A considerable time—more than a quarter of a century—had elapsed between Politian and Vida; but from the appearance of the latter’s book to the end of the century not more than three years on the average[[42]] passed without the appearance of a critical treatise of some importance. The main stream started. Every now and then a short lull would occur; but this was always made up by a greater crowd of writers after the interval. Such “rallies” of criticism (which occurred particularly during the fourth decade[[43]] of the century, about its very centre,[[44]] throughout the seventh,[[45]] eighth,[[46]] and ninth[[47]] decades, and just at the end[[48]]) were no doubt to some extent determined by the academic habits of the Italians, and the readiness with which members of the same academy, or different academies, took up the cudgels against each other. The individual exercises took various forms. A very large part of the work consists of commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics; another, closely connected, of set “Arts Poetic,” more ostensibly original; some deal with vulgar and some with “regular” poetry, while the concrete and comparative method is by no means neglected, though the abstract and theoretic is on the whole preferred. To attempt classification by kind would be a sacrifice of real to apparent method; and to trace the development of the same ideas in different writers would lead to inextricable confusion and criss-cross reference. We shall probably find it best to follow the rule which has been observed with rare exceptions throughout this History—that of giving the gist of particular books and the opinions of particular authors together, and leaving bird’s-eye views to the Interchapters.
Only two years after the appearance of Vida’s poem appeared the next critical Italian book of importance, the first instalment of Trissino’s Poetica. Trissino. The first instalment—for a singular interval took place between the beginning and the completion of this work. The first four parts were, as has just been said, published in 1529, when the main stream of Italian criticism had hardly begun to flow; the two last not till 1563, two years after the publication of Scaliger’s great work, and after a full generation (in the ordinary count) of active discussion of the matters.[[49]] Such conditions cannot fail to affect the homogeneity of a book. But still Trissino put it forth as one book in different parts, not, as he might very well have done, and as others actually did, as two books; and we are therefore entitled, and indeed bound, with the caution just given, to treat it as a whole. The handsome quartos,[[50]] well printed and beautifully frontispieced and vignetted, of the standard edition of Trissino’s Opere, are perhaps, taking them together, rather an ornament to the shelf than a plentiful provision of furniture for the mind. The disadvantages of versi sciolti have not often been shown more conspicuously than in the Italia Liberata, and the Sofonisba has little but its earliness and regularity to plead as a set-off to the general shortcomings of the modern classical Drama. The better repute of Italian comedy would hardly have arisen from such pieces as I Simillimi; and the Rime are most ordinary things. In our own division he is of some historical account; for it is impossible not to be grateful to the first publisher of the De Vulgari Eloquio, and that praise of earliness, which he has earned in more than one respect, must be extended to the first four parts of the Poetica. He boasts justly enough that nobody, save Dante and Antonio da Tempo, was before him, and that both of these had written in Latin.
Trissino does not, in his first instalment, busy himself with those abstract discussions which were soon to furnish the staple of Italian criticism. Division of his Poetic. He adopts Aristotle’s “Imitation” briefly without cavil or qualification; and then passes, in his First Part or “Division,” to the question of choosing your language, in which he generally follows Dante, but with an adaptation to the time. It is not with him a question of making an “Illustrious Vulgar Tongue,” an “Italian,” but of calling by that name one already adopted. In his further remarks on Diction he sometimes borrows, and often expands or supplements, the very words of Dante at first, and then passes to elaborate discussion, with examples, of the qualities of speech—Clearness, Grandeur, Beauty, Swiftness. Next he deals with what he calls the costume—character, ethos, suiting of style to person—with truth, artifice, and what he calls the “fashions”—that is to say, the alterations of quantity, &c., by dwelling, slurring, syncope, and the like. The arrangement of this First Division is not very logical; but, as we have seen, cross-division has been the curse of rhetorical-formal discussion of the kind from a very early period to the present day. The Second Division deals with pure prosody, the division of feet, shortening (rimozione), as in ciel for cielo, elision, cæsura, &c.; the Third with arrangement of verses and stanzas; the Fourth with the complete forms of Sonnet, Ballata, and Canzone, the sub-varieties of which were detailed with great care and plentiful examples.
Here what might more properly be called the First Part, consisting of these four divisions, ends; the long subsequent Second Part (made up of the Fifth and Sixth Divisions) has a separate Preface-dedication referring to the gap. These parts are not, like the others, divided into sections with headings; and, doubtless on the pattern if not of any one particular treatise, of the spirit of many which had gone between, they deal with general questions. The Imitation theory is handled at some length, and with citation of Plato as well as of Aristotle; the kinds of poetry are treated on a more general standard, and not with mere reference to the rules of constructing each. The larger part of the Fifth Division is given entirely to Tragedy: the Sixth begins with that Heroic Poem which was so much on the mind of the country and the century. But it ends chiefly on Figures—the formal heart of Trissino, long-travelled as it has been, fondly turning to its old loves at the last.
