Nor can it be regarded as any great drawback to the critical position of the Renaissance to which we are coming—and the grounds and data of which it is desirable to survey in advance, by way of retrospect over the contents of the present volume—that this immense provision of new critical material was not accompanied by many, or indeed (with the one great exception, soon to be known, but to be hardly in the least heeded) any, accomplished exercises in critical method. For these, as has been pointed out, were not likely to have been very good; and, good or bad, they were nearly sure to have been neglected, or to have done positive harm by way of mere reaction. Moreover, it was easily and perfectly open to the Renaissance to create for itself in this department. By its recovery—no longer in half-measure, and less than half-light, but in full—of the literature of antiquity, it had been put in possession, not merely of the other great masses of literary material, but of quite admirable examples of critical method itself. Quintilian, Horace, Cicero, the Greek and Latin Rhetoricians, were among its inherited possessions, and it had certainly had the Poetics, though little attention had for a long time been paid to them. But they were soon put before it afresh: and, what is more, the discovery of Longinus also was soon made. Horace, with his arbitrary rules, and his enforced, but probably not at all unwelcome, abstinence from any dry exhibition of material and examples, was no doubt, with all his merits, a very dangerous mentor. But with Aristotle, Quintilian, and Longinus at hand as preceptors of method, and practically all then existing literature, classical and mediæval, at hand as storehouse of matter, a man of the mid-sixteenth century had only himself to blame if he did not hit upon at least the main and general articles of the critical Catholic Faith. He might not anticipate the magnificent and almost unbelievable new developments of literature which were actually to take place, in the three western countries of Europe, within a very few years; but he would have been none the worse critic for that. The critic is, by his profession, not in the least bound to be a prophet. But he had every document necessary to correct the chief shortcomings of the ancients, to enlarge the classification of literary kinds, to rearrange the nature, degrees, and methods of the literary assault on the senses and the soul.
It would be undue anticipation to discuss what he did instead of this; or to give in detail the positive influences which worked upon him in preferring his actual alternative. But it is matter of undoubted history that he did not do what he might have done, and it is matter of relevance here to give the reasons, as far as they are retrospective, why he did not do it.
To a considerable extent the explanation, and if not the justification, the excuse, of his failure lie in a well-known and constantly repeated phenomenon which, on this particular occasion, showed itself with unusual, indeed with elsewhere unexampled, distinctness and power. Every age and every individual (it has been said often, but can never be said too often), unless it or he is a mere continuation of predecessors, is unjust to these predecessors. Examples are not necessary; the merest moment’s thought will supply them in profusion. But there were numerous and powerful conditions and forces which made this injustice certain to be more violent and more lasting here than in almost any other case. No known “dispensation” exists historically of anything like the same length, the same intensity, the same uniformity as that which characterises in all things, and certainly not least in matters literary, the thousand years of the Middle Age at its widest stretch. And this would of itself be sufficient to bring about a reaction of corresponding violence and duration. But to this general aspect of the whole period must be added the particular aspect of its final stage. Except in Italy (which had never been intensely or characteristically mediæval, and which had practically ceased to be so, in any sense not external, soon after Dante’s time) the fifteenth century had been a period of decadence, or of transition, or of stagnation, in almost every European country. It is possible, though it is not probable, that minds in which the critical spirit was reawakening might have taken a juster view of things if the fresh examples then before them, to be compared with Homer, Lucretius, Thucydides, had been Dante, Chaucer, Froissart. But there was some excuse for an indignant pooh-poohing of the mere possibility of comparison, when the persons, to be compared immediately with the great writers of antiquity, were the dreary and bombastic rhétoriqueurs of the French, or the shambling versifiers of the English, fifteenth century.
