Chapter II: Early Italian Critics (1)

THE BEGINNINGS—SAVONAROLA—PICO, ETC.—POLITIAN—THE ‘MANTO’—THE ‘AMBRA’
AND ‘RUSTICUS’—THE ‘NUTRICIA’—THEIR MERITS AND DANGER—PETRUS
CRINITUS: HIS ‘DE POETIS LATINIS’—AUGUSTINUS OLMUCENSIS: HIS
‘DEFENCE OF POETRY’—PARADOXICAL ATTACKS ON IT BY CORNELIUS AGRIPPA,
LANDI, BERNI—VIDA—IMPORTANCE OF THE ‘POETICS’—ANALYSIS OF THE
PIECE—ESSENTIAL POVERTY OF ITS THEORY—HISTORICAL AND SYMPTOMATIC
SIGNIFICANCE—THE ALLEGED APPEAL TO REASON AND NATURE—THE MAIN STREAM
STARTED—TRISSINO—DIVISION OF HIS ‘POETIC’—HIS CRITICAL
VALUE—EDITORS, ETC., OF THE ‘POETICS’—PAZZI—ROBORTELLO, SEGNI,
MAGGI, VETTORI—THEORISTS: DANIELLO—FRACASTORO—FORMALISTS: MUTIO.
TOLOMEI AND CLASSICAL METRES—OTHERS: TOMITANO, LIONARDI, B. TASSO,
CAPRIANO—IL LASCA—BEMBO—CARO—VARCHI—MINTURNO—THE ‘DE POETA’—THE
‘ARTE POETICA’—THEIR VALUE—GIRALDI CINTHIO’S ‘DISCORSI’—ON
ROMANCE—ON DRAMA—SOME POINTS IN BOTH—ON SATIRE—PIGNA—LILIUS
GIRALDUS: HIS ‘DE POETIS NOSTRORUM TEMPORUM’—ITS WIDTH OF RANGE—BUT
NARROWNESS OF VIEW—HORROR AT PREFERENCE OF VERNACULAR TO LATIN—YET A
REAL CRITIC IN BOTH KINDS—SHORT ‘PRÉCIS’ OF THE DIALOGUES—THEIR
GREAT HISTORIC VALUE.

It is not necessary to discuss, or even to expose at any length, the causes of the relative precocity of Italian Criticism in the Renaissance. [Sidenote: _The beginnings._] They are practically all contained in, and can by the very slightest expense of learning and intelligence be extracted from, the fact that Italy was at once the cradle of Humanist study of the Classics, and the only country in Europe which possessed a fully developed vernacular. But for the greater part of the fifteenth century attention was diverted from actual criticism—except of the validating or invalidating kind—by the prior and eagerer appetite for the discovery, study, and popularising, by translation and otherwise, of the actual authors and texts. For a long time, indeed, this appetite showed the usual promiscuity of such affections; and it was scarcely till the time of Vittorino da Feltre that much critical discrimination of styles was introduced. But these and other kindred things came surely, and brought criticism with them, though criticism still generally of the moral and educational kind. The Boccaccian defence was taken up by various writers of note—Bruni,[19] Guarino, Æneas Sylvius—and before the close of the fifteenth century two of the greatest of Florentines had indicated in different ways the main lines which Italian criticism was to take. These two were Savonarola and Politian.

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Footnote 19:

Since I wrote this, an obliging correspondent, Mr P.G. Thomas of
Liverpool, has suggested actual quotation of a passage of Bruni’s on
prose style in his _De Studiis et Literis_. If I do not give this it
is, first, because indulgence in quotation here is as the letting out
of waters; and, secondly, because the tractate is translated in Mr W.
H. Woodward’s well-known and excellent book on _Vittorino da Feltre_
(Cambridge, 1897), where other matter of interest to us will also be
found.

