[462]. Later Renaissance, p. 172.
[463]. Hist. Spanish Lit., p. 340.
[464]. I am very well aware that culteranismo and conceptismo are perhaps not identical, and have been asserted to be quite different. But both alike belong to the “better-bread-than-is-made-of-wheat” division of writing.
CHAPTER III.
GERMAN AND DUTCH CRITICISM.
THE HINDMOST OF ALL—ORIGINS—STURM—FABRICIUS—VERSION A.—VERSION B.—JAC. PONTANUS—HEINSIUS: THE ‘DE TRAGŒDIÆ CONSTITUTIONE’—VOSS—HIS ‘RHETORIC’—HIS ‘POETICS’—OPITZ—THE ‘BUCH DER DEUTSCHEN POETEREI.’
It is not necessary to add much to what has been said in the first chapter of the last Book on the subject of Erasmus, in order to indicate the reasons why the growth of criticism in Germany, High and Low,[[465]] was far more tardy, and for a long time far scantier, than even in England; and why, when it came, it displayed a one-eyed character which is not visible in any other of the great European countries.[[466]] The hindmost of all. Want of unity, religious and political troubles, Grobianism and its opposite or companion Pedantry—all had to do with this; but the principal hindrance was the non-existence of any considerable German vernacular literature, and the consequent inveteracy of the habit of writing in Latin. So long as this lasted the Germans and Dutch might be and were commentators, scholars, grammarians—but they could hardly be critics, because they still lacked the comparative stimulus. And it is not a little noteworthy that the earlier development of Criticism in the Low Countries as compared with Germany, during our present period, at least coincided with a greater development of Dutch vernacular literature, though this is a matter which lies out of our direct route.
There may easily be differences of opinion as to the persons, not mere Humanists, who shall be selected as representing the beginning of German criticism in modern times, in so far at least as the section of Poetics is concerned. Origins. The choice may lie between the famous Johann Sturm, who touches on literary matters in his letters, who wrote on Rhetoric, and whose pupil, late in his life, drew up a commentary on the Epistle to the Pisos in 1576; Georgius Fabricius, of Chemnitz, the first form of whose De Re Poetica appeared in 1565; and Jacobus Pontanus, whose real name was Spanmüller, whose book on the subject was published thirty years later, but who, as he was then a man of over fifty, and had long been a professor, had probably dealt with the subject, if only in lectures, much earlier.[[467]]
Sturm’s interests were more in pædagogy than in poetry, and he does not rank high as a critic: though there is no doubt that he helped to spread devotion to books. Sturm. It is not in his favour that, in the teeth of both external and internal evidence, he fights[[468]] for the name De Arte Poetica, on the special ground that the work of Horace is an Ars Perfecta (which, put its merits as high as you please, it most certainly is not), and that it has all the six parts of poetry—fable, character, dianoia, lexis, melopœia, and “sight.” For the rest he has few general remarks, and is almost wholly commentatorial. His Rhetorical writing yields little really critical: nor in his Letters have I yet found half so much criticism as is extant in that single letter of Ascham to him, which has been noticed above.[[469]]
The other two were both men of very wide influence as teachers of Poetics: and both underwent the process—complimentary but disfiguring, and specially usual in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—of having their work watered out, or boiled down, by others. Fabricius. I do not know, and I have not considered it tanti to spend much time or labour in the attempt to discover, the exact process by which the small four books of the first edition of Fabricius’ De Re Poetica[[470]] became the fat volume of seven, which presents itself under the same title thirty years later.[[471]] Version A. It seemed better to give this time and labour to the reading of the books themselves. Version A (as we may call that of 1565) is an early example of the kind of gradus which was particularly popular among the northern nations, though, as we have seen from the work of Mazzone da Miglionico,[[472]] it was by no means unknown in Italy. In his first book Fabricius discusses quantity, metre, and diction in general, with plentiful examples. Book II. is an elaborate table of locutions from the Latin poets, listed under heads as thus:—
| Amor tangit. | Matrimonium promittere. |
| ” versat. | ” ” inire. |
| ” torquet. | ” ” fallere. |
| ” dat vulnus. | ” ” odisse. |
| ” mordet. | |
| ” torret. |