§ II. THE POSITION, ACTUAL AND POSSIBLE, OF LITERARY CRITICISM AT THE RENAISSANCE.
I.
In perhaps no part of a work of the present kind is it more important than it is here to distinguish between the different kinds of value, for the special purpose, of the period in question. If you judge this by its positive contributions to the standard literature of literary criticism, it has absolutely nothing of consequence to advance but the De Vulgari Eloquio. There is not very much else at all; and what there is consists mainly of agreeable babblings, of schoolbooks, and of incidental utterances, which at best can be taken as a kind of semeiotic.
Yet, in the De Vulgari itself, the Middle Ages lodged such a diploma-piece as has been scarcely half-a-dozen times elsewhere seen in the history of the world. And, what is still more important, their contributions to productive literature were such that they take, from the catholic point of view, equal rank as a whole with those of classical and those of modern times, while, for the special critical purpose, they are almost more valuable than either. Enforced and necessary ignorance of what the Middle Ages had to teach accounts in almost every case for whatever shortcomings we find in the Classics; wilful or careless ignoring of this accounts for most of the shortcomings of the moderns; recourse to it accounts for most of the merits, such as they are, of the criticism of the nineteenth century. The critic who knows his Middle Ages, knowing also ancient and modern literature, and he alone, has the keys of the criticism of the world.
Of the excellent and astonishing accomplishment of the De Vulgari Eloquio enough has been said already, and it will not require extensive surveys to show the small accomplishment in criticism of the Middle Ages elsewhere. It is almost enough to consider, as we have done, the work of Chaucer, their next man to Dante in genius[[613]] as a known personality. Chaucer had all or almost all the necessary qualifications of a critic—a real knowledge of literature, a distinctly satirical humour, a large tolerance, a touch, decided but not too frequent, of enthusiasm, an interest in a very wide range of different subjects and forms. And he is actually a critic in embryo, and more, throughout his work. The Boethius and the Astrolabe, the Rose and the Troilus, half the Canterbury Tales, more than half the minor works, are saturated with literature—could have come from no author but one who was saturated with literature. There is uncrystallised criticism on every page; there is even some crystallised criticism in the Sir Thopas, and perhaps elsewhere. But almost always “it is not so expressed,” and for once Shylock is justified of his refusal to find it. In Chaucer, the strange mediæval levelling of authors, not merely in respect of trustworthiness, but in respect of positive value, continues. Macrobius is as Cicero; Dares is much more than Homer. If he gives an opinion, it is a moral one. He puts the rejection of alliteration on a mere local ground; and they will not even let us believe that he laughed at French of Stratford-atte-Bowe from any literary point of view.
Yet while the persistent study of Rhetoric is of great importance, as exhibiting the keeping up of a critical treatment—such as it is—of literature, the growth of the vernacular Poetics is of much more, as developing a side of formal criticism which was destined to become of more and more importance as time went on, and to have a connection with, and an influence upon, criticism not merely formal, to which there is no parallel in ancient times. So far as we have any trustworthy evidence, Greek prosody was born like Pallas—full-grown and fully armed. It has no known period of infancy or pupilage: the poets may devise—may even give their names to—ingenious combinations, but all these combinations obey one prearranged system. If the case of Latin is not quite the same, the periods where it is most significantly different happen to be periods when criticism had either not come into being or had abdicated its functions. A De Prosodia Latina, by Nævius must have been as interesting as Gascoigne’s Notes of Instruction, and might have been as interesting as the De Vulgari Eloquio. A treatise on Latin Rhythms by Prudentius might, in its different way, have had an interest which is difficult to parallel by anything modern in actual existence.