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The tendency of each could be anticipated by any one who, though actually ignorant of it, knew the characteristics of the two men in other ways. [Sidenote: _Savonarola._] Fra Girolamo’s, of course, is wholly ethical-religious, mainly neo-Platonic, but already presenting the effect of Aristotelian details on the general Platonic attitude to Poetry. Yet he is still scholastic in his general treatment of the subject, and still adopts that close subordination of poetry to Logic which is as old as Averroes and Aquinas, and which, odd as it may seem to merely modern readers, is a very simple matter when examined.[20] He disclaims, as usual, any attack on poetry itself, urging only the abuse of poetry; but he follows Plato in looking more than askance at it, and Aristotle in denying its necessary association with verse. The Scriptures are the noblest poetry; all ancient poetry is doubtfully profitable. In fact, he regards poetry altogether as specially liable to abuse, and dubiously admissible into, or certainly to be expelled from, a perfect community, such as that on which the fancy of the Renaissance was so much fixed.

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Footnote 20:

The connecting and explaining link, sometimes omitted, is to be found
in _Rhetoric_—the close connection of which with Logic and Grammar is
no puzzle, while the connection of poetry with it was then an accepted
fact. It is rather dangerous to say that Savonarola, in connecting
poetry with logic, was “tending towards the elimination of the
Imagination in art.” The extremely equivocal nature of the word
“Imagination” (_v._ vol. i. pp. 120, 165) needs constantly
to be pointed out. In the ancient sense, Imagination is as much
connected with Logic as anything else; in the modern, Savonarola
probably never even thought of it.

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Savonarola’s remarks, which are contained in his four-book tractate, _De Scientiis_,[21] are more curious than really important. Yet they derive some importance from the great name and influence of their propounder, from his position at the very watershed, so to speak, of time in Europe, if not in Italy, dividing Middle Age from Renaissance, and from the fact that they undoubtedly summarise that dubitative, if not utterly hostile, view of literature in general, and of poetry in particular, which, as we have seen,[22] was borrowed by the Fathers from the ancients, and very much intensified by the borrowers. Fra Girolamo’s attitude is a rigidly scholastic one; and to those who omit to take account of this, or do not understand it, his view must seem wholly out of focus, if not wholly obscure. Poetry is a part of Rational Philosophy; and therefore its object must be _pars entis rationis_. It differs from Rhetoric in working purely by Example, not Enthymeme. Its end is to induce men to live virtuously by decent representations; and as the soul loves harmony, it uses harmonic forms. But a poet who merely knows how to play gracefully with feet only deserves the name as an old woman deserves that of a pretty girl.[23] Still more preposterous is the habit of calling poetry “divine.” Cosmos becomes chaos, if you admit that. _Scientia autem divina est cujus objectum Deus: non illa cujus objectum exemplum._ The making of verses is only poetry _per accidens_; and as for the Heathen poets, _magnus diaboli laqueus absconditus est_ in them. He does not, he says, actually “damn” poetry; but the gist of his tractatule is that poets as a rule quite misunderstand their function, and that poetry had better keep its place, and abstain from silly, not to say blasphemous, airs.

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Footnote 21:

Otherwise, _De Divisione et Utilitate Omnium Scientiarum_. I have read
this in the Wittemberg ed. of his _Philosophiæ Epitome_ (1596, 8vo).
The passages quoted and referred to will be found at p. 807 _sq._ of
this.

Footnote 22:

Vol. i. p. 380 _sq._

Footnote 23:

Or, “a pretty old woman that of a girl,” the position of the epithet
between the two nouns being ambiguous.

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Such a point of view was, of course, liable to be taken by persons alike unlikely to assume the “know-nothing” attitude of the more ignorant Catholics, the Philistine-Puritan attitude of Protestantism, or the merely Platonic and non-Christian theory of some free-thinkers. It might well seem to thoughtful lovers of literature that its very existence was in danger when it was attacked from so many sides, and that it was necessary to intrench it as strongly as possible. Nor were the materials and the plan of the fortification far to seek. The suggestion has been rather oddly discovered in the Geographer Strabo;[24] but authorities much more germane to the matter were at hand. Boccaccio himself had, as we have seen, both taken note of the danger and indicated the means of defence: Maximus Tyrius and Plutarch, the one in a manner more, the other in a manner less, favourable to poetry, had in effect long before traced out the whole Camp of Refuge on lines suitable either to the bolder or to the more timid defender of Poesy. The latter could represent it as the philosophy of the young, as a sort of _Kindergarten_-keeper in the vestibule of the higher mysteries, as not necessarily bad at all, and possibly very good. The former could argue for its equality with philosophy itself, as pursuing the same ends by different means, and appealing, not in the least _in forma pauperis_, to its own part of human nature.

