INTERCHAPTER III.
§ I. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MEDIÆVAL PERIOD TO LITERARY CRITICISM.
§ II. THE POSITION, ACTUAL AND POSSIBLE, OF LITERARY CRITICISM AT THE RENAISSANCE.
I.
In perhaps no part of a work of the present kind is it more important than it is here to distinguish between the different kinds of value, for the special purpose, of the period in question. If you judge this by its positive contributions to the standard literature of literary criticism, it has absolutely nothing of consequence to advance but the De Vulgari Eloquio. There is not very much else at all; and what there is consists mainly of agreeable babblings, of schoolbooks, and of incidental utterances, which at best can be taken as a kind of semeiotic.
Yet, in the De Vulgari itself, the Middle Ages lodged such a diploma-piece as has been scarcely half-a-dozen times elsewhere seen in the history of the world. And, what is still more important, their contributions to productive literature were such that they take, from the catholic point of view, equal rank as a whole with those of classical and those of modern times, while, for the special critical purpose, they are almost more valuable than either. Enforced and necessary ignorance of what the Middle Ages had to teach accounts in almost every case for whatever shortcomings we find in the Classics; wilful or careless ignoring of this accounts for most of the shortcomings of the moderns; recourse to it accounts for most of the merits, such as they are, of the criticism of the nineteenth century. The critic who knows his Middle Ages, knowing also ancient and modern literature, and he alone, has the keys of the criticism of the world.
Of the excellent and astonishing accomplishment of the De Vulgari Eloquio enough has been said already, and it will not require extensive surveys to show the small accomplishment in criticism of the Middle Ages elsewhere. It is almost enough to consider, as we have done, the work of Chaucer, their next man to Dante in genius[[613]] as a known personality. Chaucer had all or almost all the necessary qualifications of a critic—a real knowledge of literature, a distinctly satirical humour, a large tolerance, a touch, decided but not too frequent, of enthusiasm, an interest in a very wide range of different subjects and forms. And he is actually a critic in embryo, and more, throughout his work. The Boethius and the Astrolabe, the Rose and the Troilus, half the Canterbury Tales, more than half the minor works, are saturated with literature—could have come from no author but one who was saturated with literature. There is uncrystallised criticism on every page; there is even some crystallised criticism in the Sir Thopas, and perhaps elsewhere. But almost always “it is not so expressed,” and for once Shylock is justified of his refusal to find it. In Chaucer, the strange mediæval levelling of authors, not merely in respect of trustworthiness, but in respect of positive value, continues. Macrobius is as Cicero; Dares is much more than Homer. If he gives an opinion, it is a moral one. He puts the rejection of alliteration on a mere local ground; and they will not even let us believe that he laughed at French of Stratford-atte-Bowe from any literary point of view.
Yet while the persistent study of Rhetoric is of great importance, as exhibiting the keeping up of a critical treatment—such as it is—of literature, the growth of the vernacular Poetics is of much more, as developing a side of formal criticism which was destined to become of more and more importance as time went on, and to have a connection with, and an influence upon, criticism not merely formal, to which there is no parallel in ancient times. So far as we have any trustworthy evidence, Greek prosody was born like Pallas—full-grown and fully armed. It has no known period of infancy or pupilage: the poets may devise—may even give their names to—ingenious combinations, but all these combinations obey one prearranged system. If the case of Latin is not quite the same, the periods where it is most significantly different happen to be periods when criticism had either not come into being or had abdicated its functions. A De Prosodia Latina, by Nævius must have been as interesting as Gascoigne’s Notes of Instruction, and might have been as interesting as the De Vulgari Eloquio. A treatise on Latin Rhythms by Prudentius might, in its different way, have had an interest which is difficult to parallel by anything modern in actual existence.
