle Ages. Not only in his heart and desires, but in his nature, he is a man of the early—if of the earliest—Renaissance. Even in the vernacular he rings false as an exponent of anything mediæval. Timotheus, not St Cecily, has taught his strains. And in his “regular” writing he is severely, almost ludicrously, a classicaster. We may return to him as the earliest distinguished example of the Renaissance attitude; here he cannot even, as others have done, help us by his silence.

It is otherwise with his great contemporary, and at the last friend, Boccaccio. Boccaccio likewise has been claimed as a prophet of the Renaissance, as one of the first of the [Sidenote: _Boccaccio._] moderns and the like; nor would it skill to deny that there is much both of the Renaissance and of the modern spirit in him. But he has not broken with the immediate past; he is only tinging it, and blending it a little, with the farther past and the future. If something of the magical charm of the mediæval prose story is gone from the _Decameron_, the learned voluptuousness of the Renaissance _conte_ is not yet there. The _Filostrato_, and the _Filocopo_[603], and the _Teseide_, are still romances. And in the _De Genealogia Deorum_, if there is much of that non-mediæval spirit which was always in Italy, and not a little of the Renaissance proper, there is enough of the Middle Age itself to give it a _locus standi_ here.

Footnote 603:

Without prejudice to _Filocolo_. We attempt not to decide such
quarrels.

Indeed, by a recent authority of great eminence[604] Boccaccio has been treated as a coryphæus and representative of “the [Sidenote: _His work on Dante._] critics of the middle ages.” I have endeavoured, in these chapters, to show that the critics of the middle ages are, except in the most remote and shadowy function, almost a non-existent body. And it seems to me that Boccaccio’s views on criticism, though most worthy of remark, are the very head and front of that Renaissance side of him which is so undeniable. In the passage which Mr Courthope cites from the _Life of Dante_, where Boccaccio says that Theology and poetry are almost one, that “Theology is God’s poetry,” that it is a kind of poetic invention when Christ is spoken of at one time as a lion, at the other as a lamb, that the words of the Saviour in the Gospel are merely or mainly allegory, that “Poetry is Theology and Theology poetry,” and that Aristotle said nearly as much[605]—when he writes in this way he is speaking very much less the mind of the Middle Ages than the mind which agitated the mass of his countrymen, the Italian critics, from Daniello onwards in the sixteenth century. But it is quite certain that in writing this he is writing with a conception of criticism quite alien from that which we are now handling. He may quote Aristotle, but he is speaking in the manner of Plato. It is poetry in the abstract with which he is dealing, not the literary value of poetry according to its expression in form, of no matter what ideal in essence. And it will be found, I think, that a careful study of his commentary on Dante, the most important thing of the kind that we possess by one considerable man of letters in the Middle Ages upon another, entirely bears this out.

Footnote 604:

My friend, Mr W. J. Courthope, in the third chapter of his _Life of
Pope_ (Pope’s _Works_, ed. Elwin and Courthope, v. 50: London, 1889.)

Footnote 605:

Had he known Maximus Tyrius (_v. supra_, p. 117), he might almost have
borrowed the very words of that writer. But in the astonishingly long
list of Boccaccio’s classical authorities Maximus does not, I think,
occur.