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Footnote 24:

Geog. i. 11, 5, where he describes poetry as a rudimentary philosophy,
providing an introduction to life, and educating pleasantly. I do not
remember who _first_, or who successively, pointed this out before
Shaftesbury, _Advice to an Author_, Part I. sect. 3, note _sub fin._
But Castelvetro (_Op. Var._, p. 83), and Opitz (_v. inf._, p. 361),
among others, refer to it.

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It seems by no means improbable that this view was partly brought about by that remarkable influencer both of early mediæval and of early Renaissance thought, Dionysius the Areopagite. [Sidenote: _Pico, &c._] Readers of Mr Seebohm’s _Oxford Reformers_[25] will remember the curious and interesting extracts there given from Colet’s correspondence with Radulphus, and the explanation of the Mosaic cosmogony as intended to present the Divine proceedings “after the manner of a poet.” This view Colet seems to have extracted partly from Dionysius himself, partly from Pico della Mirandola, the most remarkable of Savonarola’s converts, while time and place are not inconsistent with the belief that the future Dean of St Paul’s may have come into contact with Fra Girolamo himself. Now, this kind of envisagement of poetry, certain to turn to spiritual account in spiritually minded persons like Colet and Savonarola, and in mystically, if not spiritually, minded ones like Pico, would, in the general temper of the Renaissance, of which all three were early illustrations, as certainly turn to more or less spiritualised philosophy—ethical, metaphysical, or purely æsthetic, as the case might be. And we can see in it a _vera causa_ of that certainly excessive, if not altogether mistaken, devotion to the abstract questions, “What is a poet?” “What is poetry?” “What is drama?” and so forth, which we perceive in almost all the Italian critics of the mid-sixteenth century, and which is almost equally, if less originally, present in their Elizabethan pupils and followers. If Colet himself had paid more attention to literature, we cannot doubt that this is the line which his own literary criticism would have taken; and as his influence, direct or through Erasmus and More, was very great on English thought, both at Oxford and Cambridge, it is not impossible that it may have been exerted in this very way.

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Footnote 25:

More especially p. 46 _sq._ (2nd ed.) The influence of the _Somnium
Scipionis_ of Macrobius may also have been considerable.

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The other line (the line which, according to the definitions of the present work, we must call the line of criticism proper), though it was perhaps hardly in this instance traced with boldness and without deflection, started under yet more distinguished auspices. [Sidenote: _Politian._] The _Sylvæ_ of Politian consist, in the main, of a direct critical survey of classical poetry couched in the, as we may think, somewhat awkward form of verse, decked with all the ornament that could suggest itself to the author’s rich, varied, and not seldom really poetical fancy, and arranged with a view to actual recitation in the lecture-room for the delight and encouragement of actual students.[26]

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Footnote 26:

Politian’s critical faculty shows to more advantage here than in his
attribution of the Epistles of the Pseudo-Phalaris to Lucian (see
Bentley’s immortal _Dissertation_). He had almost better—from the
literary point of view—have believed them genuine.

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Neither purpose nor method can be regarded as wholly favourable to criticism. The popular _conférencier_ (for this term best expresses Politian’s position) is sure to be rather more of a panegyrist or a detractor, as the case may be, than of a critic; and the lecturer in verse is sure to be thinking rather of showing his own rhetorical and poetical gifts than of the strict merits and defects of his subject. But if we take the _Nutricia_ or the _Rusticus_, the _Ambra_ or the _Manto_, and compare any of them with the well-intentioned summary of the _Labyrinthus_,[27] we shall see without the least unfairness, and fully admitting the difference of ability and of opportunity in the two men, the difference, from the critical point of view, of the two stand-points.

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Footnote 27:

_V._ vol. i. p. 408.

