Book 3 — CHAPTER III. THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES.

LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER—THE MATERIAL IT OFFERS—THE FORMAL ARTS OF RHETORIC AND OF POETRY—EXAMPLES OF INDIRECT CRITICISM: CHAUCER—‘SIR THOPAS’—FROISSART—RICHARD OF BURY—PETRARCH—BOCCACCIO—HIS WORK ON DANTE—THE ‘TRATTATELLO’—THE ‘COMENTO’—THE ‘DE GENEALOGIA DEORUM’—GAVIN DOUGLAS—FURTHER EXAMPLES UNNECESSARY.

The contents of the two foregoing chapters should have in some sort prepared the reader for the character and limitations of the |Limitations of this chapter.| third. If it were not part of the scheme of this work to leave no period of literary history unnoticed in relation to criticism, a straight stride might almost be taken from the De Vulgari Eloquio to the earliest of the momentous and (from some points of view) rather unfortunate attempts which the Italian critics of the Renaissance made to bring about an eirenicon between Plato and Aristotle, by sacrificing the whole direct product, and the whole indirect lesson, of the Middle Ages. Between Dante and this group of his compatriots two hundred years later, it is scarcely too much to say that there is not a single critic or criticism, either in Italy or in any other European language, possessing substantive importance. But this book endeavours to be a history, not merely of explicit literary criticism, but of implicit literary taste; and no period—not the dimmest gloom of the Dark Ages nor the most glaring blaze of the Aufklärung—is profitless as a subject for inquiry in that respect, even if the result be little more than the old stage-direction—même jeu.

448In Arts of Rhetoric, with or without special or partial reference to Poetry, the two centuries, especially the fifteenth, are |The material it offers.| indeed fairly prolific. Nothing could be more significant for the subjective side of Critical History than that gradual and at last undisguised identification of “Rhetoric” with “Poetry” itself, which is notorious alike in the hackneyed title of grands rhétoriqueurs for the French poets of the fifteenth century, and the continual praise of Chaucer’s “rhetoric” by the English and Scottish writers of the same time. The sacra fames^[593] of the whole two hundred years for Allegory—a hunger which was not in the least checked by the Renaissance, though the sauce of what it glutted itself on was somewhat altered—is another capital fact of the same kind; the renewed passion for changed kinds of Romance another; the ever-increasing interest in drama yet another still. These are the real materials for the student of criticism and taste at this time, and they are identical with the materials, for this period, of the student of literary history generally. In the strictly proper matter of our particular province we not merely may, but had best, confine ourselves to some short notice of the formal writings of the period, and some, rather fuller, of the literary opinions expressed by characteristic exponents of it, whether their claim to represent be derived from eminence, or from merely average, and therefore tell-tale, quality.

Into the first it will not be necessary to enter at any length. The formal Latin Arts of Rhetoric of the fourteenth and fifteenth |The Formal Arts of Rhetoric.|centuries exhibit nothing new, but observe with a touching fidelity the lines of Martianus, or Aphthonius, or Hermogenes, as the case may be. Moreover, such notice of them as is at all necessary will be better given in the next Book and volume, in connection with their immediate successors of the undoubted Renaissance. The chain of merely formal Rhetoric is unbroken till much later; as it had been little affected by the change from “Classical” to “Mediæval,” so it was not sensibly changed till “Renaissance” had definitely given way to “Modern.” The vernacular Arts of Poetry are, in 449English of this period, non-existent; and, considering all things, they are heartily to be congratulated on their wisdom and foresight in not existing. In Italy they are of little moment, since Italian poetry had to a great extent taken its line once for all. In French and in German they both exist, and exhibit considerable individual quality. But that quality is emphatically for an age, and not of all time. The growth of the exquisitely graceful but dangerously artificial French poetry of Ballade and Chant Royal, of rondeau and triolet; the growth of the artificial, but rarely in the very least graceful, form-torturing of the meister-singers were both accompanied and followed, as was natural and indeed inevitable, by abundance of formal directions for executing the fashionable intricacies. Some of the more noteworthy of these may be indicated in a note but—as has not always been, and will not always be the case with similar things—they require little or no discussion in the text. For the developments to which they related were not merely a little artificial in the bad sense, but they were also purely episodic and of the nature of curiosities. They had not, as even the most apparently preposterous acrobatics of the Latin rhythmic had, the priceless |And of Poetry.| merit of serving as gymnastic to the new vernaculars—at best they only continued this gymnastic in the case of languages that were “grown up.” That they—at least the French division of them—furnished some exquisite moulds, into which the purest poetry could be thrown, is perfectly true. But Jehannot de Lescurel, and Charles d’Orléans, and Villon most of all, could have, and doubtless would have, produced that poetry in any form that happened to be popular at their time. Nay, as has been abundantly shown in France and England during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and a little earlier, the forms themselves will fit any poetry of any time. The ancient names, and the mediæval trimmings, and the modern sentiment of the Dames du Temps Jadis, are all equally at home in its consummate but artificial form; and that form is equally suitable to the Voyage à Cythère and the aspiration for a grave on the breast of the Windburg. Defect there is none in this accommodating character: rather there is a great quality. But, in the special kind of merit, there is a differentiation 450from such things as the Greek chorus, the Latin elegiac, the Mediæval rhythmus, the mono-rhymed or single-assonanced tirade, the Spenserian, even the eighteenth-century, couplet, which carry their atmosphere and their time inseparably with them. And so we may turn to our testings of writers in whom the criticism “is not so expressed,” but who are not the less valuable to us for that.

Are we to regret, or not, that Chaucer did not leave us an Art of Rhetoric instead of a Treatise on the Astrolabe? Probably not. |Examples of Indirect Criticism: Chaucer.| He would hardly have felt what is called in religious slang “freedom” to say what he undoubtedly might have said on Applied Rhetoric and on Pure Rhetoric, though it would have been very agreeable to hear him. He would probably not have told us anything new. In any kind of formal writing he would probably have displayed that not in the least irrational orthodoxy which he displays on most subjects. But there is perhaps no writer—at least no writer of anything approaching his greatness—who, abstaining from deliberate and expressed critical work, has left us such acute and unmistakable critical byplay, such escapes of the critical spirit. If the sly hit at his namesake of Vinsauf, which has been already glanced at^[594], stood alone, it would show us “what a critic was in Chaucer lost”—at least to the extent of lying perdu for the most part. But this is not the only example of the kind by any means, even in apparent chance-medleys: while in the Rhyme of Sir Thopas^[595] we have what is almost a criticism in form, and what certainly displays more critical power than ninety-nine out of a hundred criticisms in fact.

That this celebrated and agreeable fantasy-piece is in any sense an onslaught on Romance, as Romance, is so fond a thing that it is sufficient to discredit the imaginations, or the intelligence, of those who entertain it. Dulness never will understand, either that those who are not dull can laugh at what they love, or that it is possible for a man to see faults, and even 451serious faults, in writers and writings on whom and on which, as wholes, he bestows the heartiest admiration. From the outset of his career the critic has to make up his mind to be charged with “ungenerous,” or “grudging,” or “not cordial” treatment of those whom he loves with a love that twenty thousand of his accusers could not by clubbing together equal, and understands with an understanding of which—not of course by their own fault but by that of Providence—they are simply incapable.

Of this touch of foolish nature the inference from Sir Thopas that Chaucer disliked, or despised, or failed to sympathise with, |Sir Thopas.| Romance, is one of the capital instances. To remember that the author of the Rhyme was also the author of the Knight’s Tale, and the Squire’s Tale, and Troilus, that he was the translator of the Romance of the Rose, might of itself suffice to keep the wayfaring man straight in this matter; but those who can understand what they read have not the slightest need of such a memory. There have been parodies^[596] of Romance which incurred the curse of blasphemy: there is one in particular, not very many years old, which, in the energetic and accurate language of Mr Philip Pirrip, “must excite Loathing in every respectable mind.” But Sir Thopas, even to those who have not read many of its originals and victims, much more to those who are well acquainted with them, and who rejoice in them exceedingly and unceasingly, can never put on any such complexion. The intense good-humour and the absolutely unruffled play of intelligence, the complete freedom from (what appears for instance capitally in the example just glanced at) political, national, social animus, and the almost miraculous fashion in which the caricature strikes at the corruptions, but never at the essential character, of the thing caricatured, settle this once for all.

