This book, as dates given and to be given show, was published subsequently to the appearance of Scaliger’s Poetic, and may have been to some extent influenced by it; but I do not think that Minturno, who mentions Trissino and Bembo and Tolomei, ever refers to it, and he does not give one the idea of a man who would conceal debts. The Arte Poetica. In fact, his work upon the same subject had been completed earlier. In this he has necessarily to go over some of the same ground; but, as noted above, he repeats very little. He starts with a general definition of poetry as an imitation of various manners and persons in various modes, either with words or with harmonies or with “times” separately, or with all these things together, or with part of them. Other ternaries follow, as matter, instrument, and mode; manners, affections, and deeds; suprahuman, human, and infrahuman; personages; words, music, and “times”; epic, scenic, and melic; prose, verse, and mixed narrative. These distinctions are put forth in an orderly manner, but succinctly and without the discussion which is a feature of the general parts of the De Poeta, Minturno evidently thinking that he has sufficiently cleared the ground in that work. After some further exposition of forms, &c., the handling is more specially directed to Epic (i.e., narrative generally), and its parts and conditions are expounded, still with a certain swiftness, but at greater length than before. And once more the treatment concentrates itself—this time upon Romance. The origin of the name and thing is lightly touched, and then the great question is broached,[[83]] “Is Romance poetry?” Minturno will not refuse it the name; but he cannot admit that it is the same kind of poetry as that of which Aristotle and Horace have spoken. The contrarieties of Romance and Heroic poetry are then carefully examined; and while much praise is given to Ariosto, some fault is found with him, and the mantle of the Odyssey is especially refused him. In fact, Minturno holds generally that the Romance is a defective form of poetry, ennobled by the excellence of some of its writers—a sort of middle position which is very noteworthy. But he hardens his heart against the irresistible historical and inductive argument which the defenders of the Romance had already discovered, and will have it that the laws of poetry are antecedent to poetic production (p. [32]). And for his main style of narrative poetry he returns to Epic or “Heroic” proper, and discusses it on the old lines of Plot, Character, Manners, Passions or Affections, &c., always with modern examples from the great Italian poets. He also makes the very important, but very disastrous, suggestion that the Christian religion provides all the necessary “machinery” of Heroic,—a suggestion which was elaborately followed out by Tasso and by Milton and by many a lesser man, and which Dryden had thought of following, though he luckily did not.[[84]]
The Second Book takes up Drama in the same manner, but—as was always made legitimate by the parasitic character of at least Italian Tragedy—with much more reference to ancient and less to modern writers. The Third Book deals with Lyric, the same inclusion of Satire which we have noticed in the De Poeta being made; and the Fourth with Poetic Diction, Prosody, &c., still on the lines of the earlier treatise, but with entire adaptation to the Italian subject. The latter books, as is natural, are much more meticulous in their arrangement, descending, with complete propriety, to the minutest details of rhyme and metre, as well as, where necessary, of grammar. But Minturno never loses an opportunity of ascending to the higher and more general considerations—the nature of harmony, the origin and quality of rhyme, &c., the characters of kinds, and even, to some extent, of authors. It is characteristic of him to give an elaborate discussion of the Italian alphabet letter by letter from the poetical point of view, and to strike off from this to a consideration of the relations of Italian, Latin, and foreign modern languages, the general methods of elevating style, and the question whether there ought to be completely separate diction for poetry and prose.
It is the presence of this contrast, or combination, in him which, as much as anything else, has determined more attention in this place to Minturno than to some other authors before noticed. Their value. In combination of thoroughness and range he seems to me to hold a position both high and rather solitary. He has not quite the elaborate system of Scaliger, but then he is much less one-eyed; he is less original—has less diable au corps—than Castelvetro, but he is far less eccentric and incalculable. His unfeigned belief in the noble and general theories of poetry and the poet is set off by his sedulous attention to particulars, as his attention to particulars is by his escapes of relief into the region of generalisation, and by his all-important addition of “transport” to “teach” and “delight.” He has not reached—he has in fact declined—the historical antinomianism of Patrizzi (v. next chap.); but that was inevitable, since this view was in part a reaction from the movement which he represented, in part a development of theories contemporary with himself. And his attitude in regard to the Romanzi is a significant sign of the turn of the tide. Earlier, and in the neo-classics quand même later, the fact that a thing differs in kind from the accepted forms of poetry is proof that it is not poetry at all. Minturno cannot go this length. It is poetry inferior in kind, he still insists; but the excellence of those who have adopted it saves it, no matter to what extent. The concession is fatal. If Balbus builds a wall contrary to the laws of nature and architecture, it will not be an inferior wall; it will tumble down, and not be a wall at all. If he works a sum on the principle that two and two make five, his answer will be hopelessly wrong. But if the wall stands, if the sum comes right, the laws, the principles, cannot be wrong, though they may be different from others. The infallible and exclusive Kind-rules of the ancients are doomed to be swept away through the little gap in the dam that Minturno has opened.