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In the “Manto,” the first of the _Sylvæ_, the most important characteristic of sixteenth-century Italian criticism proper, the exaltation of Virgil, is already prominent. [Sidenote: _The_ Manto.] Politian, indeed, was too much of a wit, and too much of a poet himself, to let his Virgil-worship take the gross and prosaic form which it assumed a little later in Vida. But he has proceeded a long way from the comparatively uncritical (and yet so more critical) standpoint of Dante. He comes to details. Cicero had won the palms of sweetness from Nestor and of tempestuous eloquence from Ulysses (a little vague this), but Greece consoled herself in poetry. Ennius was too rude to give Latium the glory of that. Then came Virgil. Even with the Syracusan reed (_i.e._, in his Eclogues) he crushes Hesiod and contends with Homer. Calliope took him in her arms as an infant, and kissed him thrice. Manto, the guardian nymph of his native place, hailed his advent, and summarised in prophetic detail his achievements in verse. Her town shall enter the lists—secure of victory—with the seven competitors for Homer’s origin. And then a whirlwind of magniloquent peroration (charged with epanaphora,[28] that favourite figure of the sixteenth century) extols the poet above all poets and all wonders of the world, past, present, and to come.

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Footnote 28:

_Aut_ telo, Summane, tuo traxere ruinam,
_Aut_ trucibus nimbis aut iræ obnoxia Cauri,
_Aut_ tacitis lenti perierunt dentibus ævi.

_Dum_ ver tristis hyems, autumnum proferet æstas,
_Dum_que fluet spirans refluetque reciproca Tethys,
_Dum_ mixta alternas capient elementa figuras,
_Semper_ erit magni decus immortale Maronis,
_Semper_ inexhaustis ibunt hæc flumina venis,
_Semper_ ab his docti ducentur fontibus haustus,
_Semper_ odoratos fundent hæc gramina flores.
—_Manto_, 335-337, 342-348, p. 303, _ed. cit. inf._

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But Politian would have been faithful neither to those individual qualities which have been noted in him, nor to that sworn service of Greek which was the chivalry of the true Humanist, if he had thought of depreciating Homer. [Sidenote: _The_ Ambra _and_ Rusticus.] The “Ambra,” a poem longer than the “Manto,” and not much less enthusiastic, is mainly devoted to a fanciful description of the youth of the poet, and a verse-summary of the poems. Indeed the peroration (till it is turned into a panegyric of Ambra, a favourite villa of Lorenzo) is a brilliant, forcible, and _true_ indication of the enormous debt of all ancient literature, science, and in fact life, to Homer, of the universality of his influence, and of the consensus of testimony in his favour. The “Rusticus” is rather an independent description and panegyric of country life, as a preface to the reading of Virgil, Hesiod, and other bucolic and georgic writers, than a criticism or comparison of them. [Sidenote: _The_ Nutricia.] But the “Nutricia” is again ours in the fullest sense. Its avowed argument is _De poetica et poetis_, and, in handling this vast and congenial theme, Politian gives the fullest possible scope at once to his genius, to his learning, and to that intense love for literature without which learning is but as the Carlylian “marine-stores.” In nearly eight hundred exultant hexameters,[29] the vigour and fulness of which enable them to carry off without difficulty the frippery of their occasional trappings, he traces the origin of poetry, the transition from mere stupid wonder and the miseries of barbarism to sacred and profane verse, the elaboration of its laws in Judea by David and Solomon, in Greece by Orpheus, the succession of the Greek and Latin poets in the various forms (it is noteworthy that Politian is not at all copious on the drama) through the exploits of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to the patronage of poetry by Lorenzo himself.

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Footnote 29:

If anybody charges me with plagiarism from Mr Symonds’ “leaping,” I
had rather plead guilty than quibble. The metaphor is too obviously
the right and only one, for the peculiar motion of Politian’s verse,
to any one who has an ear. I keep, however, the order of the edition I
use (that of Signor Isidoro del Lugo, Florence, 1867), not the perhaps
more logical one of _Nutricia—Rusticus—Manto—Ambra_, which Mr Symonds
followed and which is that of Pope, _op. cit. inf._

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This is criticism leaning dangerously on the one side to panegyric, and likely to be (though it is not actually) dragged to the other still more dangerously by partisanship; but it is still criticism. [Sidenote: _Their merits_] The liker does not “like grossly,” or in accordance with mere tradition. He loves, as the American poet says, “not by allowance but with personal love”; and he can give reasons for the love that is in him. He seeks the poetic pleasure from the Muse; he obtains it from her; and he savours it, not merely with eagerness, but with acutely sensitive taste. Though he might not at some moments be averse to refining on the character of poetry generally, as well as on the character of this poetic pleasure, it is this itself that he seeks, finds, and rejoices in. Part at least of the spirit of Longinus is on him; he is transported, and he knows the power that transports.

