Chapter III: Classicism in the Other Nations (1)

PRELIMINARY REMARKS—TEMPORARY REVIVAL OF ITALIAN
CRITICISM—GRAVINA—MURATORI: HIS ‘DELLA PERFETTA
POESIA’—CRESCIMBENI—QUADRIO—THE EMERGENCE OF LITERARY
HISTORY—FURTHER DECADENCE OF ITALIAN
CRITICISM—METASTASIO—NEO-CLASSICISM TRIUMPHS IN SPAIN—THE
ABSURDITIES OF ARTIGA—LUZÁN—THE REST UNINERESTING—FEYJÓO, ISLA, AND
OTHERS—RISE AT LAST OF GERMAN CRITICISM—ITS SCHOOL TIME—CLASSICISM
AT BAY ALMOST FROM THE FIRST: GOTTSCHED—THE ‘VERSUCH EINER
CRITISCHEN DICHTKUNST’—ITS CHIEF IDEA—SPECIMEN DETAILS—GELLERT: HE
TRANSACTS.

It would be scarcely more than one of those sweeping generalisations which attract a certain class of readers, if one were to say that, during the eighteenth century, England and France exercised a reciprocal influence over one another in literature, the results of which the remaining nations did little but imitate. [Sidenote: _Preliminary remarks._] It is certainly true that, as regards the special subject of this particular Book—the criticism of orthodox neo-classicism in the eighteenth century—Germany, Italy, and Spain play a part to which justice can be very briefly done, while the rest may well be silence. Nor will Spain and Italy at least have much more to give us when, and if, in the next volume, we turn from the setting to the rising sun. But it will be very different with Germany, where almost the entire interest lies in the restless struggles and obstinate questioning which lead to Romanticism, and which practically show themselves from the very moment when the Swiss School aroused German criticism from its long sleep after Opitz. What has to be said of the Gottscheds and Gellerts of the Northern Country had better be said last, so as to bring the matter into closer juxtaposition with the account of the Romantic Revolt itself. Italy (which has some interest in at least the beginning of the century) and Spain, which has very little in any part of it, must be taken first.

For some reason, or for none, the closing years of the seventeenth century, and the opening of the eighteenth, in Italy saw a very considerable revival of that critical spirit which, as we know, had died away so strangely, after its vigorous flourishing a hundred years earlier. [Sidenote: _Temporary revival of Italian Criticism._] It is true that this new Italian criticism is of a rather tell-tale kind—that it is, in great part at least, criticism of erudition and of retrospect. But Gravina, Muratori, Crescimbeni, and even Quadrio, form a group of no small interest. The first is a real critic of great, if not always well-directed, ability; the second, something of a real critic too, with amazing erudition; the third, the author of the first really literary history of a national literature; and the fourth, the first pioneer—no Lynceus, certainly, but still a pioneer-guide—in the ways of general and comparative literary study.

Gianvincenzo Gravina is one of those persons who particularly invite the student to idle _ægri somnia_ as to what they might have been in other times and circumstances. [Sidenote: _Gravina._] A lawyer, a _littérateur_, the adoptive father of Metastasio, the joint founder of the Arcadian Academy, a critic of remarkable shrewdness, who wrote excellent things on tragedy, and thought his own bad tragedies excellent—he tempts one strangely. His most famous and most often quoted critical work is _Della Ragion Poetica_,[711] but it is necessary, in order to appreciate his criticism, to go to his _Works_[712] and read also the _Della Tragedia_ and the _Discorso delle Favole_. The total effect is, as with most other eighteenth-century critics, a conclusion that the writer has not “found his way”: though he is nearer to it than some others writing later. The _Della Ragion Poetica_ is a most interesting labyrinth of cross-purposes. The strongly scholastic character of Italian serious thought, which we have noticed in Rinaldini only a few years earlier,[713] betrays itself in Gravina’s opening _del vero e del falso_; _del reale e del finto_; and in an episodic discussion of the origin of Idolatry, which may seem absolutely preposterous at first sight, but which works itself into the consideration of Fable not so ill. The admirable description of Homer as “the potentest of mages and the wisest of enchanters, in that he makes use of words not so much for the complacency of the ear as for the advantage of the imagination,”[714] is balanced, at a page or two’s distance, by a fling at the _perniciosa turba de' Romanzi_. The utility of poetry is gravely insisted on, and we are invited as usual to the study of the Kinds; but section xiv., on “Popular Judgment,” is instinct with that Italian common-sense which had shown itself in various ways during the sixteenth century, through mouths so different as those of Castelvetro and Cinthio Giraldi, a sense almost epigrammatically concentrated in the phrase _ne con solo popolo ne senza il popolo_. In these passages of Gravina’s there is to be found, put not indeed quite clearly, but unmistakably on fair allowance, a doctrine which hardly any critic of any day has sufficiently digested—that there is something in poetry corresponding, in measure and degree, to a poetical sentiment which only needs waking in all but the exceptions of mankind. What libraries of vain or positively mischievous disquisition should we have been spared, what unintelligent laudation of Burns when the intelligent is so easy, what unintelligent depreciation of Béranger when the abstinence from it is surely not so difficult, what idle and obstinate questionings about Donne or Whitman, Macaulay or Moore, and a hundred others of the most opposite kinds, if people would only have remembered our author’s sound and sober law[715] that "in all men there gleams through [_traspare_] I know not what discernment of the Good "to which poets, if they know how, can appeal!

-----

Footnote 711:

My copy is the Naples edition of 1732. But the book had appeared some
four-and-twenty years earlier at Rome (some even quote a Roman ed. of
1704).

Footnote 712:

Leipsic, 1737.

Footnote 713:

_V. sup._, p. 330.

Footnote 714:

Ed. cit., p. 12.

Footnote 715:

Ibid., p. 45.

