[407]. Perhaps it is still desirable, though almost for the last time, to observe that the omission of casual criticism in non-critical work is intentional and necessary. Nowhere could more interesting examples of it, from Molière downwards, be produced; but this is only a temptation, not a reason.
CHAPTER II.
THE ITALIAN DECADENCE AND THE SPANIARDS.
DECADENCE OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—PAOLO BENI—POSSEVINO: HIS ‘BIBLIOTHECA SELECTA’—TASSONI: HIS ‘PENSIERI DIVERSI’—AROMATARI—HIS ‘DEGLI AUTORI DEL BEN PARLARE’—BOCCALINI AND MINORS—INFLUENCE OF THE RAGGUAGLI—THE SET OF SEICENTIST TASTE—SPANISH CRITICISM: HIGHLY RANKED BY DRYDEN?—THE ORIGINS: VILLENA—SANTILLANA—ENCINA—VALDÉS—THE BEGINNING OF REGULAR CRITICISM: HUMANIST RHETORICIANS—POETICS: RENGIFO—PINCIANO—LA CUEVA—CARVALLO—GONZALES DE SALAS—THE ‘CIGARRALES’ OF TIRSO DE MOLINA—LOPE’S ‘ARTE NUEVO,’ ETC.—HIS ASSAILANTS AND DEFENDERS—THE FIGHT OVER THE SPANISH DRAMA—CERVANTES AND CALDERON—GONGORISM, CULTERANISM, ETC.—QUEVEDO—GRACIAN—THE LIMITATIONS OF SPANISH CRITICISM.
That the Italians, who had some half of the last Book to themselves, will not have a tithe of the present, is due, on the part of the historian, neither to laziness, nor to love of contrast, nor to that rather illogical and illegitimate generosity which decrees that “the other citizen shall have his turn.” Decadence of Italian Criticism. The disproportion simply corresponds to the facts. Italy, indeed, continued to devote herself with something like enthusiasm—or at least with the engouement of dilettantism and the doggedness of pedantry—to critical studies. Some at least of the earlier writers of the century—aftercrops of the sixteenth—still exercised considerable influence: and for nearly the whole of the time the great Italians of the former age—Scaliger, Castelvetro, and others—maintained an authority which did not pass to France till the eighteenth itself was approaching. But little was really added to the critical canon of the central Peninsula. Paradoxers like Beni, eccentrics of different kinds like Tassoni and Boccalini, respectable compilers like Possevino and Aromatari, must occupy us and receive their due. But all these belong more or less to the first quarter of the century. The second, third, and fourth are much less fertile, and it is not till another meeting of the ages that we shall come to another really remarkable group, consisting of two at least painful literary historians, among the earliest of their kind, in Crescimbeni and Quadrio, of a real though limited critic in Gravina, and of a remarkable combination of erudition and insight in Muratori. And these will properly be treated in the next Book, not in this.
Paolo Beni, who has been spoken of in the last Book,[[408]] and who was a man of nearly fifty when the sixteenth century closed, had nevertheless nearly half his literary life to spend in the seventeenth, and published the most noteworthy of his works at this time. Paolo Beni. We saw that he was a strong “Torquatist,” and an innovator in respect of recommending prose for tragedy as well as for comedy. As he grew older the iconoclastic tendency so developed in him that he may almost be called the leader of Rebellion in the matter of the Ancient and Modern Quarrel; for questa lite, as a contemporary of Beni’s calls it, had been fought out in Italy long before it became a burning one in France and England. Beni was a “modern” of the extravagant kind: and his two chief critical manifestoes, after the Dissertation on Prose Drama, were a Comparatione di Homero Virgilio e Torquato,[[409]] where the author of the Gerusalemme (which Beni prefers to call by its other title, Goffredo) is exalted far above both the ancient Poets; and an Anti-Crusca,[[410]] in which, with the futile courage of his opinions, he gives no more quarter to Dante and Petrarch than to Homer and Virgil on the score of language at least, and would apparently turn “modernity” almost into “hodiernity.” This does not argue any great critical spirit: and we find little in Beni—only the sort of Old Bailey advocacy, or attack, which was rapidly coming to be the disgrace of criticism. There is not “the real integrity and perfection of the fable” in the Odyssey. Even Virgil cannot approach Tasso in regularity, nice derangement of episodes, &c., &c. The most amusing thing about Beni is the way in which he turns the batteries of the classics on themselves. He does not attempt to make a new Poetic for Romances, nor does he take his favourite poem on its own merits and extol it for them. The “parts,” the “qualities,” the “rules” are practically adopted: and it is shown—or at least asserted—that Tasso exhibits them all in greater perfection than the ancients. This is the line afterwards taken by Addison with Paradise Lost.
