The literary side of Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso[[421]] is less than the political. Boccalini and Minors. But the list of seventeenth-century treatises in Italian on critical subjects is long.[[422]] Some of them are difficult to procure out of Italy, and I doubt whether many are worth the trouble of hunting down. I am sorry that the work of Chiodino da Monte-Melone[[423]] has hitherto escaped me, because of the extreme beauty of the name, which would seem to qualify its author for the post of Chief Rhetorician to Queen Pintiquinestra. Pellegrino, Fioretti, Zani, Querengo, Menzini have not been or shall not be forgotten. But I have experienced, and fear again, the sort of disappointment which occurs when, for instance,[[424]] one is told, of Carlo Rinaldini,[[425]] that the third part of his Philosophia Rationalis “contains a tolerable Poetic.” One attacks the mighty double-columned folio, and finds a purely scholastic treatise of the familiar kind, beginning with Poetice, Poeta, Poesis, Poema as of old. It is impossible to say Non debes quadrillare in this fashion—the company is too ancient and venerable; but it is permissible to decline to play, on the strength of having had enough of the game already. There is a certain established conformity of propriety between times and books. At no time can a frank commentary on Aristotle be out of date or out of place; at this time the Poetics of Le Bossu and Bouhours, faulty as they are, were at any rate responsive to the form and pressure of the day. But such work as Rinaldini’s, however respectable, has neither the intrinsic excellence which conquers time, nor the fleeting but real grace of temporal congruity.
The Ragguagli di Parnasso themselves are of less importance to us for their actual critical utterances (which, as has been said, were not Boccalini’s first object) than for the extraordinary influence which they exercised on the form of criticism throughout Europe for more than a century. Influence of the Ragguagli. Suggested more or less directly by Lucian (whose enormous effect on modern European literature, though of course never missed entirely by any competent person, has never yet been fully allowed for) they hit the taste of the day straight and full. Not merely did they start the whole fleet of “Sessions of the Poets” and the like in England, but they had a great influence on the English prose Essayists of the early eighteenth century;[[426]] while in France even the severe Boileau paid them unacknowledged royalty. It is no uncommon experience to find that books which in this way create a kind of “rage” at one time, become chiefly sources of boredom at another; but Boccalini certainly illustrates the fact, in his literary portions at any rate. He deserves some credit for having made current, if he did not invent, the famous story of the choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. There is some critical appropriateness in the fable of Tasso being refused admission by Castelvetro on the alleged strength of Aristotle’s rules, of the reprimand bestowed by Apollo on the philosopher, and of his excuse that he never meant his observations for “rules” at all. To this the age might have paid more attention than it did. But one finds thinness in the fun of Justus Lipsius attacking Tacitus for impiety, and of Thrasea and Priscus being warned, as they value their stoical characters, not to go and see Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara too often.
In the History of Taste as distinguished from that of Criticism the important point of the Seicento is of course that development of floridity—of Marinism—which is associated in literary history with the very term. The set of Seicentist taste.But this development was common to Italy with all Europe; and though the country still exercised a sort of prerogative influence, “Marinism” is not so much the mother as the elder, and not by so very much the elder, sister of Gongorism in Spain, of the extravagances of the age before Boileau in France, of the “metaphysical” fashion in England. It will be better to treat these in the Interchapter, both in themselves and as fastening “correctness,” by way of reaction, upon Europe.