-----

A large part of Gravina’s work in the _Ragion_ consists of an actual historical survey of poets and poetry in the spirit which, as we have seen and shall see, was so prevalent in his day; and his judgments, if a little traditional, are almost always sound, whether he is dealing with the classics or with the great Renaissance group of Italian-Latin poets.[716] Nor should he lack due meed for the word of praise he gives to Folengo, a writer little likely to appeal to the ordinary eighteenth-century spirit. When one thinks of the extreme inadequacy of French judgments of Rabelais himself at this time, it is no small merit in Gravina to have said, of one of not the least of Rabelais’ creditors, that “he wanted only will, not strength, to write a noble poem,” and actually possessed learning, invention, and fancy. The first book of the _Della Ragion Poetica_ ends thus with an author who must have seemed, to the usual eighteenth-century critic, nearly as sad and bad and mad as Rabelais and Shakespeare,[717] and in whom it is not now difficult to see much Rabelaisian and even some Shakespearian quality. The second deals with the Italian vernacular. Gravina duly admires Dante; but his elaborate apology for rhyme is noteworthy and amusing. It was the way of the eighteenth century to apologise for all sorts of things—from the Bible downwards—that were not in the least need of it. He is a little less shamefaced on the question of the vulgar tongue; and says excellent things about the _De Vulgari_ itself—that “discourse so subtle and so true.” Indeed he conducts his whole discussion on the Vernacular, which is long, in accordance with the principles of the tractate, and gives to Dante in all nearly fifty pages, or more than half of the book, announcing his deliberate intention _giudicare spediatamente_ of the rest from Boiardo and Ariosto downwards. The whole forms a very interesting survey of Italian poetry, though perhaps the most interesting of Gravina’s separate critical utterances is to be found, not in it but, in his short Latin Letter _De Poesi_ to Maffei, in which he speaks of La Casa as _qui alter potest haberi a Petrarca Lyricorum princeps_. It is a bold saying, but not hard to justify, concerning the author of _Errai gran tempo_ and _O sonno, o de la queta_.

-----

Footnote 716:

He is very interesting on these, being the principal critic, between
their own times and those modern days which have forgotten them, to
deal with the subject.

Footnote 717:

Gravina calls the opposite style to Macaronic not, as most do,
_pedantesco_, but _Fidenziano_, from Fidentio, the _nom de guerre_ of
Camillo Scrofa, author of certain egregious pedantesque pieces.

-----

The monumental work of Muratori in history and antiquities has overshadowed his accomplishment in literature; and some respectable books of reference hardly mention this; but it is in fact considerable. [Sidenote: _Muratori: his_ Della Perfetta Poesia.] We have already had occasion to refer to the service that he did in editing the miscellaneous critical papers of Castelvetro, and he also did important work on the Italian Theatre; but his _Della Perfetta Poesia Italiana_[718] is a more original title-deed. There is no doubt that it had great influence: some have even thought that Luzán (_v. infra_, p. 548) was indebted to it for the impulse which enabled him finally to overcome the remnants of Romantic resistance in Spain, and to seat Neo-classicism at last triumphant in the country of Don Quixote. But it does not need this doubtful and reflected honour. The book is, given its lights and its time, a very good book. It accepts, without much or any demur, that notion of Good Taste which the seventeenth century excogitated and the eighteenth almost universally accepted, postponing inquiry whether it were the false Florimel or the true. But Muratori is both a historian and a philosopher; and he makes good use of both his qualifications. He contrasts, effectively enough, the supposed infallibility of Petrarch in Taste, the variety (without deserting this) of the sixteenth century, and the _pessimo gusto_ of that which had just closed when he wrote. He will have it that Poetry is “a daughter and servant of Moral Philosophy”—in which case it must be sadly admitted that the mother is too often not justified of the daughter, and that the service is not seldom unprofitable. But he comes (perhaps inspired by Tasso) nearer to universal acceptance when he tells us that Poetic Beauty is “a new and marvellously delightful Truth,” and he is specially copious on the Fancy—so much so that one imagines it not impossible that Addison may have seen the treatise, more particularly as there is much about “True and False Wit” in the Second Book of the _Perfetta Poesia_. He is, in his Third Book, liberal on the question of Useful or Delightful—the latter will do very well if it is healthy delight[719]—and he discusses the defects of poets, and the various parts of poetry, with sense and discrimination. All this is of course still too much “in the air”; it makes the old mistake of taking for granted that _poesis_ can be in some way strained off, or distilled from, _poeta_ and _poema_. But this defect is to some extent repaired in the sequel, and the whole is a book far from despicable. The chief defect of it (a defect which extends also to Gravina) is the absence of comparative criticism—of the attempt, at least, to study literature as a whole.

-----

Footnote 718:

Modena, 1706.

Footnote 719:

Du Bos, a little later, with the apolausticism of the French
eighteenth century, says bluntly (_op. cit. sup._, i. 275) that “the
best poem is that which interests most,” and that “one hardly ever
opens a poem for the sake of instruction.”

-----

The two historians, especially Quadrio, are freer from this defect, though by no means free from it; but they compensate for this advantage by a much weaker dose of really critical spirit. [Sidenote: _Crescimbeni._] Crescimbeni is not an unimportant figure in the History of his own literature, to which he contributed, after writing in 1700 on _La Bellezza del Volgar Poesia_, a regular work[720] on the whole subject as far as poetry is concerned. Part, and the best part, of this is made up of a refashioning of the _Bellezza_. Its contents, which are not contemptible, though too like much that we have already gone through to require minute attention, are almost indicated by its title—an enumeration of poetical beauties, cautions against defects and mistakes in the application of them, and the usual analysis of Kinds. The rest of the book is a really valuable literary encyclopædia, with extracts, commentaries, lists, indices, &c., “all very capital” in their own way, but somewhat out of ours.

-----

Footnote 720:

_Istoria del Volgar Poesia_, Roma, 1698 and later.

