We have seen in the last Interchapter how something like this creed had been achieved—though not without a good deal of opposition, and hardly, in any case, with the result of authoritative and complete statement—in Italy, and to some extent borrowed thence, in other countries, before the end of the sixteenth century itself. The seventeenth did little more than crystallise it, lay stress on particular points, fill up some gaps, arrange, codify, illustrate. The absence of dissidence, except on the minor points, is most remarkable. In regard to Aristotle, in particular, there are no Patrizzis and hardly any Castelvetros. Men tack on a considerable body of Apocrypha to the canonical books of the Stagirite, and misinterpret not a little that he actually said. But they never take his general authority in question, seldom the authority of any ancient, and that of Horace least of all. The two great artificial conceptions of the elaborate “Unities” drama, with Acts and Scenes taking the place of the choric divisions, and of the still more artificial “Heroic Poem,” with its Fable, its Epic Unity, its Machines, and so forth, acquire in theory—if luckily, as, for instance, in England, by no means in practice—greater and greater dignity. It becomes a sort of truism that the drama is the most beautiful and ingenious, the heroic poem the noblest, thing on which the human mind can exercise itself. But they are difficult things, sir! very difficult things. Each is sharply isolated as a Kind: and the other Kinds are ranged around and below them. You never criticise any thing first in itself, but with immediate reference to its Kind. If it does not fulfil the specifications of that Kind, it is either cast out at once or regarded with the deepest suspicion.
Further, all the Kinds in particular, as well as Poetry itself in general, possess, and are distinguished by, Qualities which are, in the same way, rigidly demanded and inquired into. It is generally, if not quite universally, admitted that a poem must please: though critics are not quite agreed whether you are bound to please only so as to instruct. But you must please in the Kind, by the Quality, according to the Rule. There is no room for nondescripts; or, if they are admitted at all, they must cease to be nondescripts, and become Heroi-comic, Heroi-satiric, “Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,”[[538]] or what not.
This general view may seem unorthodox to those who put faith in the notion—to be found in some books of worth, as well as of worship—that there was a “Romantic revolt” in the beginning of the seventeenth century—that there was even a kind of irruption or recrudescence of mediæval barbarism, and that the pronounced and hardened classicism of the later century was a fresh reaction—a case of Boileau à la rescousse! The texts, and the facts, and the dates, do not, to my thinking, justify this view of history, in so far, at least, as criticism is concerned. The crystallising of the classical creed goes on regardless of Euphuism, earlier and later, in England, of Marinism in Italy, of Culteranism and Conceptism in Spain, of the irregular outburst of similar tastes in France, which marks the reign of Louis XIII. As we have seen, Ogier, in the last named country, at the very moment of striking a blow for Romantic drama, admits that the critics are against him; and we have also seen how they were. In England, Sidney, at the beginning of the great Elizabethan period, holds out hands to Jonson at the end. The very Spanish Romantics, when they come to consider the matter critically, make an unblushing transaction between conscientious theory and popular practice: and such an Italian iconoclast as Beni is classical, in the very act and process of belittling the classics.
At the same time, this accepted faith of Criticism, when we come to examine it, is a very peculiar Catholicity. Uncompromisingly Aristotelian in profession, its Aristotelianism, as has been recognised by an increasing number of experts from the time of Lessing downwards, is hopelessly adulterated. Many of the insertions and accretions are purely arbitrary: others come from a combination of inability to forget, and obstinate refusal frankly to recognise, the fact that the case is quite a different case from that which Aristotle was diagnosing. But, by the time at least when the creed became triumphant, a new Pope, a new Court of Appeal, has been foisted in, styling itself Good Sense, Reason, or even (though quite Antiphysic) Nature. That this anti-Pope, this Antiphysis, was partly created by the excesses of the Euphuist-Gongorist movements, need not be denied; but this is comparatively irrelevant. We have traced above, in almost all their principal exponents, the curious, and sometimes very ludicrous, attempt to conciliate that furor poeticus which the ancients had never denied, with those dictates of good sense which the ancients were presumed to have accepted and embodied. A professed satirist could evolve, in his happiest moments, nothing more comic than the eirenicon of Mambrun,[[539]] or, rather, than his clinical examination of the poet in fury, and his observation of the poet in his right mind.
The survey of the development of this phenomenon, or group of phenomena, in different countries, requires less minuteness than was needed in the last Interchapter, because the central stage of the movement is both of less importance and of less complexity than the beginnings of it: but it is essential to the scheme of these Interchapters, and to that of the whole book, that some such survey should be given.