If we knew (as unluckily we do not know) whether the Host and the company stopped Sir Thopas because they disliked the type, or because the example was a parody, it would be a great 452help to us; but it is scarcely a less help to perceive clearly that its critical character would have been enough to put them out of conceit with it. Few people really do like criticism; fewer still like real criticism. And the criticism of Sir Thopas, though disguised, is very real. Everybody, whether he knows the metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries or not, can see the joke of the seemly nose; the far country of Flanders; the rebuke to the maidens, who had much better have been sleeping quietly than fussing about the beautiful knight; the calm decision of that knight that an elf-queen—nobody less—must be the object of his affections; the terrible wilderness, where buck and hare ramp and roar, and seek whom they may devour; the extraordinarily heroic exertions, which consist merely in pumping the unhappy steed; the fair bearing, which consists in running away with celerity and success. But nobody who does not know the romances themselves in their weakest examples, such as Sir Eglamour or Torrent of Portugal, can fully appreciate the manner in which the parody is adjusted to the original. Not the deftest and most disinterested critic of any day could single out, by explicit criticism, the faults “before the Eternal” of the feebler and more cut-and-dried romance, more clearly or more accurately than Chaucer has, by example, in this tale. The stock epithet and phrase; the stock comparison; the catalogue (he had himself indulged pretty freely in the catalogue); the pound of description to an ounce of incident; the mixture of the hackneyed and the ineffective in the incident itself,—all these things this mercilessly candid friend, this maliciously expert practitioner, exposes with the precision of an Aristotle and the zest of a Lucian.

Yet the whole is done by implication and unexpounded example, not in the very least by direct criticism. Had it occurred to him, or pleased him, he could no doubt have censured all these faults in as businesslike and direct a manner as his Parson (or rather his Parson’s original) censures the moral, social, and fashionable shortcomings of the age. But he certainly did not do this, and probably he never thought of doing it.

453Cross the Channel (though indeed it was not always necessary to do this) and take Chaucer’s greatest contemporary among French |Froissart.| writing men. It has been said, by that very agreeable biographer of Froissart whom England (mindful of his early loyalty, and characteristically neglectful of his later infidelity) lent to France, that he “was not a man of letters.”^[597] It may be so: but if it be, he was certainly one of the most literary not-men-of-letters that the world has ever seen. Not only is he admittedly one of that world’s most charming prose-writers, but it has long been known that the notion of him (if it ever existed among the intelligent) as of a good garrulous old person who wrote as the birds sing, is utterly erroneous. At one time he could make a mosaic of borrowed and original writing—the borrowings often in the very words of the original, the original adjusted to them with an art that nobody but Malory has ever approached, and that even Malory shows rather in general management than in style. At another, and at another again, he could, whether with or against the grain, laboriously recast this mosaic into the most widely different forms. His very desultoriness is calculated; he is criticising the romances by imitation when he makes a chassé-croisé to the story of Orthon from the victory of Aljubarrota, from the battle of Otterburn to the evil receipt for a green wound adopted by Geoffrey Tête-Noire, and the remarkably sensible, just, kindly, and gentlemanly remarks of that dying brigand to his fellow-outlaws.

But he is not a man of prose letters only. He is a poet, to the tune of some thirty thousand verses in the long-lost and late-won Méliador alone, to the tune of, I suppose, about as many more in his familiar, or at least long accessible, minor poems. He is deft at all the intricate popular forms of the day—at pastourelles as at chansons royaux, at virelais as at rondelets. He possesses its learning; and can not only appeal to the common tales of Troy and Thebes and Alexander, not only refer to ancient mythology with the semi-pagan docility which long puzzled students, and seems to puzzle some still, but be even at home with Enclimpostair, and Pynoteus, and 454Neptisphelè. In a certain sense he is a man of letters, a man of books, all his life, and very much more than Chaucer is. With all his patronisings by great people and his sojourns among them, he is nothing like the man of affairs that Master Geoffrey was.

And yet, in a sense also, Madame Darmesteter’s phrase is intelligible and almost justifiable. It is indeed hardly fair to base this construction on his scanty and not in the least literary reference to Chaucer, whom he does not even, like Eustache Deschamps^[598], call a great translator. In Froissart’s happy early English time Chaucer had done probably little work, and certainly none of his best: in that melancholy revisiting, no more of the blaze of the sun of Cressy and Poitiers, but of the glimpses of the moon that was to set in blood at Pontefract, he was probably too old and too disgusted to make inquiries about such matters. But the absence of the strictly literary interest in one who not merely had so much literary genius, but was so constantly reading and writing, is pervading and incessant. This interest is absent not merely where it might well have been present, but where its presence seems almost indispensable. Froissart’s style of poetry invites the widest, and (except that it is rather too methodical, not to say mechanical) the wildest, liberty of divagation, of dragging in anything that really interested him. In the most recondite allegorising of the Prison Amoureuse he expostulates^[599] with Desire for not coming to his aid, and giving him the victory, by the same sort of clever outflanking attack as that which Chandos executed at the Battle of Auray, and of which he kindly gives some details. He names books in the usual manner of Romance; he will go so far as to praise them; but he never discusses them. In the well-known passage^[600] of the Espinette Amoureuse, when he asks his beloved the name of the romance she is reading, she does 455indeed tell him that it is Cléomadès (Did he mention the same to Chaucer?), with the commendation that it is “well made and dittied amorously,” and she asks him to lend her another (it is the Bailiff of Love^[601] that he hits upon),

“Car lire est un douls mestiers.”

But, though the comparing of critical opinions on literature has been not unknown as one of the primrose paths of the garden of Flirtation, they seem to have trodden it no farther.

So in his prose. The satura of the Chroniques admits anything that interested either Froissart or the men of his time. In those strange midnight sessions of the Italianate Gascon Count of Foix—the lettered tyrant-sorcerer who would have been even more at home in Ferrara or Rimini than in Béarn—books were in great request; but nobody seems to have talked criticism. “So much the better for the Bearnese,” the reader may say; and he is welcome to an opinion which, at times, if not always, most people must have shared. But that is not the question. The question is, “Was this a critical age?” and the answer is, “If it had been, a man could not have been so bookish as Froissart was and yet be not critical in the least.” Nor could he, even if some private idiosyncrasy had accounted for his own attitude, have failed to reveal the presence of a different one in the time which he has drawn for us, more poetically no doubt than Boswell or Pepys, but with not a little of their unpremeditated, their even unconscious, fidelity.

The lesson taught by the two men, who occupy the summits of European literature at the very midmost of the period of this |Richard of Bury.| chapter, will be confirmed whether we look earlier or later. It might seem almost impossible that the somewhat famous Philobiblon^[602] of Richard of Bury (or Aungervyle), 456who made one of the greatest collections of books in the early part of the fourteenth century, and celebrated it in this little tract just before his own death and shortly after Chaucer’s probable birth, should not contribute something—improbable that it should not contribute very much—to our subject. As a matter of fact it contributes nothing at all. Almost the oldest Sacred Book (as distinguished from “sacred passages” in Cicero and others) of Bibliophily, it remains entirely outside of literary criticism. The good Bishop of Durham, indeed, does not devour all books with indiscriminating voracity. He is true to his order in candidly avowing no high opinion of law-books; but his reason—that they belong rather to Will than to Wit—shows us his point of view. From that point of view one book may be preferable to another, as being more useful, as dealing with a nobler subject, as boasting a more venerable authorship, as being perhaps rarer, more beautifully written or bound, older, newer, in better condition, but not, I think, at all as being better literature. The pleasant garrulity of the tractate; its agreeable onslaught upon woman, the natural enemy of books; its anecdotage; its keen sympathy with the Book as almost a living thing, and certainly one exposed to almost all the dangers of life, have made it, and will long make it, a favourite. It is sweet and pleasant: but it is not criticism.