-----

If Quadrio seems to invite more attention, it is partly because of his goodly bulk which fills the eye, and partly because of the oddity of some of his judgments, but partly also (in a third part) because he really intends to be critical, and because he extends his view far beyond Italian. [Sidenote: _Quadrio._] The _Della Storia e della Ragione d’Ogni Poesia_[721] is a sufficiently ambitious attempt; and I do not think I know anything of the kind, by a single man, which is at any rate more voluminous. Seven big quartos, tightly packed, give Quadrio ample room and verge enough for proceedings alike methodical and far-ranging in their method; and his _Distinzioni_—the sub-divisions of his Books—leave few things unattempted. He is able to include both branches of Patrizzi’s old division, _Disputata_ and _Istoriale_, and he extends the purview of the latter as widely as he can, if not as happily. The good faith, and the less than doubtful judgment, of some of his excursions will be sufficiently, and here most interestingly, demonstrated by some instances from his English notes. After devoting great space to the usual general questions of the nature, origin, position, &c., of poetry, he has a proportionately large distribution of Kinds, extending not merely into Acrostic-land but into Cento and Macaronic. He deals further with Poetic Art and Poetic Fury, and, in successive _Distinzioni_, with Plot and Manners, Erudition, Verse in general, Italian verse, &c. Then he attacks the actual contents of his subject, and devotes the whole of a volume of 800 pages to “Melic” or Lyric poetry. It cannot but be interesting to the reader to note who represented English Lyric poetry to the eyes of a learned and laborious Italian Jesuit in the second quarter of the eighteenth century; but it is pretty safe to say that not one of a hundred guessers would name the trio in a hundred guesses each. They are Gower, “Arthur Kelton,” and “Wicherley.”[722]

-----

Footnote 721:

7 vols. (Bologna and Milan, 1739-1752).

Footnote 722:

I shall own frankly that, when I first read this, I had either never
heard of Arthur Kelton, or had utterly forgotten him, and thought the
name must be a muddle of “Skelton.” What is known about him may be
found in Warton, iv. 159, ed. Hazlitt (taken, as was probably
Quadrio’s knowledge of him, from Wood and Bale), and also in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_. According to the latter, his poem
in praise of the Welsh nation is not now extant or discoverable; and
though a Chronicle exists I have never seen it. What made the Jesuit
name Kelton at all is as dark to me as what made him transform Gower
and “Wicherley” into “Melic” bards.

-----

He proceeds through all the divisions in the same way. His notice of Shakespeare is obviously a recollection of the milder view of Voltaire, who was a friend of Quadrio’s. Dryden wrote a “tragedy” entitled _King Arthur_; Addison is treated at length, and with evident sympathy, as well as with at least more direct knowledge than that shown of “Il Benjanson” (_sic_). There is a whole chapter on Milton, in which Rapin and the Chevalier Ramsay[723] are quoted. The critic is aware of (let us hope he had not read) Glover’s _Leonidas_; and he is naturally copious on Pope, though his section on _The Rape of the Lock_ shades itself off in the oddest manner into a Discourse on Hair, with references to Apuleius and the obliging Fotis, to Dion Chrysostom, and to Firenzuola. But Chaucer and Spenser are not (unless I have missed them) discussed by the citer of Arthur Kelton.

-----

Footnote 723:

If I have said nothing about this excellent Scoto-French disciple of
Fénelon, author of the _Voyages de Cyrus_ (which all good little
eighteenth-century boys and girls read), and writer of French which
was admitted by Frenchmen to be the best (except Hamilton’s) written
by any non-Frenchman, it is neither from ignorance nor from
_outre-cuidance_ He takes place in criticism for a _Discourse of Epic
Poetry_, prefixed to _Télémaque_.

-----

Of course there is no need to laugh at Quadrio; and if we do it must be done only in the most good-humoured and politest way possible. Doubtless we all make mistakes in dealing with foreign Literatures; and those of us who have dealt most with them have doubtless sinned most. But what is important to notice here about the Historian of All Poetry is—first, that he has shrewdly seen and manfully accepted, if not the necessity, at least the immense advantage, of comparative literary study; and secondly, that while emancipating himself to this extent, he is still under the domination of Kinds. If he had gone to A. Kelton himself, and had examined that worthy’s works—not to range him under Melic or Epic or anything _quod exit in ’ic_, but—to see whether he wrote good or bad poetry, he would at least have been in a fairer way of escape. But the mania for Kind- and Subject-division, instead of studying poetic treatment, can hardly be better illustrated than in Quadrio, whose schedule of narrative poetry, for instance, is as complicated and as meticulous as a Government return.

Yet the value of his attempt, and in a less degree of Crescimbeni’s, is very great: and it perhaps exceeds in _general_ critical importance the results of the exercise of the superior talent of Muratori and Gravina. [Sidenote: _The emergence of literary history._] These latter said more noteworthy things than the others: but they said them in a kind of criticism which, to speak our best for it, had already done all the good that was in it to do. Nay, their method of handling was likely to stand in the way of real critical advance or recovery, not to help it. Crescimbeni and Quadrio, especially the latter, recognised indeed, if they did not themselves quite understand, or lay down in so many words for the instruction of others, the great fact that before all things, and for some time at any rate instead of all things, it was time for criticism to “take stock”—that instead of theorising at large, and controlling the theory at best by a partial study of the classics and a very limited and arbitrary selection of the literature of the student’s own country, it was time for him to take the whole of that literature, to compare it with the whole of the classics, and, so far as he possibly could, with the whole of foreign modern literature as a third standard. That is practically what we have been doing for nearly two hundred years past, more or less—for more than a hundred years past, pretty steadily and with a will. It is not done yet; and it never can be done wholly, because every generation and every country adds, in its varying measure and degree, fresh supplies of matter which cannot be digested all at once, but which must sooner or later be added to the rest, and may affect conclusions drawn from that rest, as vitally as did the work of Dante or that of Shakespeare. But it has been done, and is being done, after a fashion in which, before the time of these two Italian historians, it had hardly been done by anybody.

