The De Genealogia Deorum.
Nor will this be less borne out by an examination of Boccaccio’s principal “place” of criticism, which will be, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, found in the two last books, the fourteenth and fifteenth, of that singular monument of learning, the De Genealogia Deorum.[[609]] After laboriously searching out all the mythological stories of antiquity within his reach, and co-ordinating them into a regular family history, from Demogorgon, through Erebus and his twenty-one sons and daughters by Night, to Alexander and Scipio (whom, however, he declines, as a strict genealogist, to admit as sons of Jove), Boccaccio, at the beginning of his fourteenth book, takes up the cudgels for Poetry against her enemies. The style is decidedly rhetorical, and faint remembrances of Clodius as an accuser (or, to be less pedantic and less hackneyed, of Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence) may possibly occur, as we find the author of the Decameron indignantly denouncing those who sneer at poets and learned men, meretriculis gannientes, and holding cups of foaming wine in their hands. But he is perfectly serious: if a man has not proved his seriousness by writing a Latin genealogy of the gods in four hundred large and closely printed folio pages, what is Proof? There was always, he says, a quarrel between Learning and Licentiousness. Even some graver folk sneer at, or find fault with, poetry. Lawyers do so: and the lawyers are properly rebuked and bid to look at the example of Cicero. Monks do: and there is expostulation likewise with them. But he will attack the question in form. Poetry is a noble and useful thing. Its meaning, its antiquity, its origin are discussed. There is nothing wrong or harmful in a “fable” as such; but in all its kinds it can be made of positive utility. Poets do not retire into solitude out of any misanthropy or wrong motive, but simply for the sake of meditation: and they have often been the friends of most respectable people—Ennius of the Scipios, Virgil of Augustus, Dante of King Frederick and Can de la Scala, Francis Petrarch of the Emperor Charles, of King John of France, of King Robert of Jerusalem and Sicily, and of any number of Popes.
But, some say, poetry is obscure. It is certainly written for the learned and people of wit, not for the common herd; but it is none the worse for that. It is entirely false that poets are liars: poetry and lying are two quite different things (Virgil is here particularly cleared in the matter of Dido). It is foolish to condemn what you do not understand: and this is generally done by those who abuse poetry. And it is intolerable that men should speak against Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, when they have hardly read them. The “seduction” of Poetry is all nonsense: and the accusation that poetry is the ape of philosophy, greater nonsense still. It would be better to call poets the apes of Nature.[[610]]
He does not fear to contest the authority of Jerome when he said that verses were Dæmonum cibus, of Plato himself, and of Boethius when he called the Muses “scenic meretricules.” He grapples with the two first at great length, and points out that Boethius was thinking chiefly of the naughty theatre. An allocution to the King (Hugh of Cyprus and Jerusalem), to whom the whole treatise is dedicated, and a milder deprecation to the enemies of poetry, conclude this book.
The Fifteenth at first seems to launch out into still deeper waters. You must not insist too much on use. What is the use of the beard? Yet men of a certain age are ashamed to be beardless. And as for the duration of work, that is in the hand of God. But this turns to a mere excuse of his own actual book. His work has been done as well as he can do it, both for matter and for style. He refers to divers living or recent authors, Dante and Petrarch among them, of whom he gives little descriptions that raise, but hardly satisfy, our curiosity to see whether he will really criticise. Dante was peritissimus circa poeticam, and what he was is shown by his inclytum opus, “which he wrote with wonderful art, under the title of a Comedy, in rhyme of the Florentine idiom, and in which he certainly showed himself not a mythologer but rather a catholic and divine Theologian. And while he is known to almost all the world, I know not whether the fame of his name has come to your latitude.” Petrarch is dealt with much more fully. “Even that remote corner of the earth England knows him as a principal poet,”[[611]] and here Boccaccio no longer nescit utrum, but haud dubitat quin, his fame has reached Cyprus. His “divine” Africa, his Bucolics, his Epistles in verse and prose, and a good many other things, are noticed.
Next he recurs to antiquity, mentioning Homer especially, and defending his own practice of mixing Greek words with Latin by the examples of Cicero, Macrobius, Apuleius, and Ausonius. He has a good deal to say (entirely in a Renaissance spirit) on the importance of the Greeks and of Greek; defends, against clerical prejudice, his description of the heathen poets as the theologians of mythology, argues once more that Dante may be called a theologian proper, contends at great length that there is no harm in the study of heathen matters by Christians, and, after purging himself of other objections, concludes.