The author of the Philobiblon was a friend of Petrarch’s, and it may at first sight seem strange that Petrarch himself should |Petrarch.| not be—should not indeed have been at the very beginning or this chapter—summoned to give evidence likewise. But the fact is that Petrarch has nothing to tell us in our context. He has indeed, as has been pretty universally recognised, nothing to do with the Middle Ages. Not only in his heart and desires, but in his nature, he is a man of the early—if of the earliest—Renaissance. Even in the vernacular he rings false as an exponent of anything mediæval. Timotheus, not St Cecily, has taught his strains. And in his “regular” writing he is severely, almost ludicrously, a classicaster. We may return to him as the earliest distinguished example of the Renaissance attitude; here he cannot even, as others have done, help us by his silence.

457It is otherwise with his great contemporary, and at the last friend, Boccaccio. Boccaccio likewise has been claimed as a prophet of the Renaissance, as one of the first of the |Boccaccio.| moderns and the like; nor would it skill to deny that there is much both of the Renaissance and of the modern spirit in him. But he has not broken with the immediate past; he is only tinging it, and blending it a little, with the farther past and the future. If something of the magical charm of the mediæval prose story is gone from the Decameron, the learned voluptuousness of the Renaissance conte is not yet there.there. The Filostrato, and the Filocopo^[603], and the Teseide, are still romances. And in the De Genealogia Deorum, if there is much of that non-mediæval spirit which was always in Italy, and not a little of the Renaissance proper, there is enough of the Middle Age itself to give it a locus standi here.

Indeed, by a recent authority of great eminence^[604] Boccaccio has been treated as a coryphæus and representative of “the |His work on Dante.| critics of the middle ages.” I have endeavoured, in these chapters, to show that the critics of the middle ages are, except in the most remote and shadowy function, almost a non-existent body. And it seems to me that Boccaccio’s views on criticism, though most worthy of remark, are the very head and front of that Renaissance side of him which is so undeniable. In the passage which Mr Courthope cites from the Life of Dante, where Boccaccio says that Theology and poetry are almost one, that “Theology is God’s poetry,” that it is a kind of poetic invention when Christ is spoken of at one time as a lion, at the other as a lamb, that the words of the Saviour in the Gospel are merely or mainly allegory, that “Poetry is Theology and Theology poetry,” and that Aristotle said nearly as much^[605]—when he writes in this way he is speaking very much less the mind of the Middle Ages than the mind which agitated the mass of his countrymen, the Italian critics, from 458Daniello onwards in the sixteenth century. But it is quite certain that in writing this he is writing with a conception of criticism quite alien from that which we are now handling. He may quote Aristotle, but he is speaking in the manner of Plato. It is poetry in the abstract with which he is dealing, not the literary value of poetry according to its expression in form, of no matter what ideal in essence. And it will be found, I think, that a careful study of his commentary on Dante, the most important thing of the kind that we possess by one considerable man of letters in the Middle Ages upon another, entirely bears this out.

As for the Life (or, as he himself seems to call it in the first lecture of the Commentary, the “Little Treatise”^[606]) on Dante, it is couched in so extremely rhetorical a style, with constant bursts of apostrophe and epiphonema, that there may seem to be a sort |The Trattatello.| of warning on it from the first: “Criticism not to be expected.” As a matter of fact, however, Boccaccio does give us some of what, as we shall see more fully in a moment, he thought to be criticism, and of what not a few persons seem still to think the best criticism. For he has an elaborate digression on Poetry and Poets in the abstract, with a particular parallel distinction (referred to above) between poetry and theology. But he goes no farther, and the heading “Qualità e diffetti di Dante” is entirely occupied with moral characteristics. In the Comento itself, however, it might well seem to be a case of Now or Never. Here was a literary lectureship expressly instituted for the treatment of the greatest man of letters of the city, the country, and (as it happened) the world, at the time and for long before and after. Here was an exceedingly learned lecturer, with plenty of mother-wit to keep his learning alive, with a distinct fellow-feeling of creation further to animate both, and with the sincerest and heartiest goodwill to complete his competence. He spares no trouble, but goes to his work with scholastic minuteness, expending some three score lectures and some nine hundred pages on seventeen cantos only out of the hundred of the Commedia. 459Unfortunately neither his models nor his tastes seem to incline |The Comento.| him in the way where we would so fain see him go. He has read Servius and all (or at least many of) the rhetoricians and scholastic philosophers, and he tells us with gusto what are the causes, formal, efficient, material, and final, of the book, how its form is “poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, and transitive,” and how the efficient cause is “that very same author, Dante Alighieri, of whom we will speak more extensively by-and-by.” He has also read Fulgentius:^[607] and before very long he gives us a capital specimen of derivation, in the manner of that ingenious author, by telling us that “Avernus” is from a, which is without, and vernus, which is joy. He has at his command all that extraordinary supply of mythological and miscellaneous classical learning which, as we shall see immediately, enabled him to write his Genealogy: and he never comes to the name of an ancient writer or of a mythological personage without giving a full and particular account thereof. No details are too obvious or too minute for him, even apart from the allegorical interpretation, in which, as any scholar of Fabius Planciades, and indeed any mediæval writer of the fourteenth century, was bound to do, he expatiates delightedly. He vouches the information that Dante called the forest selvaggia “because he wished to denote that there was not in it any human habitation, and that as a consequence it was horrible;” aspera, “in order to demonstrate the quality of the trees and shrubs of the same, which would be old, with long straggling branches en woven and interpleached among themselves, and likewise full of blackthorns, and brambles, and dry stubs, growing without any order, and stretching hither and thither—whereby it was a rough thing and a dangerous to go through,” &c. He is copious in moral excursus on the impropriety of Florentine dress, on the sin of Luxury, on the obvious inconvenience and hardship of the fact that while men are allowed to try horses, asses, oxen, dogs, clothing, casks, pitchers before they buy them, they have to take their wives on trust and without trial. But on literary criticism we come not seldom, but never, beyond the beggarly elements of verbal interpretation, where 460Boccaccio is just as happy with Pape Satan as with Galeotto fu il libro, or rather more so, while he is much happier with Penthesilea or Pasiphae than with either. It is no doubt unfair to try Master John Bochas with the things that make us “nearly wild” (as Cowper made Miss Marianne Dashwood,^[608] and does not often make us), but still the Galeotto passage is very tempting. Lancelot, we learn, was one of whom the French romances tell many beautiful and laudable things (things which he tells us, in confidence, he himself believes to be set forth rather to please than according to the truth), and the said Lancelot was ferventissimamente enamoured of Guinevere. Then he points out that the line which follows (Soli eravamo, &c.), and the previous mention of the book, indicate three things—reading about love, solitude, and freedom from suspicion—which are very powerful to induce a man and a woman to adoperate dishonestly. And so he proceeds, expounding or construing the whole ineffable passage, word for word, with a solemn and indiscriminate enjoyment—the trembling at the kiss, the fact that Galehault was a kind of giant, great and big, down to Quel giorno, his remark on which, though not scientifically inaccurate, savours rather of the Decameron than of the Commedia itself. But in the whole comment there is nothing (or, what is worse than nothing, a single banal ottimamente descrive) for any part whatsoever of the passion, the poetry, the mysterious magnificence of the expression. The passage is to Boccaccio a good ecphrasis, a capital compte rendu of an interesting situation—that is all.

The De Genealogia Deorum.

Nor will this be less borne out by an examination of Boccaccio’s principal “place” of criticism, which will be, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, found in the two last books, the fourteenth and fifteenth, of that singular monument of learning, the De Genealogia Deorum.^[609] After laboriously 461searching out all the mythological stories of antiquity within his reach, and co-ordinating them into a regular family history, from Demogorgon, through Erebus and his twenty-one sons and daughters by Night, to Alexander and Scipio (whom, however, he declines, as a strict genealogist, to admit as sons of Jove), Boccaccio, at the beginning of his fourteenth book, takes up the cudgels for Poetry against her enemies. The style is decidedly rhetorical, and faint remembrances of Clodius as an accuser (or, to be less pedantic and less hackneyed, of Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence) may possibly occur, as we find the author of the Decameron indignantly denouncing those who sneer at poets and learned men, meretriculis gannientes, and holding cups of foaming wine in their hands. But he is perfectly serious: if a man has not proved his seriousness by writing a Latin genealogy of the gods in four hundred large and closely printed folio pages, what is Proof? There was always, he says, a quarrel between Learning and Licentiousness. Even some graver folk sneer at, or find fault with, poetry. Lawyers do so: and the lawyers are properly rebuked and bid to look at the example of Cicero. Monks do: and there is expostulation likewise with them. But he will attack the question in form. Poetry is a noble and useful thing. Its meaning, its antiquity, its origin are discussed. There is nothing wrong or harmful in a “fable” as such; but in all its kinds it can be made of positive utility. Poets do not retire into solitude out of any misanthropy or wrong motive, but simply for the sake of meditation: and they have often been the friends of most respectable people—Ennius of the Scipios, Virgil of Augustus, Dante of King Frederick and Can de la Scala, Francis Petrarch of the Emperor Charles, of King John of France, of King Robert of Jerusalem and Sicily, and of any number of Popes.