As for the _Life_ (or, as he himself seems to call it in the first lecture of the _Commentary_, the “Little Treatise”[606]) on Dante, it is couched in so extremely rhetorical a style, with constant bursts of apostrophe and _epiphonema_, that there may seem to be a sort [Sidenote: _The_ Trattatello.] of warning on it from the first: “Criticism not to be expected.” As a matter of fact, however, Boccaccio does give us some of what, as we shall see more fully in a moment, he thought to be criticism, and of what not a few persons seem still to think the best criticism. For he has an elaborate digression on Poetry and Poets in the abstract, with a particular parallel distinction (referred to above) between poetry and theology. But he goes no farther, and the heading “Qualità e diffetti di Dante” is entirely occupied with moral characteristics. In the _Comento_ itself, however, it might well seem to be a case of Now or Never. Here was a literary lectureship expressly instituted for the treatment of the greatest man of letters of the city, the country, and (as it happened) the world, at the time and for long before and after. Here was an exceedingly learned lecturer, with plenty of mother-wit to keep his learning alive, with a distinct fellow-feeling of creation further to animate both, and with the sincerest and heartiest goodwill to complete his competence. He spares no trouble, but goes to his work with scholastic minuteness, expending some three score lectures and some nine hundred pages on seventeen cantos only out of the hundred of the _Commedia_. Unfortunately neither his models nor his tastes seem to incline [Sidenote: _The_ Comento.] him in the way where we would so fain see him go. He has read Servius and all (or at least many of) the rhetoricians and scholastic philosophers, and he tells us with gusto what are the causes, formal, efficient, material, and final, of the book, how its form is “poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, and transitive,” and how the efficient cause is “that very same author, Dante Alighieri, of whom we will speak more extensively by-and-by.” He has also read Fulgentius:[607] and before very long he gives us a capital specimen of derivation, in the manner of that ingenious author, by telling us that “Avernus” is from _a_, which is without, and _vernus_, which is joy. He has at his command all that extraordinary supply of mythological and miscellaneous classical learning which, as we shall see immediately, enabled him to write his _Genealogy_: and he never comes to the name of an ancient writer or of a mythological personage without giving a full and particular account thereof. No details are too obvious or too minute for him, even apart from the allegorical interpretation, in which, as any scholar of Fabius Planciades, and indeed any mediæval writer of the fourteenth century, was bound to do, he expatiates delightedly. He vouches the information that Dante called the forest _selvaggia_ “because he wished to denote that there was not in it any human habitation, and that as a consequence it was horrible;” _aspera_, “in order to demonstrate the quality of the trees and shrubs of the same, which would be old, with long straggling branches en woven and interpleached among themselves, and likewise full of blackthorns, and brambles, and dry stubs, growing without any order, and stretching hither and thither—whereby it was a rough thing and a dangerous to go through,” &c. He is copious in moral _excursus_ on the impropriety of Florentine dress, on the sin of Luxury, on the obvious inconvenience and hardship of the fact that while men are allowed to try horses, asses, oxen, dogs, clothing, casks, pitchers before they buy them, they have to take their wives on trust and without trial. But on literary criticism we come not seldom, but never, beyond the beggarly elements of verbal interpretation, where Boccaccio is just as happy with _Pape Satan_ as with _Galeotto fu il libro_, or rather more so, while he is much happier with Penthesilea or Pasiphae than with either. It is no doubt unfair to try Master John Bochas with the things that make us “nearly wild” (as Cowper made Miss Marianne Dashwood,[608] and does _not_ often make us), but still the Galeotto passage is very tempting. Lancelot, we learn, was one of whom the French romances tell many beautiful and laudable things (things which he tells us, in confidence, he himself believes to be set forth rather to please than according to the truth), and the said Lancelot was _ferventissimamente_ enamoured of Guinevere. Then he points out that the line which follows (_Soli eravamo_, &c.), and the previous mention of the book, indicate three things—reading about love, solitude, and freedom from suspicion—which are very powerful to induce a man and a woman to adoperate dishonestly. And so he proceeds, expounding or construing the whole ineffable passage, word for word, with a solemn and indiscriminate enjoyment—the trembling at the kiss, the fact that Galehault was a kind of giant, great and big, down to _Quel giorno_, his remark on which, though not scientifically inaccurate, savours rather of the _Decameron_ than of the _Commedia_ itself. But in the whole comment there is nothing (or, what is worse than nothing, a single banal _ottimamente descrive_) for any part whatsoever of the passion, the poetry, the mysterious magnificence of the expression. The passage is to Boccaccio a good _ecphrasis_, a capital _compte rendu_ of an interesting situation—that is all.

Footnote 606:

_Trattatello._ I use the cheap and convenient ed. of the two books
published by Le Monnier. (Florence, 1863; latest ed. 1895, 2 vols.)

Footnote 607:

He quotes him early, ed. cit., i. 94 (see note opposite).

Footnote 608:

“To hear those beautiful lines, which have frequently almost driven me
wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful
indifference!”

“... but you _would_ give him Cowper.”

“Nay, mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!”—_Sense and
Sensibility_, chap. iii.

[Sidenote: The _De Genealogia Deorum_.]

