But he is not a man of prose letters only. He is a poet, to the tune of some thirty thousand verses in the long-lost and late-won Méliador alone, to the tune of, I suppose, about as many more in his familiar, or at least long accessible, minor poems. He is deft at all the intricate popular forms of the day—at pastourelles as at chansons royaux, at virelais as at rondelets. He possesses its learning; and can not only appeal to the common tales of Troy and Thebes and Alexander, not only refer to ancient mythology with the semi-pagan docility which long puzzled students, and seems to puzzle some still, but be even at home with Enclimpostair, and Pynoteus, and Neptisphelè. In a certain sense he is a man of letters, a man of books, all his life, and very much more than Chaucer is. With all his patronisings by great people and his sojourns among them, he is nothing like the man of affairs that Master Geoffrey was.

And yet, in a sense also, Madame Darmesteter’s phrase is intelligible and almost justifiable. It is indeed hardly fair to base this construction on his scanty and not in the least literary reference to Chaucer, whom he does not even, like Eustache Deschamps[[598]], call a great translator. In Froissart’s happy early English time Chaucer had done probably little work, and certainly none of his best: in that melancholy revisiting, no more of the blaze of the sun of Cressy and Poitiers, but of the glimpses of the moon that was to set in blood at Pontefract, he was probably too old and too disgusted to make inquiries about such matters. But the absence of the strictly literary interest in one who not merely had so much literary genius, but was so constantly reading and writing, is pervading and incessant. This interest is absent not merely where it might well have been present, but where its presence seems almost indispensable. Froissart’s style of poetry invites the widest, and (except that it is rather too methodical, not to say mechanical) the wildest, liberty of divagation, of dragging in anything that really interested him. In the most recondite allegorising of the Prison Amoureuse he expostulates[[599]] with Desire for not coming to his aid, and giving him the victory, by the same sort of clever outflanking attack as that which Chandos executed at the Battle of Auray, and of which he kindly gives some details. He names books in the usual manner of Romance; he will go so far as to praise them; but he never discusses them. In the well-known passage[[600]] of the Espinette Amoureuse, when he asks his beloved the name of the romance she is reading, she does indeed tell him that it is Cléomadès (Did he mention the same to Chaucer?), with the commendation that it is “well made and dittied amorously,” and she asks him to lend her another (it is the Bailiff of Love[[601]] that he hits upon),

“Car lire est un douls mestiers.”

But, though the comparing of critical opinions on literature has been not unknown as one of the primrose paths of the garden of Flirtation, they seem to have trodden it no farther.

So in his prose. The satura of the Chroniques admits anything that interested either Froissart or the men of his time. In those strange midnight sessions of the Italianate Gascon Count of Foix—the lettered tyrant-sorcerer who would have been even more at home in Ferrara or Rimini than in Béarn—books were in great request; but nobody seems to have talked criticism. “So much the better for the Bearnese,” the reader may say; and he is welcome to an opinion which, at times, if not always, most people must have shared. But that is not the question. The question is, “Was this a critical age?” and the answer is, “If it had been, a man could not have been so bookish as Froissart was and yet be not critical in the least.” Nor could he, even if some private idiosyncrasy had accounted for his own attitude, have failed to reveal the presence of a different one in the time which he has drawn for us, more poetically no doubt than Boswell or Pepys, but with not a little of their unpremeditated, their even unconscious, fidelity.

The lesson taught by the two men, who occupy the summits of European literature at the very midmost of the period of this |Richard of Bury.| chapter, will be confirmed whether we look earlier or later. It might seem almost impossible that the somewhat famous Philobiblon[[602]] of Richard of Bury (or Aungervyle), who made one of the greatest collections of books in the early part of the fourteenth century, and celebrated it in this little tract just before his own death and shortly after Chaucer’s probable birth, should not contribute something—improbable that it should not contribute very much—to our subject. As a matter of fact it contributes nothing at all. Almost the oldest Sacred Book (as distinguished from “sacred passages” in Cicero and others) of Bibliophily, it remains entirely outside of literary criticism. The good Bishop of Durham, indeed, does not devour all books with indiscriminating voracity. He is true to his order in candidly avowing no high opinion of law-books; but his reason—that they belong rather to Will than to Wit—shows us his point of view. From that point of view one book may be preferable to another, as being more useful, as dealing with a nobler subject, as boasting a more venerable authorship, as being perhaps rarer, more beautifully written or bound, older, newer, in better condition, but not, I think, at all as being better literature. The pleasant garrulity of the tractate; its agreeable onslaught upon woman, the natural enemy of books; its anecdotage; its keen sympathy with the Book as almost a living thing, and certainly one exposed to almost all the dangers of life, have made it, and will long make it, a favourite. It is sweet and pleasant: but it is not criticism.