But, some say, poetry is obscure. It is certainly written for the learned and people of wit, not for the common herd; but it is none the worse for that. It is entirely false that poets are liars: poetry and lying are two quite different things (Virgil is here particularly cleared in the matter of Dido). It is foolish to condemn what you do not understand: and this is generally done by those who abuse poetry. And it is intolerable that 462men should speak against Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, when they have hardly read them. The “seduction” of Poetry is all nonsense: and the accusation that poetry is the ape of philosophy, greater nonsense still. It would be better to call poets the apes of Nature.^[610]

He does not fear to contest the authority of Jerome when he said that verses were Dæmonum cibus, of Plato himself, and of Boethius when he called the Muses “scenic meretricules.” He grapples with the two first at great length, and points out that Boethius was thinking chiefly of the naughty theatre. An allocution to the King (Hugh of Cyprus and Jerusalem), to whom the whole treatise is dedicated, and a milder deprecation to the enemies of poetry, conclude this book.

The Fifteenth at first seems to launch out into still deeper waters. You must not insist too much on use. What is the use of the beard? Yet men of a certain age are ashamed to be beardless. And as for the duration of work, that is in the hand of God. But this turns to a mere excuse of his own actual book. His work has been done as well as he can do it, both for matter and for style. He refers to divers living or recent authors, Dante and Petrarch among them, of whom he gives little descriptions that raise, but hardly satisfy, our curiosity to see whether he will really criticise. Dante was peritissimus circa poeticam, and what he was is shown by his inclytum opus, “which he wrote with wonderful art, under the title of a Comedy, in rhyme of the Florentine idiom, and in which he certainly showed himself not a mythologer but rather a catholic and divine Theologian. And while he is known to almost all the world, I know not whether the fame of his name has come to your latitude.” Petrarch is dealt with much more fully. “Even that remote corner of the earth England knows him as a principal poet,”^[611] and here Boccaccio no longer nescit utrum, but haud dubitat quin, his fame has reached Cyprus. His “divine” Africa, his Bucolics, his Epistles in verse and prose, and a good many other things, are noticed.

463Next he recurs to antiquity, mentioning Homer especially, and defending his own practice of mixing Greek words with Latin by the examples of Cicero, Macrobius, Apuleius, and Ausonius. He has a good deal to say (entirely in a Renaissance spirit) on the importance of the Greeks and of Greek; defends, against clerical prejudice, his description of the heathen poets as the theologians of mythology, argues once more that Dante may be called a theologian proper, contends at great length that there is no harm in the study of heathen matters by Christians, and, after purging himself of other objections, concludes.

A most interesting document; indeed a document upon which, with reference both to its general tenor and to individual expressions (of which it has been possible to mention but one or two here), it would be pleasant to spend much more time. But a document which, for our present purpose and plan, seems to establish in the main two things, both of them rather negative than positive. The first is that Boccaccio can hardly be appealed to either as helping Dantes Aligerus to remove the reproach from mediæval criticism, in the sense in which we here understand it, or even as a representative proper of mediæval criticism at all—that his criticism, such as it is, is of a purely Renaissance type, and results, not from the application of mediæval ideas to ancient matter, but from the application of resuscitated ancient ideas to matter which, though not wholly, is preferably chosen from ancient material. It is not to be forgotten that even in that creative work which has been referred to above, Boccaccio has always preferred the matière de Rome, the classical side of the mediæval storehouse. From this he has drawn the Teseide, from this the Filostrato, and if in the Filocopo he has made a more purely mediæval choice, let it be remembered that Floire et Blanche-fleur, his original, is of all Romances the most like a Byzantine novel, and has even been thought to have been directly inspired by one.

Secondly, when we examine the character of this criticism of his in detail, we find it differing from Dante’s in this, that while Dante undoubtedly does consider the general and abstract points of poetry and of literature, Boccaccio practically considers 464nothing else. His descriptions of Dante himself and of Petrarch would suffice to prove this: but, in fact, it is proved by every page, every paragraph, every sentence, almost every word. Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth books of the Genealogy Boccaccio is really pleading pro domo sua—for the status and craft of the story-teller generally, not of the poet as such. And further, he is pleading for free trade in the story, not for any special process of art or craft in its manufacture. He had possibly, if not certainly, read the De Vulgari, but, as he read it, it must have been in the first part of the first book only that he found much that was germane to his own tastes and principles. If we could but have had from himself such an examen of the Decameron as Corneille and, still more, Dryden have given of their work! But the time simply did not admit of any such thing: and though Boccaccio was very much in advance of his time in some ways, these ways were not of the some.

Nor does the Fifteenth Century proper necessitate any revision of the general doctrine of this chapter. There are here and there blind stirrings of the Renaissance spirit; but, once more, they do not concern us. There is everywhere the dogged or unconscious adherence to the uncritical promiscuousness of the past; and that has been sufficiently commented upon. If it be, as perhaps it is, desirable to take a single example, and deal with it as we have dealt with others, there can hardly be a better than Gavin Douglas, who at the very end of the period shows, side by side with Renaissance tendency (which certainly exists, though to me it does not seem so great as it has seemed to some), the strongest symptoms of persistent mediævalism.

Nobody can deny that the good Bishop of Dunkeld (uneasiest to him of bishop-stools!) not only would have liked to be a |Gavin Douglas.| critic, but shows both his critical and his Renaissance sides in the well-known and violent onslaught on poor Caxton in the first of the very agreeable Prologues to his own translation of the Æneid. In fact, those to whom the woman who killed Abimelech with a stone or slate is the patron saint of criticism, must regard him as a very 465considerable critic. How Caxton’s work and Virgil’s are “no more like than the Devil and Saint Austin”; how the author “shamefully perverted” the story; how the critic read it “with harms at his heart” that such a book “without sentence or engine” should be entitled after so divine a bard; how such a wight never knew three words of what Virgil meant; how he, Gavin, is “constrained to flyte,”—all this is extremely familiar. We seem to hear the very voice of the modern “jacket-duster,” of the man who finds his pet task anticipated, his pet subject trespassed upon, and is determined to make the varlet pay for it. Douglas, to be sure, is not quite in the worst case of this class of critic. He can render some reasons, neither garbled nor forged, for his censure. He has (and this is a sign that criticism was stirring) lost taste for, lost even comprehension of, the full, guileless, innocent, mediæval licence of suppression, suggestion, and digression. He protests (quite truly) that Neptune did not join with Æolus in causing the storm that endangered Æneas, but on the contrary stilled that storm. He is indignant at the extension given to the true romantic part of the poem, the Tragedy of Carthage in the Fourth Book, and only less indignant at the suppression of the “lusty games” and plays palustral in the Fifth. Most of all does he tell us of that aggravation of the critical misuse of allegory which was to be one of the main Renaissance notes. The “hidden meaning” of poetry is the great thing for Douglas, and he has much to say about it before he “turns again” on Caxton. Will it be believed that Caxton wrote "Touyr for Tiber"! Alas! alas!

“For Touyr divides Greece from Hungarie,

And Tiber is chief fluide of Italy.”

But all this, and a great deal more like it, as the setting up of the old Rhetoric-Poetic theory of a poem as the story of a perfectly noble character, and the rebuke even to Chaucer not merely for being too literal, just as Caxton was too loose, but for actually saying (the more Chaucer he!) that Æneas was not a perfectly noble character but a forsworn traitor,—all this argues no real relinquishment of the mediæval ideal except 466in a special case. Douglas shows in his own work that he is after all a chip of the old block, and not fresh hewn from a virgin quarry.

