There is pretty antithesis, too, between the director and the poet in Goethe’s play before the play in Faust,—one for his box-receipts, and the other for the solitudes of poetry and the gods. A happy solution has been found of late for this dilemma; over the naked contradiction of love and merchandise one throws the cloak of the artist. The artist begets in pure love of his art; and he sells for Falstaff’s reason,—it is his vocation. Until poetry got this market value, however, it was common goods; poets had written generically, as members of a class or guild,[[300]] and any member might use the common stock of expressions and ideas. A translator was as great as his original.[[301]] The eighth chapter of Dante’s essay on composition in the vernacular opens with a curious discourse about artistic property, as if the new idea and the new phrase needed a gloss. “When we say, ‘this is Peter’s canzone,’ we mean that Peter made it, not merely that he uttered it!” Such an explanation, however, seems timely enough if one remembers that “a mediæval writer held it to be improper to join his name to any literary composition,”[[302]] and that Dante, “first of the moderns” as he is, and personal as his work seems to be, actually names himself but once in the whole Commedia. Here is the dying struggle of that clan ownership[[303]] which had ruled from the days of the primitive horde; for it is clear that intellectual property would be the last kind to be developed, and even if the poet liked to see his name graven on the colder side of the rock, this was not an isolated, personal distinction, but was merged in the register of the guild like the names on a soldiers’ monument. Horace’s “write me down among the lyric poets” was an intelligible ambition to mediæval minds; but the purely personal triumph of his non omnis móriar and its splendid context was alien to their way of thought. Barring the degree of genius in each, one may say that Dante and Victor Hugo were equally strong in their intense individuality; here is a case where Gautier’s phrase holds good that the brain of an artist was the same under the Pharaohs as it is now; yet that conditions change the product, that the individual note, piercing in the modern, becomes almost communal and generic in the older poet, that a distinct curve of evolution to the personal extreme, even in artistic poetry, can be drawn between them, is clear to probation for any one who will compare two famous passages which a hasty inference would probably declare to be on the same straight individual line. If one looks at the whole passage where Dante speaks of his poetic achievement,[[304]] and if one neither isolates a phrase nor yet sentimentalizes it all to suit modern ideas; if one notes the satisfaction which the poet feels with his work in and for the guild, and how he passes the time of day with a brother craftsman; then one will find in it not only a touch of artlessness, of what is called, rightly or wrongly, the mediæval, the communal, but an effacement of personality in the very act of asserting it. He shows, as it were, his diploma from the guild of poets. To bring this artlessness into clear relief, one has only to compare the thirty-second of Hugo’s Chants du Crépuscule, where the poet, alone in an old tower, addresses the bell which hangs there, its pious inscription insulted by the obscenities, blasphemies, and futilities written over it; he is no exile, this poet, but proudly and contemptuously isolated from his kind, whose brutishness he has just deplored; and he speaks thus to the bell,—of all survivals the most characteristic of mediæval thought, the veriest symbol of communal religious life:—
Sens-tu, par cette instinct vague et plein de douceur,
Qui révèle toujours une sœur à la sœur,
Qu’à cette heure où s’endort la soirée expirante,[[305]]
Une âme est près de toi, non moins que toi vibrante,
Qui bien souvent aussi jette un bruit solennel,
Et se plaint dans l’amour comme toi dans le ciel?
Then the superb lines of comparison: life has written on the poet’s soul base and irreverent inscriptions, like those on the bell; but a touch of the divine, a message, and like the bell, so his soul breaks out into harmonies in which even the audacities and futilities perforce take part. Compare all this introspection, this immense assumption of individual importance, with the objective, communal tone of Dante, despite that “I am one who sings whenever love inspires me,”—so like Hugo’s assertion, and yet so different. In each of these passages one can see artistic individuality; but between them stretches a long chain of development in which each link is a new emphasis on the individual in art. One of the earliest and strongest of these links was forged by the renaissance; although it must be borne in mind that Dante represents not simply his guild of singers, but behind them a singing community of peasants, the songs of field, spinning-room, and village dance, still dominant among unlettered folk and not yet shamed into silence by print and the schoolmaster.