A most interesting document; indeed a document upon which, with reference both to its general tenor and to individual expressions (of which it has been possible to mention but one or two here), it would be pleasant to spend much more time. But a document which, for our present purpose and plan, seems to establish in the main two things, both of them rather negative than positive. The first is that Boccaccio can hardly be appealed to either as helping Dantes Aligerus to remove the reproach from mediæval criticism, in the sense in which we here understand it, or even as a representative proper of mediæval criticism at all—that his criticism, such as it is, is of a purely Renaissance type, and results, not from the application of mediæval ideas to ancient matter, but from the application of resuscitated ancient ideas to matter which, though not wholly, is preferably chosen from ancient material. It is not to be forgotten that even in that creative work which has been referred to above, Boccaccio has always preferred the matière de Rome, the classical side of the mediæval storehouse. From this he has drawn the Teseide, from this the Filostrato, and if in the Filocopo he has made a more purely mediæval choice, let it be remembered that Floire et Blanche-fleur, his original, is of all Romances the most like a Byzantine novel, and has even been thought to have been directly inspired by one.
Secondly, when we examine the character of this criticism of his in detail, we find it differing from Dante’s in this, that while Dante undoubtedly does consider the general and abstract points of poetry and of literature, Boccaccio practically considers nothing else. His descriptions of Dante himself and of Petrarch would suffice to prove this: but, in fact, it is proved by every page, every paragraph, every sentence, almost every word. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth books of the Genealogy Boccaccio is really pleading pro domo sua—for the status and craft of the story-teller generally, not of the poet as such. And further, he is pleading for free trade in the story, not for any special process of art or craft in its manufacture. He had possibly, if not certainly, read the De Vulgari, but, as he read it, it must have been in the first part of the first book only that he found much that was germane to his own tastes and principles. If we could but have had from himself such an examen of the Decameron as Corneille and, still more, Dryden have given of their work! But the time simply did not admit of any such thing: and though Boccaccio was very much in advance of his time in some ways, these ways were not of the some.
Nor does the Fifteenth Century proper necessitate any revision of the general doctrine of this chapter. There are here and there blind stirrings of the Renaissance spirit; but, once more, they do not concern us. There is everywhere the dogged or unconscious adherence to the uncritical promiscuousness of the past; and that has been sufficiently commented upon. If it be, as perhaps it is, desirable to take a single example, and deal with it as we have dealt with others, there can hardly be a better than Gavin Douglas, who at the very end of the period shows, side by side with Renaissance tendency (which certainly exists, though to me it does not seem so great as it has seemed to some), the strongest symptoms of persistent mediævalism.
Nobody can deny that the good Bishop of Dunkeld (uneasiest to him of bishop-stools!) not only would have liked to be a |Gavin Douglas.| critic, but shows both his critical and his Renaissance sides in the well-known and violent onslaught on poor Caxton in the first of the very agreeable Prologues to his own translation of the Æneid. In fact, those to whom the woman who killed Abimelech with a stone or slate is the patron saint of criticism, must regard him as a very considerable critic. How Caxton’s work and Virgil’s are “no more like than the Devil and Saint Austin”; how the author “shamefully perverted” the story; how the critic read it “with harms at his heart” that such a book “without sentence or engine” should be entitled after so divine a bard; how such a wight never knew three words of what Virgil meant; how he, Gavin, is “constrained to flyte,”—all this is extremely familiar. We seem to hear the very voice of the modern “jacket-duster,” of the man who finds his pet task anticipated, his pet subject trespassed upon, and is determined to make the varlet pay for it. Douglas, to be sure, is not quite in the worst case of this class of critic. He can render some reasons, neither garbled nor forged, for his censure. He has (and this is a sign that criticism was stirring) lost taste for, lost even comprehension of, the full, guileless, innocent, mediæval licence of suppression, suggestion, and digression. He protests (quite truly) that Neptune did not join with Æolus in causing the storm that endangered Æneas, but on the contrary stilled that storm. He is indignant at the extension given to the true romantic part of the poem, the Tragedy of Carthage in the Fourth Book, and only less indignant at the suppression of the “lusty games” and plays palustral in the Fifth. Most of all does he tell us of that aggravation of the critical misuse of allegory which was to be one of the main Renaissance notes. The “hidden meaning” of poetry is the great thing for Douglas, and he has much to say about it before he “turns again” on Caxton. Will it be believed that Caxton wrote "Touyr for Tiber"! Alas! alas!