The Middle Ages, however, were constrained to grapple with their problem as it arose. They had, as we have seen, been constant to Artes Poeticæ dealing with Latin: at last they had begun to face the more difficult question, how to construct and regulate their own growing vernacular prosody. No doubt, in these latter attempts, the mechanical prescriptions of the Provençal and French Arts appear more frequently than the philosophical-scientific consideration of poetical capacities visible in the De Vulgari; but there is no reasonable fault to find with this. Nor can it be reasonably contested that the extreme variety, licence, and (if any one likes the word) irregularity of the greater modern prosodies have given wider range to individual poetical development than was allowed by the prosodies of the ancients. Here, as elsewhere, uniformity rather than variety was probably the aim, and is certainly the achievement, of the Classics. For one individual and all but inimitable thing, like the Æschylean modulation of the chorus (so different from the grave but less throbbing music of Sophocles, and from the Euripidean tune) or like the Lucretian Hexameter, we find a dozen resemblances; and, with elaborate combinations like the Alcaic or Sapphic, the result is, as in the parallel case of our Spenserian, or the Jonson-Herbert-In Memoriam quatrain with enclosed rhyme, mainly uniform. But the greater or less licence of equivalent substitution in the staple English lines—the octosyllable and decasyllable, for instance—admits of the impression of a singular personal stamp, and, unless rejected by the mistake of the individual or the moment, has rarely failed to produce it.
Still one returns, and must necessarily return, to the admission that, to justify the claims here put forward as to the critical importance of the Middle Ages, one cannot go to their own explicit and deliberate exercises in criticism. To apply Johnson’s not quite inspired remark on Fielding and Richardson, they neither did, nor in all probability could, explain the mechanism of the timepiece. But they told the time of day with unerring accuracy; and their records of it have been neglected, and will be neglected by succeeding ages, only at the peril—which has already sometimes led to actual shipwreck—of miscalculating the whole literary reckoning. When the critics of the Renaissance, followed more or less blindly by those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, either contumeliously or in the sheer generous mistake of desire for improvement, turned their backs, as far as they could, on the products of Mediæval literature, they not merely shut themselves out from a vast volume of delight, they not only mistook disastrously the value of many individuals, but they recklessly deprived themselves once more—and with far less excuse and greater loss than had resulted from the similar refusal of the later Greeks—of an inestimable opportunity for Comparison. And so they once more barred for themselves the one gate and highway to really universal criticism of literature.
For the great, the immense, value of the literature of the Middle Ages consists in its freshness and independence, and the consequent fashion in which new literary bents and faculties of the human mind were manifested. The Greeks had, at any rate so far as we know, neither the advantage nor the disadvantage of any precedent literature before them; but their spirit of theory and of philosophising, while it helped to concentrate and intensify the peculiar virtue of their product, tended also to narrow and stereotype their range. Latin suffered from the double drawback of system and model. And modern literature itself has not, with all its achievements, been able to free itself from the inevitable consequences of ancestry. It is a great deal too literary; it has, in almost all cases, the obsession of the library, and the printed book, upon it. It is deliberate, preoccupied, interested; it has all sorts of cants, prejudices of education or emancipation, purposes, reminiscences, unacknowledged and often unconscious trammels and twitches. Its fountains are very rarely of living water; they are fed from carefully constructed and collected reservoirs, if not by positive distillation from the great sea of older literature.
Now, with all their slavish docility, all their writing in schools and groups and batches, all their adoption of tags and texts, the Middle Ages and their literature present a spectacle which is exactly the reverse of this. The authors have the appearance of following; they are really straying, each at the dictation of his own tastes and instincts only. You may as well try to teach a cat to do anything in any but her own way as a mediæval writer. When he copies a Romance, he will change the names if he does nothing else: but probably he will do much else, writing it in sixains if his model is in couplets, in decasyllabics if his original is octosyllabic, and so forth. Nothing shall induce him to keep historical distinctions or philosophical differences. His hero[[614]] shall be as beautiful as “Paris of Troy, or Absalom, or Partenopex”; his story of Alexander shall blend sober history and the wildest fiction, with a coolness which is only not reckless because it does not see anything to reck. Formal restrictions of the minor kind, prosodic and other, he will observe devoutly, because they come naturally to him and are of his own devising; but any restrictions of literary theory he utterly ignores. His Muse will wear no stays, though she does not disdain ornaments.