Nor will this be less borne out by an examination of Boccaccio’s principal “place” of criticism, which will be, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, found in the two last books, the fourteenth and fifteenth, of that singular monument of learning, the _De Genealogia Deorum_.[609] After laboriously searching out all the mythological stories of antiquity within his reach, and co-ordinating them into a regular family history, from Demogorgon, through Erebus and his twenty-one sons and daughters by Night, to Alexander and Scipio (whom, however, he declines, as a strict genealogist, to admit as sons of Jove), Boccaccio, at the beginning of his fourteenth book, takes up the cudgels for Poetry against her enemies. The style is decidedly rhetorical, and faint remembrances of Clodius as an accuser (or, to be less pedantic and less hackneyed, of Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence) may possibly occur, as we find the author of the _Decameron_ indignantly denouncing those who sneer at poets and learned men, _meretriculis gannientes_, and holding cups of foaming wine in their hands. But he is perfectly serious: if a man has not proved his seriousness by writing a Latin genealogy of the gods in four hundred large and closely printed folio pages, what is Proof? There was always, he says, a quarrel between Learning and Licentiousness. Even some graver folk sneer at, or find fault with, poetry. Lawyers do so: and the lawyers are properly rebuked and bid to look at the example of Cicero. Monks do: and there is expostulation likewise with them. But he will attack the question in form. Poetry is a noble and useful thing. Its meaning, its antiquity, its origin are discussed. There is nothing wrong or harmful in a “fable” as such; but in all its kinds it can be made of positive utility. Poets do not retire into solitude out of any misanthropy or wrong motive, but simply for the sake of meditation: and they have often been the friends of most respectable people—Ennius of the Scipios, Virgil of Augustus, Dante of King Frederick and Can de la Scala, Francis Petrarch of the Emperor Charles, of King John of France, of King Robert of Jerusalem and Sicily, and of any number of Popes.

Footnote 609:

There is said, to the discredit of modernity, to be no modern edition
of this most remarkable and interesting book. Of the three folio
issues (1494 and later) which are in the library of the University of
Edinburgh, I have used that of Hervagius (Basle, 1532.)

But, some say, poetry is obscure. It is certainly written for the learned and people of wit, not for the common herd; but it is none the worse for that. It is entirely false that poets are liars: poetry and lying are two quite different things (Virgil is here particularly cleared in the matter of Dido). It is foolish to condemn what you do not understand: and this is generally done by those who abuse poetry. And it is intolerable that men should speak against Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, when they have hardly read them. The “seduction” of Poetry is all nonsense: and the accusation that poetry is the ape of philosophy, greater nonsense still. It would be better to call poets the apes of Nature.[610]

Footnote 610:

Mr Courthope must, I should think, have overlooked this passage when
he denied (_loc. cit._) that Boccaccio and other mediæval writers held
the doctrine that poetry should follow Nature.

He does not fear to contest the authority of Jerome when he said that verses were _Dæmonum cibus_, of Plato himself, and of Boethius when he called the Muses “scenic meretricules.” He grapples with the two first at great length, and points out that Boethius was thinking chiefly of the naughty theatre. An allocution to the King (Hugh of Cyprus and Jerusalem), to whom the whole treatise is dedicated, and a milder deprecation to the enemies of poetry, conclude this book.

The Fifteenth at first seems to launch out into still deeper waters. You must not insist too much on _use_. What is the use of the beard? Yet men of a certain age are ashamed to be beardless. And as for the duration of work, that is in the hand of God. But this turns to a mere excuse of his own actual book. His work has been done as well as he can do it, both for matter and for style. He refers to divers living or recent authors, Dante and Petrarch among them, of whom he gives little descriptions that raise, but hardly satisfy, our curiosity to see whether he will really criticise. Dante was _peritissimus circa poeticam_, and what he was is shown by his _inclytum opus_, “which he wrote with wonderful art, under the title of a Comedy, in rhyme of the Florentine idiom, and in which he certainly showed himself not a mythologer but rather a catholic and divine Theologian. And while he is known to almost all the world, I know not whether the fame of his name has come to your latitude.” Petrarch is dealt with much more fully. “Even that remote corner of the earth England knows him as a principal poet,”[611] and here Boccaccio no longer _nescit utrum_, but _haud dubitat quin_, his fame has reached Cyprus. His “divine” _Africa_, his Bucolics, his Epistles in verse and prose, and a good many other things, are noticed.

Footnote 611:

By favour of one Geoffrey Chaucer?

Next he recurs to antiquity, mentioning Homer especially, and defending his own practice of mixing Greek words with Latin by the examples of Cicero, Macrobius, Apuleius, and Ausonius. He has a good deal to say (entirely in a Renaissance spirit) on the importance of the Greeks and of Greek; defends, against clerical prejudice, his description of the heathen poets as the theologians of mythology, argues once more that Dante may be called a theologian proper, contends at great length that there is no harm in the study of heathen matters by Christians, and, after purging himself of other objections, concludes.

