Passing from the performances of the several countries[[291]] to the general critical upshot of the century, as we passed to those performances from the survey of individual works, we have already secured one perception of result. Criticism is once more constituted; it is constituted indeed much more fully, if by no means more methodically, than has ever been the case before. By the time of our last Italian writer, Faustino Summo (Vauquelin is accidentally, and Ben Jonson not so accidentally, later in the other countries, but neither represents a stage so really advanced), Criticism has, besides its ancient books of the Law, quite a library of modern prophets, commentators, scribes. The strings of authorities, so specially dear to the coming century, can be produced without any difficulty whatsoever: and however much these authorities may differ on minor points, their general drift is unmistakable. Isolated dissenters like Patrizzi may make good their own fastnesses; but the general army hardly troubles itself to besiege or even to mask them, it goes on its way to conquer and occupy the land. Of the constitution established, or shortly to be established, in the conquered districts, some sketch has been given, but a caution should here once more be interposed against taking the word “established” too literally. Still, all the dogmas of the Neo-Classic creed, its appeal to the ancients and its appeal to Reason or Nature or Sense, its strict view of Kinds, its conception of Licence and Rule, its Unities, are more or less clearly evolved. And fresh particulars—such as its sharp reaction from the allowance and even recommendation of terms of art, archaisms, &c., which had been partly adopted by some Italians and warmly championed by the Pléiade—are at hand. Indeed, the business of the seventeenth century is, according to the title which we have ventured to take for the next book, much more to crystallise what is already passing out of the states of digestion and solution—to codify precedent case-law—than to do anything new.
There is not only this important advance in at least poetical theory to be considered, but also an advance still more important, though as yet not formally marshalled and regimented, in the direction of critical practice—of the application directly, to books old and new, of the critical principles so arrived at. We have seen that, for good and sufficient reasons, there was not so very much of this in classical times proper, and that there was so little of it as to be almost nothing in the Middle Ages. It did not seem necessary, in the concluding chapters of the first volume, to multiply proofs of this, as they could have been multiplied, merely to display acquaintance with mediæval literature. To take two fresh ones here, each famous for other reasons, the well-known reference of Wolfram von Eschenbach at the end of the Parzival to the “unrightness” of Chrestien de Troyes’ version, and the godly wrath which made “Kyot” set things in better order, contains no literary criticism at all; the matter, according to the usual mediæval habit, is looked upon as a question of truth or falsehood, not of good or bad literary presentment. And when the equally well-known but anonymous scribe wrote jubilantly on the Cursor Mundi,
“This is the best book of all,”
it is as certain as anything can be that he was not thinking, as he might fairly have thought, of the not small skill in compilation and narration displayed in that mighty miscellany, but merely that it contained a great deal of useful instruction and pleasant history. In the notices of books and writers which accumulate during our present period this is more and more ceasing to be the case; it has in fact ceased to be so from almost the beginning.
Such an estimate as that given by Ascham as Cheke’s of Sallust simply could not have suggested itself to any mediæval mind; the Humanist practice of the fifteenth century had—quite early in the sixteenth—made it natural enough, at least as regards ancient writers. And it was constantly becoming more and more common as to moderns. The Italians, in a limited and scholastic fashion, had begun it long before as to Dante; they continued it in regard to Boccaccio and Petrarch; they were spurred on to practise it more and more, first by the immense popularity of the Orlando, and then by the rival (and deliberately urged as rival) charms of the Gerusalemme. Compare for one moment the survey of books and authors which we quoted or summarised from the Labyrinthus in the last volume with that which we have analysed from Lilius Giraldus in this—the whole point of view, the whole method of handling, is altered. In France and England more specially, attempts, clumsy, limited, subject to whatever epithet of qualification any one pleases to apply, as they may be, are made to take a backward historical view of poetry at least; and when great work such as Ronsard’s or Spenser’s is produced, there is a real, if rudimentary, attempt made to judge it critically. By the time that we reach Ben Jonson—who no doubt has a strong tinge of the seventeenth century superinduced, by nature as well as time, on his sixteenth-century nativity—such aperçus almost of the highest critical kind in their species, as those on Bacon and Shakespeare, are possible to at least the higher intellects,—it needs but a step to the very highest kind, such as that of Dryden on the same Shakespeare. That what we have called the crystallisation of a critical creed affects these estimates not always for the best is not of real importance—the point is that we have at last got them.