The promise, however, of this group—the elder of whose members almost belong to the seventeenth century, while the youngest does not come below the middle of the eighteenth—was not fulfilled. [Sidenote: _Further decadence of Italian Criticism._] Hardly a single person among the other (and chiefly later) Italian critics of the time has achieved, or, so far as I have been able to inform myself, has deserved to achieve, any great reputation. Tiraboschi indeed continued the merely historical part of Crescimbeni’s labour with an industry probably unparalleled in any other country. [Sidenote: _Metastasio._] Metastasio, in his later days, occupied himself a good deal with criticism, and at an earlier time his _Estratto dell' Arte Poetica d’Aristotile_[724] would have deserved a good deal of attention from us. At his own date Metastasio is partly an eminent example of that halting between two opinions which has been so often mentioned, partly an inheritor of others’ thoughts. He is in hardly any sense a Romantic; yet he observes, against the Dacierian extension and hardening of Aristotle’s definition of poetry, that if this be so “it will be very difficult to find any writer who is not a poet”, and a little farther he has excogitated, or borrowed from the æestheticians, the all-important doctrine that the object of the sculptor is “not the illusion of the spectator but his own victory over the marble.” But these things are late, transitional, and, perhaps, as has been hinted, borrowed. The earlier critical work of the polygraphic, polyglottic, and polypragmatic Marquis Scipione Maffei has no distinction: and the very names[725] of Palesi, Salio, Denina, Zanotti are unknown to all but special students of Italian literature, and probably to not a few of these. We must come to quite modern times—to times indeed so near our own that the rule of silence as to living contemporaries may often come into operation—before we can find any heirs to the glory of Castelvetro and Patrizzi, if we can find them then.

-----

Footnote 724:

It fills the greater part of the 12th and last vol. of the Paris ed.
(1782). The passages quoted are at pp. 29, 30, and 57 of this.

Footnote 725:

For instance, of these four only Denina occurs in Dr Garnett’s
excellent _Short History of Italian Literature_ (London, 1898), and
that for his historical, not his literary, work.

-----

The singularity which in so many ways besets Spanish literature shows itself, perhaps not least, in the fact that the establishment of the neo-classic creed in Spain does not take place till that creed is beginning to be, in one way or another, deserted or undermined in other countries. [Sidenote: _Neo-classicism triumphs in Spain._] It must be admitted that there was some excuse for Don Ignacio de Luzán Claramunt de Suelves y Gurrea, whose _Poética_ in 1737 argued Spain’s poetry away, far more actually than Cervantes had ever laughed away her chivalry. It has been usual to represent Luzán as a mere populariser of Boileau in Spain: but this is not just. Any one who has followed the course of reading which this book represents will see that it was the _antiqua mater_ of Spanish criticism, Italy, which really started Luzán’s inquiries—that Muratori, and perhaps Gravina, rather than Boileau and the French schoolmen, were his masters. Indeed it seems that he had actually sketched, in Italian and in Italy (or at least Sicily), certain _Ragionamenti sopra la Poesia_, nearly a decade before his Spanish book appeared.

There was, it has been said, some excuse for him. [Sidenote: _The absurdities of Artiga._] We have seen in the last Book that, though isolated expressions and _aperçus_ of remarkable promise and acuteness appear in Spanish criticism of the seventeenth century, it was always _impar sibi_, and was constantly aiming at the establishment of a kind of illegitimate compromise between the national drama, which the critics would not give up, and the general theories of literature which they did not dare—perhaps did not wish—to impugn. In fact, this state of compromise, by yet another of the anomalies above referred to, anticipates the similar things which we see in England and in France, in Italy and in Germany, much later. At the same time, Spain had been a special victim, with Gongorism and Culteranism and Conceptism, of those contortions of the Romantic agony which, all over Europe, invited the tyranny of neo-classicism. Also its great creative period had closed for some considerable time. Lastly, there had survived in Spain a kind of childishly scholastic rhetoric, which the rest of Europe, with some slight exceptions in Italy, had long outgrown. Ticknor, the most amiable of Historians (when Protestantism is not in point), calls by the name of “a really ridiculous book” the _Epitome de la Eloquencia Española_ of Don Francisco José Artiga or Artieda, to which he gives the date of 1725, but of which the British Museum copy bears a date more than thirty years earlier.[726] People are apt to be so unkind to technical _Rhetorics_ and _Poetics_ that I own I had a faint hope, before I actually read this book, of being able to remonstrate with the Ticknorian judgment: but _no puede ser_. The work is dedicated to Francesco Borgia, Duke of Gandia—the tragic elder associations of the name serving, to those who are susceptible to such things, as a sort of heightening of the farce. It consists of verse-dialogues, in octosyllabic quatrain, between a _Hijo_ and a _Padre_ by way of question and answer. Eloquence is angelic, celestial, ethereal, elementary, mixed, dumb, and several other things. Receipts and formulas are given for all sorts of compositions down to visiting cards: and the style of exposition may perhaps best be appreciated from an extract of two quatrains—

_P._ La Imágen o Icon se haze,
bosquejando una pintúra
de algúnas cosas con otras
con propriedád y hermosúra.

And a little later the Hijo says—

_H._ En entrambos ejempláres
resplandecen las figúras:
mostradme, si [la Apostrofe] la Adversion
encierra tanta hermosúra.

One is too apt to forget, in censuring eighteenth-century flippancy and superficiality in regard to the past, that all over Europe, more or less, this kind of childish stuff was still actually taught.

-----

Footnote 726:

Huesca, 1692, 12mo.