A most interesting document; indeed a document upon which, with reference both to its general tenor and to individual expressions (of which it has been possible to mention but one or two here), it would be pleasant to spend much more time. But a document which, for our present purpose and plan, seems to establish in the main two things, both of them rather negative than positive. The first is that Boccaccio can hardly be appealed to either as helping Dantes Aligerus to remove the reproach from mediæval criticism, in the sense in which we here understand it, or even as a representative proper of mediæval criticism at all—that his criticism, such as it is, is of a purely Renaissance type, and results, not from the application of mediæval ideas to ancient matter, but from the application of resuscitated ancient ideas to matter which, though not wholly, is preferably chosen from ancient material. It is not to be forgotten that even in that creative work which has been referred to above, Boccaccio has always preferred the _matière de Rome_, the classical side of the mediæval storehouse. From this he has drawn the _Teseide_, from this the _Filostrato_, and if in the _Filocopo_ he has made a more purely mediæval choice, let it be remembered that _Floire et Blanche-fleur_, his original, is of all Romances the most like a Byzantine novel, and has even been thought to have been directly inspired by one.

Secondly, when we examine the character of this criticism of his in detail, we find it differing from Dante’s in this, that while Dante undoubtedly does consider the general and abstract points of poetry and of literature, Boccaccio practically considers nothing else. His descriptions of Dante himself and of Petrarch would suffice to prove this: but, in fact, it is proved by every page, every paragraph, every sentence, almost every word. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth books of the _Genealogy_ Boccaccio is really pleading _pro domo sua_—for the _status_ and craft of the story-teller generally, not of the poet as such. And further, he is pleading for free trade in the story, not for any special process of art or craft in its manufacture. He had possibly, if not certainly, read the _De Vulgari_, but, as he read it, it must have been in the first part of the first book only that he found much that was germane to his own tastes and principles. If we could but have had from himself such an _examen_ of the _Decameron_ as Corneille and, still more, Dryden have given of their work! But the time simply did not admit of any such thing: and though Boccaccio was very much in advance of his time in some ways, these ways were not of the some.

Nor does the Fifteenth Century proper necessitate any revision of the general doctrine of this chapter. There are here and there blind stirrings of the Renaissance spirit; but, once more, they do not concern us. There is everywhere the dogged or unconscious adherence to the uncritical promiscuousness of the past; and that has been sufficiently commented upon. If it be, as perhaps it is, desirable to take a single example, and deal with it as we have dealt with others, there can hardly be a better than Gavin Douglas, who at the very end of the period shows, side by side with Renaissance tendency (which certainly exists, though to me it does not seem so great as it has seemed to some), the strongest symptoms of persistent mediævalism.

Nobody can deny that the good Bishop of Dunkeld (uneasiest to him of bishop-stools!) not only would have liked to be a [Sidenote: _Gavin Douglas._] critic, but shows both his critical and his Renaissance sides in the well-known and violent onslaught on poor Caxton in the first of the very agreeable Prologues to his own translation of the _Æneid_. In fact, those to whom the woman who killed Abimelech with a stone or slate is the patron saint of criticism, must regard him as a very considerable critic. How Caxton’s work and Virgil’s are “no more like than the Devil and Saint Austin”; how the author “shamefully perverted” the story; how the critic read it “with harms at his heart” that such a book “without sentence or engine” should be entitled after so divine a bard; how such a wight never knew three words of what Virgil meant; how he, Gavin, is “constrained to flyte,”—all this is extremely familiar. We seem to hear the very voice of the modern “jacket-duster,” of the man who finds his pet task anticipated, his pet subject trespassed upon, and is determined to make the varlet pay for it. Douglas, to be sure, is not quite in the worst case of this class of critic. He can render some reasons, neither garbled nor forged, for his censure. He has (and this is a sign that criticism was stirring) lost taste for, lost even comprehension of, the full, guileless, innocent, mediæval licence of suppression, suggestion, and digression. He protests (quite truly) that Neptune did not join with Æolus in causing the storm that endangered Æneas, but on the contrary stilled that storm. He is indignant at the extension given to the true romantic part of the poem, the Tragedy of Carthage in the Fourth Book, and only less indignant at the suppression of the “lusty games” and plays palustral in the Fifth. Most of all does he tell us of that aggravation of the critical misuse of allegory which was to be one of the main Renaissance notes. The “hidden meaning” of poetry is the great thing for Douglas, and he has much to say about it before he “turns again” on Caxton. Will it be believed that Caxton wrote "Touyr for Tiber"! Alas! alas!

