That, however, there was, at any rate in the earlier part of the time, much blind, and even a little conscious revolt against classicism, independent of the Ancient and Modern quarrel, is not to be wholly denied. I have hinted doubts as to the correctness of regarding the Euphuist-Metaphysical extravagances in England, Marinism in Italy, Gongorism in Spain, and the fantastic and “precious” fancies which mark the reign of Louis XIII. and the Fronde in France, as either deliberate reactions against classicism, or abortive births and false dawns of Romance. They are in almost every case direct results of the Romantic or mediæval side of the earlier Renaissance—last things, not first. But, by the end of the century, they were almost everywhere got well under; though in Spain, their greatest stronghold, it was not till the eighteenth century itself was some way advanced that Luzán administered the critical miséricorde, or, if we must use the language of the country, played despeñador to them. Any other interpretation of the phenomena seems to me to distort them and make them unintelligible, while the procession of the Metaphysical from the Spenserian stage, of Marinism from Tasso, of Gongorism from the great Spanish age, and of the French extravagants from the Spaniards and Marino, working not a little on the Pléiade itself, is natural, historical, and consistent with logic. But these very facts prepare and lead up to the triumph of Neo-Classicism.

By dint, however, of these actions and interactions, there was actually evolved, towards the end of the century, a sort of false Florimel or Duessa, who was called Taste. She was rather a Protean Goddess, and reflected the knowledge or the want of it, the real taste or the want of it, possessed by her priests and worshippers. The Taste of Dryden and the Taste of Rymer are two totally different things; there is even a very considerable difference between the taste of Hédelin and the taste of Bouhours. But in all save the very happiest minds the Taste of this time, as far as Poetry is concerned almost wholly, and to a great extent as regards prose, is vitiated by all manner of mistaken assumptions, polluted by all manner of foolish and hurtful idolatries. There is the Idol of the Kind which has been noticed; the Idol of the Quality; the Idol of Good Sense, the most devouring of all.[[543]] It is agreed, and agreed very pardonably, that it is not well to write

“And periwig with snow the baldpate woods.”

But the baser folk go on from this—and all but the very noblest have some difficulty in preventing themselves from going on—to think that a man should not write

“The multitudinous seas incarnadine.”

There is a sense, and a very proper sense, that, in a certain general way, style must suit subjects: that you ought not to write to a Child of Quality, aged five, as you would do to Queen Anne, aged fifty.[[544]] But this topples over into the most absurd limitations, so that, a little later than our actual time, we shall find Pope taking modest credit to himself with Spence for that, though Virgil in his Pastorals “has sometimes six or eight lines together that are epic,” he had been so scrupulous as “scarce ever to have two together, even in the Messiah.” Indeed it is hardly possible to find a better reductio ad absurdum of Neo-Classicism than this. You lay down (as we saw long ago that Servius did lay it down), from a general induction of the practice of a particular poet, such and such a rule about Virgil’s styles in his various works. Then you turn this individual observation into a general rule. And then you go near to find fault with the very poet from whom you have derived it because he does not always observe it—as if his unquestionable exceptions had not as much authority as his supposed rules. Nor is there any doubt that this fallacy derives colour and support from the false Good Sense, the Pseudo-Reason. The induction from practice is hitched on to Reason so as to become a deduction and a demonstration, and once established as that, you deduce from it anything you like. Meanwhile Good Sense, as complaisant to the critic as stern to the victim of his criticism, will approve or disapprove anything that you choose to approve or disapprove, will set her seal to any arbitrary decision, any unjust or purblind whim, and can only be trusted with certainty to set her face invariably against the highest poetry, and often against certain kinds not so high.[[545]]

The result of all this is that, with the exception of Dryden and somewhat later Fontenelle (see next Book), hardly any critics of the time achieve, with any success, the highest function of the true critic of literature, the discovery and celebration of beautiful literary things. It is not their business, or their wish, to set free the “lovely prisoned soul of Eucharis.” If Eucharis will get a ticket from the patronesses of the contemporary Almack’s, and dress herself in the prescribed uniform, and come up for judgment with the proper courtesy, they will do her such justice as Minerva has enabled them to do; but if not, not. Sometimes (as in the case of the immortal Person of Quality who took the trouble to get Spenser into order[[546]]) they will good-naturedly endeavour to give her a better chance, poor thing! But they will never kiss the Daughter of Hippocrates on the mouth, and receive the reward thereto appropriated.[[547]]

