[4]. Published, not entirely, by Thyer of Manchester in 1759 (2 vols.). A handsome reprint of 1827 gives only a few of the prose “Characters”: more of these, but not the whole, were given by Mr H. Morley in his Character-Writing of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1891). The verse remains may be found in Chalmers or in the Aldine (vol. ii., London, 1893).
[5]. A blank rhyme indicates “Howard”—whether Edward or Robert does not matter. But another blank requires a trisyllable to fill it.
[6]. Benlowes is a warning to “illustrated poets.” It pleased him to have his main book (Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice: London, 1652, folio) splendidly decorated by Hollar and others; and the consequence is that copies of it are very rare, and generally mutilated when found. I congratulate myself on having first read Benlowes and William Woty, a minor poet of a century later, on the same day. To study Theophila and The Blossoms of Helicon in succession is quite a critical gaudy.
[7]. I do not make Vico my Italian example, for the same reasons which induced me to postpone him to this volume. See inf., chap. v.
CHAPTER II.
THE RALLY OF GERMANY—LESSING.
[STARTING-POINT OF THIS VOLUME]—[NEO-CLASSIC COMPLACENCY AND EXCLUSIVENESS ILLUSTRATED FROM CALLIÈRES]—[BÉAT DE MURALT]—[HIS ATTENTION TO ENGLISH]—[AND TO FRENCH]—[GERMAN CRITICISM PROPER]—[A GLANCE BACKWARD]—[THEOBALD HOECK]—[WECKHERLIN AND OTHERS]—[WEISE, WERNICKE, WERENFELS, ETC.]—[SOME MUTINEERS: GRYPHIUS AND NEUMEISTER]—[GOTTSCHED ONCE MORE]—[BODMER AND BREITINGER]—[THE ‘DISKURSE DER MALER’]—[GRADUAL DIVERGENCE FROM THEIR STANDPOINT; KÖNIG ON “TASTE”]—[MAIN WORKS OF THE SWISS SCHOOL]—[BREITINGER’S ‘KRITISCHE DICHTKUNST,’ ETC.]—[BODMER’S ‘VON DEM WUNDERBAREN,’ ETC.]—[SPECIAL CRITICISMS OF BOTH]—[BODMER’S VERSE CRITICISM]—[THEIR LATER WORK IN MEDIÆVAL POETRY, AND THEIR GENERAL POSITION]—[THE “SWISS-SAXON” QUARREL]—[THE ELDER SCHLEGELS: JOHANN ADOLF]—[JOHANN ELIAS]—[MOSES MENDELSSOHN]—[LESSING]—[SOME CAUTIONS RESPECTING HIM]—[HIS MORAL OBSESSION; ON ‘SOLIMAN THE SECOND’]—[THE STRICTURES ON ARIOSTO’S PORTRAIT OF ALCINA]—[‘HAMLET’ AND ‘SEMIRAMIS’]—[THE ‘COMTE D’ESSEX,’ ‘RODOGUNE,’ ‘MÉROPE’]—[LESSING’S GALLOPHOBIA]—[AND TYPOMANIA]—[HIS STUDY OF ANTIQUITY MORE THAN COMPENSATING]—[AND ESPECIALLY OF ARISTOTLE]—[WITH WHOM HE COMBINES DIDEROT]—[HIS DEFICIENCIES IN REGARD TO MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE]—[THE CLOSE OF THE ‘DRAMATURGIE’ AND ITS MORAL]—[MISCELLANEOUS SPECIMENS OF HIS CRITICISM]—[HIS ATTITUDE TO ÆSCHYLUS AND ARISTOPHANES]—[FREDERIC THE GREAT]—‘[DE LA LITTÉRATURE ALLEMANDE]’.
Starting point of this volume.
It should not be necessary to make much further observation of the linking kind between this volume and the last; but a few more words may be desirable on the fact that from a very early period of the eighteenth century itself there were perceptible underground mutterings of revolt; and that, steadily or fitfully, another current of criticism, fed likewise by springs underground, Neo-Classic complacency and exclusiveness illustrated from Callières. made its appearance side by side with, but running counter to, the orthodox, yet almost entirely neglected by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy indeed, in its special home, would have specially emphasised the scornful question, “Can any good thing come out of Germany?” The locus of Bouhours is hackneyed, and has been quoted already (ii. 315). But nothing can better show the state of complacent fatuity to which Neo-Classicism, plus national conceit, had reduced the French at the close of the seventeenth century, than the “Laws of Apollo,” which, in the twelfth book of the treatise which has the honour to have given suggestions to Swift, Callières[[8]] represents the god as promulgating to appease the strife of Ancients and Moderns. Les trois nations polies are the French, the Italians, and the Spaniards: all others are more or less barbarians. These barbarians (including not only the Germans, but the nation which had to its credit Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, with others who, if lesser than these, were the equals of the two or three best of France) may be allowed to write Latin as a concession to the literary incompetence of their own tongues; but the polished nations should not do so. Homer is the greatest of all poets, and Virgil the second; the third place had better remain vacant. No witchcraft or romance of chivalry is to be admitted into poetry. Acrostics and anagrams are to be banished from it. Et patati et patata. Apollo himself could at the time hardly have got into the head of Callières, not merely academician but diplomatist as he was, what an utterly ridiculous figure he would cut to all but the most philosophical and tolerant of posterity. Yet be it remembered that Gottsched held no different creed nearly fifty years after in Germany itself, and La Harpe no very different one more than a hundred years after in France; while among ourselves, and halfway between these two, even such iconoclasts in other ways as Adam Smith and David Hume would have made very little difficulty about accepting it. The overthrow of a belief of such prevalence, such toughness, such duration, cannot have been achieved but by agencies widespreading, patient, various: and it is these agencies that we must now investigate.