The contents of the treatise or treatises, especially if we take them with Trissino’s attempts to introduce the Greek Omega and the Greek Epsilon into Italian spelling, his grammatical “Doubts,” and his later “Introduction to Grammar,” his dialogue Il Castellano, and so forth,[[51]] will show his standpoint with sufficient clearness. His critical value. It is almost purely formal in the minor, not to say the minim, kinds of form. He is indeed credited by some with a position of importance, in the history of the Unities. He is, they say, the first to refer to the observance of the Unity of Time as a distinction from “ignorant poets,”[[52]] giving therewith a disparaging glance at mediæval drama.[[53]] But this overlooks the fact that he is simply repeating what Aristotle says, with an addition much more likely[[54]] to refer to non-Humanist contemporaries than to the almost forgotten “mystery.” His theory of the Heroic Poem, like his practice in the Italia Liberata, is slavishly Aristotelian. The chief evidence of real development that I can find is in his treatment of Comedy, where the extremely rapid and contemptuous dismissal of the Master called imperatively for some supplement, considering the popularity of the kind in the writer’s own time and country. Possibly reinforcing Aristotle here with Cicero, and certainly using the famous Suave mari magno of Lucretius, he succeeds in putting together a theory of the ludicrous to which, or to some subsequent developments of it in Italy, Hobbes’s “passion of sudden glory” has been[[55]] not unjustly traced. The “sudden” seems indeed to be directly due to Maggi, a critic who will be presently mentioned with other commentators on the Poetics. And Maggi had published long before Trissino’s later Divisions appeared, though, it may be, not before they were written.[[56]]
The growth during the interval had been of three kinds, sometimes blended, sometimes kept apart. Editors, &c., of the Poetics. The first kind consisted of translations, editions, and commentaries of and on the Poetics; the second, of abstract discussions of Poetry; the third, of more or less formal “Arts” not very different from Trissino’s own. The first class produced later, in the work of Castelvetro, a contribution of almost the first importance to the History and to the Art of Criticism; and it could not but exercise a powerful influence. It belongs, however, in all but its most prominent examples (such as that just referred to, which will be fully discussed in the next chapter), rather to monographers on Aristotle than to general historians of Criticism, inasmuch as it is mainly parasitic. Pazzi. Before any book of original critical importance later than Trissino’s had been issued, in 1536,[[57]] Alessandro de’ Pazzi published a Latin translation of the Poetics, which for some time held the position of standard, and a dozen years later came three important works on the book—Robortello’s edition of 1548, Segni’s Italian translation of 1549, and Maggi’s edition of 1550—all showing the attention and interest which the subject was exciting, while, still before the later “Divisions” of Trissino appeared, Vettori in 1560 added his edition, of greater importance than any earlier one. Long before this the book had become a regular subject of lectures. Of these writers Robortello, and still more Vettori (“Victorius”), were of the greatest service to the text; Maggi, who was assisted by Lombardi, to the discussion of the matter.[[58]]
In the critical handling of these editors and commentators we find, as we should expect, much of the old rhetorical trifling. Robortello, Segni, Maggi, Vettori. For all their scorn, expressed or implied, of the Middle Ages, they repeat the distinctions of poetica, poesis, poeta, and poema[[59]] as docilely as Martianus, or a student of Martianus, could have done a thousand or five hundred years before, and they hand it on too as a sort of charmed catchword to Scaliger[[60]] and Jonson.[[61]] But brought face to face as they are with the always weighty, though by no means always transparently clear, doctrines of Aristotle, and self-charged with the duty of explaining and commenting them, they cannot, if they would, escape the necessity of grappling with the more abstract and less merely technological questions. Robortello,[[62]] like Maggi, though less elaborately, has a theory of the ludicrous. Both, and others, necessarily grapple with that crux of the katharsis which has not yet ceased to be crucial. Both, with Segni, discuss the Unity of Time and differ about it; though none of the three has yet discovered (as indeed it is not discoverable in Aristotle or Aristotle’s literary documents) the yet more malignant Unity of Place. Vettori would extend the cramp in time (not of course with the twenty-four hours’ limit) from tragedy to epic. Most of them have arrived at that besotment as to “verisimilitude” which is responsible for the worst parts of the Neo-Classic theory, and which, in the pleasant irony common to all entanglements with Duessas of the kind, makes the unfortunate lovers guilty of the wildest excesses of artificial improbability. And in all, whether they project their reflections on their text into more general forms or not, we can see the gradual crystallising of a theory of poetry, heroic, or dramatic, or general.
Nor was such theory left without direct and independent exposition during the period which we are considering. Theorists: Daniello. The first author of one is generally taken to be Daniello, whose Poetica appeared in 1536; and I have not discovered any earlier claimant. I do not quite understand how Mr Spingarn has arrived at the conclusion that “in Daniello’s theory of tragedy there is no single Aristotelian element,” especially as he himself elsewhere acknowledges the close—almost verbal—adherence of this early writer to the Stagirite. But it is probably true that Daniello was thinking more of the Platonic objections and of following out the Boccaccian defence, than of merely treading in the footprints of Aristotle. He is the first, since Boccaccio himself, to undertake that generous, if rather wide and vague as well as superfluous, “defence of poesy” which many Italians repeated after him, and which was repeated after them by our Elizabethans, notably by Sir Philip Sidney.
