This catalogue, partly reasoned, is precious, as showing what the “Thirty best books” of the age of Dante’s birth were. It is succeeded by metrical and rhythmical directions, characterised by a good deal of punning as above, but also by acuteness and knowledge.
The extract from the Labyrinthus given by Signor Mari is followed in his book by two other rhythmical tractates of |Minor rhythmical tractates.| small importance, one very short, from a MS. in the Monaco library, and a longer one, but much later (it is probably as late as 1400), by a certain Nicolo Tibino. This last is chiefly noteworthy as giving fewer examples, but much exposition and discussion: it is indeed, after the custom of these ancestors, a kind of commentary on the Labyrinthus.
But, as it happens, the next piece to the Labyrinthus in Leyser is a treatise of interest as great as its own, if not greater, the Poetria Nova of Geoffrey de Vinsauf. Geoffrey, who, despite his French-sounding name, was certainly a |Geoffrey de Vinsauf: his Nova Poetria.| countryman of ours, has been rather unkindly treated by us. Chaucer bestowed upon him one of his most ingeniously humorous gibes,[[541]] and Mr Wright (the most faithful and enthusiastic guardian and restorer of our Latin poets, and usually as tolerant as any, this side of mere critical omnivorousness) uses hard language of him in the Biographia Britannica Literaria.[[542]] But he is too valuable to us to be here abused: rather shall we be grateful to him exceedingly for revealing the literary tastes and ideals of the age as they lived. The New Poetic[[543]] begins by one of those mediæval gambades which, themselves sometimes partaking of the not unamiably nonsensical, seem at the present day to have a special gift of maddening those persons whose imbecility is of a different complexion from theirs. Geoffrey dedicates his poem to Pope Innocent III. (“stupor mundi”), and is at once in a difficulty. It would not do to call the Pope Nocens; Innocens is simply impossible in a hexameter. So he plays about the subject for a score or so of lines, adding eulogistic jocular remarks on other Christian names, especially in relation to the Papacy. “Augustine may hold his tongue: Leo be quiet: John leave off: Gregory halt,”[[544]] while Innocent is comparable with Bartlemy in nobility, with Andrew in mildness, with St John himself in precious youth, in faith with Peter, in consummate scholarship with Paul. Then Rome is praised in comparison with England, and the poet-professor-of-poetry plunges into his subject.
His value, even if it were more flawed and alloyed than it is, will appear at once from the simple statement of the fact that, unlike the great majority of mediæval writers (such as they are) on literature, he does not confine himself to form on the one hand, and on the other does not adopt, in handling his subject, the extreme cut-and-dried rhetorical restrictions, though his own conception of the matter is more or less regulated by them. I do not remember that he ever quotes Horace; but it is pretty certain that he had the Ars Poetica before him. He opens with the most solemn and elaborate commands to the poet not to rush upon his subject, to leave nothing to chance, but to form the conception of the work carefully and completely beforehand. “A little gall embitters a whole mass of honey, and one spot makes a whole face ugly.” In his second chapter he becomes more closely rhetorical. The poet must first choose and arrange his subject; then elaborate and amplify it; then clothe it in “civil, not rustic” words; and lastly, study its proper recitation or delivery. Under the first head the mot d’ordre is order: the very word ordo occurs over and over again in the first dozen or sixteen lines. The exordium must look straight to the end: and all the other parts must follow according to the regular drill of a “theme.” Special attention is given to the employment of Examples and Proverbs. Under the head of treatment, Brevity, Amplification, and all the scholastic tricks of style are inculcated again with plentiful examples, these including that unlucky passage against Friday which tempted the wicked wit of another Geoffrey. It is, however, fair to say that He of the Sound Wine does not himself seem to have been by any means destitute of a certain sense of humour, and demands ridicule of the ridiculous. If by his precept, and still more by his examples, Geoffrey seems too much to encourage word-play as a lighter, and bombast as a graver, ornament of composition, it is well to remember that the fashions of every time are not only liable to exaggeration, but nearly always exhibit it. Professional students of literature have no difficulty in putting a name to such exaggerations in the thirteenth, the sixteenth, or the eighteenth century; nor will such students in the future have any more in performing the same office for the literary fashions of the late nineteenth. Nor are some of the prescriptions for figure, and fanciful colour and conceit, by any means infelicitous—always supposing that such things can be made the subject of regular prescription at all. On the other hand, it must be admitted that Geoffrey is sometimes painfully rudimentary. The budding poet who requires to be told that
“Aptantur bene dentes nix; labra flammæ;
Gustus mel; vultus rosa; frons lac; crines et aurum;”
and who then obediently “goes and does it,” is a person with whose works reviewers (for their sins) are indeed still well acquainted, but to whom no philanthropist would willingly give encouragement.
This descent to even the lowest ranges of the particular is, however, one of the most interesting points of the book. There are some two thousand lines in all, and the whole, except the dedication and three not very long epilogue-addresses to Pope, Emperor, and a certain Archbishop William (who has not, I think, been identified), is strictly devoted to business.
This poem is, on fair authority, assigned to the year 1216, the Labyrinthus being dated some four years earlier. And, without pinning our faith to these dates and so running the danger of its unsettlement should they be attacked, we may say quite boldly that the Labyrinthus and the Nova Poetria[[545]] together give us a remarkable and nearly complete conspectus of what the late twelfth and early thirteenth century thought about literature, in what was still its almost all-embracing form—poetry, in both its rhythmical and metrical shapes—and in the only thoroughly acknowledged literary language of the time. For although the vernaculars were already knocking at the door, they were doing so as yet timidly and half consciously, while in so far as they were deliberately practised, the principles of composition and of taste which guided the practice cannot have been different. We find, if not always with exactly the same nuance, terms of Dante’s critical vocabulary (e.g., “pexa”) in the Poetria Nova. And though neither Eberhard nor Geoffrey would in all probability have had anything but scorn for the suggestion that “vulgar” could possibly equal “regular” composition; though they were at best men of respectable talent; their general critical estimate was probably not very different from that of their great successor on the bridge of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Of his eagle glance into the future of literature they were entirely destitute, but he shared at least some of their confused vision in reference to the past.[[546]]