In Italy, as we have seen, the results of the period were almost insignificant—a fact no doubt connected with, though in no sense necessarily caused by, the declension of the Italian creative genius after Tasso. We have, it may be hoped, established, by the slow but irresistible process of reciting the actual history, the truth that no constant ratio exists between periods of creation and periods of criticism—that they may go hand in hand, or that one may follow the other, or that both may fail to put in any important appearance, as Fate and metaphysical aid may determine. This, for Italy, was a period of the last kind, though not one of its very worst examples. The Italians continued both to play at criticism in their Academies, and to accumulate solid though second-hand work in such laboratories as those of Aromatari. They fought out the half-mock battle of the Ancients and Moderns, as became them, before other nations meddled with it: and they still maintained, for long, though not for the whole time, that position of supremacy, as masters in title to Europe, which the great achievements of the preceding century had given them. But they added nothing to their claims, and by degrees the supremacy passed from them.[[540]]
That it passed to France is an accepted truth, and like most, though not all, accepted truths, this has so much of the real quality that it is idle to cavil at it. That it has been abused there can be little doubt—or could be little if people would take the small trouble necessary to ascertain the facts. I do not know who first invented the term “Gallo-Classic,” which, to judge by those Röntgen rays which the reader of examination-papers can apply, has sunk deep into the youthful mind of this country. It is a bad word. I have taken leave to call it “question-begging, clumsy, and incomplete,” before now; and I repeat those epithets with a fresh emphasis here. It begs the question whether “Italo-Classic” would not, in its own kind, be the properer term: it is clumsy because the two parts of it are not used in the same sense; and it is incomplete because it does not intimate that much beside French influence, and that a very peculiar and sophisticated kind of Classical influence, went to the making of the thing. But there was French influence: and for some three-quarters of a century France was the head manufactory in which Italian, Classical, and other ideas were torn up and remade into a sort of critical shoddy with which (as with other French shoddy in that and other times) Europe was rather too eager to clothe itself. Some pains have been taken in the foregoing Book to put the reader in a position to appreciate the real rise, progress, and history of French criticism of the Neo-classic[[541]] type. The survey, whatever difference may exist as to its justice in matter of opinion, will not, I think, be found erring in matters of fact: and it will show that the position usually accorded to Boileau requires some reconsideration. But Boileau was undoubtedly the greatest man of letters who, holding these views, devoted himself specially and definitely to the expression of them; and, for good or for ill, his name is associated with the movement. I agree with Keats,[[542]] who here, as in so many other matters, came right by genius. Those of us who do not possess this royal key can, at any rate, if we choose to take the trouble, come right by knowledge.
The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns—though we have spoken hard words of it—might look like revolt against the tyranny of Despréaux, and it undoubtedly spread seeds of the more successful revolution which followed; but the more one studies it, the more one sees that the revolt was in the main unconscious. As we have partly shown, and as might be shown much more fully, the Moderns were, as a rule, just as “classical” in their ideas as the Ancients. They were as incapable of catholic judgment; they were even more ignorant of literature as a whole: they were at least as apt to introduce non-literary criteria; they were as much under the obsession of the Kind, the Rule (cast-iron, not leaden), the sweeping generalisation. Too commonly the thing comes to this—that the man who can conjugate tupto will not hear of anything which lessens the importance of that gift, and that the man who cannot conjugate tupto will not hear of any virtue attaching to it.
Most other countries require little notice here. The Germans make practically no figure; the Dutch confine themselves to classical study and the popularisation of reviewing; and the Spaniards, with characteristic indolence, refuse to work out the interesting problem presented to them by the recalcitrance of their national drama to the consecrated ideas of the general creed. England is of more importance. I have tried to show that it is of very much more; but this importance belongs entirely to one man. This one man in his time played many parts: and as the main aim of literature is to give pleasure, and to produce original sources thereof, we cannot perhaps say that his critical part was the greatest. But we may almost say that it was the most important. We can imagine English literature without the poetry of Dryden: it would be wofully impoverished, but somebody would take up the burden, probably before Pope. Certainly Pope would take it up, though with much more to do. But English criticism, and, what is more, European criticism of the best and most fruitful kind, would have had, if Dryden had been absent, to seek some totally new source: and it is impossible to tell where that source would have been found. There is no precedent—Lilius Giraldus and Patrizzi between them might have produced one in Italy, but it is of the highest significance that they did not—for Dryden’s peculiar way of shaking different literatures and different examples of literature together, of indicating the things that please him in all, and of at least attempting to find out why they please him. It is this, not his parade of Rules, and his gleanings from the books, that makes his critical glory: and it is this in which, among critics up to his own time, he is alone.
Yet even he does parade “rules”; even he does belaud Rapin, and Le Bossu, and even Rymer; even he would have been, no doubt, quite as ready to take the oath to Boileau as he was nobly determined not to take it to William. His genius is recalcitrant to the orthodoxy of the time; but something else in him accepts it. It is not for nothing that he never published that word of power which dissolves all the spells of Duessa—“Had Aristotle seen our plays he might have changed his mind.”