In the Prologue to the Sixth Book he returns to the allegorical-philosophical interpretation of Virgil, and shows himself a hundred leagues to leeward of the critical port by urging, in Virgil’s favour, that St Augustine is always quoting him against Paganism. Not in the whole range of mediæval literature is that pell-mell cataloguing, which, with more truth than reverence, has been assimilated to that of the “Groves of Blarney,” better shown than in the Palice of Honour. Solomon, “the well of sapience,” Aristotle, “fulfillit of prudence,” “Salust, Seneca, and Titus Livius” jostle Pythagoras and Porphyry, Parmenides and “Melysses,” “Sidrach, Secundus, and Solenius,” “Empedocles, Neptanabus, and Hermes,” “wise Josephus and facund Cicero,” with other miraculous couples and trinities. The procession of the Court of Venus huddles classical, Biblical, and mediæval in the same, but a more pardonable, fashion; and when the Muses intervene to save the peccant poet, Dictys and Dares still march unblushingly with Homer and Virgil. “Plautus, Poggius, and Persius” must have looked only less oddly, the first and last at the second, than “Esop, Cato, and Allane” (Alanus de Insulis of the Anti-Claudianus and the De planetu Naturæ) each at other. Such a capital phrase as “the mixt and subtle Martial,” the valuable naming of contemporary poets that follows, and other things, may much more than atone for, but cannot hide, the higgledy-piggledy character of the cataloguing, or the odd repetition of the same thing with a difference at the end of the Second Part, and the yet further development in the Third. The note of criticism is discrimination—the note of the Middle Age, as of this, almost its latest exponent, save in the few places where he has chipped his shell, is the indiscriminate.

It can scarcely be necessary, though it might not be uninteresting, to take any more examples. We need not |Further examples unnecessary.| wander in Hercynian forests with those rules of latest Middle High German poetry, which have all the formality of the French “Arts” and none of the charm of their 467products. The Marquis of Santillana and his comrades, in castle or convent of Spain, concern national rather than general history, history of literature rather than history of criticism; and they, like others, will best be glanced at retrospectively in the Renaissance section. From the French rhétoriqueur period we might pick out much that would illustrate, over and over again, what has been sufficiently illustrated already, little that would give us anything new, nothing or next to nothing that would be at once new and important.^[612] As will be shown, a little more in detail, in the Interchapter which follows, the service which the Middle Ages rendered to Criticism was indeed inestimable; but it was by way of provision of fresh material, not by way of examination, either of that material or of anything older.

469

INTERCHAPTER III.

§ I. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE MEDIÆVAL PERIOD TO LITERARY CRITICISM.

§ II. THE POSITION, ACTUAL AND POSSIBLE, OF LITERARY CRITICISM AT THE RENAISSANCE.

I.

In perhaps no part of a work of the present kind is it more important than it is here to distinguish between the different kinds of value, for the special purpose, of the period in question. If you judge this by its positive contributions to the standard literature of literary criticism, it has absolutely nothing of consequence to advance but the De Vulgari Eloquio. There is not very much else at all; and what there is consists mainly of agreeable babblings, of schoolbooks, and of incidental utterances, which at best can be taken as a kind of semeiotic.

Yet, in the De Vulgari itself, the Middle Ages lodged such a diploma-piece as has been scarcely half-a-dozen times elsewhere seen in the history of the world. And, what is still more important, their contributions to productive literature were such that they take, from the catholic point of view, equal rank as a whole with those of classical and those of modern times, while, for the special critical purpose, they are almost more valuable than either. Enforced and necessary ignorance of what the Middle Ages had to teach accounts in almost every case for whatever shortcomings we find in the Classics; wilful or careless ignoring of this accounts for most of the shortcomings of the moderns; recourse to it accounts for most of the merits, such as they are, of the criticism of the nineteenth century. 470The critic who knows his Middle Ages, knowing also ancient and modern literature, and he alone, has the keys of the criticism of the world.

Of the excellent and astonishing accomplishment of the De Vulgari Eloquio enough has been said already, and it will not require extensive surveys to show the small accomplishment in criticism of the Middle Ages elsewhere. It is almost enough to consider, as we have done, the work of Chaucer, their next man to Dante in genius^[613] as a known personality. Chaucer had all or almost all the necessary qualifications of a critic—a real knowledge of literature, a distinctly satirical humour, a large tolerance, a touch, decided but not too frequent, of enthusiasm, an interest in a very wide range of different subjects and forms. And he is actually a critic in embryo, and more, throughout his work. The Boethius and the Astrolabe, the Rose and the Troilus, half the Canterbury Tales, more than half the minor works, are saturated with literature—could have come from no author but one who was saturated with literature. There is uncrystallised criticism on every page; there is even some crystallised criticism in the Sir Thopas, and perhaps elsewhere. But almost always “it is not so expressed,” and for once Shylock is justified of his refusal to find it. In Chaucer, the strange mediæval levelling of authors, not merely in respect of trustworthiness, but in respect of positive value, continues. Macrobius is as Cicero; Dares is much more than Homer. If he gives an opinion, it is a moral one. He puts the rejection of alliteration on a mere local ground; and they will not even let us believe that he laughed at French of Stratford-atte-Bowe from any literary point of view.

Yet while the persistent study of Rhetoric is of great importance, as exhibiting the keeping up of a critical treatment—such as it is—of literature, the growth of the vernacular Poetics is of much more, as developing a side of formal criticism which was 471destined to become of more and more importance as time went on, and to have a connection with, and an influence upon, criticism not merely formal, to which there is no parallel in ancient times. So far as we have any trustworthy evidence, Greek prosody was born like Pallas—full-grown and fully armed. It has no known period of infancy or pupilage: the poets may devise—may even give their names to—ingenious combinations, but all these combinations obey one prearranged system. If the case of Latin is not quite the same, the periods where it is most significantly different happen to be periods when criticism had either not come into being or had abdicated its functions. A De Prosodia Latina, by Nævius must have been as interesting as Gascoigne’s Notes of Instruction, and might have been as interesting as the De Vulgari Eloquio. A treatise on Latin Rhythms by Prudentius might, in its different way, have had an interest which is difficult to parallel by anything modern in actual existence.

The Middle Ages, however, were constrained to grapple with their problem as it arose. They had, as we have seen, been constant to Artes Poeticæ dealing with Latin: at last they had begun to face the more difficult question, how to construct and regulate their own growing vernacular prosody. No doubt, in these latter attempts, the mechanical prescriptions of the Provençal and French Arts appear more frequently than the philosophical-scientific consideration of poetical capacities visible in the De Vulgari; but there is no reasonable fault to find with this. Nor can it be reasonably contested that the extreme variety, licence, and (if any one likes the word) irregularity of the greater modern prosodies have given wider range to individual poetical development than was allowed by the prosodies of the ancients. Here, as elsewhere, uniformity rather than variety was probably the aim, and is certainly the achievement, of the Classics. For one individual and all but inimitable thing, like the Æschylean modulation of the chorus (so different from the grave but less throbbing music of Sophocles, and from the Euripidean tune) or like the Lucretian Hexameter, we find a dozen resemblances; and, with elaborate combinations like the Alcaic or Sapphic, the result is, as in the parallel case of 472our Spenserian, or the Jonson-Herbert-In Memoriam quatrain with enclosed rhyme, mainly uniform. But the greater or less licence of equivalent substitution in the staple English lines—the octosyllable and decasyllable, for instance—admits of the impression of a singular personal stamp, and, unless rejected by the mistake of the individual or the moment, has rarely failed to produce it.

Still one returns, and must necessarily return, to the admission that, to justify the claims here put forward as to the critical importance of the Middle Ages, one cannot go to their own explicit and deliberate exercises in criticism. To apply Johnson’s not quite inspired remark on Fielding and Richardson, they neither did, nor in all probability could, explain the mechanism of the timepiece. But they told the time of day with unerring accuracy; and their records of it have been neglected, and will be neglected by succeeding ages, only at the peril—which has already sometimes led to actual shipwreck—of miscalculating the whole literary reckoning. When the critics of the Renaissance, followed more or less blindly by those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, either contumeliously or in the sheer generous mistake of desire for improvement, turned their backs, as far as they could, on the products of Mediæval literature, they not merely shut themselves out from a vast volume of delight, they not only mistook disastrously the value of many individuals, but they recklessly deprived themselves once more—and with far less excuse and greater loss than had resulted from the similar refusal of the later Greeks—of an inestimable opportunity for Comparison. And so they once more barred for themselves the one gate and highway to really universal criticism of literature.