“For Touyr divides Greece from Hungarie,
And Tiber is chief fluide of Italy.”

But all this, and a great deal more like it, as the setting up of the old Rhetoric-Poetic theory of a poem as the story of a perfectly noble character, and the rebuke even to Chaucer not merely for being too literal, just as Caxton was too loose, but for actually saying (the more Chaucer he!) that Æneas was _not_ a perfectly noble character but a forsworn traitor,—all this argues no real relinquishment of the mediæval ideal except in a special case. Douglas shows in his own work that he is after all a chip of the old block, and not fresh hewn from a virgin quarry.

In the Prologue to the Sixth Book he returns to the allegorical-philosophical interpretation of Virgil, and shows himself a hundred leagues to leeward of the critical port by urging, in Virgil’s favour, that St Augustine is always quoting him against Paganism. Not in the whole range of mediæval literature is that pell-mell cataloguing, which, with more truth than reverence, has been assimilated to that of the “Groves of Blarney,” better shown than in the _Palice of Honour_. Solomon, “the well of sapience,” Aristotle, “fulfillit of prudence,” “Salust, Seneca, and Titus Livius” jostle Pythagoras and Porphyry, Parmenides and “Melysses,” “Sidrach, Secundus, and Solenius,” “Empedocles, _Neptanabus_, and Hermes,” “wise Josephus and facund Cicero,” with other miraculous couples and trinities. The procession of the Court of Venus huddles classical, Biblical, and mediæval in the same, but a more pardonable, fashion; and when the Muses intervene to save the peccant poet, Dictys and Dares still march unblushingly with Homer and Virgil. “Plautus, Poggius, and Persius” must have looked only less oddly, the first and last at the second, than “Esop, Cato, and Allane” (Alanus de Insulis of the _Anti-Claudianus_ and the _De planetu Naturæ_) each at other. Such a capital phrase as “the mixt and subtle Martial,” the valuable naming of contemporary poets that follows, and other things, may much more than atone for, but cannot hide, the higgledy-piggledy character of the cataloguing, or the odd repetition of the same thing with a difference at the end of the Second Part, and the yet further development in the Third. The note of criticism is discrimination—the note of the Middle Age, as of this, almost its latest exponent, save in the few places where he has chipped his shell, is the indiscriminate.

It can scarcely be necessary, though it might not be uninteresting, to take any more examples. We need not [Sidenote: _Further examples unnecessary._] wander in Hercynian forests with those rules of latest Middle High German poetry, which have all the formality of the French “Arts” and none of the charm of their products. The Marquis of Santillana and his comrades, in castle or convent of Spain, concern national rather than general history, history of literature rather than history of criticism; and they, like others, will best be glanced at retrospectively in the Renaissance section. From the French _rhétoriqueur_ period we might pick out much that would illustrate, over and over again, what has been sufficiently illustrated already, little that would give us anything new, nothing or next to nothing that would be at once new and important.[612] As will be shown, a little more in detail, in the Interchapter which follows, the service which the Middle Ages rendered to Criticism was indeed inestimable; but it was by way of provision of fresh material, not by way of examination, either of that material or of anything older.

Footnote 612:

Considerations of something the same kind may partly excuse a further
omission—which I know will be deplored by some, and which I daresay
will be denounced by others—that of any notice of rhetorical and
metrical writings in the Celtic and Scandinavian languages. I shall
very frankly acknowledge that there is another reason for this
omission. I have the greatest dislike to writing about anything at
second-hand; and while I have as yet had time to acquire only a slight
knowledge of Icelandic, I do not know anything at all of the Celtic
languages. With the help of Fors Fortuna, I may be yet able to make
these defects in some measure good; but I do not think it necessary to
delay the present volume indefinitely in order to do so. “There is no
staying,” as Johnson says, “for the concurrence of all conveniences.
We will do as well as we can.” So far as I have been able to inform
myself, the rhetorical writing of Icelandic is not extensive or
important, even though some may have come from the interesting hand of
Snorri Sturluson. The early Irish metrical treatises are, no doubt, of
great importance for the history of metre. But being purely
particularist, and out of the general current of European literature,
their critical importance can hardly be regarded as of the highest
kind. And Welsh, while anything of the sort in it must be much later,
is necessarily in the same position.