At the same time, it must be difficult, for all but the extremest Virgilians, to think that he does not err by way of excess in his estimate of that poet; and it must be still more difficult, even for them, not to perceive that the pitch, even if excusable in the individual, is dangerous as an example. [Sidenote: _and danger._] Followers will make-believe; they will give inept reasons to support their made belief; and worst of all, by that fatal catachresis of “imitation” which is always waiting upon the critic, they will begin to think, and to say, that by simply copying and borrowing from Virgil and other great ones you may go near to be thought not entirely destitute of their so-much-praised charm. The danger very soon ceased to be a danger only, and we find a victim to it in Vida; but before coming to him we may divagate a little.

The _furor poeticus_ of Politian put him much beyond other Humanists in critical respects. His contemporary and friend, [Sidenote: _Petrus Crinitus: his_ De Poetis Latinis.] Petrus Crinitus,[30] was, if not quite of the same caste as Politian, by no means of the mere ordinary Humanist type. His kissing-verses, _Dum te Neæra savior_, are among the best of their kind between Petronius and Johannes Secundus; and his curious _pot-pourri_, _De Honesta Sapientia_, is quite worth reading, though one may know most of its constituents well enough beforehand. Yet the literary inquiries here are surprisingly few, and treated in no critical spirit whatsoever, so that there is no disappointment in one sense, though there may be in another, with his three books, _De Poetis Latinis_. These consist of a large number of separate articles in more or less chronological order, by no means ill-written in the classical-dictionary fashion: _Genitus est_ here; _obiisse traditur_ there, and in such a year; _totum se dicavit poeticæ facultati_, and the rest. The taste as expressed by preferences is not bad, and the approaches (they are hardly more) to critical estimate, though very obvious and mostly traditional, are sound enough and fairly supported by quotation. But of original attempt to grasp and to render the character of Latin poetry generally, or of any one Latin poet by himself, there is hardly a vestige.

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Footnote 30:

My copy is the edition of Gryphius (Lugduni, 1554). Crinitus (Ricci or
Riccio) had dedicated it nearly fifty years earlier, and just before
his own death, I believe, to Cosmo Pazzi, Bishop of Arezzo, on
November 1, 1505.

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It is not at all improbable that _Poetics_ in one form or another, both Italian and “Tedescan,” may exist in MSS. of this period: [Sidenote: _Augustinus Olmucensis: his_ Defence of Poetry.] there is certainly work, even in print, of which very little notice has been taken hitherto. For instance, a few months ago my friend Mr Gregory Smith saw in a catalogue, bought, and very kindly lent to me, a _Dialogus in Defensionem Poetices_, printed at Venice in 1493, and written by a certain Augustinus Moravus Olmucensis.[31] This writer’s family name in vernacular appears to have been Käsenbrot; and he was one of the early German Humanists whose most famous chiefs were Reuchlin earlier, Conrad Celtes and Eobanus Hessus later, who achieved much tolerable verse, and in the _Epistolæ Obscurorum_ one immortal piece of prose, but who were whelmed in the deluge of the Reformation struggles, and accomplished little of the good which they might have done to Germany. The _Dialogus_—which has the perhaps not quite accidental interest of having appeared in the year between the writing of Savonarola’s somewhat dubious backing of Poetry, and the first printing of Boccaccio’s uncompromising and generous championship thereof—cannot be said to be of much intrinsic importance. The author gives, or rather adopts, the definition of Poetry as “a metrical structure of true or feigned narration, composed in suitable rhythm or feet, and adjusted to utility _and_ pleasure.” But his text is rather rambling. A parallel with Medicine (the piece seems to have been written at Padua, which helps it to its place here) is not very well worked out, and the latter part is chiefly occupied with rather dull-fantastic allegorisings of the stories of Tiresias, the Gorgons, the geography of Hades, and so forth. Still it is a sign, and welcome as such.

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Footnote 31:

A fellow-citizen and contemporary printer generally appears in
biographical dictionaries under the heading “Olmucensis.” The history
of Olmütz, by W. Müller (Vienna, 1882), has not come in my way, so I
do not know whether Augustinus appears there. The _Dialogus_ is duly
in Hain, but has not, I think, been much noticed by literary
historians.

