Their critical habits, as we have seen sufficiently in the last Book, had been mainly negative; and for this reason, if for no other, a considerable critical development would have been certain to spring up. But there were other reasons, and powerful ones. In the first place, the atmosphere of revolt which was abroad necessarily breeds, or rather necessarily implies, criticism. A few, whom the equal Jove has loved, may be able to criticise while acquiescing, approving, even loving and strenuously championing; but this equity is not exceedingly common, and the general tendency of acceptance, and even of acquiescence, is distinctly uncritical. On the other hand, the rebel is driven either to his rebellion by the exercise of his critical faculty, or to the exercise of his critical faculty in order to justify his rebellion. I do not myself hold that the Devil was the first critic. I have not the slightest desire to serve myself and my subject heirs to that spirit unfortunate; but I recognise the necessity of some argument to rebut the filiation.
And that these generalities should become particular in reference to Literary Criticism more especially, there were additional and momentous inducements of two different kinds. Particular. In the first place, the malcontents with the immediate past must in any case have been drawn to attack the literary side of its battlements, because of their extreme weakness. Everywhere but in the two extremities of the West, Italy and Scotland (the latter, owing to the very small bulk of its literary production, and the rudimentary condition of its language, being hardly an exception at all), the fifteenth century, even with a generous eking from the earliest sixteenth, had been a time of literary torpor and literary decadence, relieved only by a few—a very few—brilliant individual performances. In England the successors of Chaucer, not content with carrying his method and his choice of subject no further, had almost incomprehensibly lost command of both. In France the rhétoriqueur school of poets had degenerated less in form, but had been almost equally unable to show any progress, or even any Weakness of Vernaculars. maintained command, of matter. Germany was far worse than either. If Chaucer himself could criticise, indirectly but openly, the faults of the still vigorous and beautiful romance—of the romance which in his own country was yet to boast Chester in verse and Malory in prose—how much more must any one with sharp sense and sound taste, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, have been tempted to apply some similar process to the fossilised formalism of rondeau and ballade; to the lifeless and lumbering allegory of the latest “Rose” imitations; to the “aureate,” or rather tinselled, bombast of Chastellain and Robertet?
But, as it happened, no inconsiderable part of the newly disinterred classics dealt with this very subject of Literary Criticism, Recovery of Ancient Criticism. and, having been most neglected, was certain to be most attended to. Later mediæval practice had provided the examples of disease: earlier classical theory was to provide the remedy. Plato, the most cherished of the recovered treasures, had—in his own peculiar way, no doubt—criticised very largely; the Poetics and the Rhetoric were quickly set afresh before the new age in the originals; Horace had always been known; Quintilian was, since Rhetoric had not yet fallen into disfavour, studied direct;[[4]] and, before the sixteenth century was half over, Longinus himself had been unearthed and presented to a world which (if it had chosen to attend thereto) was also for the first time furnished with Dante’s critical performance.[[5]] With such an arsenal; with such a disposition of mind abroad; and with such real or imagined enemies to attack, it would have been odd if the forces of criticism, so long disorganised, and indeed disembodied, had not taken formidable shape.
There was, however, yet another influence which is not very easy to estimate, and which has sometimes perhaps been not quite rightly estimated, but which undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the matter. Necessity of defence against Puritanism. Almost as soon as—almost before indeed—the main battle of the Renaissance engaged itself, certain phenomena, not unusual in similar cases, made their appearance. Men of letters, humanists, students, were necessarily the protagonists of revolt or reform. There had always, as we have seen, been a certain jealousy of Letters on the part of the Church; and this was not likely to be lessened in the new arrangement of circumstance. But the jealousy was by no means confined to the party of order and of the defence. It had been necessary, or it would have had no rank-and-file, for the attack to enlist the descendants of the old Lollards and other opponents of the Romish Church in different countries. But in these, to no small extent, and in men like Calvin, when they made their appearance, perhaps still more, the Puritan dislike of Art, and of Literature as part of Art, was even more rampant than in the obscurest of obscuri viri on the Catholic and Conservative side. And so men of letters had not merely to attack what they thought unworthy and obsolete foes of literature, but to defend literature itself from their own political and ecclesiastical allies.