The author of the Philobiblon was a friend of Petrarch’s, and it may at first sight seem strange that Petrarch himself should |Petrarch.| not be—should not indeed have been at the very beginning or this chapter—summoned to give evidence likewise. But the fact is that Petrarch has nothing to tell us in our context. He has indeed, as has been pretty universally recognised, nothing to do with the Middle Ages. Not only in his heart and desires, but in his nature, he is a man of the early—if of the earliest—Renaissance. Even in the vernacular he rings false as an exponent of anything mediæval. Timotheus, not St Cecily, has taught his strains. And in his “regular” writing he is severely, almost ludicrously, a classicaster. We may return to him as the earliest distinguished example of the Renaissance attitude; here he cannot even, as others have done, help us by his silence.

It is otherwise with his great contemporary, and at the last friend, Boccaccio. Boccaccio likewise has been claimed as a prophet of the Renaissance, as one of the first of the |Boccaccio.| moderns and the like; nor would it skill to deny that there is much both of the Renaissance and of the modern spirit in him. But he has not broken with the immediate past; he is only tinging it, and blending it a little, with the farther past and the future. If something of the magical charm of the mediæval prose story is gone from the Decameron, the learned voluptuousness of the Renaissance conte is not yet there.[there.] The Filostrato, and the Filocopo[[603]], and the Teseide, are still romances. And in the De Genealogia Deorum, if there is much of that non-mediæval spirit which was always in Italy, and not a little of the Renaissance proper, there is enough of the Middle Age itself to give it a locus standi here.

Indeed, by a recent authority of great eminence[[604]] Boccaccio has been treated as a coryphæus and representative of “the |His work on Dante.| critics of the middle ages.” I have endeavoured, in these chapters, to show that the critics of the middle ages are, except in the most remote and shadowy function, almost a non-existent body. And it seems to me that Boccaccio’s views on criticism, though most worthy of remark, are the very head and front of that Renaissance side of him which is so undeniable. In the passage which Mr Courthope cites from the Life of Dante, where Boccaccio says that Theology and poetry are almost one, that “Theology is God’s poetry,” that it is a kind of poetic invention when Christ is spoken of at one time as a lion, at the other as a lamb, that the words of the Saviour in the Gospel are merely or mainly allegory, that “Poetry is Theology and Theology poetry,” and that Aristotle said nearly as much[[605]]—when he writes in this way he is speaking very much less the mind of the Middle Ages than the mind which agitated the mass of his countrymen, the Italian critics, from Daniello onwards in the sixteenth century. But it is quite certain that in writing this he is writing with a conception of criticism quite alien from that which we are now handling. He may quote Aristotle, but he is speaking in the manner of Plato. It is poetry in the abstract with which he is dealing, not the literary value of poetry according to its expression in form, of no matter what ideal in essence. And it will be found, I think, that a careful study of his commentary on Dante, the most important thing of the kind that we possess by one considerable man of letters in the Middle Ages upon another, entirely bears this out.