The reward of this obedience to Nature was signal. In the first place the Middle Ages created, or practically created, the STORY. Of course there were stories before; of course the Odyssey would be the best story in the world if, of the main elements of Romance—Passion and Mystery—one were a little more developed, and is almost the best story in the world as it is. Of course there are capital fabliaux in Herodotus, fine apologues in Plato, good things of other kinds elsewhere. But the ancients not only hampered themselves by almost always telling their longer stories in verse, but seldom knew how to manage them in verse or prose. The Iliad is such a bad story that it has tempted the profanity of those who would make it not one but a dozen stories; the Æneid is a story, dull à dormir debout as such, with some good rambling and fighting, a great descent to Hades, a capital boxing-match, not a bad regatta, and a famous but borrowed episode of passion. Out of Herodotus, till we come to the very verge of the classical period with Apuleius and Lucian, it is almost impossible to find a Greek, quite impossible to find a Roman, who knows how to tell a story at all. The exquisite substance of mythology receives no due honour from the story-teller as such. Read Ovid (who had as much of the story-telling spirit in him as any ancient except Herodotus), and then turn to what is often the mere doggerel and jargon of the mediæval Latin story-tellers in prose and verse. The gift, no matter whether it came from the East or from the West, from the North or from the South, from the Heaven above or the earth beneath, or rose a new Aphrodite from the Atlantic sea, is here and is not there.
Without this gift of story-telling there could not have appeared—though it would not by itself have been enough to produce—the greater gift of the Romance. It would be as unnecessary as it would be foolish to enter here into the secular and truceless war as to the origin, the nature, and so forth of this famous thing. It is sufficient to observe, once more, that the thing is here and is not there, except almost by accident. And the gift of the Romance—in that wide historical sense in which it could be, and was, in the Middle Ages applied to almost every manner of subject—was a gift to literature so inestimable that perhaps no other has ever quite equalled it. At once, with that nonchalance (they called it nonchaloir) in which no time has ever equalled these Ages, they swept away the Doctrine of the Subject, with all the cants and heresies which pullulate round its undoubtedly noble articles of original faith. Romance was perfectly prepared to deal with any subject, from religion to stag-hunting, from chronology to love. It depended no doubt on the individual craftsman whether the result was good or bad; but the method has, in the right hands, triumphed over the most intractable materials, added charm to the most commonplace, made the most grotesque acceptable. Could anything be thinner and more ordinary than the subject of Floire et Blanchefleur? Can anything be more charming, not merely than its most perfect outcome in Aucassin et Nicolette, but even than the diffuser and less happily phrased verse-forms? In the Arthurian Legend the success is greater still. Romance takes a dim personality, and a handful of cacophonous place-names, out of a suspicious compilation of pseudo-history, and spins it, in a single lifetime, into a story the most elaborate, the most artful, the most variedly interesting, the fullest of meaning (if men must have meaning) in the whole literary world.