The Renaissance, moreover, was likely to be led wrong by that constant delusion of matter, that fatal attraction towards the subject, which, as this History endeavours to show, has led Criticism wrong a dozen times for once that it has led her right. The mediæval forms of literature were identified, allied, in fact saturated, with certain beliefs and modes of thought—scholastic philosophy, Catholic religion, aristocratic politics. To the pure Platonist on the one hand and the thorough-going Aristotelian on the other, to the reformer on the one hand and the freethinker on the other, to the democrat on the one hand and the believer in Machiavellian statecraft on the other, all these things were partly horrible, partly idiotic, altogether to be shaken off and refused. The natural, but in the main irrational and frivolous, weariness of an old fashion was supplemented, inspirited, made far more vehement and dangerous, by the deliberate and reasoned, if not reasonable, antipathy to, and revolt against, an old faith. It has been acknowledged already that the Morte d’Arthur would have fared as badly with Augustine as it did with Ascham; but the moral provocation would not have been aggravated to Augustine, as it was perhaps to Ascham, certainly to more thorough-going Protestants than he, by the distinct connection between the Graal Legend and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
Accordingly, the Renaissance indulged itself, and left to its successors, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (different as they were from itself in many ways), an amount of “unintelligent scorn” of the past which, if it does credit to nothing else, does credit at least to the vigour and intensity of the time. Sometimes this scorn was vocal and argumentative, as in Ascham himself, in Du Bellay, in others. More often, and with a subtler mischief still, it was silent, implicit, apparently exchanged for mere negligence. The childish things were simply put away, despatched to the lumber-room, and left there. And it was this negligence, rather than the scorn, which did harm to the criticism of the periods that followed. It does not do the critic unmitigated harm to take the wrong side now and then; he exercises himself at his weapons, he can acquire dexterity in them, and very often (Dryden is a notable example) he teaches himself orthodoxy in the very act of fighting for the heterodox. But when he allows himself to ignore, great gulfs or smaller pits open for him at once. That is what he can never afford to do; that is the cause of all the errors which have beset his kind, from the beginning of critical things until the present day. One of the most excellent and admirable of librarians once replied to a childish question of the present writer, “What do you do with the rubbish?” “It is rather difficult, you see, to know what is rubbish to-day; and quite impossible to know what will be rubbish to-morrow.” And while this is more especially true of the critic, who can with safety pass nothing, at least unexamined, as rubbish, his case is more dangerous still than that of the librarian, who has but to arrange what he has got in orderly fashion, and prepare plentiful shelves for what is coming.
With the critic, as we have seen, it is different. He must always generalise at his peril, and subject to the upset of his generalisations by fresh discoveries. But he can at least be careful of the “without prejudice,” and he can at least neglect nothing that is within his reach, in his processes of observation and comparison. The earlier Greek critics erred, as we have seen, partly because of a necessary and guiltless deprivation. But their venial sin became more of a mortal one, when they not only assumed that there was nothing save what they knew in Greek, but deliberately ignored the opportunities, not of sovereign but of considerable efficacy, which were offered them by Latin. The Latin critics erred, partly by the same assumption, and partly by converting the despite of Latin into a slavish and unintelligent adoration of Greek, and not always the best Greek. The Middle Age was innocent, as hardly indulging in criticism at all. But the Renaissance critics at first committed, and to far too great an extent handed on, a combination of the sins of their classical teachers. They assumed the stationary state of literary kinds and qualities, as both Greeks and Romans had done; they adulated classical literature, like the Romans in regard to Greek; they despised mediæval literature, like the Greeks in relation to Latin. And, as we shall see, they had their reward.
But I should be sorry to end not merely a chapter but a Book, not merely a Book but a volume, without a caveat against possible misconstruction of the words “fault,” “error,” “sin,” “mischief,” “misfortune,” and the like, which have just been used, not merely in this context, but throughout the volume itself. There have been, I believe, persons unfortunate enough to be dissatisfied with the moral and physical government of the universe—persons who have sadly pronounced it “a crank machine” in many ways. These things are not my trade. But, in matters literary, I must plead guilty to being something of an optimist. Not that I think all literature good—that is not precisely the conclusion to which a thirty years’ practice of criticism brings one. In the critical land, as in the pays des amours, the shore where one always loves is a shore of which it must be said that on ne la connaît guère. There is, indeed, a certain critical delight in reading even the worst books, so long as they are positively and not merely negatively bad—but that is another matter.
The point on which I am contented to be called a critical Pangloss is this, that I have hardly the slightest desire to alter—if I could do so by the greatest of all miracles, that of retro-active change—the literary course of the world. No doubt things might have been better still—one may there agree with the pious divine on his strawberry. But one may also be perfectly contented with the actual result. I have endeavoured to show that, however we may feel bound to pronounce Greek literature incomplete in this or that department, and still more Greek criticism imperfect in its assumptions and of questionable adequacy in its methods, yet Greek criticism was the criticism which was wanted, to register and to preserve the qualities which have made Greek literature perhaps the most indispensable possession among the now goodly list of the literatures of the world. I have endeavoured further to show that the two conflicting strains or streams in Latin criticism correspond, in a manner “necessary and voluptuous and right,” on the one hand, to the ordered correctness and venustas which are the notes of the Latin spirit on its Academic side; on the other, to the under-current of half-barbaric gorgeousness which there, as elsewhere, now and again asserted itself—with no small benefit to the world’s letters.
And so, also, in this chapter and the Book which precedes it, I have tried to show that the immense provision of new kinds of literature by the Middle Age, side by side with its almost total abstinence from criticism, was the best thing that could have happened. Nor is it impossible that, if we are able to pursue the inquiry, we shall find that the new differentia of the Renaissance period and that which followed to the Romantic revival—the curious fact that almost all its criticism went one way, while almost all its best creation went dead in the teeth of that criticism—has again worked mainly if not wholly for good. But this is for the future. Si laisse ore à tant li contes à parler!