-----

Luzán is at least not childish, though he betrays the insufficient historical examination and the hasty generalising which beset the whole school. [Sidenote: _Luzán._] He devotes the principal attention of his folio,[727] after generalities avowedly taken from Muratori, to Epic and Tragedy, and while using complimentary words to Lope and Calderon, indicates, without doubt or hesitation, that his heart is with Corneille and Racine. It is true that he is himself—as all these Eighteenth-century “classics” are without exception, save the mere school dogmatists or the obstinate reactionaries like La Harpe—inconsistent. Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly[728] goes so far as to say that there is hardly a proposition in his book which is not contradicted elsewhere in it. But that he at least meant to be a neo-classic, a Unitarian, a Nicolaitan, there can be no doubt, nor any that he met with no markworthy or effectual resistance.

-----

Footnote 727:

Published at Saragossa, date as above. A later edition is said to be
garbled.

Footnote 728:

_Op. cit._, p. 348.

-----

The rest of the Spanish criticism of the eighteenth century has, save for special students of Spanish literature, and perhaps even for them, very little interest; [Sidenote: _The rest uninteresting._] and it is noticeable that, from this point, even the accomplished and indefatigable historian of the subject[729] practically breaks away from Spain itself, and gives a history of æsthetic ideas, not as they arose, and developed, and changed, and fell there, but rather as they went through these phases in Europe at large. The better known names of Spanish authors of the time, such as Isla and Feyjóo, have a certain right to figure here, but their literary critical work is only a part, and not a very important or interesting part, of the extension of the _Aufklärung_, especially in the forms which it assumed in France, to the most bigoted and conservative (except its sister Portugal) of European countries. This process, though perhaps necessary, is not in any department, political, religious, or other, particularly grateful to study; for Spain lost venerable and fascinating illusions—if illusions they were—to gain a very shallow, dubious, and second-rate civilisation and enlightenment. And this was almost more the case in literature than anywhere else.

-----

Footnote 729:

Señor Menéndez y Pelayo, as cited before, in vols. 5 and 6 of his
_History_.

-----

Feyjóo’s _Teátro Crίtico_, a series of Essays published between 1726 and 1738, and his _Letters_, which after a short interval he began in 1742, and continued at intervals for eighteen years more, are more philosophical and “moral,” in the French sense, than literary. [Sidenote: _The rest uninteresting._] But the “Spanish Hotel de Rambouillet”—the “Academy of good taste” which met about the middle of the century at the house of the Countess de Lemos—included not only Luzán, but another _littérateur_ of high rank, Luis José Velasquez, Marquis of Valdeflores, with Nasarre y Ferriz, and others. The whole school was rather anti-national, but Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, their contemporary, did great service to Spanish literature by publishing the _Origins_, to which we have been indebted above,[730] and some by compiling a _Rhetoric_, traditional enough, but not specially “Gallo”-Classic. The famous Father Isla not only attacked the remnants of extravagant style, which had sought refuge in the Spanish pulpit, in _Fray Gerundio_, the one Spanish book of this time, which became a European possession, but left unpublished other critical work, especially in his poem of _Ciceron_, much of which is satirically critical of literature. Isla was probably more of a patriot than of a critic in his well-known attempt to claim _Gil Blas_ for Spain, not merely in suggestion but in direct original. Nor should we omit to mention with honour, as members of that invaluable class of restorers of ancient literature which arose in almost all countries in the latter half of the century, Sedano of the _Spanish Parnassus_, Sanchez of the _Poesias Anteriores al Siglo_ XV, and Sarmiento, the first general Historian of Old Spanish Poetry. Their work was, if a somewhat slow, a sure and certain antidote to the Gallicism of Moratin (Luzán’s chief successor) and others of the later time.[731]

-----

Footnote 730:

P. 333.

Footnote 731:

This Gallicism was not universal. As Mr Ticknor (III. v., opening)
says, while Moratin spoke contemptuously of the ballad of “Calaynos,”
his opponent Huerta pronounced _Athalie_ fit for nothing but its
original purpose of being acted by schoolgirls.

-----

Despite some exceptions (which only prove the rule rather more than is usual), and despite the immense dead-lift which at one time they gave, or helped to give, to criticism, the Germans have never been very good critics. [Sidenote: _Rise at last of German Criticism._] There has always been too much in them of the girl in the fable who jumped on the floor to hunt mice, instead of attending to the more important business and pleasure of the occasion. And though that dead-lift which has been referred to began extremely early in the eighteenth century, its history belongs to our next volume. It is, indeed, less easy to effect the separation which our plan demands here than anywhere else; for hardly had German vernacular criticism begun to exert itself once more, after its long inertia since Opitz, than the double current of abstract æstheticism, and of study of Romantic literature, began to appear. But it would be impossible to omit from a gallery or panorama of Neo-classicism such a typical specimen of the _perruque_ as Gottsched, such an eminent example of the “man who looks over his shoulder” as Gellert. And though we must leave substantive dealings with Bodmer, Breitinger, and their fellows and followers to that early division of the next volume in which, with leave of Nemesis, Germany will be compensated for the little pride of place she has hitherto enjoyed, it will be very proper here at least to mention the singular and interesting process of novitiate by which the Germans vindicated their character as the good boys of technical education; and, by sheer hard study and omnivorous reading, put the national abilities into a condition to turn out a Lessing and a Goethe.

The means—sufficiently obvious, but not often resorted to save by those nations which have not “decayed through pride”—were those of abundant translation from the more forward vernaculars, as well as from the classics. [Sidenote: _Its school time._] The German _Sammlungen_ of the first half of the eighteenth century[732] are very interesting things. From French, from English, from the Latin writings of the previous century, they selected, and batched together, critical tractates which they thought might do them good, taking these to heart with Aristotle and Horace, with Boileau and Vida. That the assemblage had sometimes something of a “Groves of Blarney” character—that people like Camusat[733] find themselves jostling Pope and Addison among writers of Belles-Lettres, and Vossius and Casaubon among scholars, mattered not so very much. Manure, seed, patterns (to take various lines of metaphor) were what the German mind wanted; and it received them in plenty, and certainly not without good result.

