CHAPTER I.
BEFORE DANTE.
CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE—ITS ATTITUDE TO CRITICISM—IMPORTANCE OF PROSODY—THE EARLY FORMAL RHETORICS: BEDE—ISIDORE—ALCUIN (?)—ANOTHER TRACK OF INQUIRY—ST AUGUSTINE A PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC—HIS ATTITUDE TO LITERATURE BEFORE AND AFTER HIS CONVERSION—ANALYSIS OF THE ‘CONFESSIONS’ FROM THIS POINT OF VIEW—A CONCLUSION FROM THIS TO THE GENERAL PATRISTIC VIEW OF LITERATURE—SIDONIUS APOLLINARIS—HIS ELABORATE EPITHET-COMPARISON AND MINUTE CRITICISMS OF STYLE AND METRE—A DELIBERATE CRITIQUE—CASSIODORUS—BOETHIUS—CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF THE FIFTH CENTURY—THE SIXTH: FULGENTIUS—THE FULGENTII AND THEIR BOOKS—THE ‘SUPER THEBAIDEN’ AND ‘EXPOSITIO VIRGILIANA’—VENANTIUS FORTUNATUS—ISIDORE OF SEVILLE AGAIN—BEDE AGAIN—HIS ‘ARS METRICA’—THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES TO BE MORE RAPIDLY PASSED OVER—PROVENÇAL AND LATIN TREATISES—THE ‘DE DICTAMINE RHYTHMICO’—JOHN OF GARLANDIA—THE ‘LABYRINTHUS’—CRITICAL REVIEW OF POETS CONTAINED IN IT—MINOR RHYTHMICAL TRACTATES—GEOFFREY DE VINSAUF: HIS ‘NOVA POETRIA.’
It may seem a platitude, but it really has much more of the altitudinous than of the platitudinous about it, to say that, before entering on the consideration of mediæval criticism,[[457]] it is above all things necessary to clear the mind of cant about mediæval literature. For in no division of this work is such a caution a more appropriate writing on the door. On the classical |Characteristics of mediæval literature.| and on the modern sections it would be a gratuitous impertinence. In both or them, as here, there is the distinction between linguistic and literary criticism, and the further distinction between literary criticism of different kinds. But in both there are, as there always have been in relation to the classics, and as there sometimes have been in relation to modern literature, a very large number of persons who are aware of the crevasses, and who can cross them.
In mediæval literature such persons are, and for the strongest reasons, much more to seek. Until recently—it is the greatest “refusal” and the greatest misfortune in the literary history of the world—mediæval literature, which some, at least, believe to hold the keys of both ancient and modern, was utterly neglected and contemned. Then, for a time, it was praised without full knowledge, or by divination only. It is now possible to know much if not most of it; but few are they who are content to know it as literature. Not only has it had to go through, all at once, the usual diseases to which literary childhood is obnoxious, the petty grammarianisms which Latin and Greek got over in their own time, the squabbles as to interpretation from which the Renaissance, to a great extent, delivered us in their case, and the criticastry of the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, but new ailments, diphtherias and influenzas of its own, have arisen in “phonology,” and Heaven knows what else. Even this does not exhaust the list of ills that wait upon its most unhappy state. It has been thought necessary, for political and ecclesiastical reasons, to praise the Middle Ages a little unwisely for a time, and then (more recently) to abuse them with an unwisdom so much greater, that one feels inclined to relapse upon the mood of the real Mr Kenelm Digby of The Broad Stone of Honour, and the imaginary Mr Chainmail of Crotchet Castle. Abused and extolled as “Ages of Faith,” they were really ages of a mixture of logical argument and playful half-scepticism. Regarded with scorn as “Ages of Ignorance,” they knew what they did know thoroughly, which is more than can be said of some others. Commiserated as Ages of Misery, they were probably the happiest times of the world, putting Arcadia and Fairyland out of sight. Patronised as Ages of mere preparation, they accomplished things that we have toiled after in vain for some five hundred years. They have in the rarest cases been really understood, even historically. And the understanding which has, in these rare cases, reached their history, has almost always merely scrabbled on the doors of their literature. There are exceptions, of course, some of whom have taught me all I know, and whom I honour only short of the great originals. But they are still exceptions.