The Discorsi[[85]] of Giraldi Cinthio—famous author of Novelle, and now much less famous, but perhaps not much less remarkable, producer of the chief Italian horror-tragedy, the Orbecche—supply a very interesting supplement-contrast to Minturno, whose earlier work they preceded by but a few years, and whom they provided with a theory of Romance to protest against. Giraldi Cinthio’s Discorsi. The exact date of the most interesting of them, and the question of property or plagiarism in their contents, have been the subject of one of those tedious “quarrels of authors” which are thickening upon us, but which we shall avoid as far as possible. On Romance. Cinthio and a certain pupil of his, Giovanbattista Pigna, published in the same year (1554) books on the “Romances”—i.e., poems like Ariosto’s. Authorities decide in favour of the novelist, who asserts that his book was written in 1549, while each asserted that he had furnished the other with ideas; but it really does not matter. The point is, that on one of the two, and very probably on both, there had dawned the critical truth, which nobody had seen earlier, and on which Minturno himself would have pulled down “the blanket of the dark” once more if he could. Cinthio, it seems, first struck out the true line, and Pigna later developed it in still greater detail. Aristotle did not know Romance, and therefore his rules do not and cannot apply to it; while Italian literature generally is so different in circumstances from Greek that it must follow its own laws. Then Cinthio takes Ariosto and Boiardo, as Aristotle himself had taken the poets that were before him, and formulates laws from them. He does not ostracise the single-action and single-hero poem, the Aristotelian epic. But he adds the many-actioned and many-heroed poem like Ariosto’s, and the chronicle-poem of successive actions by one party, of which there are examples from Statius downward (and of which, we may add, the Odyssey itself is really an example). For these two latter, which he rightly regards as both Romantic, he and Pigna (who is more specially Ariostian) gave rules accordingly, and Cinthio even illustrated his by a poem on Hercules. Both, but especially Pigna, despite their revolutionary tendencies in certain ways, cling to the ethical point of view, and maintain, perhaps a little hardily, that the modern romantic writers actually surpass the ancients in this respect.
In their main contention Cinthio and Pigna were no doubt right, and much in advance of their time. On Drama. The reply of Minturno that Poetry may adapt itself to the times, but cannot depart from its own fundamental laws, is clearly a petitio principii. In his less important Discorso on the Drama Cinthio is hardly at all rebel to Aristotle—indeed it is very important to observe that even in the Romance Essay he has none of the partisan and somewhat illiberal anti-Peripateticism which we find later in Bruno and others. There he goes on the solid ground that Aristotle did not know the Kind for which he does not account—that he was no more blamable than, as we may say, supposing that he had given a definition of mammalia which excluded the kangaroo. In the Drama Cinthio had not been brought face to face with any similarly new facts. Italian tragedy, his own included, was scrupulously Senecan, if not quite scrupulously Aristotelian, in general lines. Italian comedy followed Plautus and Terence only too closely; and though Cinthio’s lines of criticism (strengthened by the Ciceronian-Donatist theory of the speculum vitæ) led him, like Il Lasca and others, to insist on the different circumstances of Italian literature here also, they necessitated no new lawmaking as in the case of the Romanzi.
Both Discorsi are full of ingenious aperçus, sometimes followed out—sometimes not. Some points in both. For instance, when Cinthio (i. 24) cites his three examples of writers who have treated their heroes from childhood upwards contrary to the Aristotelian principles, he instances Xenophon in the Cyropædia as well as Statius and Silius Italicus. The instance does not in his expressed remarks, but it might very well in his own or others’ thoughts, lead to the consideration that whether verse is or is not essential to poetry, it is certainly not essential to Romance—with all the momentous and far-reaching consequences of that discovery. Again he seems (i. 82) to have appreciated, with a taste and sense rare in his age, the impropriety of mixing up Christian and Pagan mythology. And the same taste and sense appear, as a rule, in the minuter remarks (p. 100 sq.) on verse and phrase, and even on those minutest points not merely of verbal but of literal criticism which the Italians, more sensible than some modern critics, never despised, though they may sometimes have gone to the other extreme. In fact, the last half, and rather more, of the Discorso is not so much concerned with the Romances as with poetic diction and arrangement in general, or even with these matters as concerns literature both in prose and in verse.