As for the Life (or, as he himself seems to call it in the first lecture of the Commentary, the “Little Treatise”[[606]]) on Dante, it is couched in so extremely rhetorical a style, with constant bursts of apostrophe and epiphonema, that there may seem to be a sort |The Trattatello.| of warning on it from the first: “Criticism not to be expected.” As a matter of fact, however, Boccaccio does give us some of what, as we shall see more fully in a moment, he thought to be criticism, and of what not a few persons seem still to think the best criticism. For he has an elaborate digression on Poetry and Poets in the abstract, with a particular parallel distinction (referred to above) between poetry and theology. But he goes no farther, and the heading “Qualità e diffetti di Dante” is entirely occupied with moral characteristics. In the Comento itself, however, it might well seem to be a case of Now or Never. Here was a literary lectureship expressly instituted for the treatment of the greatest man of letters of the city, the country, and (as it happened) the world, at the time and for long before and after. Here was an exceedingly learned lecturer, with plenty of mother-wit to keep his learning alive, with a distinct fellow-feeling of creation further to animate both, and with the sincerest and heartiest goodwill to complete his competence. He spares no trouble, but goes to his work with scholastic minuteness, expending some three score lectures and some nine hundred pages on seventeen cantos only out of the hundred of the Commedia. Unfortunately neither his models nor his tastes seem to incline |The Comento.| him in the way where we would so fain see him go. He has read Servius and all (or at least many of) the rhetoricians and scholastic philosophers, and he tells us with gusto what are the causes, formal, efficient, material, and final, of the book, how its form is “poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, and transitive,” and how the efficient cause is “that very same author, Dante Alighieri, of whom we will speak more extensively by-and-by.” He has also read Fulgentius:[[607]] and before very long he gives us a capital specimen of derivation, in the manner of that ingenious author, by telling us that “Avernus” is from a, which is without, and vernus, which is joy. He has at his command all that extraordinary supply of mythological and miscellaneous classical learning which, as we shall see immediately, enabled him to write his Genealogy: and he never comes to the name of an ancient writer or of a mythological personage without giving a full and particular account thereof. No details are too obvious or too minute for him, even apart from the allegorical interpretation, in which, as any scholar of Fabius Planciades, and indeed any mediæval writer of the fourteenth century, was bound to do, he expatiates delightedly. He vouches the information that Dante called the forest selvaggia “because he wished to denote that there was not in it any human habitation, and that as a consequence it was horrible;” aspera, “in order to demonstrate the quality of the trees and shrubs of the same, which would be old, with long straggling branches en woven and interpleached among themselves, and likewise full of blackthorns, and brambles, and dry stubs, growing without any order, and stretching hither and thither—whereby it was a rough thing and a dangerous to go through,” &c. He is copious in moral excursus on the impropriety of Florentine dress, on the sin of Luxury, on the obvious inconvenience and hardship of the fact that while men are allowed to try horses, asses, oxen, dogs, clothing, casks, pitchers before they buy them, they have to take their wives on trust and without trial. But on literary criticism we come not seldom, but never, beyond the beggarly elements of verbal interpretation, where Boccaccio is just as happy with Pape Satan as with Galeotto fu il libro, or rather more so, while he is much happier with Penthesilea or Pasiphae than with either. It is no doubt unfair to try Master John Bochas with the things that make us “nearly wild” (as Cowper made Miss Marianne Dashwood,[[608]] and does not often make us), but still the Galeotto passage is very tempting. Lancelot, we learn, was one of whom the French romances tell many beautiful and laudable things (things which he tells us, in confidence, he himself believes to be set forth rather to please than according to the truth), and the said Lancelot was ferventissimamente enamoured of Guinevere. Then he points out that the line which follows (Soli eravamo, &c.), and the previous mention of the book, indicate three things—reading about love, solitude, and freedom from suspicion—which are very powerful to induce a man and a woman to adoperate dishonestly. And so he proceeds, expounding or construing the whole ineffable passage, word for word, with a solemn and indiscriminate enjoyment—the trembling at the kiss, the fact that Galehault was a kind of giant, great and big, down to Quel giorno, his remark on which, though not scientifically inaccurate, savours rather of the Decameron than of the Commedia itself. But in the whole comment there is nothing (or, what is worse than nothing, a single banal ottimamente descrive) for any part whatsoever of the passion, the poetry, the mysterious magnificence of the expression. The passage is to Boccaccio a good ecphrasis, a capital compte rendu of an interesting situation—that is all.