It is not necessary to discuss, or even to expose at any length, the causes of the relative precocity of Italian Criticism in the Renaissance. The beginnings. They are practically all contained in, and can by the very slightest expense of learning and intelligence be extracted from, the fact that Italy was at once the cradle of Humanist study of the Classics, and the only country in Europe which possessed a fully developed vernacular. But for the greater part of the fifteenth century attention was diverted from actual criticism—except of the validating or invalidating kind—by the prior and eagerer appetite for the discovery, study, and popularising, by translation and otherwise, of the actual authors and texts. For a long time, indeed, this appetite showed the usual promiscuity of such affections; and it was scarcely till the time of Vittorino da Feltre that much critical discrimination of styles was introduced. But these and other kindred things came surely, and brought criticism with them, though criticism still generally of the moral and educational kind. The Boccaccian defence was taken up by various writers of note—Bruni,[[19]] Guarino, Æneas Sylvius—and before the close of the fifteenth century two of the greatest of Florentines had indicated in different ways the main lines which Italian criticism was to take. These two were Savonarola and Politian.
The tendency of each could be anticipated by any one who, though actually ignorant of it, knew the characteristics of the two men in other ways. Savonarola. Fra Girolamo’s, of course, is wholly ethical-religious, mainly neo-Platonic, but already presenting the effect of Aristotelian details on the general Platonic attitude to Poetry. Yet he is still scholastic in his general treatment of the subject, and still adopts that close subordination of poetry to Logic which is as old as Averroes and Aquinas, and which, odd as it may seem to merely modern readers, is a very simple matter when examined.[[20]] He disclaims, as usual, any attack on poetry itself, urging only the abuse of poetry; but he follows Plato in looking more than askance at it, and Aristotle in denying its necessary association with verse. The Scriptures are the noblest poetry; all ancient poetry is doubtfully profitable. In fact, he regards poetry altogether as specially liable to abuse, and dubiously admissible into, or certainly to be expelled from, a perfect community, such as that on which the fancy of the Renaissance was so much fixed.
Savonarola’s remarks, which are contained in his four-book tractate, De Scientiis,[[21]] are more curious than really important. Yet they derive some importance from the great name and influence of their propounder, from his position at the very watershed, so to speak, of time in Europe, if not in Italy, dividing Middle Age from Renaissance, and from the fact that they undoubtedly summarise that dubitative, if not utterly hostile, view of literature in general, and of poetry in particular, which, as we have seen,[[22]] was borrowed by the Fathers from the ancients, and very much intensified by the borrowers. Fra Girolamo’s attitude is a rigidly scholastic one; and to those who omit to take account of this, or do not understand it, his view must seem wholly out of focus, if not wholly obscure. Poetry is a part of Rational Philosophy; and therefore its object must be pars entis rationis. It differs from Rhetoric in working purely by Example, not Enthymeme. Its end is to induce men to live virtuously by decent representations; and as the soul loves harmony, it uses harmonic forms. But a poet who merely knows how to play gracefully with feet only deserves the name as an old woman deserves that of a pretty girl.[[23]] Still more preposterous is the habit of calling poetry “divine.” Cosmos becomes chaos, if you admit that. Scientia autem divina est cujus objectum Deus: non illa cujus objectum exemplum. The making of verses is only poetry per accidens; and as for the Heathen poets, magnus diaboli laqueus absconditus est in them. He does not, he says, actually “damn” poetry; but the gist of his tractatule is that poets as a rule quite misunderstand their function, and that poetry had better keep its place, and abstain from silly, not to say blasphemous, airs.
Such a point of view was, of course, liable to be taken by persons alike unlikely to assume the “know-nothing” attitude of the more ignorant Catholics, the Philistine-Puritan attitude of Protestantism, or the merely Platonic and non-Christian theory of some free-thinkers. It might well seem to thoughtful lovers of literature that its very existence was in danger when it was attacked from so many sides, and that it was necessary to intrench it as strongly as possible. Nor were the materials and the plan of the fortification far to seek. The suggestion has been rather oddly discovered in the Geographer Strabo;[[24]] but authorities much more germane to the matter were at hand. Boccaccio himself had, as we have seen, both taken note of the danger and indicated the means of defence: Maximus Tyrius and Plutarch, the one in a manner more, the other in a manner less, favourable to poetry, had in effect long before traced out the whole Camp of Refuge on lines suitable either to the bolder or to the more timid defender of Poesy. The latter could represent it as the philosophy of the young, as a sort of Kindergarten-keeper in the vestibule of the higher mysteries, as not necessarily bad at all, and possibly very good. The former could argue for its equality with philosophy itself, as pursuing the same ends by different means, and appealing, not in the least in forma pauperis, to its own part of human nature.