That, on the other hand, there is observable, throughout the century, a certain interpenetration of the older and more Romantic spirit—in the creative work chiefly, but even there dying down, in the critical overmastered from the first, and less and less perceptible,—this opinion will meet with no contradiction here, but, on the contrary, with the strongest support. All the eccentric phenomena, as they may be called, which have been noticed from Euphuism to Gongorism, are symptoms of this on the larger scale; and other things—the fancy of Chapelain himself for the Romances, the lingering attraction which Gongorism exercises even on such a man as Bouhours—confirm it. Yet even this was, as has been said, steadily dying down; and by the end of the century the old Phœnix was nearly in ashes, though the new bird was to take slow rebirth from them. I am myself inclined to think that the signs of Romantic leaning in Dryden belong to the new, not to the old, chapter of symptoms; and that in this way England, the last, save perhaps Spain, to give up, was the first to feel again for, the standard of Romanticism. But in this Dryden was in advance, not merely of all his countrymen, but of all Europe; and he did not himself definitely raise any flag of revolt. On the contrary, he always supposed himself to be, and sometimes was, arguing for a reasonable and liberal Classicism.

It was not in flippancy, but in logical connection with the present subject, that attention was drawn above[[548]] to a certain aporia of Tassoni’s on the admitted lovesomeness, body and soul, of le donne brutte, and on the tricks which bruttezza and bellezza play to each other. If that ingenious poet and polemic had but pushed his inquiries a little further, and extended them in purview as well as lineally, he might have come to great things in criticism. It might, for instance, have struck him whether the accepted notions of literary beauty were not peculiarly like those of physical beauty, which were also those of his century. These laws laid it down that “from the chin to the pit betwixt the collar-bones there must be two lengths of the nose,” that the whole figure must be “ten faces high,” and that “the inside of the arm, from the place where the muscle disappears to the middle, is four noses”; while the careful calculators noted all the while with dismay that both the Apollo Belvidere and the Medicean Venus set these proportions at the most godlike defiance.[[549]] He would (or he might) have observed that, just as when you have settled exactly what a bella donna must not have, there is apt to sail, or slip, into the room somebody with that particular characteristic to whom you become a hopeless slave, so, when you have settled the qualifications of the drama with the infallibility of Hédelin, and those of the Epic with the finality of Le Bossu, there comes you out some impudent production which is an admirable poem, while the obedient begettings of your rules are worthless rubbish. Tassoni, I say, might have done this; he seems to have had quite the temper to do it; but he did it not. It was doubtless with him, as with others, a case of Di terrent et Jupiter hostis—the gods of their world and their time forbade them.

But the angry gods were not wholly able to maintain their anger; and at the other end of the century, in that Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns which, for all its irritating ignorationes elenchi, did certainly assist in the discussion of general æsthetic problems, we find, among other glimpses, an advance, though only a partial advance, on this suggestion of the Pensieri. Perrault, who doubtless knew Tassoni (one of his brothers had translated the Secchia), has a curious passage on the diversity of the forms of feminine beauty. He had,[[550]] he says, visited the gallery of a connoisseur who had collected portraits of the most famous beauties of Europe for a century past. There were not two of the same type of loveliness; and of the spectators there were not two who fixed on the same portrait as the most beautiful. But Perrault, though he has had this glimpse of the true path opened up to him, does not dare pursue it. He is as convinced as the rest of them that you can reduce ideas of beauty to a minimum which is always invariable, though you may add others which vary; and he is perfectly arbitrary in his admissions and exclusions of these latter. He hates Gothic architecture; it may be strongly suspected that he would fall far short of Chapelain in appreciating Romance, for all his fairy tales. His criticisms of the Ancients belie his theory itself; for he will not open his eyes to see the beauty of their peculiarity. His remarks on Homer are pitiable. My always estimable and not seldom admirable predecessor, Blair, was no doubt sadly “left to himself” when he selected,[[551]] as the awful example of a man of bad taste, the person who said that Homer was no better than “some old tale of chivalry.” But Perrault, I fear, is a more terrible spectacle when he says that none of the Three Tragedians will bear comparison with Corneille (and I think I may claim the merit of not undervaluing Corneille), that nobody but professed scholars can read Aristophanes, and that Ovid is the inferior of Benserade. When we read these things—and except in Fontenelle, the eternal exception, they are to be found in every espouser of the Modern side, just as the corresponding absurdities are to be found in every defender of the Ancients—there is nothing to say but “This is all out of focus. Both of you see men as trees walking.”