The title-question of the Tenth Book is, “Whether the modes of Imitation are three?” He discusses this generally, and specially in regard to narrative and dramatic delivery of the poetic matter, and then passes in an appendix (which, however, he declares to be part of the book) to the Trimerone of reply to Tasso. The Trimerone on Tasso. This is a necessarily rather obscure summary, with some quotations, of a fuller controversy between the two, complicated by glances at the other literature of the Gerusalemme quarrel, especially at the work of Camillo Pellegrino.[[134]] To disentangle the spool, and wind it in expository form, is out of the question here. Fortunately the piece concludes with a tabular statement[[135]] of forty-three opposition theses to Pellegrino and Tasso. A good many of these turn on rather “pot-and-kettle” recriminations between Homerists and Ariostians; but the general principles of comparative criticism are fairly observed in them, and there is no acerbity of language. In fact, although on some of the points of the controversy Patrizzi took the Della Cruscan side, it does not seem to have interrupted his friendship with Tasso, who attended his lectures,[[136]] and whose funeral he attended.

The intrinsic importance of Patrizzi’s criticism may be matter of opinion; but it will hardly be denied that both its system and its conclusions are widely different from those of nearly all the Italian critics whom we have yet considered, though there may be approaches to both in Cinthio on the one hand and in Castelvetro on the other. Remarkable position of Patrizzi. The bickering with Aristotle on particular points is of much less importance than the constant implicit, and not rare explicit, reliance on the historic method—on the poets and the poems that exist, the ideas of poetry conveyed by common parlance, the body of the written Word in short, and not the letter of the written Rule. I am not sure that Patrizzi ever lays down the doctrine that “Rules follow practice, not practice rules,” with quite the distinctness of Bruno in the passage cited above.[[137]] But he makes a fight for it in a passage of the Trimerone,[[138]] and his entire critical method involves it more or less. If he does not quote modern literature much, it is obviously because the controversy in which he was mixing took its documents and texts mainly from the ancients; but he is so well acquainted with the modern literature, not merely of his own language, that he actually cites[[139]] Claude Fauchet’s Origines de la Poésie Française, which had appeared in 1581. That his interest in the whole matter may have been philosophical rather than strictly, or at least exclusively, literary is very possible—he was actually a Professor of Philosophy; but however this may be, he has hit on the solid causeway under the floods, and has held his way steadily along it for as far as he chose to go. Nay, in the sentence which has been chosen for the epigraph of this Book, he has kept it open for all to the end of Poetry and of Time.

There are, however, few propositions in literature truer than this—that it is of no present use to be wise for the future. Sed contra mundum. If a man chooses the wisdom of the morrow, he must be content for the morrow to appreciate him—which it does not always, though no one but a poor creature will trouble himself much about that. Patrizzi had a really considerable reputation, and deserved it; but in matters literary he was two hundred years in front of his time, and his time avenged itself by taking little practical notice of him.[[140]] The critical writers of the last fifteen or twenty years of the century are fairly numerous; and though none of them can pretend to great importance, the names of some have survived, and the writings of some of these are worth examination, certainly by the historian and perhaps by the student. But the general drift of them is usually anti-Patrician and pro-Aristotelian, in that very decidedly sophisticated interpretation of Aristotle which was settling itself down upon the world as critical orthodoxy. The latest group of sixteenth-century Critics. Among them we may mention one or two which, though actually earlier than Patrizzi, are later than Castelvetro, and will help to complete, as far as we can here attempt it, the conspectus of that remarkable flourishing time of Italian critical inquiry which actually founded, and very nearly finished, the edifice of European criticism generally for three centuries at least. The authors to whom we return are Partenio, Viperano, Piccolomini, Gilio da Fabriano, and Mazzoni; those to whom we proceed are Jason Denores, Gabriele Zinano, and Faustino Summo. This latter, who, with an odd coincidence of name, date, and purport, does really sum up the sixteenth century for Aristotle, and so govern the decisions of the seventeenth and eighteenth, had been immediately preceded in the same sense by Buonamici,[[141]] Ingegneri,[[142]] and others.

Partenio, like Minturno and some others, gave his thoughts on the subject to the world in both “vulgar” and “regular”;[[143]] Partenio. but the two forms, while not identical, are closer together than is sometimes the case, though there is in the Latin a curious appended anthology of translation and parallel in the two languages. He is rather a formal person (as indeed may be judged from his particular addiction to Hermogenes as an authority), but he is not destitute of wits. Throughout he quotes Italian as well as Latin examples, and refers to Italian critics such as Trissino; while in one place he gives something like a regular survey of contemporary Latin poetry by Italians from Pontanus to Cotta. He lays special stress on the importance of poetic diction; he thinks that Art can and should improve nature; but he is as classical as the stiffest perruque of the French anti-Romantic school in believing Aristotle and Horace to contain everything necessary to poetical salvation.

Viperano.

Viperano[[144]] (who by a natural error is sometimes cited as Vituperano) somewhere makes the half-admission, half-boast, scripsimus autem varios libros de variis rebus, and is indeed a sort of rhetorical bookmaker who oscillates between instruction and epideictic. This character is sufficiently reflected in his De Arte Poetica. He had some influence—even as far as Spain (v. inf.)