It seems by no means improbable that this view was partly brought about by that remarkable influencer both of early mediæval and of early Renaissance thought, Dionysius the Areopagite. Pico, &c. Readers of Mr Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers[[25]] will remember the curious and interesting extracts there given from Colet’s correspondence with Radulphus, and the explanation of the Mosaic cosmogony as intended to present the Divine proceedings “after the manner of a poet.” This view Colet seems to have extracted partly from Dionysius himself, partly from Pico della Mirandola, the most remarkable of Savonarola’s converts, while time and place are not inconsistent with the belief that the future Dean of St Paul’s may have come into contact with Fra Girolamo himself. Now, this kind of envisagement of poetry, certain to turn to spiritual account in spiritually minded persons like Colet and Savonarola, and in mystically, if not spiritually, minded ones like Pico, would, in the general temper of the Renaissance, of which all three were early illustrations, as certainly turn to more or less spiritualised philosophy—ethical, metaphysical, or purely æsthetic, as the case might be. And we can see in it a vera causa of that certainly excessive, if not altogether mistaken, devotion to the abstract questions, “What is a poet?” “What is poetry?” “What is drama?” and so forth, which we perceive in almost all the Italian critics of the mid-sixteenth century, and which is almost equally, if less originally, present in their Elizabethan pupils and followers. If Colet himself had paid more attention to literature, we cannot doubt that this is the line which his own literary criticism would have taken; and as his influence, direct or through Erasmus and More, was very great on English thought, both at Oxford and Cambridge, it is not impossible that it may have been exerted in this very way.
The other line (the line which, according to the definitions of the present work, we must call the line of criticism proper), though it was perhaps hardly in this instance traced with boldness and without deflection, started under yet more distinguished auspices. Politian. The Sylvæ of Politian consist, in the main, of a direct critical survey of classical poetry couched in the, as we may think, somewhat awkward form of verse, decked with all the ornament that could suggest itself to the author’s rich, varied, and not seldom really poetical fancy, and arranged with a view to actual recitation in the lecture-room for the delight and encouragement of actual students.[[26]]
Neither purpose nor method can be regarded as wholly favourable to criticism. The popular conférencier (for this term best expresses Politian’s position) is sure to be rather more of a panegyrist or a detractor, as the case may be, than of a critic; and the lecturer in verse is sure to be thinking rather of showing his own rhetorical and poetical gifts than of the strict merits and defects of his subject. But if we take the Nutricia or the Rusticus, the Ambra or the Manto, and compare any of them with the well-intentioned summary of the Labyrinthus,[[27]] we shall see without the least unfairness, and fully admitting the difference of ability and of opportunity in the two men, the difference, from the critical point of view, of the two stand-points.
In the “Manto,” the first of the Sylvæ, the most important characteristic of sixteenth-century Italian criticism proper, the exaltation of Virgil, is already prominent. The Manto. Politian, indeed, was too much of a wit, and too much of a poet himself, to let his Virgil-worship take the gross and prosaic form which it assumed a little later in Vida. But he has proceeded a long way from the comparatively uncritical (and yet so more critical) standpoint of Dante. He comes to details. Cicero had won the palms of sweetness from Nestor and of tempestuous eloquence from Ulysses (a little vague this), but Greece consoled herself in poetry. Ennius was too rude to give Latium the glory of that. Then came Virgil. Even with the Syracusan reed (i.e., in his Eclogues) he crushes Hesiod and contends with Homer. Calliope took him in her arms as an infant, and kissed him thrice. Manto, the guardian nymph of his native place, hailed his advent, and summarised in prophetic detail his achievements in verse. Her town shall enter the lists—secure of victory—with the seven competitors for Homer’s origin. And then a whirlwind of magniloquent peroration (charged with epanaphora,[[28]] that favourite figure of the sixteenth century) extols the poet above all poets and all wonders of the world, past, present, and to come.
But Politian would have been faithful neither to those individual qualities which have been noted in him, nor to that sworn service of Greek which was the chivalry of the true Humanist, if he had thought of depreciating Homer. The Ambra and Rusticus. The “Ambra,” a poem longer than the “Manto,” and not much less enthusiastic, is mainly devoted to a fanciful description of the youth of the poet, and a verse-summary of the poems. Indeed the peroration (till it is turned into a panegyric of Ambra, a favourite villa of Lorenzo) is a brilliant, forcible, and true indication of the enormous debt of all ancient literature, science, and in fact life, to Homer, of the universality of his influence, and of the consensus of testimony in his favour. The “Rusticus” is rather an independent description and panegyric of country life, as a preface to the reading of Virgil, Hesiod, and other bucolic and georgic writers, than a criticism or comparison of them. The Nutricia. But the “Nutricia” is again ours in the fullest sense. Its avowed argument is De poetica et poetis, and, in handling this vast and congenial theme, Politian gives the fullest possible scope at once to his genius, to his learning, and to that intense love for literature without which learning is but as the Carlylian “marine-stores.” In nearly eight hundred exultant hexameters,[[29]] the vigour and fulness of which enable them to carry off without difficulty the frippery of their occasional trappings, he traces the origin of poetry, the transition from mere stupid wonder and the miseries of barbarism to sacred and profane verse, the elaboration of its laws in Judea by David and Solomon, in Greece by Orpheus, the succession of the Greek and Latin poets in the various forms (it is noteworthy that Politian is not at all copious on the drama) through the exploits of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to the patronage of poetry by Lorenzo himself.
This is criticism leaning dangerously on the one side to panegyric, and likely to be (though it is not actually) dragged to the other still more dangerously by partisanship; but it is still criticism. Their merits The liker does not “like grossly,” or in accordance with mere tradition. He loves, as the American poet says, “not by allowance but with personal love”; and he can give reasons for the love that is in him. He seeks the poetic pleasure from the Muse; he obtains it from her; and he savours it, not merely with eagerness, but with acutely sensitive taste. Though he might not at some moments be averse to refining on the character of poetry generally, as well as on the character of this poetic pleasure, it is this itself that he seeks, finds, and rejoices in. Part at least of the spirit of Longinus is on him; he is transported, and he knows the power that transports.