Even to Dante it did not occur to subject the methods and the results of this new and potent kind to such an examination as that which Aristotle had partly given to the older literature. Nor, at that time and in those circumstances, was even Dante likely to have led such an inquiry to a good end. The Middle Ages, while consciously abandoning, almost or altogether, the old aim at Action, had not arrived at the modern command of Character. They worked at and by mediate things—Incident, Atmosphere, Description, Manners, Passion—and they made all these and others subserve a Romantic Unity of plot which, instead of being circular like the Classical Unity, was calculated for indefinite prolongation, not merely in straight line, but after the manner of a tree, with branches and inarchings skyward, earthward, and horizontal. The scheme admitted adornments of various kinds, which must have been difficult if not impossible to reconcile with the more sober and exacting classical model. It permitted a much greater indulgence of the resort to the methods of other arts, especially painting, than classical literature had, until its latest days, thought proper. It paid very little attention to mere probability. All these points invited the comparative critic, but they did not find him. In three respects, however, the difference between classical and mediæval Imitation or Representation was almost more striking than in any other, and all of these presented the most tempting opportunities for criticism. These were the attitude of the new literature to Religion, its attitude to the passion of Love, and its use of an implement which, though by no means unknown to Classical literature, had been more sparingly used therein, the method of Allegory.
On the first point it would be very easy to enlarge beyond the widest toleration of this treatise; it is here only necessary to point out how delicate, and how important, are the new duties prescribed to the critic of mediæval literature in regard to it. The “blinded Papist” view (which makes itself felt even in some observations of such a man as Scott now and then) may not be so common as it once was, but it is not entirely obsolete. And it may be doubted whether that to which it has given place—a philosophical pity, contemptuous or sympathising, for “superstition” generally—is not even more hampering, while there can be no doubt of the hamper imposed on the yet earlier Renaissance by the superior contempt which it felt for mediæval childishness and ignorance. In this literature, and in the romantic branch of it more particularly, allowance has to be made at every moment, in every respect and condition, for the omnipresence of an elaborate creed which nobody doubted, with which everybody indeed was so saturated and familiar that he could jest with it and at it, as one jests with and at a best-beloved and best-known person and friend. It supplies subject, it affects treatment, it colours phrase and image. Although it is very easy to underrate the amount of actual religious feeling in antiquity, yet this feeling, at its noblest and sincerest, was unquestionably of an entirely different character from that of the “Ages of Faith.” Take, at their best and strongest, the sincere fetichism of the ancient equivalent of the “charcoal-burner,” the beautiful mythology of the poet, the sublime mysticism of the Platonist, and the exalted if slightly Pharisaical morality of the better Stoic—combine them with all the art of the student of development. But you will not succeed in making anything in the least like the creed of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with Christ, or rather with the Virgin and the Devil, fighting perpetually for Mansoul, with Angels and Deadly Sins under their command, with a miracle possible at every moment, Death and Fortune ruling affairs subject to, but not always interfered with by, the higher influences, the Sacraments to be resorted to at will or neglected at peril, Purgatory to be faced or anticipated and won through, Hell or Heaven for final goal. It is almost impossible to allow too much in degree (though it is extremely possible to allow wrongly in kind) for the influence which this ever-present set of thoughts, beliefs, feelings, which was absent from antiquity and present in the Middle Ages, had upon the literary utterance of the latter. The unnatural gloom and the half-inarticulate gaiety which have been discovered in this literature (the latter at least as truly as the former), its occasional irrationality, as we are pleased to call it (perhaps “irrationalism” would be a better word), its shuddering attraction for the horrible and loathsome, its delight in dream, its quaint and almost flighty revulsions and contrasts—all are due to this.
