LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER—THE MATERIAL IT OFFERS—THE FORMAL ARTS OF RHETORIC AND OF POETRY—EXAMPLES OF INDIRECT CRITICISM: CHAUCER—‘SIR THOPAS’—FROISSART—RICHARD OF BURY—PETRARCH—BOCCACCIO—HIS WORK ON DANTE—THE ‘TRATTATELLO’—THE ‘COMENTO’—THE ‘DE GENEALOGIA DEORUM’—GAVIN DOUGLAS—FURTHER EXAMPLES UNNECESSARY.
The contents of the two foregoing chapters should have in some sort prepared the reader for the character and limitations of the |Limitations of this chapter.| third. If it were not part of the scheme of this work to leave no period of literary history unnoticed in relation to criticism, a straight stride might almost be taken from the De Vulgari Eloquio to the earliest of the momentous and (from some points of view) rather unfortunate attempts which the Italian critics of the Renaissance made to bring about an eirenicon between Plato and Aristotle, by sacrificing the whole direct product, and the whole indirect lesson, of the Middle Ages. Between Dante and this group of his compatriots two hundred years later, it is scarcely too much to say that there is not a single critic or criticism, either in Italy or in any other European language, possessing substantive importance. But this book endeavours to be a history, not merely of explicit literary criticism, but of implicit literary taste; and no period—not the dimmest gloom of the Dark Ages nor the most glaring blaze of the Aufklärung—is profitless as a subject for inquiry in that respect, even if the result be little more than the old stage-direction—même jeu.
In Arts of Rhetoric, with or without special or partial reference to Poetry, the two centuries, especially the fifteenth, are |The material it offers.| indeed fairly prolific. Nothing could be more significant for the subjective side of Critical History than that gradual and at last undisguised identification of “Rhetoric” with “Poetry” itself, which is notorious alike in the hackneyed title of grands rhétoriqueurs for the French poets of the fifteenth century, and the continual praise of Chaucer’s “rhetoric” by the English and Scottish writers of the same time. The sacra fames[[593]] of the whole two hundred years for Allegory—a hunger which was not in the least checked by the Renaissance, though the sauce of what it glutted itself on was somewhat altered—is another capital fact of the same kind; the renewed passion for changed kinds of Romance another; the ever-increasing interest in drama yet another still. These are the real materials for the student of criticism and taste at this time, and they are identical with the materials, for this period, of the student of literary history generally. In the strictly proper matter of our particular province we not merely may, but had best, confine ourselves to some short notice of the formal writings of the period, and some, rather fuller, of the literary opinions expressed by characteristic exponents of it, whether their claim to represent be derived from eminence, or from merely average, and therefore tell-tale, quality.
Into the first it will not be necessary to enter at any length. The formal Latin Arts of Rhetoric of the fourteenth and fifteenth |The Formal Arts of Rhetoric.|centuries exhibit nothing new, but observe with a touching fidelity the lines of Martianus, or Aphthonius, or Hermogenes, as the case may be. Moreover, such notice of them as is at all necessary will be better given in the next Book and volume, in connection with their immediate successors of the undoubted Renaissance. The chain of merely formal Rhetoric is unbroken till much later; as it had been little affected by the change from “Classical” to “Mediæval,” so it was not sensibly changed till “Renaissance” had definitely given way to “Modern.” The vernacular Arts of Poetry are, in English of this period, non-existent; and, considering all things, they are heartily to be congratulated on their wisdom and foresight in not existing. In Italy they are of little moment, since Italian poetry had to a great extent taken its line once for all. In French and in German they both exist, and exhibit considerable individual quality. But that quality is emphatically for an age, and not of all time. The growth of the exquisitely graceful but dangerously artificial French poetry of Ballade and Chant Royal, of rondeau and triolet; the growth of the artificial, but rarely in the very least graceful, form-torturing of the meister-singers were both accompanied and followed, as was natural and indeed inevitable, by abundance of formal directions for executing the fashionable intricacies. Some of the more noteworthy of these may be indicated in a note but—as has not always been, and will not always be the case with similar things—they require little or no discussion in the text. For the developments to which they related were not merely a little artificial in the bad sense, but they were also purely episodic and of the nature of curiosities. They had not, as even the most apparently preposterous acrobatics of the Latin rhythmic had, the priceless |And of Poetry.| merit of serving as gymnastic to the new vernaculars—at best they only continued this gymnastic in the case of languages that were “grown up.” That they—at least the French division of them—furnished some exquisite moulds, into which the purest poetry could be thrown, is perfectly true. But Jehannot de Lescurel, and Charles d’Orléans, and Villon most of all, could have, and doubtless would have, produced that poetry in any form that happened to be popular at their time. Nay, as has been abundantly shown in France and England during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and a little earlier, the forms themselves will fit any poetry of any time. The ancient names, and the mediæval trimmings, and the modern sentiment of the Dames du Temps Jadis, are all equally at home in its consummate but artificial form; and that form is equally suitable to the Voyage à Cythère and the aspiration for a grave on the breast of the Windburg. Defect there is none in this accommodating character: rather there is a great quality. But, in the special kind of merit, there is a differentiation from such things as the Greek chorus, the Latin elegiac, the Mediæval rhythmus, the mono-rhymed or single-assonanced tirade, the Spenserian, even the eighteenth-century, couplet, which carry their atmosphere and their time inseparably with them. And so we may turn to our testings of writers in whom the criticism “is not so expressed,” but who are not the less valuable to us for that.
