It would be scarcely more than one of those sweeping generalisations which attract a certain class of readers, if one were to say that, during the eighteenth century, England and France exercised a reciprocal influence over one another in literature, the results of which the remaining nations did little but imitate. Preliminary remarks. It is certainly true that, as regards the special subject of this particular Book—the criticism of orthodox neo-classicism in the eighteenth century—Germany, Italy, and Spain play a part to which justice can be very briefly done, while the rest may well be silence. Nor will Spain and Italy at least have much more to give us when, and if, in the next volume, we turn from the setting to the rising sun. But it will be very different with Germany, where almost the entire interest lies in the restless struggles and obstinate questioning which lead to Romanticism, and which practically show themselves from the very moment when the Swiss School aroused German criticism from its long sleep after Opitz. What has to be said of the Gottscheds and Gellerts of the Northern Country had better be said last, so as to bring the matter into closer juxtaposition with the account of the Romantic Revolt itself. Italy (which has some interest in at least the beginning of the century) and Spain, which has very little in any part of it, must be taken first.
For some reason, or for none, the closing years of the seventeenth century, and the opening of the eighteenth, in Italy saw a very considerable revival of that critical spirit which, as we know, had died away so strangely, after its vigorous flourishing a hundred years earlier. Temporary revival of Italian Criticism. It is true that this new Italian criticism is of a rather tell-tale kind—that it is, in great part at least, criticism of erudition and of retrospect. But Gravina, Muratori, Crescimbeni, and even Quadrio, form a group of no small interest. The first is a real critic of great, if not always well-directed, ability; the second, something of a real critic too, with amazing erudition; the third, the author of the first really literary history of a national literature; and the fourth, the first pioneer—no Lynceus, certainly, but still a pioneer-guide—in the ways of general and comparative literary study.
Gianvincenzo Gravina is one of those persons who particularly invite the student to idle ægri somnia as to what they might have been in other times and circumstances. Gravina. A lawyer, a littérateur, the adoptive father of Metastasio, the joint founder of the Arcadian Academy, a critic of remarkable shrewdness, who wrote excellent things on tragedy, and thought his own bad tragedies excellent—he tempts one strangely. His most famous and most often quoted critical work is Della Ragion Poetica,[[711]] but it is necessary, in order to appreciate his criticism, to go to his Works[[712]] and read also the Della Tragedia and the Discorso delle Favole. The total effect is, as with most other eighteenth-century critics, a conclusion that the writer has not “found his way”: though he is nearer to it than some others writing later. The Della Ragion Poetica is a most interesting labyrinth of cross-purposes. The strongly scholastic character of Italian serious thought, which we have noticed in Rinaldini only a few years earlier,[[713]] betrays itself in Gravina’s opening del vero e del falso; del reale e del finto; and in an episodic discussion of the origin of Idolatry, which may seem absolutely preposterous at first sight, but which works itself into the consideration of Fable not so ill. The admirable description of Homer as “the potentest of mages and the wisest of enchanters, in that he makes use of words not so much for the complacency of the ear as for the advantage of the imagination,”[[714]] is balanced, at a page or two’s distance, by a fling at the perniciosa turba de' Romanzi. The utility of poetry is gravely insisted on, and we are invited as usual to the study of the Kinds; but section xiv., on “Popular Judgment,” is instinct with that Italian common-sense which had shown itself in various ways during the sixteenth century, through mouths so different as those of Castelvetro and Cinthio Giraldi, a sense almost epigrammatically concentrated in the phrase ne con solo popolo ne senza il popolo. In these passages of Gravina’s there is to be found, put not indeed quite clearly, but unmistakably on fair allowance, a doctrine which hardly any critic of any day has sufficiently digested—that there is something in poetry corresponding, in measure and degree, to a poetical sentiment which only needs waking in all but the exceptions of mankind. What libraries of vain or positively mischievous disquisition should we have been spared, what unintelligent laudation of Burns when the intelligent is so easy, what unintelligent depreciation of Béranger when the abstinence from it is surely not so difficult, what idle and obstinate questionings about Donne or Whitman, Macaulay or Moore, and a hundred others of the most opposite kinds, if people would only have remembered our author’s sound and sober law[[715]] that "in all men there gleams through [traspare] I know not what discernment of the Good "to which poets, if they know how, can appeal!