-----

Footnote 732:

One of the most important works of the Swiss school itself is Bodmer’s
_Sammlung Kritischer Schriften_, 1741, but this is for another time.
Nicolai’s _Bibliothek der Schönen Wissenschaften_ (Berlin, 1757) and
_Literaturbriefe_ (ibid., 1759-66) perhaps show the movement best.

Footnote 733:

I did not think it worth while to mention Camusat in the French
chapter, though he is not quite a contemptible person. He was one of
the tribe of French men of letters who, for this reason or that,
settled in Holland. He has the not small credit of being one of the
first to attempt a _Literary History_ (Amsterdam, 1722, 3 vols.) _of
France_. He edited part of the literary contents of Chapelain’s
letters, and did other things. But the Germans seem to have been
particularly attracted by a _Lettre sur les Poètes qui ont chanté la
Volupté_, which he wrote, I think, in connection with the work of
Chaulieu, but which I have only read in German. It may have had, for
them, the attraction of elegant naughtiness; but it has in reality
very little either of the adjective or of the noun.

-----

There are some very good authorities[734] who do not see much difference between Gottsched and his adversaries of the Swiss school, Bodmer and Breitinger. [Sidenote: _Classicism at bay almost from the first: Gottsched._] I am not able to agree with them. That there are characteristics in common nobody can deny,—that Gottsched is of the evening and Bodmer and Breitinger of the morning of the same day on the older arrangement, I do most sincerely think. And “the German Johnson”—so _echt-deutsch_ and so little Johnsonian—is much too characteristic and agreeable a figure not to have some substantive place here. It is interesting no doubt—and it would give an excellent subject for one of the many not-to-be-written _excursus_ of this history—that he, the analogue, to some extent, in Germany, of Johnson himself in England and of La Harpe in France, comes far earlier than these representatives of the neo-classicism which “makes an end” in countries far more accomplished in literature. But this is natural. The seventeenth century in Germany had but been one long fallow, producing nothing but not unfascinating weeds, like Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, or wildings like Grimmelshausen. But, as in other cases of fallow, the rains of heaven had descended, and the winds had blown, and the worms had done their work of breaking up, and the soil, if technically “foul,” was also fertile. Its production was necessarily mixed; but it was at any rate not subject to the desperate hook of the preceptist weeder, or to the traditional courses of the orthodox agriculturist. The German man of letters of 1700-1750 had the “Y” before him as few men of letters have had.

-----

Footnote 734:

_E.g._, my friend Professor Elton, in his _Augustan Ages_ (Edinburgh,
1899), p. 348. It is, I trust, not immoral, I am sure it is not
illiberal, to edit a book without absolutely indorsing all its
opinions, or insisting that all these opinions shall be one’s own.

-----

Gottsched took the classical branch of the letter unflinchingly, and quarrelled with others, like a good party man, as he realised that they were taking the Romantic. [Sidenote: _The_ Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst.] His _Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst_[735] is frontispieced with a striking picture of Apollo, and the Muses, and Pegasus looking benignly at Bellerophon(?), whom he is just pitching off, and Mercury, probably flying, but in appearance rather tumbling, down the Holy Hill, with a copy of Horace in his hand, and a group of critics and poets and personified Kinds of poetry waiting to receive it in ecstatic attitudes at the bottom. It has three separate dedication-pages, in the largest print, to three fair ladies of the same family,—the high-born Countess and Lady, Lady Ernestine Wilhelmine, widowed Baroness von Plotho, born Reichsgräfinn von Manteufel, “my especially gracious Countess and Lady”; the high-born Countess Johanna Henrietta Constantia, born the same, “my especially gracious Countess”; and my ditto the high-born Countess Louisa Marianne, born the same,—not to mention a beautiful Ode, several Prefaces, an Introduction, and the full text, with translation in German Alexandrines, of the _Ars Poetica_ itself. If writer and reader do not feel themselves safe under the convoy of all these charming spells and periapts, it is surely a pity.

-----

Footnote 735:

My copy is the third edition, Leipsic, 1742. The first is, I think, of
1730.

-----

It would, however, be most uncritical, and entirely unjust to Gottsched, to assert or insinuate that his apparatus is mere matter of parade. [Sidenote: _Its chief idea._] On the contrary, the preface to the second edition first enumerates as “the greatest connoisseurs and masters of Poetic,” Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Scaliger, Boileau, Bossu, Dacier, Perrault, Bouhours, Fénelon, Saint-Evremond, Fontenelle, La Motte, Corneille, Racine, Callières, Furetière, Shaftesbury, Addison, Steele, Castelvetro, Muralt, and Voltaire. For all of whom, except where (like Béat de Muralt, for instance) they have been reserved for reasons,[736] reference may be made to other pages of the present History. It afterwards specially alleges, as additional authorities, Riccoboni’s history of the Italian Stage, an anonymous _Paragone della Poesia Tragica d' Italia con quella de Francia_ which I have not seen, Rapin, Brumoy [spelt Brumo_is_], Hédelin, Rémond de Saint-Mard, an English _anonymus_[737] on _The Taste of the Town_, Ramsay, Pope, Casaubon, Heinsius, Voss, Rappolt, and Sebastian Regulus his Imitations of the First Book of the _Æneis_ (which last I have not read and do not think I intend to read). In the Preface to the Third Edition his quarrel with the Swiss school breaks out. We shall see in future, I trust, what this school taught; it is here of chief, if not of only, import to know what, according to Gottsched, the “Zürichers” (_i.e._, those about Bodmer) did _not_ teach and he did. “While I,” he says in mingled pride and indignation, “after treating of poetry in general, have dealt with all its Kinds, and given its own rules to each, so that beginners may turn them out impeccably, the Zürich poetic has nothing of the sort.” “Man would,” adds Gottsched incredulously and detesting, “thereout neither an Ode nor a Cantata, neither an Eclogue nor an Elegy, neither a Verse Epistle nor a Satire, neither an Epigram nor a Song of Praise, neither an Epic nor a Tragedy, neither a Comedy nor an Opera to make learn!”[738]

-----

Footnote 736:

Callières, a diplomatist and Academician, who wrote a good deal on
various subjects, in his later years, has been referred to under Swift
(p. 450). For more on him and his _Histoire poétique de la guerre des
A. et des M._, _v._ Rigault, _op. cit._, pp. 213-217. As to Furetière,
the agreeable author of the _Roman Bourgeois_ seemed to me to lie too
far outside any possible limits here, though, of course, there are
critical touches in his work. Some might even reckon, as an important
if rather excessive testimony to the rise of the novel, the curious
picture of the girl Javotte—pretty but innocent to the verge of
idiocy—turned into an accomplished and intelligent young lady by the
mere reading of the _Astrée_. Furetière even defends this
representation by serious argument (_Roman Bourgeois_, i. 171 _sq._,
ed. Jannet, 2 vols., Paris, 1878).