The change, however, was there; the tide had turned against communal sentiment, and individuals were feeling a new power. Not only fame and glory fled from the guild to the great man; individual disgrace, the lapse, the shortcoming, find a record. Once the flyting was carried out before the folk, rose and fell with the occasion, and was a thing of festal origin, like the Eskimo poem-duel, or the earliest amœbean verse, or the German schnaderhüpfl; but Aretino now appears as the father of journalism in our pleasant modern sense, as the arch reporter, the discoverer and publisher of personal scandal.[[306]] In painting, too, one notes the sudden rage for portraits; and it is the portrait of the individual for himself, not simply of pope, or of abbot, or of prince, as the head and type of a corporation, although a trace of this influence lingers in the setting of the picture, witness one of Holbein’s merchants, with his bills, pens, memoranda, and a dozen mercantile suggestions scattered about him. Poetry, of course, felt the change first of all, both in subject-matter and in form. For the latter, there is the founding of the sonnet, that apartment for a single gentleman in verse. One thinks at once of Petrarch, rightly called “the first modern man,” and deserving the title better than Dante, who was quite as mediæval as he was modern,[[307]] while Petrarch belonged to the new world; besides his sonnets, his correspondence and his confessions show that he not only felt the need, as none of his predecessors had felt it, to reveal and analyze his personality, but also recognized an interest on the part of the public to which these revelations could respond. The mediæval poet sought his public, did not call the public to himself; and the artistic form of his poetry is the utterance of common feeling in a common and often conventional phrase. The May morning, the vision,[[308]] the garden and the roses and the blindingly beautiful young person, the allegorical birds and beasts,—this was the late mediæval tether; although allegory helped the poet to escape the throng and hedge his personality with some importance, even allegory is in the service if not of the throng, at least of the guild. Allegory as a poetical form mediates between the old communal ballad, or the chanson de geste, and the new lyric of confidences. The modern poet cut loose from it all, and cast about for the gentle reader, soon to be his portion by the happy intervention of print. Ronsard strikes this note of separation from an unappreciative throng, and so does many another humanist; while Chaucer’s contempt for the masses is not so much artistic as mediæval and aristocratic. Dunbar, our first really modern poet, the first to take that purely individual attitude, was also first of our poets to see his work in printer’s ink. Even when the form of literature demanded objective treatment, the interest began to be individual. We now laud our poet or playwright for the fine individuality of his folk, and flout those masterless tales, songs, ballads, where even the hero is a mere type, or, worse, a mere doer of deeds. This doer of deeds answered the desire for poetic expression at a time when an individual was merged in his clan; the excess of interest in action is proportioned to the excess of communal over individual importance. As the artist develops, as he begins to feel his way toward individualism, his genius is spent first upon allegory, and then, as real life grows more imperious, upon the type, a compromise between individual and community. Here stands Chaucer. Like Dante he looks both ways; his squire, for example, deliciously clear and individual as he seems, has as much reminiscence of Childe Waters as prophecy of Romeo. It is characteristic of the two periods in which Chaucer and Shakspere respectively worked, that while one named his masterpiece, the study of a vulgar woman, “a wife of Bath,” the other called a like masterpiece “Mrs. Quickly of Eastcheap,”—a very pretty little curve of evolution in itself; and when the portrait of the merchant is drawn,—and what a portrait!—that careless “sooth to sayn, I noot how men hym calle,” as compared with Shakspere’s treatment of Antonio, is suggestive not only of the aristocrat, but also of the mediæval point of view. Even the setting of the Prologue is in point,—these pilgrims, each a representative of his class or corporation, their common lodging, their association, even if temporary, as in a guild, their jests, courtesies, and quarrels, all in the open air. A century later, people had come indoors. Professor Patten,[[309]] alert to note the connection between æsthetic change and a change in economic conditions, points out the alteration thus wrought in the passage from communal to individual life. Window-glass, the chimney, bricks, all improvements of the home, changed this home from a prison to a palace, from something shunned and undesired to the focal point of happiness. Outdoor communal amusements yielded to indoor pleasures shared by a few. The dances and the license of May-day, uproarious and often questionable rejoicings once common to all, were now left to the baser sort, while quiet, reputable folk turned to their homes. Knight and prioress, too, no longer rode beside the miller and put up with his gros rire, his drunken antics, and his tale.
The main expression in poetry brought about by that new power of the individual is the confidential note, the assumption of a reader’s interest in the poet’s experience, what J. A. Symonds called “the lyric cry,” begetting on the part of this reader or hearer a sense at first confined to such mutual relations of the poet and the sympathetic soul to which he spoke, but spreading little by little until it is now fairly to be called the medium, the atmosphere, of poetry at large; one names it sentiment. The history of modern verse, with epic and drama in decay, is mainly the history of lyrical sentiment. Where does this first appear in European poetry?[[310]] Answers to such a question are made with melancholy forebodings, seeing that a first appearance in literary annals is as unstable as the positively last appearance of a favourite singer; but French criticism has pitched, with considerable show of right, upon that amiable vagabond, Villon. Certainly the Grand Testament is as familiar in its tone to the modern reader as it is difficult and obsolete in its speech; and Sainte-Beuve, in a pretty bit of criticism, has undertaken to show why Villon’s most famous ballade touches this modern sense, while verses seemingly like it are scorned as monkish prattle.[[311]] Throughout the Middle Ages a favourite form of communal sentiment, or rather of theological and professional reflection, was to ask where this and that famous person might now be found. The mediæval poet could string together interminable rimed queries like these of St. Bernard:—