Are we to regret, or not, that Chaucer did not leave us an Art of Rhetoric instead of a Treatise on the Astrolabe? Probably not. |Examples of Indirect Criticism: Chaucer.| He would hardly have felt what is called in religious slang “freedom” to say what he undoubtedly might have said on Applied Rhetoric and on Pure Rhetoric, though it would have been very agreeable to hear him. He would probably not have told us anything new. In any kind of formal writing he would probably have displayed that not in the least irrational orthodoxy which he displays on most subjects. But there is perhaps no writer—at least no writer of anything approaching his greatness—who, abstaining from deliberate and expressed critical work, has left us such acute and unmistakable critical byplay, such escapes of the critical spirit. If the sly hit at his namesake of Vinsauf, which has been already glanced at[[594]], stood alone, it would show us “what a critic was in Chaucer lost”—at least to the extent of lying perdu for the most part. But this is not the only example of the kind by any means, even in apparent chance-medleys: while in the Rhyme of Sir Thopas[[595]] we have what is almost a criticism in form, and what certainly displays more critical power than ninety-nine out of a hundred criticisms in fact.
That this celebrated and agreeable fantasy-piece is in any sense an onslaught on Romance, as Romance, is so fond a thing that it is sufficient to discredit the imaginations, or the intelligence, of those who entertain it. Dulness never will understand, either that those who are not dull can laugh at what they love, or that it is possible for a man to see faults, and even serious faults, in writers and writings on whom and on which, as wholes, he bestows the heartiest admiration. From the outset of his career the critic has to make up his mind to be charged with “ungenerous,” or “grudging,” or “not cordial” treatment of those whom he loves with a love that twenty thousand of his accusers could not by clubbing together equal, and understands with an understanding of which—not of course by their own fault but by that of Providence—they are simply incapable.
Of this touch of foolish nature the inference from Sir Thopas that Chaucer disliked, or despised, or failed to sympathise with, |Sir Thopas.| Romance, is one of the capital instances. To remember that the author of the Rhyme was also the author of the Knight’s Tale, and the Squire’s Tale, and Troilus, that he was the translator of the Romance of the Rose, might of itself suffice to keep the wayfaring man straight in this matter; but those who can understand what they read have not the slightest need of such a memory. There have been parodies[[596]] of Romance which incurred the curse of blasphemy: there is one in particular, not very many years old, which, in the energetic and accurate language of Mr Philip Pirrip, “must excite Loathing in every respectable mind.” But Sir Thopas, even to those who have not read many of its originals and victims, much more to those who are well acquainted with them, and who rejoice in them exceedingly and unceasingly, can never put on any such complexion. The intense good-humour and the absolutely unruffled play of intelligence, the complete freedom from (what appears for instance capitally in the example just glanced at) political, national, social animus, and the almost miraculous fashion in which the caricature strikes at the corruptions, but never at the essential character, of the thing caricatured, settle this once for all.
If we knew (as unluckily we do not know) whether the Host and the company stopped Sir Thopas because they disliked the type, or because the example was a parody, it would be a great help to us; but it is scarcely a less help to perceive clearly that its critical character would have been enough to put them out of conceit with it. Few people really do like criticism; fewer still like real criticism. And the criticism of Sir Thopas, though disguised, is very real. Everybody, whether he knows the metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries or not, can see the joke of the seemly nose; the far country of Flanders; the rebuke to the maidens, who had much better have been sleeping quietly than fussing about the beautiful knight; the calm decision of that knight that an elf-queen—nobody less—must be the object of his affections; the terrible wilderness, where buck and hare ramp and roar, and seek whom they may devour; the extraordinarily heroic exertions, which consist merely in pumping the unhappy steed; the fair bearing, which consists in running away with celerity and success. But nobody who does not know the romances themselves in their weakest examples, such as Sir Eglamour or Torrent of Portugal, can fully appreciate the manner in which the parody is adjusted to the original. Not the deftest and most disinterested critic of any day could single out, by explicit criticism, the faults “before the Eternal” of the feebler and more cut-and-dried romance, more clearly or more accurately than Chaucer has, by example, in this tale. The stock epithet and phrase; the stock comparison; the catalogue (he had himself indulged pretty freely in the catalogue); the pound of description to an ounce of incident; the mixture of the hackneyed and the ineffective in the incident itself,—all these things this mercilessly candid friend, this maliciously expert practitioner, exposes with the precision of an Aristotle and the zest of a Lucian.
Yet the whole is done by implication and unexpounded example, not in the very least by direct criticism. Had it occurred to him, or pleased him, he could no doubt have censured all these faults in as businesslike and direct a manner as his Parson (or rather his Parson’s original) censures the moral, social, and fashionable shortcomings of the age. But he certainly did not do this, and probably he never thought of doing it.
Cross the Channel (though indeed it was not always necessary to do this) and take Chaucer’s greatest contemporary among French |Froissart.| writing men. It has been said, by that very agreeable biographer of Froissart whom England (mindful of his early loyalty, and characteristically neglectful of his later infidelity) lent to France, that he “was not a man of letters.”[[597]] It may be so: but if it be, he was certainly one of the most literary not-men-of-letters that the world has ever seen. Not only is he admittedly one of that world’s most charming prose-writers, but it has long been known that the notion of him (if it ever existed among the intelligent) as of a good garrulous old person who wrote as the birds sing, is utterly erroneous. At one time he could make a mosaic of borrowed and original writing—the borrowings often in the very words of the original, the original adjusted to them with an art that nobody but Malory has ever approached, and that even Malory shows rather in general management than in style. At another, and at another again, he could, whether with or against the grain, laboriously recast this mosaic into the most widely different forms. His very desultoriness is calculated; he is criticising the romances by imitation when he makes a chassé-croisé to the story of Orthon from the victory of Aljubarrota, from the battle of Otterburn to the evil receipt for a green wound adopted by Geoffrey Tête-Noire, and the remarkably sensible, just, kindly, and gentlemanly remarks of that dying brigand to his fellow-outlaws.