Footnote 737:

This was James Ralph—the “Ralph to Cynthia howls” of Pope. It appeared
in 1731, and deals with public amusements, from the theatre (which it
defends from Prynne and Collier) to cock-fighting, auctions, and
“Henley’s oratory.” It is rather amusing, and by no means, as Mr Pope
calls its author, “wholly illiterate.”

Footnote 738:

It is notable that, since the beginning of the twentieth century,
critics of the youngest school have been found Gottschedising in this
sense, and proposing to judge the worth or worthlessness of criticism
on similar cookery-book lines. I have seen an excellent critic rebuked
by a reviewer for not “showing how to _do_ something”—as if he were a
dancing-master.

-----

The Slurk-and-Pott objurgation which follows concerns us little. But the passage just quoted has real weight. For it shows how, to the absolute and half-incredulous horror of one party, and probably by the not entirely conscious or intentional purpose of the other, the battle of Rule-poetic against Appreciation-poetic had begun. To Gottsched the Art, or Science, or what-not, of Poetry is a huge schedule, which may be quite emptied of actual contents and yet retain its pre-established compartments and the rules for filling them; to his adversaries Poetry itself is a library, a treasury, a new world full of things and persons that cause, or do not cause, the poetic pleasure.

It would be unnecessary to analyse this not quite “the poor last” of Classical _Poetics_. [Sidenote: _Specimen details._] It may be sufficient to say that Gottsched has his first or general and his second or particular book, the first dealing with the origin and growth of poetry, the character and taste of a poet, the species of poetic imitation, the Wonderful in poetry, the Admirable in poetry, and the like, the second with the usual Kinds in regular order. His occasional utterances are, at this stage of the history, of far greater importance. We find (p. 86) the sonnet classed with madrigals, rondeaux, and other “little things which are worth little.” The old German _Heldengedichten_ are (p. 88), if not so good as Homer, Virgil, and Voltaire, yet not so bad as Marino, Ariosto, Chapelain, Saint-Amand, and Milton.[739] Later (p. 109), “Among Englishmen, who are specially inclined to excessive fantasy, Milton in his _Paradise Lost_ has exhibited everything that man can possibly do in this kind of _schwärmerei_.” It is well to remember that the detested Zürichers were special admirers of Milton; but there is no reason to suspect Gottsched of being unduly biassed by this, either here or in the longer examination which he gives to Milton’s sins afterwards. He is almost as severe on Ariosto (p. 209), arguing with unruffled gravity that the discoveries of Astolfo (which he sums up as solemnly as a judge) are not probable, and finishing with the sad observation that the Italian’s fantasies are really more like a sick man’s dream than like the reasonable inventions of a poet.

-----

Footnote 739:

Gottsched, like a true _Klassiker_, dislikes and distrusts romance,
ancient as well as modern, prose as well as verse, in and for itself.
“Romance writers,” he says (at p. 167), “know as little of the rules
of poetic imitation as of true morality.”

-----

The good Gottsched, in fact, is an apostle not so much even of classicism as of that hopeless _prosaism_ to which classicism lent itself but too easily.[740] Even Voltaire is not sufficiently _wahrscheinlich_ for him; and he asks (pp. 183, 215) in agitated tones whether Herr Voltaire, who has elsewhere such sound ideas on the Highest of Beings, has not made a mistake in the magic scenes of the _Henriade_? He is, however, no friend to prosaic diction, and stoutly defends what he calls (p. 263) “good florid expression,”[741] giving some better examples, from poets like Amthor and Flemming, than those who regard the German seventeenth century as a mere desert might expect. So long as he can get these flights under the recognised Figures, and so long as they do not outstep “the rules of prudence” (273), all is well. But the outstepping, as may be guessed, is not very far off. He finds it, under the guidance of Bouhours, in Malherbe of all remarkable places, and naturally much more in Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein, as well as in Ariosto and Marino and Gracián,—being as severe on _galimatias_ and “Phébus” as he had previously (and quite justly) been against that medley of German-French which Opitz had long before condemned. There is, in fact, a good deal of sense as well as of minuteness in Gottsched’s particular rules, both as to poetry in general and as to the Kinds. In dealing with these last he gives very extensive examples, and since these are taken from a division of poetry not much in most readers’ way, they are distinctly interesting. But we must not follow him into these details; nor is it at all necessary to do so. The neo-classic critic has at least the virtue of adhering to his own rules, and observing his own type, with Horatian strictness. There is little danger of finding in him a politic Achilles, a prudent youth, or an old man who is good-humoured and does not praise the past. Gottsched says of Epic and Romance, of Comedy and Tragedy, exactly what we should expect him to say, if not exactly what we may think he ought to have said. He cannot understand how Tasso could hope to “unite this Gothic taste of chivalrous books” (p. 682) with the Greek rules of Heroic poetry; and he makes so bold as almost to rebuke the great Voltaire for according the name of Heroic poem to the _Lusiad_ and the _Araucana_. But there is a characteristic note in the words, “It is time to leave the historic-critic part and come to the dogmatic,” which, it seems, we shall find—all of it—in Aristotle, Dacier, and Le Bossu. It is, in a different relation, like Balzac’s _passons aux choses réelles_—“Never mind the Poems: come to the Rules!”