A large part of Gravina’s work in the Ragion consists of an actual historical survey of poets and poetry in the spirit which, as we have seen and shall see, was so prevalent in his day; and his judgments, if a little traditional, are almost always sound, whether he is dealing with the classics or with the great Renaissance group of Italian-Latin poets.[[716]] Nor should he lack due meed for the word of praise he gives to Folengo, a writer little likely to appeal to the ordinary eighteenth-century spirit. When one thinks of the extreme inadequacy of French judgments of Rabelais himself at this time, it is no small merit in Gravina to have said, of one of not the least of Rabelais’ creditors, that “he wanted only will, not strength, to write a noble poem,” and actually possessed learning, invention, and fancy. The first book of the Della Ragion Poetica ends thus with an author who must have seemed, to the usual eighteenth-century critic, nearly as sad and bad and mad as Rabelais and Shakespeare,[[717]] and in whom it is not now difficult to see much Rabelaisian and even some Shakespearian quality. The second deals with the Italian vernacular. Gravina duly admires Dante; but his elaborate apology for rhyme is noteworthy and amusing. It was the way of the eighteenth century to apologise for all sorts of things—from the Bible downwards—that were not in the least need of it. He is a little less shamefaced on the question of the vulgar tongue; and says excellent things about the De Vulgari itself—that “discourse so subtle and so true.” Indeed he conducts his whole discussion on the Vernacular, which is long, in accordance with the principles of the tractate, and gives to Dante in all nearly fifty pages, or more than half of the book, announcing his deliberate intention giudicare spediatamente of the rest from Boiardo and Ariosto downwards. The whole forms a very interesting survey of Italian poetry, though perhaps the most interesting of Gravina’s separate critical utterances is to be found, not in it but, in his short Latin Letter De Poesi to Maffei, in which he speaks of La Casa as qui alter potest haberi a Petrarca Lyricorum princeps. It is a bold saying, but not hard to justify, concerning the author of Errai gran tempo and O sonno, o de la queta.
The monumental work of Muratori in history and antiquities has overshadowed his accomplishment in literature; and some respectable books of reference hardly mention this; but it is in fact considerable. Muratori: his Della Perfetta Poesia. We have already had occasion to refer to the service that he did in editing the miscellaneous critical papers of Castelvetro, and he also did important work on the Italian Theatre; but his Della Perfetta Poesia Italiana[[718]] is a more original title-deed. There is no doubt that it had great influence: some have even thought that Luzán (v. infra, p. 548) was indebted to it for the impulse which enabled him finally to overcome the remnants of Romantic resistance in Spain, and to seat Neo-classicism at last triumphant in the country of Don Quixote. But it does not need this doubtful and reflected honour. The book is, given its lights and its time, a very good book. It accepts, without much or any demur, that notion of Good Taste which the seventeenth century excogitated and the eighteenth almost universally accepted, postponing inquiry whether it were the false Florimel or the true. But Muratori is both a historian and a philosopher; and he makes good use of both his qualifications. He contrasts, effectively enough, the supposed infallibility of Petrarch in Taste, the variety (without deserting this) of the sixteenth century, and the pessimo gusto of that which had just closed when he wrote. He will have it that Poetry is “a daughter and servant of Moral Philosophy”—in which case it must be sadly admitted that the mother is too often not justified of the daughter, and that the service is not seldom unprofitable. But he comes (perhaps inspired by Tasso) nearer to universal acceptance when he tells us that Poetic Beauty is “a new and marvellously delightful Truth,” and he is specially copious on the Fancy—so much so that one imagines it not impossible that Addison may have seen the treatise, more particularly as there is much about “True and False Wit” in the Second Book of the Perfetta Poesia. He is, in his Third Book, liberal on the question of Useful or Delightful—the latter will do very well if it is healthy delight[[719]]—and he discusses the defects of poets, and the various parts of poetry, with sense and discrimination. All this is of course still too much “in the air”; it makes the old mistake of taking for granted that poesis can be in some way strained off, or distilled from, poeta and poema. But this defect is to some extent repaired in the sequel, and the whole is a book far from despicable. The chief defect of it (a defect which extends also to Gravina) is the absence of comparative criticism—of the attempt, at least, to study literature as a whole.
The two historians, especially Quadrio, are freer from this defect, though by no means free from it; but they compensate for this advantage by a much weaker dose of really critical spirit. Crescimbeni. Crescimbeni is not an unimportant figure in the History of his own literature, to which he contributed, after writing in 1700 on La Bellezza del Volgar Poesia, a regular work[[720]] on the whole subject as far as poetry is concerned. Part, and the best part, of this is made up of a refashioning of the Bellezza. Its contents, which are not contemptible, though too like much that we have already gone through to require minute attention, are almost indicated by its title—an enumeration of poetical beauties, cautions against defects and mistakes in the application of them, and the usual analysis of Kinds. The rest of the book is a really valuable literary encyclopædia, with extracts, commentaries, lists, indices, &c., “all very capital” in their own way, but somewhat out of ours.