The Bibliotheca Selecta of Antonio Possevino, Jesuit negotiator and teacher, is a good example of the kind of compiling work which the great development of Criticism was imposing on at least some critics. Possevino. His Bibliotheca Selecta. From some points of view it also may seem to belong rather to the last Book, for Possevino, who retired from active work in many countries to his native land and an old age of study in 1586, brought it out first at Rome in 1593. But he made alterations and rearrangements in it afterwards, and the edition I have used[[411]] was published, with his own approval and assistance, a few years before his death, and well within the seventeenth century. It is a mighty folio (or rather two in one) dealing with something like the whole range of studies, and intended, it would seem, rather for teachers than learners; but the First Book[[412]] has something, and the three last much, to do with our subject. In these three Possevino successively discusses History at enormous length[[413]] and with considerable bibliographical information, Poetry[[414]] at somewhat less, and finally the Art of Letter Writing, under the special title of “Cicero,” but with reference also to Libanius and others. Possevino, as was in fact inevitable from his profession and his purpose, is very much cumbered about orthodoxy and morality, especially in the poetical department; but he does not allow himself to be wholly guided by these considerations. Scaliger’s Poetic he calls spissum sane opus—a happy but rather ambiguous epithet; quotes Gambara, Minturno, Cinthio, Pigna, and Patrizzi as main authorities, and though he says that he will not quote Castelvetro, as being on the Index, evidently means that he should be read, though he duly prescribes Caro as an antidote. He has a good selection of extracts, mighty lists of books and authorities, and an inserted tract (two in fact) by Macarius Mutius on Poetry and Christian Poetry, by which he sets much store, but in which little will be found but rhetoric.
Some of the most interesting and suggestive, if not the most regular, criticism in this part of Italian literature is to be found in the Pensieri Diversi of Alessandro Tassoni.[[415]] Tassoni. His Pensieri Diversi. The author of the Secchia Rapita was not likely to be dull in anything that he undertook: and his undertakings were of a sufficiently various kind.[[416]] In his Considerazioni[[417]] on Petrarch he treated that revered sonneteer and his sonnets as cavalierly as he was to treat the sacred Heroic Poem in the Secchia: but this kind of frondeur spirit was nothing new in Italy. The Pensieri, in which their author was candidly prepared to find people discovering “extravagance and capriciousness,” are modelled on Aristotle’s Problems, and Plutarch’s Symposiacs and Roman Questions. They deal with curious matters “such as are wont to come into the discourse of Gentlemen and Professors of Literature,” a phrase where the “and” is half complimentary and half the reverse. On perusing the contents we find that gentlemen and professors of literature talk about the radical humours, and the reason of the spots on the moon, and why it is that ugly ladies are loved, and a very great many other interesting things. They do it, moreover (at least Tassoni does it for them), in a very interesting manner—that peculiar early seventeenth-century mixture of learning, fancy, and humour which, in still greater measure, gives Burton and Browne their quintessenced charm. If Tassoni had pushed that question about the donne brutte home, he might have rediscovered, against his own age, the great secret of criticism; but of this we may treat more properly in the Interchapter. It is not till the Tenth Book of the Pensieri that he attacks literature, save by incidence and tangent; and then he plunges full into the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns, devoting twenty-seven out of twenty-eight chapters to an elaborate comparison of the two periods, in every class of art, science, and literature itself. But he preserves his invincible quaintness by going off in the twenty-eighth to a very elaborate study of the Hangman (Il Boia), which readers of Joseph de Maistre should not fail to compare with the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg.
