The promise, however, of this group—the elder of whose members almost belong to the seventeenth century, while the youngest does not come below the middle of the eighteenth—was not fulfilled. Further decadence of Italian Criticism. Hardly a single person among the other (and chiefly later) Italian critics of the time has achieved, or, so far as I have been able to inform myself, has deserved to achieve, any great reputation. Tiraboschi indeed continued the merely historical part of Crescimbeni’s labour with an industry probably unparalleled in any other country.[country.] Metastasio. Metastasio, in his later days, occupied himself a good deal with criticism, and at an earlier time his Estratto dell' Arte Poetica d’Aristotile[[724]] would have deserved a good deal of attention from us. At his own date Metastasio is partly an eminent example of that halting between two opinions which has been so often mentioned, partly an inheritor of others’ thoughts. He is in hardly any sense a Romantic; yet he observes, against the Dacierian extension and hardening of Aristotle’s definition of poetry, that if this be so “it will be very difficult to find any writer who is not a poet”, and a little farther he has excogitated, or borrowed from the æestheticians, the all-important doctrine that the object of the sculptor is “not the illusion of the spectator but his own victory over the marble.” But these things are late, transitional, and, perhaps, as has been hinted, borrowed. The earlier critical work of the polygraphic, polyglottic, and polypragmatic Marquis Scipione Maffei has no distinction: and the very names[[725]] of Palesi, Salio, Denina, Zanotti are unknown to all but special students of Italian literature, and probably to not a few of these. We must come to quite modern times—to times indeed so near our own that the rule of silence as to living contemporaries may often come into operation—before we can find any heirs to the glory of Castelvetro and Patrizzi, if we can find them then.
The singularity which in so many ways besets Spanish literature shows itself, perhaps not least, in the fact that the establishment of the neo-classic creed in Spain does not take place till that creed is beginning to be, in one way or another, deserted or undermined in other countries. Neo-classicism triumphs in Spain. It must be admitted that there was some excuse for Don Ignacio de Luzán Claramunt de Suelves y Gurrea, whose Poética in 1737 argued Spain’s poetry away, far more actually than Cervantes had ever laughed away her chivalry. It has been usual to represent Luzán as a mere populariser of Boileau in Spain: but this is not just. Any one who has followed the course of reading which this book represents will see that it was the antiqua mater of Spanish criticism, Italy, which really started Luzán’s inquiries—that Muratori, and perhaps Gravina, rather than Boileau and the French schoolmen, were his masters. Indeed it seems that he had actually sketched, in Italian and in Italy (or at least Sicily), certain Ragionamenti sopra la Poesia, nearly a decade before his Spanish book appeared.
There was, it has been said, some excuse for him. The absurdities of Artiga. We have seen in the last Book that, though isolated expressions and aperçus of remarkable promise and acuteness appear in Spanish criticism of the seventeenth century, it was always impar sibi, and was constantly aiming at the establishment of a kind of illegitimate compromise between the national drama, which the critics would not give up, and the general theories of literature which they did not dare—perhaps did not wish—to impugn. In fact, this state of compromise, by yet another of the anomalies above referred to, anticipates the similar things which we see in England and in France, in Italy and in Germany, much later. At the same time, Spain had been a special victim, with Gongorism and Culteranism and Conceptism, of those contortions of the Romantic agony which, all over Europe, invited the tyranny of neo-classicism. Also its great creative period had closed for some considerable time. Lastly, there had survived in Spain a kind of childishly scholastic rhetoric, which the rest of Europe, with some slight exceptions in Italy, had long outgrown. Ticknor, the most amiable of Historians (when Protestantism is not in point), calls by the name of “a really ridiculous book” the Epitome de la Eloquencia Española of Don Francisco José Artiga or Artieda, to which he gives the date of 1725, but of which the British Museum copy bears a date more than thirty years earlier.[[726]] People are apt to be so unkind to technical Rhetorics and Poetics that I own I had a faint hope, before I actually read this book, of being able to remonstrate with the Ticknorian judgment: but no puede ser. The work is dedicated to Francesco Borgia, Duke of Gandia—the tragic elder associations of the name serving, to those who are susceptible to such things, as a sort of heightening of the farce. It consists of verse-dialogues, in octosyllabic quatrain, between a Hijo and a Padre by way of question and answer. Eloquence is angelic, celestial, ethereal, elementary, mixed, dumb, and several other things. Receipts and formulas are given for all sorts of compositions down to visiting cards: and the style of exposition may perhaps best be appreciated from an extract of two quatrains—
P. La Imágen o Icon se haze,
bosquejando una pintúra
de algúnas cosas con otras
con propriedád y hermosúra.
And a little later the Hijo says—
H. En entrambos ejempláres
resplandecen las figúras: