Here the subdivision is again of great importance and some difficulty. Dante distinguishes a sort of tree—
| Puerilia — Muliebria — Virilia. | ||||
| Silvestria. | Urbana. | |||
| Pexa et hirsuta. | Lubrica et reburra. | |||
All these words (save perhaps reburra, which, however, a remembrance of the French à rebours will clear up at once) are easy to understand, if sometimes rather hard of application.
Now, according to Dante, Pexa et Hirsuta are grandiosa, while lubrica et reburra in superfluum sonant. And it will be most specially important to use the “sieve,” for, looking to the poets who have succeeded in the Illustrious Vernacular, sola vocabula nobilissima are to be left therein. “Childish”[[568]] words must be left out altogether: “feminine”[[569]] words are too soft, “silvan”[[570]] words too rough, nor will lubrica nor reburra[[571]], though urbana, do. So pexa[[572]] et hirsuta[[573]] alone are left.
All this terminology is, of course, more than a little obscure, and the explanation of the obscurities rather concerns a commentator |Pexa et hirsuta.| on Dante than a historian of literary criticism. But the explanation, given by the critic-poet himself, of pexa et hirsuta does concern us, and is interesting. The former, it seems, are words which are trisyllabic, or “neighbours to trisyllabity,” without an aspirate, without an acute or circumflexed accent, without double x’s or z’s, without the conjunction of two liquids, or the placing of them after a mute, which freedoms give a certain sweetness. Hirsuta, on the other hand, are all others which, like the monosyllabic pronouns and articles, cannot be dispensed with, or which, though the above uglinesses have not been “combed out” of them, still, when mixed with combed-out words, are ornamental. He includes in this last class sovramagnificentissimamente, a hendecasyllabic in itself. He would not even mind onorificabilitudinitate, which has thirteen syllables in two of its Latin cases, if it were not by its length excluded from Italian verse.
So having got the sticks of words for our faggot the canzone, and the cords of construction and classification to bind them |The Canzone.| up[[574]], let us set to work to the actual binding and faggoting, before which something more must be said about the faggot itself, the Canzone. The Canzone (cantio) is the action or passion of singing, just as a “reading” or book (lectio) is the action or passion of reading. A little metaphysic follows on actio and passio, and the fact that the cantio is actio when composed, passio when sung or acted. But is the cantio the words or the tune? Surely the words; nobody calls the tune canzone. In fact, all words written for music may in a sense be called canzoni, even ballads, even sonnets, even poems in Latin (regulariter). But we are speaking of the supreme canzone, like Dante’s Donne ch’ avete. It is “a tragic composition” of equal stanzas, without responsorium (dialogue or antiphon). The last six chapters concern us less, because they are wholly occupied with the particular rhyming, lining, and stanza-fashion of the canzone itself, and, interesting as they are, overflow our limits, except as a particular example of the general kind of criticism which has been so laboriously built up.
With the conclusion of this the tractate stops abruptly, nor have we any indication of what the Third Book was to consist of, though the Fourth, as we have seen above, is more than once referred to. The loss of both must be regarded as one of the most serious that the history of criticism has suffered.
Yet the possession of what we have is no mean consolation, and I must be excused for repeating an expression of the |Importance of the book.| extremest surprise at the comparatively small attention which the book has received, and at the slighting fashion in which it has been treated by some of those who have paid attention to it. For myself, I am prepared to claim for it, not merely the position of the most important critical document between Longinus and the seventeenth century at least, but one of intrinsic importance on a line with that of the very greatest critical documents of all history. There is no need at all to lay much stress on the mere external attractiveness, unusual as that may be, of the combination in one person of the greatest poet and the first, if not the sole, great critic of the Middle Ages. The tub can stand on its own bottom.
In the first place, it only requires acquaintance with that previous history of the subject, which we have here endeavoured to unfold, to see that we have the inestimable advantage of a quite new and independent treatment of that subject. There is |Independence and novelty of its method.| no direct evidence that Dante knew the Poetics[[575]]: we see that he cites Horace and cites him magnificentissime. But the Epistle to the Pisos might never have been written, for any sign there is of direct influence from it on Dante’s method. So, too, singular as is the resemblance between the spirit of him and the spirit of Longinus; remarkable as is the coincidence between the words of both about words; and possible as the John of Sicily[[576]] reference makes it that Dante might have known the Great Unknown of Criticism—yet there is not the faintest evidence that he did know him, and an almost overwhelming probability that he did not. To the method of no classical predecessor in pure criticism does his method bear the smallest resemblance, even if faint resemblances might be pointed out in phrase.
But it is still more remarkable that, steeped to the lips as he is in scholastic lore—though trivium and quadrivium must have been at his fingers’ ends—the De Vulgari Eloquio, even in mentioning Rhetoric itself, shows not the faintest tincture of that scholastic rhetoric which we have noticed. There is not so much as an allusion to the Figures: they have been, for Dante on this occasion, as completely banished from rerum natura as poor Albucius feared they would be, if his judges disallowed his pleading.[[577]] The familiar Arts of Composition make no appearance: Beginning, Middle, and End are with the Figures. If we did not know that these things must have been as familiar to Dante as the alphabet or the multiplication-table to any modern child, we might think, from this treatise, that he had never heard of them.