This is, perhaps, best indicated by the history of Aristotle's influence in English criticism from Ascham to Milton. The first reference to the Poetics in England is to be found in Ascham's Scholemaster.[565] There we are told that Ascham, Cheke, and Watson had many pleasant talks together at Cambridge, comparing the poetic precepts of Aristotle and Horace with the examples of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca. In Sidney's Defence of Poesy, Aristotle is cited several times; and in the drama, his authority is regarded by Sidney as almost on a par with that of the "common reason."[566] Harington was not satisfied until he had proved that the Orlando agrees substantially with Aristotle's requirements. Jonson wrote a commentary on Horace's Ars Poetica, with elucidations from Aristotle, in which
"All the old Venusine [i.e. Horace], in poetry,
And lighted by the Stagyrite [i.e. Aristotle], could spy,
Was there made English;"[567]
but the manuscript was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1623. Yet Jonson was aware how ridiculous it is to make any author a dictator.[568] His admiration for Aristotle was great; but he acknowledges that the Aristotelian rules are useless without natural talent, and that a poet's liberty cannot be bound within the narrow limits prescribed by grammarians and philosophers.[569] At the same time, he points out that Aristotle was the first critic, and the first of all men to teach the poet how to write. The Aristotelian authority is not to be contemned, since Aristotle did not invent his rules, but, taking the best things from nature and the poets, converted them into a complete and consistent code of art. Milton, also, had a sincere admiration for "that sublime art which [is taught] in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others."[570] But despite all this, the English independence of spirit never failed; and before the French influence we can find no such thing in English criticism as the literary dictatorship of Aristotle.[571]
To conclude, then, it would seem that by the middle of the sixteenth century there had grown up in Italy an almost complete body of poetic rules and theories. This critical system passed into France, England, Spain, Germany, Portugal, and Holland; so that by the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a common body of Renaissance doctrine throughout western Europe. Each country, however, gave this system a national cast of its own; but the form which it received in France ultimately triumphed, and modern classicism therefore represents the supremacy of the French phase, or version, of Renaissance Aristotelianism. A number of modern writers, among them Lessing and Shelley, have returned more or less to the original Italian form. This is represented, in Elizabethan criticism, by Sidney; Ben Jonson represents a transitional phase, and Dryden and Pope the final form of French classicism.
FOOT-NOTES:
[536] Morley, English Writers, ix. 187.
[537] Haslewood, ii. 197.
[538] Ibid. ii. 217.
[539] Jonson, Works, iii. 470. Cf. Gascoigne's comments on enjambement, in Haslewood, ii. 11.