-----

Footnote 740:

Thus we are to divide the Wonderful in Poetry (p. 171) into three
parts—like _omnis Gallia_! One may hesitate whether to emend “three
thousand” or “three million.”

Footnote 741:

He quotes a passage which he calls _ein Muster des guten verblümten
Ausdruckes_.

-----

Gellert, a pupil of Gottsched, at any rate for a time, and a pretty poet in his own way, betrays that tendency to compromise, if not actually to capitulate, which we have seen in parts of French Classicism. [Sidenote: _Gellert: he transacts._] His principal critical tractate[742] carries a confession in its very title, “How far the Use of the Rules extends in Rhetoric and Poetry,” and the confession is emphasised in the text. It comes to this—that the Rules are useful, but only generally so, and with a “thus far and no further.” It is evident that, when this point is reached, the Oppression of Gwenhidwy is on the eve of descending upon the land of Gwaelod, the dykes are bursting, and the sea is flowing in.[743] We saw just now Gottsched’s indignant horror at the idea of writing upon poetry without giving rules to anybody how he shall do anything. He must have been more horrified still, because there is an element of treacherous surrender instead of bold defiance in it, at this other view of the rules as not bad things in their way—to be followed when it is convenient and when you please, and broken or left behind when it is convenient, or when you please again. In fact, any such admission at once reduces the whole Neoclassic system to an absurdity. A law which may be obeyed or not exactly as people choose—a sealed pattern which is followed or not at the taste and fancy of the tailor or other craftsman—you surely cannot too soon repeal the first and throw the second into the dustbin. And this was, as we shall see, what Germany very speedily did.

-----

Footnote 742:

In the 7th vol. (pp. 117-154) of his _Works_, 10 vols., Berne,
1774-75.

Footnote 743:

See _The Misfortunes of Elphin_.

-----

INTERCHAPTER VI.

§ I. THE NEMESIS OF CORRECTNESS.
§ II. THE BALANCE-SHEET OF NEO-CLASSIC CRITICISM.

I.

In the present Interchapter, as in that at the close of the former volume, it seems desirable to make the summary twofold: in the first place, with reference to the Book which the chapter immediately follows, so as to provide a corresponding view to that given by the Interchapters of the two earlier Books in the volume itself; in the second, surveying the State of Criticism—with a look before and after—at the period which we have reached. This survey is here of even more importance than it was on the former occasion because of the greater—in fact the almost absolute—homogeneity of the subject. But it comes second in order, and for the moment we must busy ourselves only with that portion or side of Eighteenth-Century Criticism itself which has been considered in the last three chapters.

In one way Eighteenth-Century criticism has a very notable advantage over Seventeenth and Sixteenth. In the earliest of the three, as we saw, criticism exists almost without a critic. Its authorities are either men of something less (to speak kindly) than the first rank as men of letters, or else they devote only a slight and passing attention to the subject. In the Seventeenth this is not quite so, for Dryden is a host in himself, and Boileau, to name nobody else, is no common man of letters.

But in the Eighteenth the case is far more altered. English and French, the two leading literatures of Europe, are copiously and intensely critical, if not entirely according to knowledge. Addison, Johnson, Pope, Voltaire, are all dictators of literature, whose fame and authority, in the case at least of the two last, go far beyond their own country—and they are all critics. In another country, though in a division, for reasons, not yet noticed, Goethe, who, if any one, is the representative man of letters in his own nation, is a critic. The second class of names—mentioned or to be mentioned—Vico, Shaftesbury, Lessing, Gray, Buffon, Diderot, and others, approaches very nearly, if it does not sometimes reach, the first rank. Moreover, criticism has enormously _multiplied_ its appearances and opportunities of appearance: it has, in a manner, become popular. The critical Review—the periodical by means of which it is possible, and becomes easy, to give critical account of the literature, not merely of the past but of the present—becomes common. The critic as such is no longer regarded as a mere pedant; he at least attempts to take his place as a literary man of the world. If Italy and Spain fail—even allowing for the remarkable Italian critical group at the beginning of the century—to justify their old reputation, Germany, on the other hand, begins that career of critical hard labour to which she has apparently sentenced herself in perpetuity, and relieves it with more excursions into the fairer letters than of late. The French, though subject more severely than men of any other country to the idols of the time, continue to justify themselves both in the lighter and the severer critical work.

But the contribution of England is the most interesting of all. Our position at the time may be compared, with some advantage and no danger of straining, to that of Spain at a somewhat earlier period (see pp. 338-350). We do not indeed find, in any English critic after Dryden, formal expressions of such weight and pregnancy in the Romantic direction as those which the sharp-sightedness and patience of Señor Menéndez y Pelayo have extracted from the Spanish Preceptists. But the general tendency is even more comprehensive, if not yet catholic. In consequence, very mainly, of Dryden’s own magnificent championship of Shakespeare and Milton, it was, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, felt in England that these two at any rate had to be reckoned with; while Chaucer also had the same powerful recommendation, and Spenser had never lost the affection of the fit, though for a time they might be few. With these four to be somehow or other—by hook or by crook—taken into consideration, it was impossible for the worst harm to be done; and the peculiarities of English character, combined with the more vigorous condition of English creative literature, made the compromise work far better than that which had been in a manner entertained in Spain on the subject of Lope and Calderon. It might have been dangerous if Johnson had written the _Lives_ at the age which was Pope’s when he wrote the _Essay on Criticism_; but this danger also the Fortune of England—kindest of Goddesses, and most abused in her kindness, yet justified of Fate!—averted.

We shall, it is to be hoped, be able to show in the next volume how these conditions of Classicism in the several countries affected the rise or resurrection of Romanticism. For the present we must confine ourselves to the way in which they affected Classicism itself.