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Another Transalpine may be admitted here, for reasons of time rather than of place, to introduce two undoubted Italians. [Sidenote: _Paradoxical attacks on it by Cornelius Agrippa, Landi, Berni._] It is customary to mention the name at least of Cornelius Agrippa,[32] if not exactly as a critic, at any rate as being a denouncer, though no mean practitioner, of literature. It is perhaps a just punishment for his blasphemy that no one who only knew this would dream that the adept of Nettesheim was as good a man of letters as he is. It constitutes the fourth chapter of the _De Vanitate Scientiarum_ (1527), and is a mere piece of hackneyed railing at the art which _aures stultorum demulcet_, which is _architectrix mendaciorum et cultrix perversorum dogmatum_, which is _pertenuis et nuda, insulsa, esuriens, famelica_. Alas! if some tales are true, Cornelius (who really was a clever man) found that Occultism could starve its votaries as well as Poetry. His attack is, in fact, nothing but an instance of that measles of the Renaissance (nor of the Renaissance only) paradox-quackery; and it has no solid foundation whatever. The later (1543) _Paradossi_ of Ortensio Landi[33] exhibit more frankly the same spirit, but in regard to individuals, especially Aristotle, rather than to poetry and literature generally. And it is probably not absent from Berni’s _Dialogo contra i Poeti_[34] (1537, but written earlier), in which Poetry is dismissed by this agreeable poet as suitable enough pastime for a gentleman, but out of the question as a regular vocation or serious business.

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Footnote 32:

I have used the _Opera_, 2 vols., Lugduni, 1531, 8vo. The passages
cited will be found at ii. 14 _sq._

Footnote 33:

For Landi or Lando, see an interesting paper by Mr W. E. A. Axon, in
vol. xx. of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature.

Footnote 34:

This, which is very amusing, opens the ed. of Berni’s _Opere_ in the
Sonzogno collection (Milan, 1888).

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But we must return to serious persons. Of the critical texts to which we pay chief attention in this book, there are not a few which are of far higher critical value than Vida’s _Poetics_.[35] [Sidenote: _Vida._] But it may be doubted whether even the similarly named treatises of Aristotle and of Horace have had a greater actual influence; and I at least am nearly certain that no modern treatise has had, or has yet had a chance of having, anything like so much. In the recently renewed study of Renaissance Criticism there has been, naturally enough, a repetition of a phenomenon familiar on such occasions—that is to say, the deflection of attention from pretty well-known if half-forgotten material to material which had been still more forgotten, and was hardly known at all. Daniello, Minturno, and the rest had, since the seventeenth century, rested almost undisturbed; even Castelvetro and Scaliger had more or less shrunk to the position of authorities, of some importance, in regard to ancient criticism. But Vida, owing to the unmistakable though unacknowledged borrowing of Boileau, the franker discipleship of Pope, and the inclusion of a very characteristic translation by Pitt among the usual collections of “British Poets,” had taken rank once for all. It is true that it was a rank somewhat of the museum order, but it existed. Now, the critics who followed him and refined upon him have been disinterred, and are enjoying their modest second vogue; and he is comparatively neglected, though a judicious American[36] has put him in modern dress once more between his master Horace and his pupil Boileau.

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Footnote 35:

For the Latin I use Pope’s _Selecta Poemata Italorum_ (2 vols.,
London, 1740), i. 131-189, and the anonymous _Poemata Selecta
Italorum_ (Oxford, 1808), 207-266; for Pitt’s Englishing, Chalmers’s
_Poets_, xix. 633-651. The original is Rome, 1527, 4to.

Footnote 36:

Prof. A. S. Cook (Boston, 1892).

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Of three things, however, the one is absolutely incontestable as a fact, and the other two are not easily, I think, to be gainsaid by competent authority. [Sidenote: _Importance of the_ Poetics.] The first is, that Vida anticipates in time even the earliest of the prose critics of the new Italian school by some couple of years, while he anticipates the main group of these critics by more than twenty. The second is, that though no doubt he took some impulse from Politian and other Humanists, he is practically the first to codify that extravagant Virgil-worship which reigned throughout the Neo-Classical dispensation. The third is that, not merely in this point but in others, he seems, by a sort of intuition, to have anticipated, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, almost the whole critical orthodoxy of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth. It is this which makes the translation of him by Pitt so interesting; because the translator is, for once, no traitor, but _plus royaliste que le roi_—fanatically imbued with the principles, and equipped to the finger-tips with the practice, of his original. But for the purposes of the scholar that original itself must of course be taken.

