In practising them, and in practising all, the poet is to look first, midmost, and last to the practice of the ancients. “The ancients” may even occasionally be contracted to little more than Virgil; they may be extended to take in Homer, or may be construed much more widely. But taking things on the whole, “the ancients” have anticipated almost everything, and in everything that they have anticipated have done so well that the best chance of success is simply to imitate them. The detailed precepts of Horace are never to be neglected; if supplemented, they must be supplemented in the same sense.
It is less the business of the historian, after drawing up this creed, to criticise it favourably or unfavourably, than to point out that it had actually, by the year 1600, come very near to formulated existence. We shall find it in actual formulation in the ensuing book; we have already seen it in more than adumbration, governing the pronouncements of a scholar and a man of genius like Ben Jonson thirty years later than the close of the sixteenth century. A full estimate of its merits and demerits must be postponed to the close of this volume. But it may be observed at once that it is, prima facie, not a perfect creed by any means. It has (and this, I think, has been too seldom noticed) a fault, almost, if not quite, as great on the a priori side as that which it confessedly has on the a posteriori. It does not face the facts; it blinks all mediæval and a great deal of existing modern literature. But, then, to do it justice, it does not pretend to do other than blink them. The fault in its own more special province is much more glaring, though, as has been said, it has, by a sort of sympathy, been much more ignored. There is no real connection between the higher and the lower principles of Neo-Classicism. There is not merely one crevasse, not easily to be crossed, in this glacier of Correctness; there are two or three. Let us, for argument’s sake, concede all the points in Fracastoro’s Naugerius, the Aconcagua or Everest of the school. Let us allow that to the real lover of poetry it skills not much whether he grants or denies all its propositions. But how are we to pass from these to the further group—to allow that Reason, Common-Sense, Nature, will govern the poet’s mediate and lower necessities? How from this, again, to the still other group of dramatic, heroic, miscellaneous requirements of the Correct? How from any of them to the entirely arbitrary warning clause that the ancients have actually or virtually anticipated everything?
On the more obvious faults of Italian criticism in detail—its extravagant Virgil-worship; its refusal (except in such rare and practically isolated cases as Lilius Giraldus’ knowledge of Chaucer and Wyatt, Patrizzi’s of Fauchet and his Old French subjects) to take any account of foreign modern literature; its coterie-squabbling and the rest, it would not be profitable to dwell much. But it is curious and instructive to notice how little appreciative criticism of contemporaries this active critical period gives. If you start a controversy of an ancient against a modern or a modern against a modern—of Homer against Ariosto, or of Ariosto against Tasso—there will be plenty of persons to take a hand. For a really appreciative study of any writer, modern or ancient, I do not know where to look. Men are so besotted, on the one hand, with their inquiries into general principles; on the other, with their sporadic annotations, that they cannot attempt anything of the kind.
Yet it would be an act of the grossest injustice and ingratitude to refuse or to stint recognition of the immense services that the Italians rendered to criticism at this time. It was, in their own stately word, a veritable case of risorgimento; and of resurrection in a body far better organised, far more gifted, than that which had gone to sleep a thousand years before.
In the year 1500 we may look over Europe and find criticism really alive and awake nusquam et nullibi—at best fast asleep, and dreaming a little with the dreams of Gavin Douglas or (had he lived a couple of years longer) of Savonarola, or of such more infantine persons as Augustine Käsenbrot. In 1600 criticism is a classed and recognised department of literature; Faustino Summo, in the very year, can quote authority after authority, refer—as to a sort of common law of the subject—to dicta and obiter dicta of nearly three generations of distinguished judges. And Italian criticism has colonised: its colonies, with the virtues of that kind, are showing characteristics sometimes quite different, though derived from those of the mother country, and are carrying the critical torch round the world. No matter for the moment whether the more perfect way has been reached, or the less perfect way declined upon. The time of “liking grossly,” of composing anyhow, has passed: that of critical study of the old, and critical reception of the new, has begun.
Never, therefore, shall I join in the anathema in which De Quincey[[285]] has coupled Italian critics with Greek rhetoricians. In fact, the Italians suffer far more unjustly than the Greeks. Castelvetro and Patrizzi alone would be enough to clear their company handsomely: Capriano, Cinthio Giraldi, Minturno could put in quite sufficient bail on their own recognisances: yet others would leave the court more than recommended to mercy.[[286]] I disagree with many of the principles of most of them; I wish that even those with whom I agree had opened their eyes wider, kept them more steadily on the object, and cared less about fighting abstract prizes, and more about appreciating the goods which the gods had given them in concrete literature. It was also a misfortune, no doubt, that no man of very distinct genius and whole-hearted devotion gave himself up to the business. Vida was a good kind of pedant, and Trissino at heart a philologist; Daniello, Capriano, and most of the rest, including even Minturno, down to Denores and Summo, persons of respectable talent merely; Fracastoro, a man of science; Cinthio, a novelist and miscellanist; Scaliger, a not quite so good kind of more deeply-dyed pedant; Castelvetro, a scholar, with the scholar’s quarrelsomeness; Patrizzi, a philosopher primarily; Torquato Tasso himself, a great poet, with, for a poet, a sensible and logical but curiously timid and hesitating mind. Not a few of them did great things for Criticism; all together they did a really mighty thing for her and for Literature: but they were not her sworn servants, as Lessing and Hazlitt, as Sainte-Beuve and Arnold, were later.