For the great, the immense, value of the literature of the Middle Ages consists in its freshness and independence, and the consequent fashion in which new literary bents and faculties of the human mind were manifested. The Greeks had, at any rate so far as we know, neither the advantage nor the disadvantage of any precedent literature before them; but their spirit of theory and of philosophising, while it helped to concentrate and intensify the peculiar virtue of their product, 473tended also to narrow and stereotype their range. Latin suffered from the double drawback of system and model. And modern literature itself has not, with all its achievements, been able to free itself from the inevitable consequences of ancestry. It is a great deal too literary; it has, in almost all cases, the obsession of the library, and the printed book, upon it. It is deliberate, preoccupied, interested; it has all sorts of cants, prejudices of education or emancipation, purposes, reminiscences, unacknowledged and often unconscious trammels and twitches. Its fountains are very rarely of living water; they are fed from carefully constructed and collected reservoirs, if not by positive distillation from the great sea of older literature.

Now, with all their slavish docility, all their writing in schools and groups and batches, all their adoption of tags and texts, the Middle Ages and their literature present a spectacle which is exactly the reverse of this. The authors have the appearance of following; they are really straying, each at the dictation of his own tastes and instincts only. You may as well try to teach a cat to do anything in any but her own way as a mediæval writer. When he copies a Romance, he will change the names if he does nothing else: but probably he will do much else, writing it in sixains if his model is in couplets, in decasyllabics if his original is octosyllabic, and so forth. Nothing shall induce him to keep historical distinctions or philosophical differences. His hero^[614] shall be as beautiful as “Paris of Troy, or Absalom, or Partenopex”; his story of Alexander shall blend sober history and the wildest fiction, with a coolness which is only not reckless because it does not see anything to reck. Formal restrictions of the minor kind, prosodic and other, he will observe devoutly, because they come naturally to him and are of his own devising; but any restrictions of literary theory he utterly ignores. His Muse will wear no stays, though she does not disdain ornaments.

The reward of this obedience to Nature was signal. In the first place the Middle Ages created, or practically created, the STORY. Of course there were stories before; of course the Odyssey would be the best story in the world if, of the main elements 474of Romance—Passion and Mystery—one were a little more developed, and is almost the best story in the world as it is. Of course there are capital fabliaux in Herodotus, fine apologues in Plato, good things of other kinds elsewhere. But the ancients not only hampered themselves by almost always telling their longer stories in verse, but seldom knew how to manage them in verse or prose. The Iliad is such a bad story that it has tempted the profanity of those who would make it not one but a dozen stories; the Æneid is a story, dull à dormir debout as such, with some good rambling and fighting, a great descent to Hades, a capital boxing-match, not a bad regatta, and a famous but borrowed episode of passion. Out of Herodotus, till we come to the very verge of the classical period with Apuleius and Lucian, it is almost impossible to find a Greek, quite impossible to find a Roman, who knows how to tell a story at all. The exquisite substance of mythology receives no due honour from the story-teller as such. Read Ovid (who had as much of the story-telling spirit in him as any ancient except Herodotus), and then turn to what is often the mere doggerel and jargon of the mediæval Latin story-tellers in prose and verse. The gift, no matter whether it came from the East or from the West, from the North or from the South, from the Heaven above or the earth beneath, or rose a new Aphrodite from the Atlantic sea, is here and is not there.

Without this gift of story-telling there could not have appeared—though it would not by itself have been enough to produce—the greater gift of the Romance. It would be as unnecessary as it would be foolish to enter here into the secular and truceless war as to the origin, the nature, and so forth of this famous thing. It is sufficient to observe, once more, that the thing is here and is not there, except almost by accident. And the gift of the Romance—in that wide historical sense in which it could be, and was, in the Middle Ages applied to almost every manner of subject—was a gift to literature so inestimable that perhaps no other has ever quite equalled it. At once, with that nonchalance (they called it nonchaloir) in which no time has ever equalled these Ages, they swept away the 475Doctrine of the Subject, with all the cants and heresies which pullulate round its undoubtedly noble articles of original faith. Romance was perfectly prepared to deal with any subject, from religion to stag-hunting, from chronology to love. It depended no doubt on the individual craftsman whether the result was good or bad; but the method has, in the right hands, triumphed over the most intractable materials, added charm to the most commonplace, made the most grotesque acceptable. Could anything be thinner and more ordinary than the subject of Floire et Blanchefleur? Can anything be more charming, not merely than its most perfect outcome in Aucassin et Nicolette, but even than the diffuser and less happily phrased verse-forms? In the Arthurian Legend the success is greater still. Romance takes a dim personality, and a handful of cacophonous place-names, out of a suspicious compilation of pseudo-history, and spins it, in a single lifetime, into a story the most elaborate, the most artful, the most variedly interesting, the fullest of meaning (if men must have meaning) in the whole literary world.

Even to Dante it did not occur to subject the methods and the results of this new and potent kind to such an examination as that which Aristotle had partly given to the older literature. Nor, at that time and in those circumstances, was even Dante likely to have led such an inquiry to a good end. The Middle Ages, while consciously abandoning, almost or altogether, the old aim at Action, had not arrived at the modern command of Character. They worked at and by mediate things—Incident, Atmosphere, Description, Manners, Passion—and they made all these and others subserve a Romantic Unity of plot which, instead of being circular like the Classical Unity, was calculated for indefinite prolongation, not merely in straight line, but after the manner of a tree, with branches and inarchings skyward, earthward, and horizontal. The scheme admitted adornments of various kinds, which must have been difficult if not impossible to reconcile with the more sober and exacting classical model. It permitted a much greater indulgence of the resort to the methods of other arts, especially painting, than classical literature had, until its latest days, thought proper. It paid very little attention 476to mere probability. All these points invited the comparative critic, but they did not find him. In three respects, however, the difference between classical and mediæval Imitation or Representation was almost more striking than in any other, and all of these presented the most tempting opportunities for criticism. These were the attitude of the new literature to Religion, its attitude to the passion of Love, and its use of an implement which, though by no means unknown to Classical literature, had been more sparingly used therein, the method of Allegory.

On the first point it would be very easy to enlarge beyond the widest toleration of this treatise; it is here only necessary to point out how delicate, and how important, are the new duties prescribed to the critic of mediæval literature in regard to it. The “blinded Papist” view (which makes itself felt even in some observations of such a man as Scott now and then) may not be so common as it once was, but it is not entirely obsolete. And it may be doubted whether that to which it has given place—a philosophical pity, contemptuous or sympathising, for “superstition” generally—is not even more hampering, while there can be no doubt of the hamper imposed on the yet earlier Renaissance by the superior contempt which it felt for mediæval childishness and ignorance. In this literature, and in the romantic branch of it more particularly, allowance has to be made at every moment, in every respect and condition, for the omnipresence of an elaborate creed which nobody doubted, with which everybody indeed was so saturated and familiar that he could jest with it and at it, as one jests with and at a best-beloved and best-known person and friend. It supplies subject, it affects treatment, it colours phrase and image. Although it is very easy to underrate the amount of actual religious feeling in antiquity, yet this feeling, at its noblest and sincerest, was unquestionably of an entirely different character from that of the “Ages of Faith.” Take, at their best and strongest, the sincere fetichism of the ancient equivalent of the “charcoal-burner,” the beautiful mythology of the poet, the sublime mysticism of the Platonist, and the exalted if slightly Pharisaical morality of the better Stoic—combine 477them with all the art of the student of development. But you will not succeed in making anything in the least like the creed of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with Christ, or rather with the Virgin and the Devil, fighting perpetually for Mansoul, with Angels and Deadly Sins under their command, with a miracle possible at every moment, Death and Fortune ruling affairs subject to, but not always interfered with by, the higher influences, the Sacraments to be resorted to at will or neglected at peril, Purgatory to be faced or anticipated and won through, Hell or Heaven for final goal. It is almost impossible to allow too much in degree (though it is extremely possible to allow wrongly in kind) for the influence which this ever-present set of thoughts, beliefs, feelings, which was absent from antiquity and present in the Middle Ages, had upon the literary utterance of the latter. The unnatural gloom and the half-inarticulate gaiety which have been discovered in this literature (the latter at least as truly as the former), its occasional irrationality, as we are pleased to call it (perhaps “irrationalism” would be a better word), its shuddering attraction for the horrible and loathsome, its delight in dream, its quaint and almost flighty revulsions and contrasts—all are due to this.