Piccolomini’s book,[[145]] which is a compact small quarto of 422 pages, differs in arrangement from Castelvetro’s merely in not giving the Greek—the particelle of the original in translation being followed by solid blocks of annotationi. Piccolomini. The author was of that well-known type of Renaissance scholar which aspired to a generous if perhaps impossible universalism; and as he puts this encyclopædic information at the service of his notes, they are naturally things not easily to be given account of in any small space, or with definite reference to a particular subject. That Piccolomini, however, was not destitute of acuteness or judgment to back his learning, reference to test passages will very easily show. He has not allowed the possible force of the μᾶλλον, for instance, to escape him in the Homer-and-Empedocles passage referred to a little earlier—indeed Maggi had put him in the right way here. But, in this and other cases, he is somewhat too fond of “hedging.” “We must remember this; but we must not forget that,” &c. The inspiriting downrightness of Scaliger on the one side, and Patrizzi on the other, is not in him; and we see the approach, in this subject also, of a time of mere piling up of authorities, and marshalling of arguments pro and con, to the darkening rather than the illumination of judgment.

The Topica Poetica of Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano[[146]] comes well next to Piccolomini, because the pair are characteristic examples of the two parallel lines in which, as we have seen throughout, Italian criticism proceeds during the century. Gilio. In plan it presents no inconsiderable resemblance to that work of our own Puttenham (v. infra) which followed it at no great interval; but it is, as its special title will have indicated to the expert, even more definitely rhetorical. In fact, it must be one of the very latest treatises in which, on the partial precedent of antiquity, Poetics are brought directly under Rhetoric. We actually start with accounts, illustrated by poetical examples in the vernacular, of the Deliberative, Demonstrative, and Judicial kinds; we pass thence to Invention, Imitation, and Style; and thence again to Decorum, the Proper, and so forth, all still illustrated from the vulgar tongue mainly, but with a Latin example here and there. And this finishes the short First Book. The longer Second is the most strictly “topical,” with its sections (at first sight bewildering to the modern non-expert mind) on Definition and Etymology, on Genus and Species, on Example and Induction, on Proceeding from Less to Greater and from Greater to Less, on Amplification, Authority, Custom, and Love. The Third is wholly on Figures of Speech, and the Fourth on Tropes or Figures of “Conceit.” The poetical illustration is all-pervading, and there is an odd appendix of sonnets from ladies of Petrarch’s time. The book is chiefly worth notice here because, as has been said, it is one of the latest—perhaps, with the exception of Puttenham’s own, the actually latest—of its special subdivision that we shall have to notice,—the subdivision, that is to say, in which the literature handled is absolutely subordinate to an artificial system of classification, in which the stamped and registered ticket is everything, so that, when the critic has tied it on, his task is done.

Giacomo Mazzoni is perhaps better known[[147]] than at least some of the subjects of this chapter, owing to his connection with Mazzoni. Dante. He first, in 1573, published at Cesena a brief Difesa di Dante of some fifty folios, in fairly large print, and followed it up fourteen years later with an immense Della Difesa, containing 750 pages of very small print without the index. The points of the actual Difesa are not uncurious—such as an argument that discourses on Poetry are not improper for the philosopher, and that Dante is a particularly philosophical poet, in fact encyclopædic. From the Imitation point of view the Comedy can be easily defended, as it is a real following of action, and not the mere relation of a dream: and as dealing with costume (manners) it is a comedy, not a tragedy or heroic poem. The Della Difesa, on the other hand, is a wilderness of erudition and controversy, arranged under abstract heads (“how the poets have conducted themselves towards the predicaments of Time and Place,” &c.), and diverging into inquiries and sub-inquiries of the most intricate character—the trustworthiness of dreams,[[148]] the opinions held of them in antiquity, the nature and kinds of allegory, Dante’s orthodoxy—in short, all things Dantean, and very many others. If I cannot with Mr Spingarn[[149]] discover “a whole new theory of poetry” in the Difesa itself, I am ready to admit that almost anything might be discovered in the Della Difesa.

The Poetica of Jason Denores[[150]] is remarkable from one point of view for its thoroughgoing and “charcoal-burner” Aristotelianism, from another for the extraordinary and meticulous precision of its typographical arrangements. How many sizes and kinds of type there are in Jason’s book I am Denores. not enough of an expert in printing to attempt to say exactly: and the arrangement of his page is as precious as the selection of his type. Sometimes his text overflows the opened sheet, with decent margins indeed but according to ordinary proportions; at others (and by no means always because he requires side-notes) it is contracted to a canal down the centre, with banks broader than itself. It is, however, when Denores comes to the tabular arrangement and subdivision of statement and argument, in which nearly all these writers delight, that he becomes most eccentric. As many divisions, so many parallel columns; under no circumstances will his rigid equity give one section the advantage of appearing on the recto of a leaf while the others are banished to the verso. This is all very well when the divisions are two or three or even four. But when, as sometimes happens, there are six or even eight, the cross-reading of the parallel columns is at once tempting and conducive to madness. As each column is but some half-inch broad, almost every word longer than a monosyllable has to be broken into, and as only a single em of space is allowed between the columns, there is a strong temptation to “follow the line.” By doing this you get such bewilderments as