Tassoni deals with the general question in the same curious indirect and ironical fashion in which he handles the charms of bruttezza, and the reason why it was specially rude (let us say, though he does not) of Spenser to call the husband of Hellenore Malbecco. He begins by advancing, and even seeming to countenance, the “Modern” argument for Progress, as being the law of nature and so decisive of questa lite. But he very soon turns round, and gives reasons and instances for the much sounder doctrine of Fluctuation—not merely in general, but in regard to particular Arts. Therefore it is necessary to examine these Arts; and then he does this. Once more he becomes a “Modern” in awarding to his countrymen the palm of grammatico-critical studies. In Logic and Philosophy generally, he thinks they can match the Latins, and though they yield to the Greeks, may make some fight even with them. He will pit Guicciardini, Comines, and Giovio against any of the ancients, which is a little rash; putting Machiavelli with others in a second rank. And on the modern side of Oratory he urges, with his unconquerable unexpectedness, Peter the Hermit and John of Munster! But on the Poets this unexpectedness of his turns to the disappointing. He gives us a very unnecessary classification of Kinds, obviously in order that he may quote his own Secchia as a new kind, the Heroi-comic. But it is interesting to find him dividing the Commedia into “Heroi-satiric” for the Inferno, Heroic mixed with Hymnic for the Paradiso, and a division (not, as in the Inferno, a blend) of Heroic and Satiric for the Purgatory. Except on this head of questa lite, in which he is a notable forerunner of later disputants, Tassoni has little that is positively critical. And if he shows on the one hand a singularly active and inquiring spirit, such as may any day discover fresh and promising outlooks, he shows us also the risk of mere fantastic “problem”-raising, to which a century of active criticism was leading a century of Academies.[[418]]
Tassoni’s Petrarch-blasphemies brought him into collision with Giuseppe Aromatari, of whose original work, including his part in this battle,[[419]] I do not know much. Aromatari. But Aromatari was responsible, many years later, for a remarkable encyclopædia or corpus, which may very well follow the Pensieri Diversi as a pendant to Possevino’s work already mentioned, and as illustrating the learned and scholastic side. It is entitled Degli Autori del Ben Parlare,[[420]] and, if its grammatical and Rhetorical divisions had been succeeded by a similar collection of Poetics, it would have gone far to cover, in a certain peculiar and limited way, the entire field of criticism. As it is, not a few of its documents extend in the poetic direction. Its first volume gives the promise of an almost unique thesaurus, starting with illustrative and comparative extracts from Hesiod, Lucian, Cicero, Xenophon, &c., then giving the whole of Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia in the Italian, and following this with Trissino’s Castellano, Tolomei’s Cesano, a discourse of Varchi, and “Opinions” from Mutio, Doni, Dolce, Citadini, and others, all on the subject of the Vulgar Tongue. Other treatises, including Bembo’s, with less famous ones by Alunno, Delminio, and others, follow; while two whole parts are given up to Salviati’s Avvertimenti della Lingua on Boccaccio. Not seldom the grammatical matter touches points very important indeed to criticism, as for instance in vol. vi., where Buonmattei enters on the question (made a burning one in France by Malherbe) whether popular or literary usage is to be the standard of correctness.
The Rhetorical part has the additional interest of combining ancient and modern matter—of being, in short, a kind of compressed Rhetorici Græci et Latini with modern additions. His Degli Autori del Ben Parlare. Sometimes the texts are given simply in whole or part—Aristotle, Longinus, Hermogenes being thus treated—while an Introduction to Hermogenes by Giulio Camillo Delminio shows how strongly the authority of that master was working, and how much it had to do with the insistence on criticism by Kinds and Qualities. Sometimes a catena of authorities on particular matters is given—as in the case of Tropes and Figures, where the chain stretches from Quintilian to Mazzoni. Only specialists, probably, will care to investigate profoundly the huge commentary-paraphrase of Panigarola on Demetrius Phalereus, readjusted to the purposes of sacred Oratory, though the book had a great vogue in its day. But one turns with more interest to the work of Patrizzi on Rhetoric, much less known as it is than his Della Poetica and Della Storia. It has, however, hardly any of the interest of the Poetica, being almost entirely devoted to the subjects of the orator, and philosophical rather than literary in its handling. But this great medley of Aromatari’s shows us, better perhaps than any single book except Baillet’s, and nearly fifty years before it, the bulk and importance of the position which the critical consideration of literature was taking among literary studies.