Equally a commonplace, and yet still more important to, and still more neglected by, criticism, is the attitude of the Middle Ages to Love—which is very mainly conditioned by their attitude to Religion. The not infrequent, though very idle, debate as to whether the Venus of chivalry was Urania or Pandemos is, of course, best avoided by the frank acknowledgment that she was (as indeed Her Divinity always has been) both. The distinction from antiquity, and its influence upon literature, do not lie in the least in this direction, or in the fact of the mixture, but in its nature and character. With exceptions, of course, the tone of antiquity in literature, as to love and to its objects, is either the tone of slightly unreal philosophising, or the tone of the naughty story, or that of half-paraded, half-confessing contempt. The two former require no treatment here; the latter is important. Love and its objects are, to an average serious man of letters of the Classics when not a subject for conventional escapades, a rather regrettable 478incident attached to humanity, something not in the least spoudaion, something only not among the parerga of life because it is almost impossible to avoid them, something useful, not unpleasant, rather better than a constitutional or a bath, but affording a much less worthy employment than talking in a porch, or declaiming in a school. This is undeniably the average attitude of the average man of letters of old. That of his mediæval brother need hardly be described; but its causes come within our view. You have to reckon, not merely with the cult of the Virgin, as has often been done, but with the whole Christian (especially mediæval-Christian) theory of morals and of sin. Why excite yourself about actions indifferent at best, always rather below the attention of a serious man, and at worst leading to unpleasant and dubious consequences? Excitement becomes easy when the consequence of a moment’s guilty indulgence may be the Inferno for eternity. Nay, from a less purely selfish point of view there are reasons enough. Imagination—the real Imagination of Apollonius or Philostratus, not the mere image-furnishing faculty of the ancients generally—had “come to town,” and brought a transformed Love with her. The sense of mystery, of miracle, of the invisible, grafted itself upon the strongest of the merely physical instincts, and the result pervaded literature. The trumpery subject, proper for comedy, for epic episodes, for a carefully kept-under seasoning to tragedy, for light trifles, became, with Religion, the subject of nearly all poetry, and of not a little prose, and made its influence felt in all manner of ways. It even, although the Middle Age was confessedly not strong in character, paved the way to that last grace, thanks to the fancy of the time for rehandling the same subjects and persons. Trace Briseis-Briseida, a fashion-plate in Dares, a slave-girl in Benoist, to the Cressida of Chaucer and of Henryson; trace Guanhumara, a handsome Roman damsel of good family and nothing more, down to the complex woman and Queen of the complete Lancelot, and you will see how character-drawing arose.

But undoubtedly one of the greatest, and perhaps the most characteristic, of the influences of the love-motive on literature, and the development of literary methods through 479this and other motives, is the mediæval use of Allegory. The thing, of course, is not new—nothing ever is in the strict sense. It may actually have dwelt upon the banks of Nile: it certainly did on those of Ilissus and Tiber. But the very strong prominence of it in the Scriptures, and in ecclesiastical writings generally, could not fail to develop it in the younger vernaculars; and its alliance (a dangerous one no doubt, but a real and natural) with Imagination could not long be missed. Many ingenious and industrious hands have traced its origin from Homer to Claudian, and from Claudian to the Romance of the Rose. How it thence coloured all literature is sufficiently known. But no critic has even yet exhausted, nor are a hundred critics likely to exhaust, the subtle and innumerable ramifications of its literary influence and manifestations.

These things and others showed themselves no doubt mainly in the Romance—the chief, the most characteristic, and, so far as anything is original, the most original of the literary products of the Middle Ages. But the Romance was far indeed from being the only new development in literary morphology that the period had to offer. Until nearly its closing time, no great change or advance was made in History, though the artificial speech, which ancient exaggerations of oratory had imposed on the historian, was to a great extent dropped, and the purview of the writer was insensibly widened in other directions. But the immense cultivation of the short tale—first in verse, then in prose—was a matter closely connected, but by no means identical, with the progress of Romance itself. And, as in another matter glanced at above, the restless character of the time, and its constant tendency to reproduce with slight alteration, had, here also, a great influence. In all these alterations the arts and crafts of the future novelist and dramatist were insensibly exercising themselves. But the drama itself demands at least a glance. That the modern play owes nothing to the mediæval is the foolishest of critical delusions; but it would hardly be rash to say that the mediæval drama owes nothing to the ancient. When the horror with which (for not such very bad reasons) the Church regarded stage plays altogether had been a little relaxed, the natural and the artificial 480dramas followed entirely different lines. Hroswitha’s work, and Christus Patiens, and the rest, have absolutely nothing to do with Miracle or Mystery or Farce, which are the romance and the short story thrown, according to the natural histrionic bent of man, into presentation by personages instead of by continuous narration. And the laws which they developed, and by which they helped the greater and more genuine modern drama to be what it was, were natural likewise, and had nothing to do with Aristotle or with Horace, with Plato or with Aristophanes.

This would by itself have sufficed to give the new drama a very different nature, and therefore a most important comparative critical influence, when contrasted with the old. The Greek drama (which the Roman more or less slavishly copied) may have had its infancies; but we possess it only in its riper age. Nor is it even possible that these infancies, granting their existence, could have shown anything like the multiform influences which betray themselves in the mediæval drama. Both may have been originally liturgic; but there is such an infinite difference in the complexity of the liturgies! Both may have been preceded by epic and perhaps lyric; but in other respects the Greek drama was certainly among the first—as the mediæval drama was nearly the last—to take rank among literary kinds. And these differences, putting others aside, would have accounted, in great part, for the singularly undulating and diverse character which (in company, no doubt, with an imperfection as great as the diversity) distinguished the new drama from the splendid, but somewhat narrow, perfection of the old. Even in the stock types, in the Vices and Fools of the new form, there was little or nothing of the fixed character of the Roman—we can say little of the Greek—"comedy of art."

And so, not merely in more kinds of literature than one, but in every kind of literature, with hardly a single exception, the Middle Ages provided their successors with the material for an entirely new Calculus of Critical Variations—for a complete redressing of whatever positive errors or mere relative gaps had existed in the older criticism, by reason of the absence of opportunities for observation.

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II

Nor can it be regarded as any great drawback to the critical position of the Renaissance to which we are coming—and the grounds and data of which it is desirable to survey in advance, by way of retrospect over the contents of the present volume—that this immense provision of new critical material was not accompanied by many, or indeed (with the one great exception, soon to be known, but to be hardly in the least heeded) any, accomplished exercises in critical method. For these, as has been pointed out, were not likely to have been very good; and, good or bad, they were nearly sure to have been neglected, or to have done positive harm by way of mere reaction. Moreover, it was easily and perfectly open to the Renaissance to create for itself in this department. By its recovery—no longer in half-measure, and less than half-light, but in full—of the literature of antiquity, it had been put in possession, not merely of the other great masses of literary material, but of quite admirable examples of critical method itself. Quintilian, Horace, Cicero, the Greek and Latin Rhetoricians, were among its inherited possessions, and it had certainly had the Poetics, though little attention had for a long time been paid to them. But they were soon put before it afresh: and, what is more, the discovery of Longinus also was soon made. Horace, with his arbitrary rules, and his enforced, but probably not at all unwelcome, abstinence from any dry exhibition of material and examples, was no doubt, with all his merits, a very dangerous mentor. But with Aristotle, Quintilian, and Longinus at hand as preceptors of method, and practically all then existing literature, classical and mediæval, at hand as storehouse of matter, a man of the mid-sixteenth century had only himself to blame if he did not hit upon at least the main and general articles of the critical Catholic Faith. He might not anticipate the magnificent and almost unbelievable new developments of literature which were actually to take place, in the three western countries of Europe, within a very few years; but he would have been none the worse critic for 482that. The critic is, by his profession, not in the least bound to be a prophet. But he had every document necessary to correct the chief shortcomings of the ancients, to enlarge the classification of literary kinds, to rearrange the nature, degrees, and methods of the literary assault on the senses and the soul.