The temper and the faith in which Vida writes are made manifest by the very beginning of his poem—an invocation to the Muses woven of unexceptionable _gradus_-tags, and deftly dovetailed into a dedication to the luckless Dauphin Francis, who had then taken his father’s place as Charles the Fifth’s prisoner at Madrid, and to whose captivity the poem is modestly offered as a solace or pastime. [Sidenote: _Analysis of the piece._] These invocations accomplished _more majorum_, Vida proceeds to occupy his First Book with a sort of general clearing of the ground. He is ready to teach the secret of all kinds of poetry; but the poet must very carefully inquire what are the kinds to which he himself is best adapted and best inclined. Commissioned work is dubious, unless under a king’s command. But there is more than this: the poetic child must be carefully nursed in the arts suitable to his great calling. He must be as carefully guarded from the taint of vulgar and incorrect speech; and must be regularly initiated into Poetry—Latin first, especially Virgil, and then Greek, especially Homer. A short historical sketch of poetry follows; but it, like everything else, is brought round to the deification of the Mantuan. Hence Vida (who must be pronounced rather long in weighing anchor) diverges to a good-natured intercession with parents and teachers not to have the boys whipped too much, telling a moving legend of an extremely pretty[37] boy who was actually whipped to death, or at least died of fear. Emulation, however, is quite a good stimulus; and by degrees work will be loved for itself. But original poetical production must not be attempted too young; there must be time for play; the rudiments of metre and so forth must be thoroughly learnt; and, above all, _non omnes omnia_ must be constantly kept in mind. It is better to begin with pastorals and minor subjects; solitude and country life are very desirable circumstances. And so Book I. closes with a fresh invocation of the spirit of poetry and a fresh celebration of its power.

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Footnote 37:

_Insignis facie ante alios_, ed. Oxon., p. 215.

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After this rather ample prelude the author somewhat unreasonably (seeing that the delay has been his own doing), but in coachmanlike fashion, says _Pergite! Pierides_, and proposes to unfold the whole of Helicon to coming ages. The first disclosure is scarcely novel. You must invoke Jove and the Muses; nor will one Invocation do. When in doubt always invoke.[38] Next you should, without holding out bombastic promises, allure your reader by a modest but sufficient description of the subject of your poem. So far the method of turning the practice of the ancients into a principle is impartially adjusted to Homer and Virgil alike; but after a few score verses the partisan appears. The beginnings of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the plunging into the midst of things with the wrath of Achilles, and the sojourn with Calypso, instead of the rape of Helen (why not of Hesione?) or the launching from Troy, are duly praised. But the elaborate Homeric descriptions—as that of the car—are boggled at; the introduction of Thersites shocks Vida (Drances seems a far nobler figure), and the pettiness of the subjects of some of the Homeric similes would never suit the magniloquence of the Latian Muse.[39] In Virgil, on the other hand, he can see no fault; even the demand of Venus for arms to clothe her bastard son, which had given qualms to admirers of old, does not disturb Vida at all; and his poem seems to be slipping by degrees into a mere _précis_ of the _Æneid_, that each trait actually found in Virgil may be registered as a pattern to poets generally. He wrenches himself free for a moment to inculcate the following of nature; but presently lapses into an elaborate demonstration of the beautiful way in which the Mantuan _does_ follow nature. In short, though now and then to “save his face” an illustration is drawn _honoris causa_ from Homer, this Second Book on the _ordonnance_ of the poem is, till it ceases with a panegyric of Leo X., little more than a descant _On the Imitation of Virgil_.

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Footnote 38:

For a very interesting and characteristic view of this “invoking” in
the next generation, see Castelvetro, _Op. Var._, _ed. cit. inf._, pp.
79-99.

Footnote 39:

“Drances ... consiliis non futilis auctor,
Dives opum, pollens lingua et popularibus auris.
... Neque enim in Latio magno ore sonantem
Arma ducesque decet tam viles decidere in res.”