As his little book is somewhat rare, and as it has such good claims to be among the very earliest vernacular disputations of a general character on poetry in Italy, if not also in Europe, it may be well to give some account of it. My copy has no title-page, but dates itself by a colophon on the recto of the errata-leaf at the end, with a veto-privilege, by concession of the Pope, the seignory of Venice, and all the other princes and lords of Italy, advertised by Giovan Antonio di Nicolini da Sabio, Venice, 1536. It fills 136 small pages of italic type, and is in dialogue form, rather rhetorically but not inelegantly written, and dedicated by Bernardo Daniello of Lucca to Andrea Cornelio, Bishop-Elect of Brescia. Daniello does refer to Aristotle, and borrows (not perhaps quite intelligently) from him; but his chief sources are the Latins, and he sets or resets, with no small interest for us, that note of apology for the Poets against Plato which was to dominate Italian criticism, and after exercising some, but less, effect on French, to be strenuously echoed in England. There are some rather striking things in Daniello. He is sound enough on the mission of the poet as being to delight (though he is to teach too) and also to persuade—the ancient union of Poetics and limited Rhetoric evidently working in him. On the relations of poetry and philosophy he might be echoing Maximus Tyrius and Boccaccio, and very likely is thinking of the latter. But he strikes a certain cold into us by remarking that Dante (whom he nevertheless admires very much) was perhaps greater and more perfect as a philosopher than as a poet; and it does not seem likely that he was aware of the far-reaching import of his own words when he lays it down (p. 26) that Invention, Disposition, and Elocution being the three important things, the poet is not, as some think, limited to any special matter. If he had meant this, of course he would have come to one of those arcana of criticism which are even yet revealed, as matter of serene conviction, to very few critics. But he pretty certainly did not fully understand his own assertion; and indeed slurs it off immediately afterwards. After taking some examples from Dante and more from Petrarch, Daniello adopts (again prophetically) the doctrine that the Poet must practically know all arts and sciences, in order that he may properly deal with his universal subject. He is specially to study what is called in Latin Decorum and in Italian Convenevolezza. Tragedy and Comedy are to be rigidly distinguished. And so this curious First Blast of the Trumpet of sixteenth-century vernacular criticism is emphatic against the confusion which was to bring about the mightiest glories of sixteenth-century literature. A large part of the small treatise is taken up with examples, in the old rhetorical manner of qualities, “colours,” figures, &c. The whole of the latter part of the First Book consists of these, as does almost the whole of the Second, with an extension into verbal criticism of the passages cited as illustrating kinds, technical terms, and the like. Indeed the general considerations are chiefly to be found in the first forty or fifty pages; and it is really remarkable how much there is in this short space which practically anticipates in summary the ideas of most of the much more voluminous writers who follow.[[63]]
Fracastoro, physician, logician, and not ungraceful poet of the graceless subject of Syphilis, deals with both Plato and Aristotle in his dialogue Naugerius, and discourses deeply on the doctrine of Imitation, the Theory of Beauty, the Aristotelian conception of the poet as more universal and philosophical than the historian, and the Platonic objection to the intervals between poetry and truth. Fracastoro. This dialogue,[[64]] however (the full title is Naugerius sive de Poetica, its chief interlocutor being Andrea Navagero, the best follower of Catullus in Renaissance Latin[[65]]), tells a certain tale by its coupling with another, Turrius sive de Intellectione. It is wholly philosophical in intent and drift: it is perhaps the very “farthest”—comparatively early (1555) as is its date—of those Italian excursions, in the direction of making Criticism an almost wholly abstract and a priori subject, which balance the unblushing “Convey—do nothing but convey,” of Vida and his followers. One of its very earliest axioms (p. 324 ed. cit. infra) is that “qui recte dicere de hac re velit, prius sciat necesse est, quænam poetæ natura est, quidque ipsa poetica, tum et quis philosophi genius,” &c. It must be admitted that Fracastoro is among the very ablest and most thoroughgoing explorers of these altitudes. No one has more clearly grasped, or put more forcibly, than he has that compromise between Plato and Aristotle which has been and will be mentioned so often as characteristic of the Italian thinkers in this kind. Indeed, the fifty pages of his Dialogue are almost a locus classicus for the first drawing up of the creed which converted Sidney, and to which Milton, indocile to creeds as he was, gave scarcely grudging allegiance. It is full, too, of interest in deliverances on minor points—the difference between the orator and the rhetor (p. 343), the shaping of a particular kind of “orator” into a poet, his universality and his usefulness, the limits of his permitted fiction and the character of his charm. But Fracastoro is wholly in these generals: it is much if he permits himself a rare illustration from an actual poet.