“For Touyr divides Greece from Hungarie,
And Tiber is chief fluide of Italy.”
But all this, and a great deal more like it, as the setting up of the old Rhetoric-Poetic theory of a poem as the story of a perfectly noble character, and the rebuke even to Chaucer not merely for being too literal, just as Caxton was too loose, but for actually saying (the more Chaucer he!) that Æneas was not a perfectly noble character but a forsworn traitor,—all this argues no real relinquishment of the mediæval ideal except in a special case. Douglas shows in his own work that he is after all a chip of the old block, and not fresh hewn from a virgin quarry.
In the Prologue to the Sixth Book he returns to the allegorical-philosophical interpretation of Virgil, and shows himself a hundred leagues to leeward of the critical port by urging, in Virgil’s favour, that St Augustine is always quoting him against Paganism. Not in the whole range of mediæval literature is that pell-mell cataloguing, which, with more truth than reverence, has been assimilated to that of the “Groves of Blarney,” better shown than in the Palice of Honour. Solomon, “the well of sapience,” Aristotle, “fulfillit of prudence,” “Salust, Seneca, and Titus Livius” jostle Pythagoras and Porphyry, Parmenides and “Melysses,” “Sidrach, Secundus, and Solenius,” “Empedocles, Neptanabus, and Hermes,” “wise Josephus and facund Cicero,” with other miraculous couples and trinities. The procession of the Court of Venus huddles classical, Biblical, and mediæval in the same, but a more pardonable, fashion; and when the Muses intervene to save the peccant poet, Dictys and Dares still march unblushingly with Homer and Virgil. “Plautus, Poggius, and Persius” must have looked only less oddly, the first and last at the second, than “Esop, Cato, and Allane” (Alanus de Insulis of the Anti-Claudianus and the De planetu Naturæ) each at other. Such a capital phrase as “the mixt and subtle Martial,” the valuable naming of contemporary poets that follows, and other things, may much more than atone for, but cannot hide, the higgledy-piggledy character of the cataloguing, or the odd repetition of the same thing with a difference at the end of the Second Part, and the yet further development in the Third. The note of criticism is discrimination—the note of the Middle Age, as of this, almost its latest exponent, save in the few places where he has chipped his shell, is the indiscriminate.
It can scarcely be necessary, though it might not be uninteresting, to take any more examples. We need not |Further examples unnecessary.| wander in Hercynian forests with those rules of latest Middle High German poetry, which have all the formality of the French “Arts” and none of the charm of their products. The Marquis of Santillana and his comrades, in castle or convent of Spain, concern national rather than general history, history of literature rather than history of criticism; and they, like others, will best be glanced at retrospectively in the Renaissance section. From the French rhétoriqueur period we might pick out much that would illustrate, over and over again, what has been sufficiently illustrated already, little that would give us anything new, nothing or next to nothing that would be at once new and important.[[612]] As will be shown, a little more in detail, in the Interchapter which follows, the service which the Middle Ages rendered to Criticism was indeed inestimable; but it was by way of provision of fresh material, not by way of examination, either of that material or of anything older.
[593]. The “cursed appreciation,” as a modern wit has translated the phrase in its most famous context.
[595]. I must apologise to those who hold that Chaucer never rhymed -y and -ye for ascribing Sir Thopas to him. But I really cannot give it up as Chaucerian.
[596]. Not Rebecca and Rowena. I think it barely desirable to insert this note because quite recently a person, not demonstrably insane, called that exquisite piece of Romantic humour “distressing,” or some such word.