mostradme, si [la Apostrofe] la Adversion
encierra tanta hermosúra.
One is too apt to forget, in censuring eighteenth-century flippancy and superficiality in regard to the past, that all over Europe, more or less, this kind of childish stuff was still actually taught.
Luzán is at least not childish, though he betrays the insufficient historical examination and the hasty generalising which beset the whole school. Luzán. He devotes the principal attention of his folio,[[727]] after generalities avowedly taken from Muratori, to Epic and Tragedy, and while using complimentary words to Lope and Calderon, indicates, without doubt or hesitation, that his heart is with Corneille and Racine. It is true that he is himself—as all these Eighteenth-century “classics” are without exception, save the mere school dogmatists or the obstinate reactionaries like La Harpe—inconsistent. Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly[[728]] goes so far as to say that there is hardly a proposition in his book which is not contradicted elsewhere in it. But that he at least meant to be a neo-classic, a Unitarian, a Nicolaitan, there can be no doubt, nor any that he met with no markworthy or effectual resistance.
The rest of the Spanish criticism of the eighteenth century has, save for special students of Spanish literature, and perhaps even for them, very little interest; The rest uninteresting. and it is noticeable that, from this point, even the accomplished and indefatigable historian of the subject[[729]] practically breaks away from Spain itself, and gives a history of æsthetic ideas, not as they arose, and developed, and changed, and fell there, but rather as they went through these phases in Europe at large. The better known names of Spanish authors of the time, such as Isla and Feyjóo, have a certain right to figure here, but their literary critical work is only a part, and not a very important or interesting part, of the extension of the Aufklärung, especially in the forms which it assumed in France, to the most bigoted and conservative (except its sister Portugal) of European countries. This process, though perhaps necessary, is not in any department, political, religious, or other, particularly grateful to study; for Spain lost venerable and fascinating illusions—if illusions they were—to gain a very shallow, dubious, and second-rate civilisation and enlightenment. And this was almost more the case in literature than anywhere else.
Feyjóo’s Teátro Crίtico, a series of Essays published between 1726 and 1738, and his Letters, which after a short interval he began in 1742, and continued at intervals for eighteen years more, are more philosophical and “moral,” in the French sense, than literary. The rest uninteresting. But the “Spanish Hotel de Rambouillet”—the “Academy of good taste” which met about the middle of the century at the house of the Countess de Lemos—included not only Luzán, but another littérateur of high rank, Luis José Velasquez, Marquis of Valdeflores, with Nasarre y Ferriz, and others. The whole school was rather anti-national, but Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, their contemporary, did great service to Spanish literature by publishing the Origins, to which we have been indebted above,[[730]] and some by compiling a Rhetoric, traditional enough, but not specially “Gallo”-Classic. The famous Father Isla not only attacked the remnants of extravagant style, which had sought refuge in the Spanish pulpit, in Fray Gerundio, the one Spanish book of this time, which became a European possession, but left unpublished other critical work, especially in his poem of Ciceron, much of which is satirically critical of literature. Isla was probably more of a patriot than of a critic in his well-known attempt to claim Gil Blas for Spain, not merely in suggestion but in direct original. Nor should we omit to mention with honour, as members of that invaluable class of restorers of ancient literature which arose in almost all countries in the latter half of the century, Sedano of the Spanish Parnassus, Sanchez of the Poesias Anteriores al Siglo XV, and Sarmiento, the first general Historian of Old Spanish Poetry. Their work was, if a somewhat slow, a sure and certain antidote to the Gallicism of Moratin (Luzán’s chief successor) and others of the later time.[[731]]
Despite some exceptions (which only prove the rule rather more than is usual), and despite the immense dead-lift which at one time they gave, or helped to give, to criticism, the Germans have never been very good critics. Rise at last of German Criticism. There has always been too much in them of the girl in the fable who jumped on the floor to hunt mice, instead of attending to the more important business and pleasure of the occasion. And though that dead-lift which has been referred to began extremely early in the eighteenth century, its history belongs to our next volume. It is, indeed, less easy to effect the separation which our plan demands here than anywhere else; for hardly had German vernacular criticism begun to exert itself once more, after its long inertia since Opitz, than the double current of abstract æstheticism, and of study of Romantic literature, began to appear. But it would be impossible to omit from a gallery or panorama of Neo-classicism such a typical specimen of the perruque as Gottsched, such an eminent example of the “man who looks over his shoulder” as Gellert. And though we must leave substantive dealings with Bodmer, Breitinger, and their fellows and followers to that early division of the next volume in which, with leave of Nemesis, Germany will be compensated for the little pride of place she has hitherto enjoyed, it will be very proper here at least to mention the singular and interesting process of novitiate by which the Germans vindicated their character as the good boys of technical education; and, by sheer hard study and omnivorous reading, put the national abilities into a condition to turn out a Lessing and a Goethe.