Equally a commonplace, and yet still more important to, and still more neglected by, criticism, is the attitude of the Middle Ages to Love—which is very mainly conditioned by their attitude to Religion. The not infrequent, though very idle, debate as to whether the Venus of chivalry was Urania or Pandemos is, of course, best avoided by the frank acknowledgment that she was (as indeed Her Divinity always has been) both. The distinction from antiquity, and its influence upon literature, do not lie in the least in this direction, or in the fact of the mixture, but in its nature and character. With exceptions, of course, the tone of antiquity in literature, as to love and to its objects, is either the tone of slightly unreal philosophising, or the tone of the naughty story, or that of half-paraded, half-confessing contempt. The two former require no treatment here; the latter is important. Love and its objects are, to an average serious man of letters of the Classics when not a subject for conventional escapades, a rather regrettable incident attached to humanity, something not in the least spoudaion, something only not among the parerga of life because it is almost impossible to avoid them, something useful, not unpleasant, rather better than a constitutional or a bath, but affording a much less worthy employment than talking in a porch, or declaiming in a school. This is undeniably the average attitude of the average man of letters of old. That of his mediæval brother need hardly be described; but its causes come within our view. You have to reckon, not merely with the cult of the Virgin, as has often been done, but with the whole Christian (especially mediæval-Christian) theory of morals and of sin. Why excite yourself about actions indifferent at best, always rather below the attention of a serious man, and at worst leading to unpleasant and dubious consequences? Excitement becomes easy when the consequence of a moment’s guilty indulgence may be the Inferno for eternity. Nay, from a less purely selfish point of view there are reasons enough. Imagination—the real Imagination of Apollonius or Philostratus, not the mere image-furnishing faculty of the ancients generally—had “come to town,” and brought a transformed Love with her. The sense of mystery, of miracle, of the invisible, grafted itself upon the strongest of the merely physical instincts, and the result pervaded literature. The trumpery subject, proper for comedy, for epic episodes, for a carefully kept-under seasoning to tragedy, for light trifles, became, with Religion, the subject of nearly all poetry, and of not a little prose, and made its influence felt in all manner of ways. It even, although the Middle Age was confessedly not strong in character, paved the way to that last grace, thanks to the fancy of the time for rehandling the same subjects and persons. Trace Briseis-Briseida, a fashion-plate in Dares, a slave-girl in Benoist, to the Cressida of Chaucer and of Henryson; trace Guanhumara, a handsome Roman damsel of good family and nothing more, down to the complex woman and Queen of the complete Lancelot, and you will see how character-drawing arose.
But undoubtedly one of the greatest, and perhaps the most characteristic, of the influences of the love-motive on literature, and the development of literary methods through this and other motives, is the mediæval use of Allegory. The thing, of course, is not new—nothing ever is in the strict sense. It may actually have dwelt upon the banks of Nile: it certainly did on those of Ilissus and Tiber. But the very strong prominence of it in the Scriptures, and in ecclesiastical writings generally, could not fail to develop it in the younger vernaculars; and its alliance (a dangerous one no doubt, but a real and natural) with Imagination could not long be missed. Many ingenious and industrious hands have traced its origin from Homer to Claudian, and from Claudian to the Romance of the Rose. How it thence coloured all literature is sufficiently known. But no critic has even yet exhausted, nor are a hundred critics likely to exhaust, the subtle and innumerable ramifications of its literary influence and manifestations.
These things and others showed themselves no doubt mainly in the Romance—the chief, the most characteristic, and, so far as anything is original, the most original of the literary products of the Middle Ages. But the Romance was far indeed from being the only new development in literary morphology that the period had to offer. Until nearly its closing time, no great change or advance was made in History, though the artificial speech, which ancient exaggerations of oratory had imposed on the historian, was to a great extent dropped, and the purview of the writer was insensibly widened in other directions. But the immense cultivation of the short tale—first in verse, then in prose—was a matter closely connected, but by no means identical, with the progress of Romance itself. And, as in another matter glanced at above, the restless character of the time, and its constant tendency to reproduce with slight alteration, had, here also, a great influence. In all these alterations the arts and crafts of the future novelist and dramatist were insensibly exercising themselves. But the drama itself demands at least a glance. That the modern play owes nothing to the mediæval is the foolishest of critical delusions; but it would hardly be rash to say that the mediæval drama owes nothing to the ancient. When the horror with which (for not such very bad reasons) the Church regarded stage plays altogether had been a little relaxed, the natural and the artificial dramas followed entirely different lines. Hroswitha’s work, and Christus Patiens, and the rest, have absolutely nothing to do with Miracle or Mystery or Farce, which are the romance and the short story thrown, according to the natural histrionic bent of man, into presentation by personages instead of by continuous narration. And the laws which they developed, and by which they helped the greater and more genuine modern drama to be what it was, were natural likewise, and had nothing to do with Aristotle or with Horace, with Plato or with Aristophanes.
This would by itself have sufficed to give the new drama a very different nature, and therefore a most important comparative critical influence, when contrasted with the old. The Greek drama (which the Roman more or less slavishly copied) may have had its infancies; but we possess it only in its riper age. Nor is it even possible that these infancies, granting their existence, could have shown anything like the multiform influences which betray themselves in the mediæval drama. Both may have been originally liturgic; but there is such an infinite difference in the complexity of the liturgies! Both may have been preceded by epic and perhaps lyric; but in other respects the Greek drama was certainly among the first—as the mediæval drama was nearly the last—to take rank among literary kinds. And these differences, putting others aside, would have accounted, in great part, for the singularly undulating and diverse character which (in company, no doubt, with an imperfection as great as the diversity) distinguished the new drama from the splendid, but somewhat narrow, perfection of the old. Even in the stock types, in the Vices and Fools of the new form, there was little or nothing of the fixed character of the Roman—we can say little of the Greek—"comedy of art."
And so, not merely in more kinds of literature than one, but in every kind of literature, with hardly a single exception, the Middle Ages provided their successors with the material for an entirely new Calculus of Critical Variations—for a complete redressing of whatever positive errors or mere relative gaps had existed in the older criticism, by reason of the absence of opportunities for observation.
II
Nor can it be regarded as any great drawback to the critical position of the Renaissance to which we are coming—and the grounds and data of which it is desirable to survey in advance, by way of retrospect over the contents of the present volume—that this immense provision of new critical material was not accompanied by many, or indeed (with the one great exception, soon to be known, but to be hardly in the least heeded) any, accomplished exercises in critical method. For these, as has been pointed out, were not likely to have been very good; and, good or bad, they were nearly sure to have been neglected, or to have done positive harm by way of mere reaction. Moreover, it was easily and perfectly open to the Renaissance to create for itself in this department. By its recovery—no longer in half-measure, and less than half-light, but in full—of the literature of antiquity, it had been put in possession, not merely of the other great masses of literary material, but of quite admirable examples of critical method itself. Quintilian, Horace, Cicero, the Greek and Latin Rhetoricians, were among its inherited possessions, and it had certainly had the Poetics, though little attention had for a long time been paid to them. But they were soon put before it afresh: and, what is more, the discovery of Longinus also was soon made. Horace, with his arbitrary rules, and his enforced, but probably not at all unwelcome, abstinence from any dry exhibition of material and examples, was no doubt, with all his merits, a very dangerous mentor. But with Aristotle, Quintilian, and Longinus at hand as preceptors of method, and practically all then existing literature, classical and mediæval, at hand as storehouse of matter, a man of the mid-sixteenth century had only himself to blame if he did not hit upon at least the main and general articles of the critical Catholic Faith. He might not anticipate the magnificent and almost unbelievable new developments of literature which were actually to take place, in the three western countries of Europe, within a very few years; but he would have been none the worse critic for that. The critic is, by his profession, not in the least bound to be a prophet. But he had every document necessary to correct the chief shortcomings of the ancients, to enlarge the classification of literary kinds, to rearrange the nature, degrees, and methods of the literary assault on the senses and the soul.
It would be undue anticipation to discuss what he did instead of this; or to give in detail the positive influences which worked upon him in preferring his actual alternative. But it is matter of undoubted history that he did not do what he might have done, and it is matter of relevance here to give the reasons, as far as they are retrospective, why he did not do it.