Lest any one should accuse me of passing from criticism into dithyrambic, let me acknowledge at once that whatsoever the |Its attitude to criticism.| Middle Ages were or were not, they were certainly not Ages of Criticism. They could not—it has already been hinted—have been anything of the kind; it would have ruined their business and choked their vocation if they had attempted to be so. One mighty figure does indeed show himself in their midst, to pass on the torch from Aristotle and Longinus, through unknowing ages, to Coleridge and Sainte-Beuve. But their very essence was opposed to criticism in any prevalence. The incorrigible and triumphant (though or because wholly unconscious) originality which, in practice, created the Romance, revolutionised the Drama, altered History, devised a fresh Lyric, would have been constrained and paralysed in the face of theory. At no time can we be so thankful for the shortcomings of the School Rhetoric which, if it had been better, might have done frightful harm. Had the Italian critics, with their warpings of Plato and of Aristotle, appeared in the thirteenth century instead of the sixteenth, it might have been all over with us. For the thirteenth century was docile: the sixteenth, fortunately, was not.
In one particular, however, the comparatively scanty criticism of the thousand years from the sack of Rome by Alaric to the |Importance of prosody.| fall of Constantinople before Mahomet, acquires a new significance. We have hitherto said little about the formal criticism of prosody, and for good reasons. The Greek, and in a less degree the Latin, writers on Metric, are interesting, but their interest is hardly literary at all, though it has so much to do with literature. Before we have any finished classical literature from them, Greek had by its own euphuia acquired, and Latin had forced on itself by a stern process of gymnastic, systems of prosody which, though in the former case at least easy as nature, were in both cases simply a branch of mathematics. The decay of Greek, the bursting by the strong Italian wine of the earthen or leathern vessel of artificial prosody which had so long contained it, and the rise of the new vernaculars, introduced a perfectly different situation; and the criticism, the tentative unscientific rule-of-thumb criticism, of prosody assumed an importance, at about the beginning of the fifth century of our era, which it has not lost on the eve of the twentieth. But these general questions will be further treated at the close of this Book (see Interchapter iii.) We must now turn to the details of the actual history.
The standard collection[[458]] of Latin Rhetorics contains four of very early date, speaking from our present point of view. The |The early formal Rhetorics—Bede.| oldest, and, if it were genuine, the most interesting, of all in point of authorship, that attributed to S. Augustine, we shall—for reasons—take last. The others, still of great interest in this respect, are by, or attributed to, the three greatest men of “regular” letters in the whole period (500-1000), except Scotus Erigena—to wit, Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Alcuin.
Bede, who has also left us work of interest on metre,[[459]] has included in his works a tractate on the Tropes and Figures of the Holy Scriptures which gives us, at least, a glimmer in darkness. His argument is characteristic of his time; but nobody except a churl, and an ignorant and foolish churl, will smile at it. The Figures are the most important things in style; the Scriptures are the most important of books; therefore there must be as good Figures in the Scriptures as in any other book, and better. He uses, to prove his point, seventeen figures with examples. In what follows, the chief point of interest is that he first quotes classical examples (chiefly from Virgil) and then Scriptural analogues. But he does not by any means confine himself to the chosen seventeen.
The critical importance of this, for its time especially, can be shown with little labour. The great danger, the great curse, so to say, of uncritical reading, is the taking of things as a matter of course, and the neglect to analyse and ascertain the exact causes and sources of literary excellence. Now, in itself, the comparison of the Bible and the classics, from the hard-and-fast point of view of a scholastic classification of Figures, is a very small matter—and not perhaps even a very good matter. But when these two so different things are compared, from any point of view no matter what, the curiosity is aroused; the mind begins to consider what it really does think fine in this and that; and in happy circumstances and cases a real—in any perhaps some approach to a real—appreciation of the goodness of literature will result. Bede did not intend this—he might have left no pepper to any one who suggested it to him, as a consequence of his work. But such a consequence at least might follow.
The references of that great authority of the early Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville, to Rhetoric are not copious, and are |Isodore.| chiefly made up of the already consecrated tags, while the subject is somewhat mixed with Logic. The orator is the vir bonus dicendi peritus; the parts of Rhetoric are as usual, its kinds likewise. The forensic side is almost exclusively prominent, and style has hardly any attention at all.[[460]]