No analysis of a book of such a size, so necessarily parasitic or satellitic on another in general run, and yet branching and winding with such a self-willed originality of its own, is possible. On Dramatic conditions. One might easily write a folio on Castelvetro’s quarto. Here we can only, as in most other cases now, except those of books or parts of books at once epoch-making in character and moderate in bulk, give an idea of the author’s most important views on general and particular points. It was necessary, since Castelvetro is revolving round Aristotle, that the greater part of his treatise should deal with the drama: and perhaps nowhere is that originality which has been praised more visible than here, whether it lead him wrong or right. He has undoubtedly made a step, from the mathematical towards the æsthetic view of literature, in conditioning, as he does, his view of the Drama by a consideration of the stage. To literary a-priorists this is of course horrible; to those who take the facts of literature, as they take the facts of life, it is a welcome and reconciling discovery. The conditions of the Greek stage were admittedly such as can never be naturally reproduced, and therefore, however great and perfect the Greek Tragedy may be in its own way, it cannot usurp the position of “best in all ways”; and can still less pretend to dictate to other kinds that they shall not be good at all in ways different from its own.

If the details of Castelvetro’s theory do not always correspond in excellence to the sense and novelty of the general view, this is because he adulterates his notion of stage requirements with that unlucky “verisimilitude” misunderstood, which is the curse of all the neo-classic critics, and which comes from neglect of the Aristotelian preference of the probable-impossible to the improbable-possible. On the Three Unities. The huge Mysteries of the Middle Ages, which ranged from Heaven to Hell, which took weeks to act, and covered millennia in their action, did at least this good to the English and some other theatres—that they familiarised the mind with the neglect of this verisimilitude. But Castelvetro would have none of such neglect. His play must be adjusted, not merely in Action, but in Space and Time, as nearly as possible to the actual capacity of the stage, the actual duration of the performance.[[111]] And so the Fatal Three, the Weird Sisters of dramatic criticism, the vampires that sucked the blood out of nearly all European tragedy, save in England and Spain, for three centuries, make their appearance. They “enter the critical literature of Europe,” as Mr Spingarn has very truly laid it down,[[112]] “from the time of Castelvetro.”

But to balance this enslaving of the Drama (in which he far exceeds Aristotle), Castelvetro frees the Epic from Aristotelian restrictions in an almost equally important manner. On the freedom of Epic. From his references in the Opere Varie to Cinthio and Pigna, it would appear that he claimed, if not priority, an even portion with them in the consideration of the subject of Epic Poetry. And though not agreeing with them altogether, he certainly agrees with them in enlarging the domains of the Epic. Poetry, he says in effect,[[113]] may do anything that History can do; and, like the latter, it may deal, not only with one action of one man, but with his life-actions, or with many actions of many men.

With Castelvetro, however,—and it is probably the cause why pedants like Dacier undervalue him,—both the character of his compositions, and probably also the character of his mind, draw him much more to independent, though by no means always or often isolated, critical aperçus and judgments, than to theoretical discourses, with or without illustration. His eccentric acuteness. To put it differently, while there is usually a theory at the back of his appreciations, the appreciation generally stands in front of the theory. But however this may be, that quality of “unexpectedness,” in which some æsthetic theorists have found such a charm, belongs to him as it does to few critics. One might, for instance, give half-a-dozen guesses to a tolerably ingenious person without his hitting on Castelvetro’s objection to the story of Ricciardetto and Fiordispina in the Orlando.[[114]] That objection is not moral: not on the ground of what is ordinarily called decorum: not on that of digression, on that of improbability generally, on any other that is likely to occur. It is, if you please, that as Fiordispina was a Mahometan, and Ricciardetto a Christian, and as Christians and Mahometans do not believe in the same kind of Fauns and Fairies, as, further, Fauns do not eat ladies or goddesses, whether alive or dead, Ricciardetto’s explanation of his alleged transformation of sex is not credible. In a modern writer this would look like an absolute absence of humour, or like a clumsy attempt at it; and I am not prepared to say that humour was a strong point with these Italian critics as a rule. But Castelvetro strikes me as being by no means exceptionally unprovided with it: and such a glaring lapse as this is probably due to the intense seriousness with which these critical questions, new as they were, presented themselves to him and to his class.

They get, as was once said, “into logical coaches”; and are perfectly content to be driven over no matter what minor precipices, and into no matter what sloughs of despond, so long as they are not actually thrown out. Yet Castelvetro at least is never dull. At one time[[115]] he compares the “somnolent indecorum,” the sconvenevolezza sonnachiosa, of Homer to the practice of German innkeepers (whether observed by himself in his exile, or taken from Erasmus, one cannot say) in putting the worst wines and viands on the table first, and the best later. Elsewhere[[116]] he gives a very curious reason against that other sconvenevolezza (this sonorous word is a great favourite with him) which he too saw in the use of prose for tragedy—namely, that in reciting verse the speaker naturally raises his voice, and so makes it more audible to the audience. He has been blamed for adopting the notion of rank being necessary to tragic characters, but on this see ante (p. [61]).