The line which they took had been taken before, and was no doubt partly suggested to them by Boccaccio in the remarkable book already referred to[[6]]—the De Genealogia Deorum—which was repeatedly printed in the early days of the press. The line of criticism resultant. There can be very little question that this anticipates the peculiar tone of what we may call anti-Platonic Platonism, which is so noticeable in the Italian critics of the Renaissance, and which was caught from them by Englishmen of great note and worth, from Sidney to Milton. The excellent historian of the subject—whom I have already quoted, and my indebtedness to whom must not be supposed to be repudiated because I cannot agree with him on some important points—is, I think, entirely wrong in speaking of mediæval “distrust of literature,” while the statement with which he supports this, that “popular literature had fallen into decay, and, in its contemporary form, was beneath serious consideration,”[[7]] is so astonishing, that I fear we must class it with those judicia ignorantium of which our general motto speaks. In his context Mr Spingarn mentions, as examples of mediæval treatment of literature, Fulgentius, Isidore, John of Salisbury, Dante, Boccaccio. What “popular” (by which I presume is meant vernacular) literature was there in the times of Fulgentius or of Isidore? Is not the statement that “popular literature had fallen into decay” in the time of Dante self-exploded? And the same may be said of Boccaccio. As for John of Salisbury, he certainly, as we have seen,[[8]] was not much of a critic himself; but that popular literature was decaying in his time is a statement which no one who knows the Chansons de Gestes and the Arthurian Legend can accept for one moment; while the documents also quoted supra, the Labyrinthus, the Nova Poetria, and the rest—entirely disprove any “distrust” of letters.
The truth is, with submission to Mr Spingarn, that there never was any such, except from the Puritan-religious side, and that this was by no means specially conspicuous in the Middle Ages. Not necessarily anti-mediæval, The “Defence of Poesy,” and of literature generally, which animates men so different as Boccaccio and Milton, as Scaliger and Sidney, is no direct revolt against the Middle Ages at all, but, as has been said, a discourse Pro Domo, in the first place, against the severer and more obscurantist partisans of Catholicism, who were disposed to dislike men of letters as Reformers, and literature as the instrument of Reformation; secondly, and much more urgently, against the Puritan and Philistine variety of Protestantism itself, which so soon turned against its literary leaders and allies. And the special form which this defence took was in turn mainly conditioned, not by anti-mediæval animus, but in part by the circumstances of the case, in part by the character of the critical weapons which men found in their new arsenal of the Classics.
Classical Criticism, as we have seen in the preceding volume, had invariably in theory, and almost as invariably in practice, confined itself wholly or mainly to the consideration of “the subject.” but classicalAlthough Aristotle himself had not denied the special pleasure of art and the various kinds of art, although Plato, in distrusting and denouncing, had admitted the psychagogic faculties thereof; yet nobody except Longinus had boldly identified the chief end of it with “transport,” not with persuasion, with edification, or anything of the kind. Accordingly, those who looked to the ancients to help them against the Obscuri Viri on the one hand, and against good Puritan folk like our own Ascham on the other, were almost bound to keep the pleasure of poetry and literature generally in the background; or, if they brought it to the front at all, to extol it and defend it on ethical and philosophical, not on æsthetic grounds. Taking a hint from their “sweet enemy” Plato, from Plutarch, and from such neo-Platonic utterances as that tractate of Plotinus, which has been discussed in its place,[[9]] they set themselves to prove that poetry was not a sweet pleasant deceit or corrupting influence in the republic, but a stronghold and rampart of religious and philosophical truth. and anti-Puritan.Calling in turn Aristotle to their assistance, and working him in with his master and rival, they dwelt with redoubled and at length altogether misleading and misled energy on “Action,” “Unity,” and the like. And when they did consider form it was, always or too often, from the belittling point of view of the ancients themselves in spirit, and from the meticulous point of view of Horace (who had always been known) in detail. Here and there in such a man as Erasmus (v. infra), who was nothing if not sensible, we find the Gellian and Macrobian particularisms taken up with a really progressive twist towards inquiry as to the bearing of these particularities on the pleasure of the reader. But Erasmus was writing in the “false dawn”; the Puritan tyranny of Protestantism on the one side, and of the Catholic revival on the other, had not brought back a partial night as yet; and some of the best as well as some of the worst characteristics of the new age inclined those of his immediate successors rather than contemporaries, who adopted criticism directly, to quite different ways.