Let there be to them not the less but almost the more glory! It is something—nay, it is very much—to have created a Kind. Up to their time Criticism had been a mere Cinderella in the literary household. Aristotle had taken her up as he had taken all Arts and Sciences. The Rhetoricians had found her a useful handmaid to Rhetoric. Roman dilettanti had dallied with her. The solid good sense and good feeling of Quintilian had decided that she must be “no casual mistress but a wife” (perhaps on rather polygamic principles) to the student of oratory. Longinus had suddenly fixed her colours on his helmet, and had ridden in her honour the most astonishing little chevauchée in the annals of adventurous literature. The second greatest poet of the world had done her at once yeoman’s service and stately courtesy. And yet she was, in the general literary view, not so much déclassée as not classed at all—not “out,” not accorded the entrées.
This was now all over. The country which gave the literary tone and set the literary fashions of Europe had adopted Criticism in the most unmistakable manner—whether in the manner wisest or most perfect is not for the present essential. Rank thus given is never lost; at any rate, there is no recorded instance of a literary attainder for Kinds, whatever there may be for persons.
When this criticism passes the Alps, and we pass them with it, a curious difference is to be perceived. We leave the abstract side of the matter almost wholly behind us—the most abstract side perhaps wholly. A little of the Platonic generalities, relieved from the Platonic detraction, may be indulged in pro forma, and Vauquelin (in that odd familiarity[familiarity] with Deity which the French have always displayed) may image God as a gardener ordering the garden of Poesy with trim walks, and neatly planted beds, and hedges, which must not be trespassed on, or from, or through. But the French attention almost wholly deserts such things for the mediate generalities of kind and form; and is constantly tempted to desert these also for the still lower and more particular questions of language, prosody, and style. The fact is, that the circumstances have entirely changed. The Italians, though they may not know it, are in a state of declining vitality and creative force as regards actual literature; even Tasso is an “old man’s child” among their greatest. Besides, to do them justice, there is very little left for them to do with their mere means of language and the like. It is quite different with French and Frenchmen. If they are rashly neglectful (and Fauchet, Pasquier, and others are soon on the spot to vindicate them to some extent from this neglect) of their further past, there is some excuse for impatience of the past that is nearer; and it is even natural and human, though far from praiseworthy, that they should scorn the once charming formal devices which latterly, in most hands, have been so destitute of charm. But make allowance as we may for the causes, the facts remain. French criticism is much the least important of the three divisions which we have considered in the foregoing book. Not only does it begin late; not only does it fail to be very fertile; but its individual documents require a certain kindness to speak very highly of their virtues, and a good deal of blindness to conceal their shortcomings. I have protested above against a too low estimate of the critical value of the Défense et Illustration. Its critical interest is really great, and its critical importance really high; but this greatness and this importance are scarcely absolute. They belong to it as to one of our very first pieces of revolutionary criticism—one of the first in which the newly hatched and fledged critical spirit of Europe shows itself of falcon breed, and sets out to fight and destroy as well as to build nests and hatch young in its turn. The censure of the Défense is very mainly unjust, and its positive doctrine, though generous, and, in the circumstances, not insalutary, is vague, not very far-sighted, and, at the very best, extremely incomplete. What saves it is, first, the abundant and conclusive evidence that it gives of the critic being actually abroad in earnest, of the time of mere acquiescence and tradition having ceased, of there being writers who are determined to attack some kinds of writing and encourage others with their very best will and power; and, secondly, the generous and uncompromising championship of the vernacular, which is the greatest glory of the Pléiade, and which, followed in other countries, gave us the great modern literatures. Du Bellay has the credit of bringing criticism, if we may so speak, nearer to her true object than almost any Italian critic of his own century had done, though he does not himself either practise or prescribe the best way of getting at that object.
The criticism of his colleague, or master, Ronsard, is, as we have seen, injured by its small bulk, by its rather fragmentary character, by the fact that the most considerable piece of it has passed through another hand, and that we have only that hand’s own testimony for the faithfulness of the rehandling, and by not a little decided inconsistency. But it has the same militant, practical spirit as Du Bellay’s in quality, and more of it in proportional quantity. Moreover, it is extremely germinal. Those[[287]] who contend that the classical French criticism of the seventeenth century was only the Pléiade criticism of the sixteenth, denying its masters, omitting some, if not always the worst, parts of their creed, narrowed in range, and perfected in apparent system, have a great deal to say for themselves. Nor can there be reasonable doubt that, though Du Bellay was the first to speak critically, the teaching was the teaching of Ronsard throughout. Of this teaching, the injunction to enrich the language by archaism, and dialect, and word-coining (even by reading the forgotten romances of Arthur), was the very best part, and the first to be discarded by the ingratitude of the rebellious disciples, Malherbe and those about him. The worst part, which was not discarded but retained, was the adoption of the Italian doctrines about the hybrid kind of “Heroic” or “Long” Poem. But in most points the criticism of Ronsard justifies itself by a real adherence, conscious or unconscious, to the practical ideals of the French.