These are great things, but, still postponing criticism on this criticism as a whole, we may point out one or two drawbacks in it which already appear, and which are quite independent of individual inclination on the vexed questions of Classic or Romantic, Practice or Rule, Subject or Expression.
The first is that, to some extent unavoidably, but to a greater extent than that excuse will cover, the criticism which we have reviewed is criticism of poetry only. Most of it is quite openly and avowedly so. Poetica, Poetice, De Poetica, Della Poetica, Della Vera Poetica, Art Poétique, Art of Poetry, Apology for Poetry—these are the very titles of the books we have been discussing. When prose comes in at all, except on rare and mostly late occasions, it is only on questions more abstract or less abstract connected with poetry—“Whether Tragedy and Comedy may be written in Prose,” “Whether Verse is necessary to Poetry,” and the like. If poetry in ancient days was, though it received plenty of attention, sometimes injuriously postponed to oratory, it certainly now has its revenge. Oratory itself, though occasionally handled, obviously is so as a sort of legacy from the ancients themselves, from a sort of feeling that it would not be decent to say nothing about a subject on which Aristotle, and Cicero, and Quintilian have said so much. The formal Letter, being rather a favourite Italian institution, is not quite neglected; it receives some attention among ourselves from Ben. Whether History can or must give subjects for poetry is keenly debated; but the question is approached entirely from the side of interest in Poetry, not in History. At the very close of our period, we find so great a prose writer as Bacon doubting the solvency of vernacular prose; a little earlier we find Montaigne taking note of it chiefly, if at all, in regard to matter, Pasquier hardly taking notice of it at all.
This is unfortunate, because it tends further to perpetuate the mischievous absorption in Kinds, and to postpone the attainment of the position from which, though the difference between prose and poetry may be seen more sharply than ever, the common literary qualities of both, and the way in which they affect the delight of the receiver, are at last perceived. It is unfortunate, further, because it tends to prevent the enjoyment of the full advantages which the modern literatures are gradually giving to the critic in the very departments—the prose romance, the essay, and others—where ancient criticism suffered most from the absence of material.
Another drawback which it may seem captious, or ungenerous, or even childish, to urge, but which really has a great deal to do with the matter, is that, active as the period was in criticism, it did not produce a single very great critic practising on a great scale. Its four or five critics of greatest literary genius were (I exclude Bacon for reasons given, and Spenser hardly comes in) Ronsard, Du Bellay, Tasso, Sidney, and Ben Jonson. The two Frenchmen dealt with but a small part of the subject, and from but a special point of view; Tasso was mainly “fighting a prize,” and his own prize; Sidney’s was a very little tractate of general, if generous, protest, and entered into no applications; Ben’s critical remains are un-co-ordinated notes. On the other hand, of the specially critical writers, Scaliger on the strictly erudite and strictly classical side, Castelvetro in a sort of middle station, and Patrizzi as a voice crying in the wilderness, are perhaps the only three who rise distinctly above mediocrity. And, as has been pointed out already, Scaliger is too much of a pedant, Castelvetro is a mere commentator, and Patrizzi a philosopher militant, who carries on one of his campaigns in the province of criticism.
The disadvantages of this are twofold. Not merely do we get no brilliant and, at least in appearance and claim, authoritative exposition of the subject, like that of Boileau or that of Pope later on the dogmatic side, like those of Dryden and Johnson on the illustrative and exemplifying; but the whole critical system comes into existence by a process of haphazard accretion—by (to repeat a metaphor already used) an accumulation of individual judgments at common law. No doubt this gives a certain strength, a certain naturalness, to the creed when it is formed. It has not been foisted on the communis sensus—that sensus has been inured and trained to it. The extraordinary toughness and vitality of the resultant is very likely due to this. But it caused also some of that inconsistency and apparent irrationality which a system of common law almost necessarily contracts as it grows: and it was more and more driven to throw over these inconsistencies and irrationalities that cloak of factitious Reason, or Sense, or Nature which, by the eighteenth century, becomes the mere threadbare disguise of a decrepit Duessa.