Spain has never ranked very high in the general estimate as a contributor to European criticism: and though this estimate has not been too solidly founded, the communis sensus seems here to have exercised that mysterious power of appeal to the world-spirit which so often keeps it from going hopelessly wrong.[[427]] Spanish criticism—Highly ranked by Dryden? There is, however, one remarkable piece of testimony which, if it were a little better authenticated, would give Spanish critics a very high position as teachers. We shall see in a future chapter that Dryden (as has indeed been generally, though, until recent times, but vaguely, allowed) is himself one of the great turning-points of the critical story of Europe. Now Spence says that Bolingbroke told him that Dryden had assured him that “he got more from the Spanish critics alone than from the Italian and French and all others together.” Unfortunately Spence speaks at second-hand; and Bolingbroke, even if he really did say this, is always a Bardolphian security. Moreover, Dryden, who was not at all in the habit of concealing his indebtedness, but, on the contrary, seems to have “felt an innocent warmth” of pleasure in mustering and marshalling his authorities, quotes no Spanish authors. And the references (which are fairly numerous) to Spanish plays in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy neither quote, nor necessarily show knowledge of, Spanish critics at all. It has been thought that Dryden may have read Tirso de Molina’s Cigarrales (v. infra); and it has occurred to me that something in his attitude may have been derived from Lope’s Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias. But I do not believe this to be at all certain, or even very probable.[[428]]
Intrinsically, however, Spanish criticism before the eighteenth century, though not extraordinarily rich nor furnishing any documents of extreme importance, is interesting, and in one point almost supremely so, for circumstances if not for contents. The Origins—Villena. The trail begins fairly early, though the scent is scattered at uncommonly long intervals. A glance was made towards the close of the first volume of this book at the actual beginnings. They were due to two persons of the greatest distinction in the early fifteenth century—Enrique, Marquis(?)[[429]] de Villena and Master of Calatrava, of the blood royal both of Aragon and Castille, and Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana. The Arte de Trobar[[430]] of the former, a treatise on the Gay Science, was sent by him, a year before his death, in 1434, to the latter; and Santillana himself touched criticism, or at least Poetics, both in the Preface to his Proverbs, and still more in a letter to the Constable (Dom Pedro) of Portugal, written about 1455, not long before his own death, and containing observations not merely on Poetry in general, but on early Spanish poets up to his own times. This document was fortunately, and most wisely, prefixed by Sanchez to his collection of the older Spanish poets, and is easily accessible in the re-edition of Ochoa,[[431]] or in the Appendix to Señor Menéndez' History, vol. ii.
The Marquis begins, after compliments, by the usual generalities about poetry containing “useful things covered with a very pretty coverlet, composed, distinguished, and scanned in certain number, weight, and measure.” Santillana. So “as fructiferous gardens abound and give convenient fruits,” &c., &c., with Tully to give security. But for all his own very pretty coverlet of rhetoric, the Marquis talks very good sense. He is sure that verse is above prose, basing himself soundly on Isidore of Seville and his proofs from Hebrew literature, with the Greeks to follow, and Cassiodorus to back up Isidore. Then he comes to modern times—to Petrarch and Robert of Naples, to Boccaccio and John of Cyprus, quoting the De Genealogia itself, and therefore, in a very interesting way, gearing on Spanish criticism, even in these its rudiments, to Italian, then not much less rudimentary. He divides styles properly into “sublime,” “middle,” and “low,” liberally placing all those who write in Greek or Latin in the first class. The middle contains those who write in any vulgar tongue; the low those who merely botch up romances and songs for the common people, without order or rule. Dante wrote the Commedia “elegantemente,” and Boccaccio composed proses of grand eloquencia in the manner of Boethius. Santillana then shows himself well read in Provençal, French, and Catalan, as well as Italian. He refers to the Roman de la Rose and its authors, to “Michaute” (Machault), Otho de “Crantzon” (Granson), “Alen Charrotier,” whom, naturally, he much admires. He thinks the Italians surpass the French in genius, the French the Italians in art. Then he turns to Spain, and beginning with those who have written in the Provençal style, comes to Gallegan, Castilian, &c., later, mentions the chief poets, gives the metres in which they have written, and ends with a (mis)quotation of Horace[[432]] and a shower of classical allusions—among others to aquellas dueñas que en torno de la fuente Elicon incesantemente danzan. For even then the modern confusion of the Mount and the Fount had begun. The piece is, if not very advanced criticism, at any rate an early and interesting critical glance over European poetry in the Romance tongues.
Villena, as his title shows, and Santillana to some extent, had been considering Catalan and Galician as the chief poetic media for Spaniards; it is different with Juan del Encina, who, in 1496,[[433]] prefixed an Arte to his Cancionero nearly half a century after Santillana wrote, and almost as long after an earlier Cancionero, that of Baena, the compiler of which does not seem to have been tempted to criticism. Encina. The nine chapters of this deal with the origin of Castilian poetry, the distinction between the art of poetry and the arte de trobar, while both have an art; the necessities of the trobador, feet, consonance and assonance, verses and couplets, poetic “colours,” &c., and a general conclusion on writing and reading poetry. The book shows a certain Italian influence which distinguishes it from earlier work; but which, when that Italian influence had been repeated in stronger dose, seemed to later generations insufficient and out of date. Still, it is interesting, and earlier than anything of the kind in vernacular Italian.
Another half-way house may be found in the interesting Diálogo de La Lengua or de Las Lenguas[[434]] of Juan de Valdés, which has even been called “an important monument of literary criticism.” Valdés. It is rather, however, linguistic than literary, though the author deserves to rank with other national heroes of the time for his strenuous support of the vernacular, which he thought a more “corrupted” representative of Latin than Italian, and respecting which he held the odd but characteristically Renaissance notion that Greek, not Basque, was its remoter ancestor. He mentions the romances and the Celestina.