If Quadrio seems to invite more attention, it is partly because of his goodly bulk which fills the eye, and partly because of the oddity of some of his judgments, but partly also (in a third part) because he really intends to be critical, and because he extends his view far beyond Italian. Quadrio. The Della Storia e della Ragione d’Ogni Poesia[[721]] is a sufficiently ambitious attempt; and I do not think I know anything of the kind, by a single man, which is at any rate more voluminous. Seven big quartos, tightly packed, give Quadrio ample room and verge enough for proceedings alike methodical and far-ranging in their method; and his Distinzioni—the sub-divisions of his Books—leave few things unattempted. He is able to include both branches of Patrizzi’s old division, Disputata and Istoriale, and he extends the purview of the latter as widely as he can, if not as happily. The good faith, and the less than doubtful judgment, of some of his excursions will be sufficiently, and here most interestingly, demonstrated by some instances from his English notes. After devoting great space to the usual general questions of the nature, origin, position, &c., of poetry, he has a proportionately large distribution of Kinds, extending not merely into Acrostic-land but into Cento and Macaronic. He deals further with Poetic Art and Poetic Fury, and, in successive Distinzioni, with Plot and Manners, Erudition, Verse in general, Italian verse, &c. Then he attacks the actual contents of his subject, and devotes the whole of a volume of 800 pages to “Melic” or Lyric poetry. It cannot but be interesting to the reader to note who represented English Lyric poetry to the eyes of a learned and laborious Italian Jesuit in the second quarter of the eighteenth century; but it is pretty safe to say that not one of a hundred guessers would name the trio in a hundred guesses each. They are Gower, “Arthur Kelton,” and “Wicherley.”[[722]]
He proceeds through all the divisions in the same way. His notice of Shakespeare is obviously a recollection of the milder view of Voltaire, who was a friend of Quadrio’s. Dryden wrote a “tragedy” entitled King Arthur; Addison is treated at length, and with evident sympathy, as well as with at least more direct knowledge than that shown of “Il Benjanson” (sic). There is a whole chapter on Milton, in which Rapin and the Chevalier Ramsay[[723]] are quoted. The critic is aware of (let us hope he had not read) Glover’s Leonidas; and he is naturally copious on Pope, though his section on The Rape of the Lock shades itself off in the oddest manner into a Discourse on Hair, with references to Apuleius and the obliging Fotis, to Dion Chrysostom, and to Firenzuola. But Chaucer and Spenser are not (unless I have missed them) discussed by the citer of Arthur Kelton.
Of course there is no need to laugh at Quadrio; and if we do it must be done only in the most good-humoured and politest way possible. Doubtless we all make mistakes in dealing with foreign Literatures; and those of us who have dealt most with them have doubtless sinned most. But what is important to notice here about the Historian of All Poetry is—first, that he has shrewdly seen and manfully accepted, if not the necessity, at least the immense advantage, of comparative literary study; and secondly, that while emancipating himself to this extent, he is still under the domination of Kinds. If he had gone to A. Kelton himself, and had examined that worthy’s works—not to range him under Melic or Epic or anything quod exit in ’ic, but—to see whether he wrote good or bad poetry, he would at least have been in a fairer way of escape. But the mania for Kind- and Subject-division, instead of studying poetic treatment, can hardly be better illustrated than in Quadrio, whose schedule of narrative poetry, for instance, is as complicated and as meticulous as a Government return.
Yet the value of his attempt, and in a less degree of Crescimbeni’s, is very great: and it perhaps exceeds in general critical importance the results of the exercise of the superior talent of Muratori and Gravina. The emergence of literary history. These latter said more noteworthy things than the others: but they said them in a kind of criticism which, to speak our best for it, had already done all the good that was in it to do. Nay, their method of handling was likely to stand in the way of real critical advance or recovery, not to help it. Crescimbeni and Quadrio, especially the latter, recognised indeed, if they did not themselves quite understand, or lay down in so many words for the instruction of others, the great fact that before all things, and for some time at any rate instead of all things, it was time for criticism to “take stock”—that instead of theorising at large, and controlling the theory at best by a partial study of the classics and a very limited and arbitrary selection of the literature of the student’s own country, it was time for him to take the whole of that literature, to compare it with the whole of the classics, and, so far as he possibly could, with the whole of foreign modern literature as a third standard. That is practically what we have been doing for nearly two hundred years past, more or less—for more than a hundred years past, pretty steadily and with a will. It is not done yet; and it never can be done wholly, because every generation and every country adds, in its varying measure and degree, fresh supplies of matter which cannot be digested all at once, but which must sooner or later be added to the rest, and may affect conclusions drawn from that rest, as vitally as did the work of Dante or that of Shakespeare. But it has been done, and is being done, after a fashion in which, before the time of these two Italian historians, it had hardly been done by anybody.