“non magnus dat tibi cuncta liber;”
of the Institutiones proper in about four hundred; and of a De Imitatione which is rather shorter than the Ars. The first, as reason and its title both import, is a purely general tractate, which, after pointing out that Poetry has much in common with Oratory, and that therefore much which concerns it has been said in the earlier book, discusses all the old generalities about the origin, nature, moral character, and so forth, of poetry, with expositions of most of the cruces and technical catchwords from Ψιλὸς λόγος down to furor poeticus. Voss is here also very generally Scaligerian; he adheres to the “natural” origin of poetry, love-songs, cradle-songs, &c., as against the religious and the deliberately “imitative”; gives very wide scope of subject to the poet, and defends him handsomely against his enemies and detractors from Plato downwards, but is properly indignant with naughty poets.[[479]]
The Institutions deal more directly with the question of Poetic Art, and proceed by a series of section-headings in the form of Propositions, which are then explained, commented, and defended. The first of the Three Books deals with the matter common to all kinds of poetry; the Second with the Drama; the Third with the Epic and the minor Kinds. All this is old stuff rehandled. There is somewhat more originality in the De Imitatione, which does not exactly correspond to any of the older books, or parts of books, on that subject. Voss generally supposes the question, “How is the poet to set about his work?” “How is he to apply all these rules that we have given him?” and before very long we see that he is really thinking of the wrong Imitation no less than Vida was. He devotes himself (no doubt under the happier inspiration of Quintilian) to discussing how we are to imitate, how to read. But he very soon slips into the inquiry, practical indeed but a little undignified, “How are we to escape plagiarism?” to which one is tempted to reply, “By not imitating in this sense at all.” That is not his opinion. He thinks, if we may vary a well-known proverb, that the safe way is to take all your eggs out of one basket. But you are never to imitate bad words and thoughts; you must plan your work carefully beforehand, correct carefully, invite criticism, but distinguish between what is good and what is not. It is all very just in this way; but that way has led us far from furor poeticus. We feel at the end of Voss’s laborious and erudite book that we are indeed in the century of the Gradus. And here, as in his other volume, we also feel that he has, for good or for evil, caught up and uttered the gospel of Neo-Classicism.
So far we have dealt only with Latin authors. The work of Heinsius is mentioned, both in the text by the author, and by the introducer, Augustinus Iskra, of the Buch von der Deutschen Poeterei[[480]] of Martin Opitz. Opitz. This interesting and agreeable little book, though not exactly (as it has sometimes been incorrectly called) the first[[481]] piece of German poetic in the vernacular, is entitled, with the usual reserves, to the place of origin in modern German Poetics. It cannot be called prolix, for it only occupies sixty pages in the recent reprint; but it is equally modest and business-like, and helps to redeem from the utter absurdity of most of such appellations (though it still remains absurd) the title of German Dryden which somebody or other has given to Opitz. Augustine Iskra does not exaggerate when he says—
“Altius scandes patria canendo
Barbyto, quam si Latium peritæ
Atticæ jungas, Syriæque Peithus
Noveris artem.”
And it is the peculiar glory of the Silesian poet that he not only sang himself on the lyre of his country, but did his best to enable others to do so. The spirit of genuine patriotism breathes in his dedication of the booklet to the magistrates of his native town, Buntzlau; and that of a modest scholarship (an adjective and substantive which make such an agreeable couple that it is pity they should live so much apart) in the opening of the book itself. He has not the least idea, he says, that you can make a poet by rules and laws; nor has he any intention of doing over again the work which Aristotle, Horace, Vida, and Scaliger have done. The Buch der Deustchen Poeterei. But he arrays himself (to speak ecclesiastically) in a “decent tippet” of the old stuff about Linus and Orpheus, with the Strabo passage all complete, and a train of citations as to the nobility of the poet’s office and the like. He comes in his fourth chapter to business. He actually quotes Walther von der Vogelweide; and I do not think that he can be fairly charged with that ὕβρις towards the ancient poetry of his country which too frequently marks others in other countries. But he is evidently set on the work of Reform—of substituting “smoothness of numbers” for the “wild sweetness” of the folk-song. Wherein no doubt he was wrong. Not that way did the counsels of perfection lie for the Higher Dutch; and they have always had to come back to the woodnotes and the wood-Muses to find poetic luck. But Opitz was entitled—was in his day almost bound—to think differently. The interesting thing—much more interesting to us than the details to which it led him, such as the patronage of the Alexandrine, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, &c.—is the particular source to which he turned for inspiration and guidance. He knew, as has been said, the Italian critics, at least those in Latin, and he probably knew the Italian poets (he cites Petrarch). But it is to France, and specially to Ronsard, that he fondly turns. Now it need hardly be said that in 1624 the influence of the Pléiade in its own country, though not quite dead, was moribund; the correctness of Malherbe, on the one hand, was doing its best deliberately to throttle it, and the Italianated and Spaniolated extravagances which were fashionable were choking it in another way. This is no doubt not the only instance of a literary influence which is dead or dying in its own country showing full vitality in another, but it is one of the most remarkable. For, beyond question, the French influence—in successive forms, but still French—reigned in Germany for some hundred and fifty years; and it was Opitz who first brought it to bear.
His details, as has been said, are less interesting: yet they do not lack interest. He begins by stickling for pure High German: and certainly no one who, for his sins, has been condemned to read much of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century German—one of the ugliest and most mongrel speeches in history, and quite astounding after the musical sweetness of the best Mittelhochdeutsch—will owe him a grudge for this. He protests against the mingle-mangle of foreign words which was flooding the language, and even against the famous -iren by which, to the present day to some extent, Germans give a sort of spurious naturalisation to such foreigners. He would have limits set (though he does not forbid it altogether) to that odd custom of declining classical names in German speech, which is also maintained to some extent, but which sometimes made a mere Macaronic of sixteenth-century German. On the other hand, it is curious to find him urging on Germans, who by right were, and by practice long have been, among the busiest and most successful of word-compounders, the sonderliche anmuthigkeit of compounds: and actually quoting the French as, next the Greeks, the masters of such things.[[482]] Of course the historical student, even if citations from Ronsard were not on the same page, would know at once whence this comes. Still, there still remains the oddity of alleging the undoubtedly awkward and exotic-sounding chasse-nue, ébranle-rocher, and irrite-mer as warrants and patterns for words like wolkentreiber, felsenstürmer, and meeraufreitzer, which simply seem to us natural-born, and to require no warranty but their own sound and appearance.