It is interesting to hear the watchword “Low!” so early.

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It cannot be said that the Third Book offers much difference in this respect—though the idolatry of Virgil is in parts a little more disguised. It is, again _more majorum_, devoted to Diction, and, the Muses having been invited to cross the stage once more, our Mentor first reprobates Obscurity. But though you must not be obscure, you may and should be Figurative, and not a few of the best known of our ancient acquaintances the Figures—Metaphor, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, and so forth—are introduced and commended, or sometimes discommended. It is extremely noteworthy that the warnings-off include one far from ugly conceit—

“Aut crines Magnæ Genetricis gramina dicat.”

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

“exuvias veterumque insignia”

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 [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 40:

Some would plead for “mosaic.” But the mosaic worker works his tiny
cubes _himself_—he does not steal them ready made and arranged.

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When it is examined in detail the proceeding may excite even more astonishment, which will be wisely directed not more to [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 41:

Cf. _Poet._, ii. 162. _Semper nutu rationis eant res._

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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

“Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.”

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. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 42:

Mr Spingarn’s useful chronological table gives twenty-five books by
nearly as many different authors for the seventy-three years. Nor does
this list pretend to be exhaustive; for instance, it omits
Robortello’s _Longinus_ (1554), and the important _De poetis nostrorum
temporum_ of Lilius Giraldus.

Footnote 43:

Dolce’s (1535) translation of Horace; Pazzi’s (1536) of Aristotle;
Daniello’s _Poetica_ (1536), and Tolomei’s _Versi e Regole_ (1539).

Footnote 44:

Robortello’s ed. of _Poetics_ (1548), and Segni’s translation (1549);
Maggi’s ed. (1550); Muzio’s _Arte Poetica_ (1551); Giraldi Cinthio’s
_Discorsi_ (1554).

Footnote 45:

Minturno’s Latin _De Poeta_ (1559); Victorius’ Aristotle’s _Poetics_
(1560); Scaliger’s own _Poetics_ (1561); the completion of Trissino
(1563); Minturno’s Italian _Arte Poetica_ (1564), and Castelvetro’s
_Poetics_ (1570).

Footnote 46:

The work of Piccolomini and Viperano.

Footnote 47:

That of Patrizzi, Tasso, and Denores.

Footnote 48:

That of Buonamici, Ingegneri, and Summo.

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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_. [Sidenote: _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.

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Footnote 49:

But most of this latter part had been written in 1548-49, and all must
have been before 1550, when Trissino died. Even this, however, leaves
a twenty years’ gap, which Trissino attributes to the composition of
his great (or at any rate large) poem on the Goths.

Footnote 50:

2 vols., Verona, 1729.

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Trissino does not, in his first instalment, busy himself with those abstract discussions which were soon to furnish the staple of Italian criticism. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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]

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Footnote 51:

All these, with the _Poetica_ and the translation of Dante, will be
found in the second volume of the edition cited. I take the
opportunity of correcting an injustice to Trissino which I committed
at i. 417, and which was brought to my notice by a reviewer in the
_Athenæum_. “Giovan- [or Giam-] battista Doria” _does_ say, in his
dedication to the Cardinal de' Medici, that Dante wrote it in Latin,
adding, however, a clause of such singular obscurity that at first
sight one takes it as meaning that Dante _himself_ translated the book
into Italian. For discussion of this see Rajna’s ed. of the _De V.
E._, p. li _sq._

Footnote 52:

II. 95. Perhaps better “unlearned,” _indotti Poeti_.

Footnote 53:

Spingarn, p. 92.

Footnote 54:

_Et ancor oggi si fa._

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The growth during the interval had been of three kinds, sometimes blended, sometimes kept apart. [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: _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]

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Footnote 55:

Spingarn, p. 102.

Footnote 56:

The discussion occupies nearly four quarto pages, ii. 127-130.
Trissino, of course, does not neglect Quintilian’s handling of the
subject in _Inst._, vi. 3, and he quotes modern as well as ancient
examples.

Footnote 57:

Dolce had translated the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace into Italian the year
before.

Footnote 58:

Mr Spingarn has extracted from MS., and published as an appendix to
his book, an interesting review of these commentators and others, by
Leonardo Salviati, a successor of theirs in 1586, and too famous in
the Tasso controversy.

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