To a considerable extent the explanation, and if not the justification, the excuse, of his failure lie in a well-known and constantly repeated phenomenon which, on this particular occasion, showed itself with unusual, indeed with elsewhere unexampled, distinctness and power. Every age and every individual (it has been said often, but can never be said too often), unless it or he is a mere continuation of predecessors, is unjust to these predecessors. Examples are not necessary; the merest moment’s thought will supply them in profusion. But there were numerous and powerful conditions and forces which made this injustice certain to be more violent and more lasting here than in almost any other case. No known “dispensation” exists historically of anything like the same length, the same intensity, the same uniformity as that which characterises in all things, and certainly not least in matters literary, the thousand years of the Middle Age at its widest stretch. And this would of itself be sufficient to bring about a reaction of corresponding violence and duration. But to this general aspect of the whole period must be added the particular aspect of its final stage. Except in Italy (which had never been intensely or characteristically mediæval, and which had practically ceased to be so, in any sense not external, soon after Dante’s time) the fifteenth century had been a period of decadence, or of transition, or of stagnation, in almost every European country. It is possible, though it is not probable, that minds in which the critical spirit was reawakening might have taken a juster view of things if the fresh examples then before them, to be compared with Homer, Lucretius, Thucydides, had been Dante, Chaucer, Froissart. But there was some excuse for an indignant pooh-poohing of the mere possibility of comparison, when the persons, to be compared immediately with the great writers of antiquity, were the dreary and bombastic rhétoriqueurs of the French, or the shambling versifiers of the English, fifteenth century.
The Renaissance, moreover, was likely to be led wrong by that constant delusion of matter, that fatal attraction towards the subject, which, as this History endeavours to show, has led Criticism wrong a dozen times for once that it has led her right. The mediæval forms of literature were identified, allied, in fact saturated, with certain beliefs and modes of thought—scholastic philosophy, Catholic religion, aristocratic politics. To the pure Platonist on the one hand and the thorough-going Aristotelian on the other, to the reformer on the one hand and the freethinker on the other, to the democrat on the one hand and the believer in Machiavellian statecraft on the other, all these things were partly horrible, partly idiotic, altogether to be shaken off and refused. The natural, but in the main irrational and frivolous, weariness of an old fashion was supplemented, inspirited, made far more vehement and dangerous, by the deliberate and reasoned, if not reasonable, antipathy to, and revolt against, an old faith. It has been acknowledged already that the Morte d’Arthur would have fared as badly with Augustine as it did with Ascham; but the moral provocation would not have been aggravated to Augustine, as it was perhaps to Ascham, certainly to more thorough-going Protestants than he, by the distinct connection between the Graal Legend and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
Accordingly, the Renaissance indulged itself, and left to its successors, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (different as they were from itself in many ways), an amount of “unintelligent scorn” of the past which, if it does credit to nothing else, does credit at least to the vigour and intensity of the time. Sometimes this scorn was vocal and argumentative, as in Ascham himself, in Du Bellay, in others. More often, and with a subtler mischief still, it was silent, implicit, apparently exchanged for mere negligence. The childish things were simply put away, despatched to the lumber-room, and left there. And it was this negligence, rather than the scorn, which did harm to the criticism of the periods that followed. It does not do the critic unmitigated harm to take the wrong side now and then; he exercises himself at his weapons, he can acquire dexterity in them, and very often (Dryden is a notable example) he teaches himself orthodoxy in the very act of fighting for the heterodox. But when he allows himself to ignore, great gulfs or smaller pits open for him at once. That is what he can never afford to do; that is the cause of all the errors which have beset his kind, from the beginning of critical things until the present day. One of the most excellent and admirable of librarians once replied to a childish question of the present writer, “What do you do with the rubbish?” “It is rather difficult, you see, to know what is rubbish to-day; and quite impossible to know what will be rubbish to-morrow.” And while this is more especially true of the critic, who can with safety pass nothing, at least unexamined, as rubbish, his case is more dangerous still than that of the librarian, who has but to arrange what he has got in orderly fashion, and prepare plentiful shelves for what is coming.