It would, however, be a glaring omission if the critical position of Erasmus himself were not set forth at some length.[[10]] Erasmus. Standing as he does, the most eminent literary figure of Europe on the bridge of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nothing if not critical as he is in his general temperament, and on the textual and exegetical, if not on the strictly literary sides of the Art, one of its great historical figures—his absence from this gallery would be justly regarded as inexcusable. And if his voluminous work does not yield us very much within the more special and fully enfranchising lines of our system, it might be regarded as a sufficient answer to say that the imperfection of the vernaculars, his own concentration on particular forms of Biblical and patristic text-criticism, and that peculiar cosmopolitanism which made him practically of no country at all, served to draw him away from a practice in which he would, but for these circumstances and conditions, have certainly indulged.
It may, however, be doubted whether Erasmus would ever have made a capital figure as a purely literary critic. Very great man of letters as he was, and almost wholly literary as were his interests, those interests were suspiciously directed towards the applied rather than the pure aspects of literature—were, in short, per se rather scientific than literary proper. It is at least noteworthy that the Ciceronianus (though Erasmus was undoubtedly on the right side in it) was directed against a purely literary folly, against an exaggeration of one of the tastes and appetites which spur on the critic. And it is almost enough to read the Adagia and Apophthegmata—books much forgotten now, but written with enormous zest and pains by him, and received with corresponding attention and respect by two whole centuries at least—to see how much is there left out which a literary critic pur sang could not but have said.
The Ciceronianus, however, must receive a little fuller treatment, both because of its intimate connection with our subject, and because hardly any work of Erasmus, except the Colloquies, so definitely estates him in the new position of critical man of letters, as distinguished from that of philosophical or rhetorical teacher. The Ciceronianus. The piece[[11]] (which has for its second title De Optimo Dicendi Genere) did not appear, and could not have appeared, very early in his career. He might even, in the earlier part of that career, have been slow to recognise the popular exaggeration which, as in the other matter of the Reformation itself, struck his maturer intelligence. He glances at its genesis in divers of his letters, to Budæus, to Alciatus, and others, from 1527 onwards, and the chief “begetter” of it seems to have been the Flemish scholar, Longolius (Christophe de Longueil), who during the latter part of his short life was actually very much such a fanatic as the Nosoponus of the dialogue. This person is described by his friends Bulephorus and Hypologus as olim rubicundulus, obesulus, Veneribus et gratiis undique scatens, but now an austere shadow, who has no aspiration in life but to be “Ciceronian.” In order to achieve this distinction, he has given his days and nights wholly to the study of Cicero. The “copy” of his Ciceronian lexicon would already overload two stout porters. He has noted the differing sense of every word, whether alone or in context; and by the actual occurrence, not merely of the word itself, but of its form and case, he will be absolutely governed. Thus, if you are to be a true Ciceronian, you may say ornatus and ornatissimus, but not ornatior; while, though nasutus is permitted to you, both comparative and superlative are barred. In the same way, he will only pass the actual cases and numbers found in the Arpinate; though every one but, let us say, the dative plural occurs, the faithful must not presume to usurp that dative. Further, he intends to reduce the whole of Cicero to quantitative rhythm, fully specified; and in his own writing he thinks he has done well if he accomplishes one short period in a winter night. The piece begins with the characteristic Erasmian banter,—Nosoponus is a bachelor, and Bulephorus observes that it is just as well, for his wife would in the circumstances either make an irruption into the study, and turn it topsy-turvy, or console herself with somebody else in some other place,—but by degrees becomes more serious, and ends with a sort of adjustment of most ancient and many modern Latin writers to the Ciceronian point of view.