His irreverent independence in regard to Virgil is noticeable in a critic of his time, and of course especially so if one comes Examples: Homer’s nodding, prose in tragedy, Virgil, minor poetry. to him straight from Scaliger. It would not be fair to represent him as a “Virgiliomastix,” but his finer critical sense enables him to perceive the superiority of Homer, in respect of whom he goes so far[[117]] as to say that Virgil “is not a poet.” But this—per se, of course, excessive—had been provoked by the extravagance of Maronolatry from Vida downwards: and Castelvetro does not scruple to praise the Mantuan for his grasp, his variety of phrase, and other good things. He has an extremely sensible passage—not novel to us, but by no means a truism to his contemporaries or to a good many poets still—on what he who publishes miscellaneous poetry has to expect. By the publication, says this other Messer Lodovico, of a thing which nobody asked him for (cosa non richiesta) without any necessity, he publishes at the same time his confidence in himself, and affirms that the thing is good. “Which thing,” goes on Castelvetro in his pitiless critical manner, “if it be found to be faulty (rea) and blameworthy, it convicts him who publishes it either of malice or of folly.” Alas! for the minor bard.

His attitude[[118]] to the everlastingly vexed question of the connection of verse and poetry is very sensible, and practically anticipates, with less reluctant circumlocution, that of Coleridge, who in more things than one comes close to Castelvetro, and who probably knew him. The medium and end of Poetry. He does not here contradict Aristotle by denying that verse is un-essential to poetry. But he insists—and points out the undoubted truth that Aristotle’s practice, whatever his theory may do, admits this—that Verse is a kind of inseparable accident of poetry,—that it is the appropriate garb and uniform thereof, which cannot be abandoned without impropriety. And he takes up this attitude still more emphatically in regard to the closely connected, and still more important, question of the end of Poetry. Here, as we have seen, the great Master of Criticism temporised. Uncompromising championship of Delight. He did not doubt that this end was Delight: but in deference to idols, partly of the Cavern, partly of the Market-place, he yokes and hampers this end with moral improvement, with Imitation, itself for itself, and so on. Castelvetro is much more uncompromising. One shudders, almost as much as one rejoices, at the audacity of a critic who in mid-sixteenth-century calmly says, “What do beginning, middle, and end matter in a poem, provided it delights?”[[119]] Nay, Castelvetro has reached a point of view which has since been attained by very few critics, and which some who thought they had gained this peak in Darien first may be mildly chagrined to find occupied by him—the view that there are different qualities of poetry, suited to delight different qualities of persons and of mind.

How seldom this view has been taken all critics ought to know, if they do not. Even now he who climbs the peak must lay his account with stone-throwing from the garrisons of other points. That Burns administers, and has a right to administer, one delight to one class of mind, Shelley another to another; that Béranger is not to be denied the wine of poetry because his vintage is not the vintage of Hugo: that Longfellow, and Cowper, and George Herbert are not to be sneered at because their delight is the delight of cheering but not of intoxication; that Keble is not intrinsically the less a poet because he is not Beddoes, or Charles Wesley because he is not Charles Baudelaire—or vice versa in all the cases—these are propositions which not every critic—which perhaps not very many critics—will admit even in the abstract, and which in practice almost every critic falsifies and renounces at some time or other.[[120]] But they are propositions which follow fairly, and indeed inevitably, from Castelvetro’s theory of the necessary end, Delight, and the varying adjustment of the delighting agent to the patient’s faculty of being delighted.

He is perhaps less sound in his absolute condemnation of “knowledge” as material for poetry. He is right in black-marking Fracastoro from this point of view: but he is certainly not right in extending the black mark to Lucretius. The fact is, that even he could not wrench himself sufficiently free from the trammels of old time to see that in the treatment lies the faculty of delighting, and that therefore, on his own scheme, the treatment is the poetry.

There are few writers to be dealt with in this volume—none, I think, already dealt with—to whom it would be more satisfactory to devote the minutest handling than to Castelvetro. His exceptional interest and importance. He has been called by Mr Spingarn “revolutionary.” The term, in an American mouth, probably has no unfavourable connotation; but waiving that connotation altogether, I should be inclined to demur to it. Even the Vehmgericht (if one may rely on the leading case of Vgr. v. Philipson, reported by Sir Walter Scott) acquitted of High Treason those who had spoken evil of it in countries where its authority was not acknowledged, and indeed its name hardly known. Now, Castelvetro was dealing—as we must, for his honour as well as for our comprehension of him, remember that he dealt—with modern as well as with ancient literature at once, and instead of adopting the injudicious though natural separation of Minturno, or the one-sided treatment of Scaliger, was constantly exploring, and always more or less keeping in view, territories not merely in which Aristotle’s writ did not run, but which in Aristotle’s time were No Man’s Land and terra incognita. He can no more be regarded as a revolutionary or a rebel, in framing new laws for the new facts, than a man could be regarded in either light for disregarding the Curfew Law at the North Pole, or for disobeying sumptuary regulations as to the use of woollen in the tropics. His ethos is really that of the self-reliant, resourceful, and adventurous explorer, as he has been called—of the experimenter in new material and under new conditions. That the paths he strikes out sometimes lead to culs-de-sac—that the experiments he makes sometimes fail, is nothing more than is natural, than is inevitable in the circumstances.