The dramatic Discorso, or rather Discorsi (for we may throw in a third piece on Satiric Composition), is much shorter than that on the Romances, being necessarily less controversial, and therefore, as has been said, less original. But Cinthio’s independence of mind does not desert him even here. He is said to have been the first Italian who dared, in the Orbecche before mentioned, to disregard the Senecan practice[[86]] (so tedious in all modern imitations of it, and so crushingly exhibited in our own earliest tragic attempts) of beginning with an entire scene, or even act, of monologue. But, as often happens, his licences in some directions invite condonation by a tighter drawing of the reins elsewhere. He is credited (or debited) with the first reference in modern literature to the Unity of Time: and though it is well always to accept these assertions of priority with a certain suspension of judgment, it may be so. It is at any rate certain that he does out-Aristotle Aristotle in regard to this Unity, upon which, as is well known, the Stagirite lays very little stress. But he makes some amends by relaxing the proscription of the happy ending, so long as the proper purging effects of pity and terror are achieved. He also to some extent relaxes the extremest stringency of the old rule about trucidations coram populo. There may be death on the stage: but generally the bienséances of domestic life should be preserved there. On one point, in which Cinthio has had assigned to him the position of anti-Aristotelian origin, I venture to differ as to the interpretation of the Poetics themselves, not merely from Mr Spingarn but from Professor Butcher.[[87]] The later Neo-Classics, and especially the French, may have made rank too absolute a qualification of the tragic Hero. But I must say that I think they had their justification from Aristotle himself, and that Cinthio is at worst but dotting the i's of the Stagirite as to σπουδαῖοι and χρηστοί. His extreme admiration of the choruses of Seneca (in justification whereof he cites Erasmus) is not wholly unwarranted. Few modern readers, unfortunately, know the stately beauty of these artful odes: though of course his preference (p. 81) of them to “all the Greeks” is wrong, and was probably occasioned by the very small attention which most Renaissance writers paid to Æschylus. The elaborate distinctions which he, like others, seeks to draw between Tragedy and Comedy from artificial points of view are to some extent justified by the very absence of such distinctions in Aristotle. They thought it their duty to supply what they did not find.
The Discourse, or rather Letter (for it bears both titles, and in scale and character rather deserves the latter name) on Satire is confessedly supplementary to the other Discorsi, and may be at least connected with the fact that the indefatigable author had himself attempted a satiric piece, Egle. On Satire. He lays stress on the special connection of the Satire with the cult of Bacchus, takes into consideration the poetical as well as the scenic form, mentions the mixed or Varronian variety, and even extends his view to the Bucolic or Pastoral proper. But there are only some five-and-twenty pages, and the thing seems to have been really composed at “request of friends.”
From a critic who did so much it would be somewhat unreasonable to demand more. In fact, though Cinthio did not go so far along the high historic path of truth as did Patrizzi thirty years later, he set on that path a firm foot. For the moment, and in Italy, the romanzi were the true battle-ground; just as in England, for instance, that battle-ground was to be found a little later in the drama. At a period so early as this, and so close to the actual revolution of the Renaissance, it could hardly be expected that any one should reach the vantage-ground of a comprehensive survey of all literature, so as to deduce from it the positive and enfranchising, and not even from it the negative and disfranchising, laws of poetry. Not only had the vernaculars, with the exception of Italian itself, hardly furnished, at the time when Cinthio wrote, any modern literature fit to rank with the ancient—not only was it far too late, or far too early, to expect any one to give mediæval literature a fair chance with both—but men were still actually disputing whether the vernaculars had a right to exist. They were, like his namesake and clansman, to whom we come next, hinting surprise that any man of genius and culture should employ these vernaculars when he might write Latin, or, like one of his antagonists, Celio Calcagnini, aspiring to the disuse of vernacular for literary purposes altogether. In an atmosphere still so far from clear, with such heats and mists about, it is no small credit to Cinthio that, whether moved by mere parochial patriotism or by the secret feeling that sua res as a novelist was at question, or by anything else, he heard and caught at the dominant of the tune of criticism proper.
Pigna’s I Romanzi,[[88]] whatever we may think of the quarrel between him and Cinthio, is a book not to be mentioned without considerable respect, or dismissed with mention so merely incidental as that given to it above. Pigna. It is mainly, but not solely, a defence of Ariosto, and has not a few merits,—a just conception of the essentially Romantic nature of the Odyssey, a very careful and in the main sensible discussion of Prosody, and a widish comparison of instances. The main defect of it is the besetting sin of the whole three centuries with which this volume deals—the Obsession of the Kind. Instead of being satisfied with the demonstration (which he and Cinthio had reached) that Romance is not Epic, and is not bound by Epic laws, Pigna torments himself to show that Romance is Epic in this particular, not-Epic in that, and is alternately subject to and free from bondage: while some of his detailed investigations may raise smile, or sigh, or shrug, according to mood or temperament. Thus for instance he inquires (after a fashion which we shall find echoed in Ronsard) into the character of the objects—Lance, Horn, Ring—with which fatura (fairy agency) is usually associated, till we feel inclined to say, “O learned and excellent signor, the poet may put fatura in a warming-pan—if he pleases, and can do it poeticamente!” But the book is, on the whole, a good book: and Pigna deserves to rank with Cinthio and Patrizzi as one of the Three who, alone in this first modern stage, saw, if but afar-off and by glimpses, the Promised Land from which the ship of criticism was to be once more driven by adverse winds for centuries to come.