But the regular course of technical and elaborate Spanish criticism does not begin, after these long preliminary stages, till quite the close of the sixteenth century. The beginning of regular Criticism. Humanist Rhetoricians. The earlier course of that century has indeed supplied Señor Menéndez with a tolerably fair herd of humanist rhetoricians to fill the ninety pages of his ninth chapter. The list is headed by Antonio de Nebrija (Nebrissensis), De Artis Rhetoricæ compendiosa coaptatione ex Aristotele Cicerone et Quintiliano, in 1529. But the only names of much interest that appear in it are those of the famous Luis Vives, disciple of Erasmus and of Oxford, with his anti-Ciceronianism, and with at least some admission (the passage is quoted by Señor Menéndez at vol. iii. on p. 226 from the De causis Corruptarum Artium), that it does not matter in what language a man writes in so far as faults and impurities of diction and the duty of avoiding them are concerned; and of the equally famous preacher Luis de Granada, with his Rhetorica Ecclesiastica, a good deal later. Still, the metrical Rhetoric (1569) of Arias Montano, that “Lope of Latin verse,” a piece of didactic much more spirited and really poetical than Vida’s Poetic, on which no doubt it is modelled; and the vigorous if mistaken scholasticism of Francesco Sanchez (“El Brocense”), in his attempt to subject Rhetoric entirely to Logic, deserve some notice. So, perhaps, does Alfonso Garcia Matamoros, who, though Señor Menéndez conscientiously suspects him of not being very original, stumbled upon a remarkable anticipation of Buffon in the definition Est stylus habitus orationis, a cujusque hominis natura fluens. This is a slight but distinct advance on the earlier one of Fox Morcillo, De Imitatione (1544), which gives it as something quæ vel pro ingenio cujusquam, vel rei, quæ in questionem vocatur, ratione varietur. These writers, however, seem (except El Brocense, who dealt on more than one occasion with the Horatian Art) to have given little or no attention to Poetics, and in fact to have allowed themselves to drift a good deal to leeward of the purely literary side of Rhetoric altogether. When the ship bore up again for this side, the Spaniards, like everybody else in Europe without exception, took the Italians for their schoolmasters; and they might seem all the more certain to be docile pupils in that their poetical practice—their practice indeed in all sorts of regular writing—had long been under the same influence. Boscan had more or less deliberately Italianated Spanish poetry[[435]] half a century before Rengifo,[[436]] and Pinciano, and La Cueva, in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first of the seventeenth, began to theorise. At the same time there was a very important point of difference between Spain and all other European nations, except to some extent England. In the contents of the Cancioneros—perhaps not in actual form very old, but stretching back by tradition and association to the very blending-time of Goth, and Cantabrian, and Latin—and in the drama which had been so rapidly maturing from Naharro to Lope de Vega, the Spaniards had two mighty, popular, and intensely anti-"regular" forms of literary composition. The critical “dependence” therefore—the point to be fought out—was, “Which was to prevail?”
Mr Spingarn’s thesis, that translation of the Epistle to the Pisos is the invariable prelude of original critical work, completes its proofs, as far as the Latin races are concerned, by the version of Espinel which appeared in 1591, and was followed in the very next year by Rengifo’s Arte Poética Española. Poetics. Rengifo. Of the former there is little to say, for though Espinel was a man of literary gift (he was the author, it may be excusable to remind the reader, of Marcos de Obregón, and so a slight, though only a slight, creditor of Le Sage), he did not add anything original to his translation. The latter has been sometimes rather unkindly spoken of by those who do not like formal Arts of Poetry. Those, on the other hand, who have weak places in their hearts for such things may give Rengifo shelter therein. He reminds one at very first sight of his Italian originals in the comely small quarto of his format—the book-size of all others which retains a certain dignity without entirely forfeiting the benefit of the Archpriest of Hita’s celebration of dueñas pequeñas: he has a beautiful folding plate of a Labyrinto—one of the artificial forms which are dear because they maddened the eighteenth century—and he gives a large Sylva or rhyming dictionary. I do not know that there is much else to be said for him, but he is a symptom.[[437]] So, some twenty years later is, on the other side, the severe Cascales,[[438]] who in his Tablas Poéticas[[439]] lays it down that “if any part of a fable can be changed without loss, this fable is not well managed.” There was a contemporary of Cascales in a country which loved not Spain, neither was loved of her, who would have changed you every part of every one of his fables, and left the versions so that you could not tell which was the better.