With the critic, as we have seen, it is different. He must always generalise at his peril, and subject to the upset of his generalisations by fresh discoveries. But he can at least be careful of the “without prejudice,” and he can at least neglect nothing that is within his reach, in his processes of observation and comparison. The earlier Greek critics erred, as we have seen, partly because of a necessary and guiltless deprivation. But their venial sin became more of a mortal one, when they not only assumed that there was nothing save what they knew in Greek, but deliberately ignored the opportunities, not of sovereign but of considerable efficacy, which were offered them by Latin. The Latin critics erred, partly by the same assumption, and partly by converting the despite of Latin into a slavish and unintelligent adoration of Greek, and not always the best Greek. The Middle Age was innocent, as hardly indulging in criticism at all. But the Renaissance critics at first committed, and to far too great an extent handed on, a combination of the sins of their classical teachers. They assumed the stationary state of literary kinds and qualities, as both Greeks and Romans had done; they adulated classical literature, like the Romans in regard to Greek; they despised mediæval literature, like the Greeks in relation to Latin. And, as we shall see, they had their reward.
But I should be sorry to end not merely a chapter but a Book, not merely a Book but a volume, without a caveat against possible misconstruction of the words “fault,” “error,” “sin,” “mischief,” “misfortune,” and the like, which have just been used, not merely in this context, but throughout the volume itself. There have been, I believe, persons unfortunate enough to be dissatisfied with the moral and physical government of the universe—persons who have sadly pronounced it “a crank machine” in many ways. These things are not my trade. But, in matters literary, I must plead guilty to being something of an optimist. Not that I think all literature good—that is not precisely the conclusion to which a thirty years’ practice of criticism brings one. In the critical land, as in the pays des amours, the shore where one always loves is a shore of which it must be said that on ne la connaît guère. There is, indeed, a certain critical delight in reading even the worst books, so long as they are positively and not merely negatively bad—but that is another matter.
The point on which I am contented to be called a critical Pangloss is this, that I have hardly the slightest desire to alter—if I could do so by the greatest of all miracles, that of retro-active change—the literary course of the world. No doubt things might have been better still—one may there agree with the pious divine on his strawberry. But one may also be perfectly contented with the actual result. I have endeavoured to show that, however we may feel bound to pronounce Greek literature incomplete in this or that department, and still more Greek criticism imperfect in its assumptions and of questionable adequacy in its methods, yet Greek criticism was the criticism which was wanted, to register and to preserve the qualities which have made Greek literature perhaps the most indispensable possession among the now goodly list of the literatures of the world. I have endeavoured further to show that the two conflicting strains or streams in Latin criticism correspond, in a manner “necessary and voluptuous and right,” on the one hand, to the ordered correctness and venustas which are the notes of the Latin spirit on its Academic side; on the other, to the under-current of half-barbaric gorgeousness which there, as elsewhere, now and again asserted itself—with no small benefit to the world’s letters.
And so, also, in this chapter and the Book which precedes it, I have tried to show that the immense provision of new kinds of literature by the Middle Age, side by side with its almost total abstinence from criticism, was the best thing that could have happened. Nor is it impossible that, if we are able to pursue the inquiry, we shall find that the new differentia of the Renaissance period and that which followed to the Romantic revival—the curious fact that almost all its criticism went one way, while almost all its best creation went dead in the teeth of that criticism—has again worked mainly if not wholly for good. But this is for the future. Si laisse ore à tant li contes à parler!
[613]. If, as is still possible, and most probably can never be disproved, Walter Map fashioned the perfect Arthur stories, by dint of combining the Lancelot-Guinevere romance and the Graal Legend, composed the De Nugis, and wrote an appreciable quantity of the Goliardic poems, he will run Chaucer hard in all but the claims impossible to his time. But the “if” is a great if.
[614]. As is actually the case with Floire or Florice, the lover of Blanchefleur.