The means—sufficiently obvious, but not often resorted to save by those nations which have not “decayed through pride”—were those of abundant translation from the more forward vernaculars, as well as from the classics. Its school time. The German Sammlungen of the first half of the eighteenth century[[732]] are very interesting things. From French, from English, from the Latin writings of the previous century, they selected, and batched together, critical tractates which they thought might do them good, taking these to heart with Aristotle and Horace, with Boileau and Vida. That the assemblage had sometimes something of a “Groves of Blarney” character—that people like Camusat[[733]] find themselves jostling Pope and Addison among writers of Belles-Lettres, and Vossius and Casaubon among scholars, mattered not so very much. Manure, seed, patterns (to take various lines of metaphor) were what the German mind wanted; and it received them in plenty, and certainly not without good result.
There are some very good authorities[[734]] who do not see much difference between Gottsched and his adversaries of the Swiss school, Bodmer and Breitinger. Classicism at bay almost from the first: Gottsched. I am not able to agree with them. That there are characteristics in common nobody can deny,—that Gottsched is of the evening and Bodmer and Breitinger of the morning of the same day on the older arrangement, I do most sincerely think. And “the German Johnson”—so echt-deutsch and so little Johnsonian—is much too characteristic and agreeable a figure not to have some substantive place here. It is interesting no doubt—and it would give an excellent subject for one of the many not-to-be-written excursus of this history—that he, the analogue, to some extent, in Germany, of Johnson himself in England and of La Harpe in France, comes far earlier than these representatives of the neo-classicism which “makes an end” in countries far more accomplished in literature. But this is natural. The seventeenth century in Germany had but been one long fallow, producing nothing but not unfascinating weeds, like Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, or wildings like Grimmelshausen. But, as in other cases of fallow, the rains of heaven had descended, and the winds had blown, and the worms had done their work of breaking up, and the soil, if technically “foul,” was also fertile. Its production was necessarily mixed; but it was at any rate not subject to the desperate hook of the preceptist weeder, or to the traditional courses of the orthodox agriculturist. The German man of letters of 1700-1750 had the “Y” before him as few men of letters have had.
Gottsched took the classical branch of the letter unflinchingly, and quarrelled with others, like a good party man, as he realised that they were taking the Romantic. The Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst. His Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst[[735]] is frontispieced with a striking picture of Apollo, and the Muses, and Pegasus looking benignly at Bellerophon(?), whom he is just pitching off, and Mercury, probably flying, but in appearance rather tumbling, down the Holy Hill, with a copy of Horace in his hand, and a group of critics and poets and personified Kinds of poetry waiting to receive it in ecstatic attitudes at the bottom. It has three separate dedication-pages, in the largest print, to three fair ladies of the same family,—the high-born Countess and Lady, Lady Ernestine Wilhelmine, widowed Baroness von Plotho, born Reichsgräfinn von Manteufel, “my especially gracious Countess and Lady”; the high-born Countess Johanna Henrietta Constantia, born the same, “my especially gracious Countess”; and my ditto the high-born Countess Louisa Marianne, born the same,—not to mention a beautiful Ode, several Prefaces, an Introduction, and the full text, with translation in German Alexandrines, of the Ars Poetica itself. If writer and reader do not feel themselves safe under the convoy of all these charming spells and periapts, it is surely a pity.