Book III. provides the dull-witted versifier with store of clichés of the same kind, but a little more elaborate; there being, for instance, dozens of phrases for embracing. And IV. is a sort of common place-book of short copies of verses on everything in Heaven and Earth.
Version B (which is dated long after Fabricius’ death in 1571) is not only much enlarged but differently arranged. Version B. Book I. deals as before with Quantity and Feet; Book II. with the subject of A, Book III.; and the rest follow the same schemes,—III. B with tags on Ages, Seasons, Heavenly Bodies, &c.; IV. with epithets suitable to proper names; V. with ditto to common; VI. with a pot-pourri of poetical faults and beauties, &c.; while VII. gives a sort of appendix on prosody and diction generally.
There is no need to say much on the inevitable critical result, the obvious critical value or valuelessness, of this. There is in A a reference to Scaliger’s Poetic, which had appeared a little before. As a matter of fact Scaliger and Fabricius between them provided the average late sixteenth-century man—sometimes even when he was a professed critic or poet, constantly when he was merely a person of ordinary culture—with a sort of joint poetical Thesaurus,—Scaliger doing the historical, critical, and (of its kind) philosophical business for him, and Fabricius keeping a general marine-store of materials, with precepts for their use.
The Institutiones Poeticæ of Spanmüller [Pontanus] appeared first in 1594. Jac. Pontanus. Its author is quoted, among other prophets of criticism, by the Spaniard Juan de La Cueva a dozen years later, and, independently of its original form, the book acquired, early in the seventeenth century, a large currency by being arranged (concinnata) in the Sacrarum Profanarumque Phraseum Thesaurus of J. Buehler,[[473]] where it serves as theoretic handbook to another Gradus. Indeed Pontanus’ own work has all the characteristics of a decoction or abstract of Scaliger himself. And once more the same reflection applies. It is impossible not to see how powerful and (beyond mere school-work, in which they were no doubt invaluable[[474]]) how maleficent must have been the influence of such works on the critical temper of the generations influenced by them. La Bruyère’s Tout est dit—an ironical fling in its author’s mouth partly, no doubt, though perhaps not quite so even there—tended to become matter of breviary. Everything had been said and done; all the Kinds found out; all the phrases set down; all the poetry raised from shaft and vein and seam. You simply rearranged it like a child’s house of wooden bricks, according to patterns provided on the lid. The “Causes of Corrupted Arts” into which Vives inquired, “The Lost System of Speaking” which Sturm deplored, were all to be found, and found sufficiently, in the Ancients.
The solid qualities of the German race have not commonly distinguished themselves in pure criticism, and to this day Lessing and Goethe are rather captains without companies, and with at best a staff of Schlegels, and suchlike, for lieutenants and ancients. Germans were, however, to do something better, in this century of erudition, than the mere preparation of fourth-form handbooks. Daniel Heinsius and Gerard Voss may be regarded with some reason as the Jachin and the Boaz of the temple of seventeenth-century Poetics. The De Tragœdiæ Constitutione of the first, which appeared at Leyden in 1611,[[475]] is the succinctest and best argued statement of the neo- and to a great extent pseudo-Aristotelian view of Drama. The new Institutes of Oratory,[[476]] and the much later Poetical Institutes[[477]] of the second, construct, with a great deal of learning and a very considerable amount of good sense, an entire neo-classical Rhetoric and Poetic. To both we must give some attention.
The De Tragœdiæ Constitutione is beyond all doubt a very remarkable book. Heinsius. The De Tragœdiæ Constitutione. It is quite short; only some 250 very small pages of very large print, so that there are scarcely more than a hundred words in a page. But Heinsius writes as one having authority; and we can read but little of him before it becomes perfectly clear why that authority was accepted, for the rest of the century at least, with more docility and less cavil than that of almost any other critic. He takes the Poetics—as many, indeed most men for more than half a century, had taken them—for gospel. But he neither translates them on the one hand, nor wanders in the wilderness of scrappy and desultory commentary on the other. Not merely does he confine himself to that part of the book which concerns his actual subject, but he renders this part in a fashion which may best be described as a very rare, and very masterly, kind of lecturing. He neither slavishly keeps nor prudishly avoids the actual words of his author; his paraphrases are brief but lucid; he adds to Aristotle what he thinks necessary[[478]] in the way of illustrations from the Greek tragedians, citation from Horace, examples (by no means always laudatory) from Seneca, and the like; but in such a fashion as never to overload, or water down, the milk of the Aristotelian word. That he always gives that milk quite “sincere” we cannot say; he emphasises the “single revolution of the sun” more than he has any right to do, though he does not do the same for the still more pestilent and apocryphal Unity of Place. He may sometimes, or often in the disputable places (as of “purgation” and so forth), miss the full meaning of Aristotle according to the view of some judges, or impute a wrong one according to others. But nobody, let it be repeated, can read him impartially without seeing that he has soaked himself with the spirit of his author, has equipped himself pretty thoroughly with the literature of his subject, and, as a result, is speaking, as we said, with authority. There is no clearer or more workmanlike exposition of the neo-classic, and not too neo-classic, dramatic ideal than his.
Heinsius, like his successor Hédelin in France, and like Hédelin’s successors Rymer and Dennis in England, was rash enough to forget that though a critic is (thank Heaven!) not bound to write good poetry, he is bound not to publish bad. Voss. And he ventured on a tragedy, Herodes Infanticida, and other things which did not meet much quarter even from those who agreed with him in critical principles. Voss was wiser, and confined himself to the pure erudition and comment of which the two books referred to above are far from being the worst examples. Indeed his unboastful scholarship, his immense reading, and his untiring industry would seem to have fitted him quite exceptionally for the duty; and he has actually given us in these two books, or rather collections of books, the completest Rhetoric and Poetic of modern, if not of any, times. Only two things more were needed to put these books in a place even more unique; but Nature refused the one to Voss personally, and the other was a thing almost unreasonable to require from a Dutch savant of the seventeenth century. The first was positive critical genius; and the second was an impartial appreciation of ancient and modern literature.
His Rhetoric.
The Rhetoric, which the author put out in its first form in 1606, revising and enlarging it for at least thirty years, till it forms a quarto of a thousand closely printed pages, has some seventy more of minute index, but lacks the Table of Contents, or displayed syllabus of section headings, for which we have so often had to be thankful in Italian work. Voss evidently had the practice of the Roman Law constantly before him, and he thus follows the method of the Latin treatises in a way which makes it for the most part superfluous for us to follow him, though he has plenty of modern instances and applications. From the Fourth Book onwards, however, he deals with Elocution and Style, chiefly of course by the way of Figures, yet, according to his lights, in the most careful and exhaustive fashion. But what is at once noteworthy and rather tell-tale is his unqualified admiration for the Scaligers,—father and son. “That divine man,” “that man, ad unguem factus,” that “emperor of the literary world,” that “prince of the senate of criticism”; without some phrase of this kind he seems unable to name them. And in fact the whole book is rather a huge commentatorial digest of what they and others, from Aristotle downwards, have said than anything more.
The Poetical Institutions are somewhat more original, and they had much greater influence. His Poetics. The book consists really of three separate works, a brief De Arte Poetica of less than ninety pages, of which Grotius, in a commendatory epigram prefixed to some editions, says—