INTERCHAPTER III.

§ I. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MEDIÆVAL PERIOD TO LITERARY CRITICISM.

§ II. THE POSITION, ACTUAL AND POSSIBLE, OF LITERARY CRITICISM AT THE
RENAISSANCE.

I.

In perhaps no part of a work of the present kind is it more important than it is here to distinguish between the different kinds of value, for the special purpose, of the period in question. If you judge this by its positive contributions to the standard literature of literary criticism, it has absolutely nothing of consequence to advance but the _De Vulgari Eloquio_. There is not very much else at all; and what there is consists mainly of agreeable babblings, of schoolbooks, and of incidental utterances, which at best can be taken as a kind of _semeiotic_.

Yet, in the _De Vulgari_ itself, the Middle Ages lodged such a diploma-piece as has been scarcely half-a-dozen times elsewhere seen in the history of the world. And, what is still more important, their contributions to productive literature were such that they take, from the catholic point of view, equal rank as a whole with those of classical and those of modern times, while, for the special critical purpose, they are almost more valuable than either. Enforced and necessary ignorance of what the Middle Ages had to teach accounts in almost every case for whatever shortcomings we find in the Classics; wilful or careless ignoring of this accounts for most of the shortcomings of the moderns; recourse to it accounts for most of the merits, such as they are, of the criticism of the nineteenth century. The critic who knows his Middle Ages, knowing also ancient and modern literature, and he alone, has the keys of the criticism of the world.

Of the excellent and astonishing accomplishment of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_ enough has been said already, and it will not require extensive surveys to show the small accomplishment in criticism of the Middle Ages elsewhere. It is almost enough to consider, as we have done, the work of Chaucer, their next man to Dante in genius[613] as a known personality. Chaucer had all or almost all the necessary qualifications of a critic—a real knowledge of literature, a distinctly satirical humour, a large tolerance, a touch, decided but not too frequent, of enthusiasm, an interest in a very wide range of different subjects and forms. And he is actually a critic in embryo, and more, throughout his work. The _Boethius_ and the _Astrolabe_, the _Rose_ and the _Troilus_, half the _Canterbury Tales_, more than half the minor works, are saturated with literature—could have come from no author but one who was saturated with literature. There is uncrystallised criticism on every page; there is even some crystallised criticism in the _Sir Thopas_, and perhaps elsewhere. But almost always “it is not so expressed,” and for once Shylock is justified of his refusal to find it. In Chaucer, the strange mediæval levelling of authors, not merely in respect of trustworthiness, but in respect of positive value, continues. Macrobius is as Cicero; Dares is much more than Homer. If he gives an opinion, it is a moral one. He puts the rejection of alliteration on a mere local ground; and they will not even let us believe that he laughed at French of Stratford-atte-Bowe from any literary point of view.

Footnote 613:

If, as is still possible, and most probably can never be disproved,
Walter Map fashioned the perfect Arthur stories, by dint of combining
the Lancelot-Guinevere romance and the Graal Legend, composed the _De
Nugis_, and wrote an appreciable quantity of the Goliardic poems, he
will run Chaucer hard in all but the claims impossible to his time.
But the “if” is a great if.

Yet while the persistent study of Rhetoric is of great importance, as exhibiting the keeping up of a critical treatment—such as it is—of literature, the growth of the vernacular Poetics is of much more, as developing a side of formal criticism which was destined to become of more and more importance as time went on, and to have a connection with, and an influence upon, criticism not merely formal, to which there is no parallel in ancient times. So far as we have any trustworthy evidence, Greek prosody was born like Pallas—full-grown and fully armed. It has no known period of infancy or pupilage: the poets may devise—may even give their names to—ingenious combinations, but all these combinations obey one prearranged system. If the case of Latin is not quite the same, the periods where it is most significantly different happen to be periods when criticism had either not come into being or had abdicated its functions. A _De Prosodia Latina_, by Nævius must have been as interesting as Gascoigne’s _Notes of Instruction_, and might have been as interesting as the _De Vulgari Eloquio_. A treatise on _Latin Rhythms_ by Prudentius might, in its different way, have had an interest which is difficult to parallel by anything modern in actual existence.