The Middle Ages, however, were constrained to grapple with their problem as it arose. They had, as we have seen, been constant to Artes Poeticæ dealing with Latin: at last they had begun to face the more difficult question, how to construct and regulate their own growing vernacular prosody. No doubt, in these latter attempts, the mechanical prescriptions of the Provençal and French Arts appear more frequently than the philosophical-scientific consideration of poetical capacities visible in the De Vulgari; but there is no reasonable fault to find with this. Nor can it be reasonably contested that the extreme variety, licence, and (if any one likes the word) irregularity of the greater modern prosodies have given wider range to individual poetical development than was allowed by the prosodies of the ancients. Here, as elsewhere, uniformity rather than variety was probably the aim, and is certainly the achievement, of the Classics. For one individual and all but inimitable thing, like the Æschylean modulation of the chorus (so different from the grave but less throbbing music of Sophocles, and from the Euripidean tune) or like the Lucretian Hexameter, we find a dozen resemblances; and, with elaborate combinations like the Alcaic or Sapphic, the result is, as in the parallel case of our Spenserian, or the Jonson-Herbert-In Memoriam quatrain with enclosed rhyme, mainly uniform. But the greater or less licence of equivalent substitution in the staple English lines—the octosyllable and decasyllable, for instance—admits of the impression of a singular personal stamp, and, unless rejected by the mistake of the individual or the moment, has rarely failed to produce it.
Still one returns, and must necessarily return, to the admission that, to justify the claims here put forward as to the critical importance of the Middle Ages, one cannot go to their own explicit and deliberate exercises in criticism. To apply Johnson’s not quite inspired remark on Fielding and Richardson, they neither did, nor in all probability could, explain the mechanism of the timepiece. But they told the time of day with unerring accuracy; and their records of it have been neglected, and will be neglected by succeeding ages, only at the peril—which has already sometimes led to actual shipwreck—of miscalculating the whole literary reckoning. When the critics of the Renaissance, followed more or less blindly by those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, either contumeliously or in the sheer generous mistake of desire for improvement, turned their backs, as far as they could, on the products of Mediæval literature, they not merely shut themselves out from a vast volume of delight, they not only mistook disastrously the value of many individuals, but they recklessly deprived themselves once more—and with far less excuse and greater loss than had resulted from the similar refusal of the later Greeks—of an inestimable opportunity for Comparison. And so they once more barred for themselves the one gate and highway to really universal criticism of literature.
For the great, the immense, value of the literature of the Middle Ages consists in its freshness and independence, and the consequent fashion in which new literary bents and faculties of the human mind were manifested. The Greeks had, at any rate so far as we know, neither the advantage nor the disadvantage of any precedent literature before them; but their spirit of theory and of philosophising, while it helped to concentrate and intensify the peculiar virtue of their product, tended also to narrow and stereotype their range. Latin suffered from the double drawback of system and model. And modern literature itself has not, with all its achievements, been able to free itself from the inevitable consequences of ancestry. It is a great deal too literary; it has, in almost all cases, the obsession of the library, and the printed book, upon it. It is deliberate, preoccupied, interested; it has all sorts of cants, prejudices of education or emancipation, purposes, reminiscences, unacknowledged and often unconscious trammels and twitches. Its fountains are very rarely of living water; they are fed from carefully constructed and collected reservoirs, if not by positive distillation from the great sea of older literature.
Now, with all their slavish docility, all their writing in schools and groups and batches, all their adoption of tags and texts, the Middle Ages and their literature present a spectacle which is exactly the reverse of this. The authors have the appearance of following; they are really straying, each at the dictation of his own tastes and instincts only. You may as well try to teach a cat to do anything in any but her own way as a mediæval writer. When he copies a Romance, he will change the names if he does nothing else: but probably he will do much else, writing it in sixains if his model is in couplets, in decasyllabics if his original is octosyllabic, and so forth. Nothing shall induce him to keep historical distinctions or philosophical differences. His hero[[614]] shall be as beautiful as “Paris of Troy, or Absalom, or Partenopex”; his story of Alexander shall blend sober history and the wildest fiction, with a coolness which is only not reckless because it does not see anything to reck. Formal restrictions of the minor kind, prosodic and other, he will observe devoutly, because they come naturally to him and are of his own devising; but any restrictions of literary theory he utterly ignores. His Muse will wear no stays, though she does not disdain ornaments.