It would be undue anticipation to discuss what he did instead of this; or to give in detail the positive influences which worked upon him in preferring his actual alternative. But it is matter of undoubted history that he did not do what he might have done, and it is matter of relevance here to give the reasons, as far as they are retrospective, why he did not do it.

To a considerable extent the explanation, and if not the justification, the excuse, of his failure lie in a well-known and constantly repeated phenomenon which, on this particular occasion, showed itself with unusual, indeed with elsewhere unexampled, distinctness and power. Every age and every individual (it has been said often, but can never be said too often), unless it or he is a mere continuation of predecessors, is unjust to these predecessors. Examples are not necessary; the merest moment’s thought will supply them in profusion. But there were numerous and powerful conditions and forces which made this injustice certain to be more violent and more lasting here than in almost any other case. No known “dispensation” exists historically of anything like the same length, the same intensity, the same uniformity as that which characterises in all things, and certainly not least in matters literary, the thousand years of the Middle Age at its widest stretch. And this would of itself be sufficient to bring about a reaction of corresponding violence and duration. But to this general aspect of the whole period must be added the particular aspect of its final stage. Except in Italy (which had never been intensely or characteristically mediæval, and which had practically ceased to be so, in any sense not external, soon after Dante’s time) the fifteenth century had been a period of decadence, or of transition, or of stagnation, in almost every European country. It is possible, though it is not probable, that minds in which the critical spirit was reawakening might have taken a juster view of things if the fresh examples then before them, to be compared with Homer, 483Lucretius, Thucydides, had been Dante, Chaucer, Froissart. But there was some excuse for an indignant pooh-poohing of the mere possibility of comparison, when the persons, to be compared immediately with the great writers of antiquity, were the dreary and bombastic rhétoriqueurs of the French, or the shambling versifiers of the English, fifteenth century.

The Renaissance, moreover, was likely to be led wrong by that constant delusion of matter, that fatal attraction towards the subject, which, as this History endeavours to show, has led Criticism wrong a dozen times for once that it has led her right. The mediæval forms of literature were identified, allied, in fact saturated, with certain beliefs and modes of thought—scholastic philosophy, Catholic religion, aristocratic politics. To the pure Platonist on the one hand and the thorough-going Aristotelian on the other, to the reformer on the one hand and the freethinker on the other, to the democrat on the one hand and the believer in Machiavellian statecraft on the other, all these things were partly horrible, partly idiotic, altogether to be shaken off and refused. The natural, but in the main irrational and frivolous, weariness of an old fashion was supplemented, inspirited, made far more vehement and dangerous, by the deliberate and reasoned, if not reasonable, antipathy to, and revolt against, an old faith. It has been acknowledged already that the Morte d’Arthur would have fared as badly with Augustine as it did with Ascham; but the moral provocation would not have been aggravated to Augustine, as it was perhaps to Ascham, certainly to more thorough-going Protestants than he, by the distinct connection between the Graal Legend and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.

Accordingly, the Renaissance indulged itself, and left to its successors, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (different as they were from itself in many ways), an amount of “unintelligent scorn” of the past which, if it does credit to nothing else, does credit at least to the vigour and intensity of the time. Sometimes this scorn was vocal and argumentative, as in Ascham himself, in Du Bellay, in others. More often, and with a subtler mischief still, it was silent, implicit, apparently exchanged for mere negligence. The childish things were simply put away, 484despatched to the lumber-room, and left there. And it was this negligence, rather than the scorn, which did harm to the criticism of the periods that followed. It does not do the critic unmitigated harm to take the wrong side now and then; he exercises himself at his weapons, he can acquire dexterity in them, and very often (Dryden is a notable example) he teaches himself orthodoxy in the very act of fighting for the heterodox. But when he allows himself to ignore, great gulfs or smaller pits open for him at once. That is what he can never afford to do; that is the cause of all the errors which have beset his kind, from the beginning of critical things until the present day. One of the most excellent and admirable of librarians once replied to a childish question of the present writer, “What do you do with the rubbish?” “It is rather difficult, you see, to know what is rubbish to-day; and quite impossible to know what will be rubbish to-morrow.” And while this is more especially true of the critic, who can with safety pass nothing, at least unexamined, as rubbish, his case is more dangerous still than that of the librarian, who has but to arrange what he has got in orderly fashion, and prepare plentiful shelves for what is coming.

With the critic, as we have seen, it is different. He must always generalise at his peril, and subject to the upset of his generalisations by fresh discoveries. But he can at least be careful of the “without prejudice,” and he can at least neglect nothing that is within his reach, in his processes of observation and comparison. The earlier Greek critics erred, as we have seen, partly because of a necessary and guiltless deprivation. But their venial sin became more of a mortal one, when they not only assumed that there was nothing save what they knew in Greek, but deliberately ignored the opportunities, not of sovereign but of considerable efficacy, which were offered them by Latin. The Latin critics erred, partly by the same assumption, and partly by converting the despite of Latin into a slavish and unintelligent adoration of Greek, and not always the best Greek. The Middle Age was innocent, as hardly indulging in criticism at all. But the Renaissance critics at first committed, and to far too great an extent handed on, a combination of the sins of their classical teachers. They assumed the 485stationary state of literary kinds and qualities, as both Greeks and Romans had done; they adulated classical literature, like the Romans in regard to Greek; they despised mediæval literature, like the Greeks in relation to Latin. And, as we shall see, they had their reward.

But I should be sorry to end not merely a chapter but a Book, not merely a Book but a volume, without a caveat against possible misconstruction of the words “fault,” “error,” “sin,” “mischief,” “misfortune,” and the like, which have just been used, not merely in this context, but throughout the volume itself. There have been, I believe, persons unfortunate enough to be dissatisfied with the moral and physical government of the universe—persons who have sadly pronounced it “a crank machine” in many ways. These things are not my trade. But, in matters literary, I must plead guilty to being something of an optimist. Not that I think all literature good—that is not precisely the conclusion to which a thirty years’ practice of criticism brings one. In the critical land, as in the pays des amours, the shore where one always loves is a shore of which it must be said that on ne la connaît guère. There is, indeed, a certain critical delight in reading even the worst books, so long as they are positively and not merely negatively bad—but that is another matter.

The point on which I am contented to be called a critical Pangloss is this, that I have hardly the slightest desire to alter—if I could do so by the greatest of all miracles, that of retro-active change—the literary course of the world. No doubt things might have been better still—one may there agree with the pious divine on his strawberry. But one may also be perfectly contented with the actual result. I have endeavoured to show that, however we may feel bound to pronounce Greek literature incomplete in this or that department, and still more Greek criticism imperfect in its assumptions and of questionable adequacy in its methods, yet Greek criticism was the criticism which was wanted, to register and to preserve the qualities which have made Greek literature perhaps the most indispensable possession among the now goodly list of the literatures of the world. I have endeavoured further to show that the two conflicting 486strains or streams in Latin criticism correspond, in a manner “necessary and voluptuous and right,” on the one hand, to the ordered correctness and venustas which are the notes of the Latin spirit on its Academic side; on the other, to the under-current of half-barbaric gorgeousness which there, as elsewhere, now and again asserted itself—with no small benefit to the world’s letters.

And so, also, in this chapter and the Book which precedes it, I have tried to show that the immense provision of new kinds of literature by the Middle Age, side by side with its almost total abstinence from criticism, was the best thing that could have happened. Nor is it impossible that, if we are able to pursue the inquiry, we shall find that the new differentia of the Renaissance period and that which followed to the Romantic revival—the curious fact that almost all its criticism went one way, while almost all its best creation went dead in the teeth of that criticism—has again worked mainly if not wholly for good. But this is for the future. Si laisse ore à tant li contes à parler!

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