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at any time, the best criticism is impossible; the “He followeth not us”
interferes with all due appreciation.[710]

649. The standard edition of Fontenelle (8 vols., Paris, 1790) is an

agreeable book, excellent in print and paper.
650. Op. cit. sup., especially Part I., chaps, ix. and xi.
651. Though there is a good deal of the critical spirit in him, too, and
the famous advice to “Bélier, mon ami” has fellows of critical application.
652. Œuvres, ed. cit., i. 234.
653. Œuvres, i. 249.
654. Ibid., p. 270. The Dialogues, it should perhaps be said, appeared
first, as early as 1683.
655. Ed. cit., iii. 1-67.
656. Ed. cit., iii. 181.
657. As if, however, to show that one must never speak of Fontenelle
without reserves, there are some extremely interesting things here also.
For instance, the characteristic malice, with a serious and sensible side to
it, of the law that the sentiments and language of the artificial pastoral
shall bear the same relation to nature as ces habits que l’on prend dans
des ballets pour représenter les paysans.
 658. My copy is the Œuvres (Paris, 1754) in 10 vols. (the first
divided into two parts).
659. The main documents of which are Madame Dacier’s Traité
des causes de la corruption du goût (Paris, 1714) and La Motte’s
Réflexions sur la Critique, which will be found in the third volume of
the ed. just mentioned.
660. In his Premier Discours sur la Tragédie, ed. cit. sup., iv. 23
sq.
661. 4 vols., Paris, 1720-1731.
662. Op. cit. inf., I. xx.
663. 3 vols., Paris, 1730.
664. I have found him repeatedly quoted in those interesting early
gropings of the German nonage, which will be referred to in the next
chapter. Had he anything to do with Lady Mary W. Montagu’s
tormentor, Rémond?
665. 5 vols., Amsterdam, 1750. It is rather too pretty, and so rare.
But it is in the British Museum: and I have a copy (which I owe to the
kindness of Mr Gregory Smith) of the Réflexions (v. inf.) It has only
initials (“R. D. S. M.”) on the title-page.
666. i. 65, ed. cit. The Dialogues themselves had appeared as
early as 1711.
667. The Réflexions sur la poésie suivies de lettres, &c., had
originally appeared in 1733-34 at The Hague. The passage is this:
On y rapproche de nous les objets qui sont les plus éloignés—on
leur donne du corps—on les anime. Toute la Nature est agitée des
mêmes passions que nous.
668. 6 vols., Paris, 1808. For in this kind of work one must often
read six volumes to justify the writing of six lines. And Racine, to do
him justice, if not a great genius, is no small symptom. When a
Frenchman of his time and associations reads Milton reverently,
something will happen soon.
669. 2 vols., Paris, 1719. In English by T. Nugent: 3 vols., 1748.
670. Op. cit., Part I., § 35. His justest strictures are on the
extravagantly syllabic quality of French prosody, and its neglect of
quantity. His ear seems to have been good for rhythm, bad for
rhyme.
 671. Why did he think that Hudibras was written par un homme de
la maison Hovvart? [i.e., Howard] (i. 132). I may note here that Père
Andrè, with his Essai sur le Beau, is postponed, as a pure
Æsthetician, to the next volume.
672. Pensées Diverses (Œuvres, ed. Laboulaye, Paris, 1875, 7
vols., or with Vian’s Life 8), vii. 171.
673. It has been thought that this passage, as glancing at the
Henriade, was one of the reasons of Voltaire’s affection for
Montesquieu. It is perhaps worth observing that there is a strong
resemblance, with some minor differences, between Montesquieu’s
attitude to literature, and that of his friend Chesterfield.
674. I use the thirteen-vol. ed. of the Panthéon Littéraire (Paris,
1876) because, though cumbrous individually, it is the only one that
will go in moderate shelf-room.
675. This comes, it is true, from the Sentiments du Curé Meslier
(vi. 542). But it is allowed that Voltaire rewrote this, and I should not
be surprised if he did a little more.
676. These are to be found in more places than one: the Lettres
sur les Anglais (originally Lettres Philosophiques), those to the
Prince of Brunswick, the dialogue in which Rabelais figures with
Lucian and Erasmus, &c.
677. This, the usually quoted form, runs in the Lettres sur les A.,
“un Rabelais dans son bon sens, et vivant en bonne compagnie.”
678. Ed. cit., ix. 56.
679. I have not thought it necessary to waste time and space by
selecting additional justificatory pieces from his enormous
Correspondence.
680. This attitude was emphasised (perhaps by his dislike of
Rousseau) in his later years; and was handed on to men like
Condorcet and La Harpe.
681. The gibe of Gautier (Caprices et Zigzags, “Un tour en
Belgique”), where he calls the Sun “un astre à qui M. de Malfilâtre
fait une ode trouvée admirable par D’Alembert” contains no doubt
something of youthful Romantic naughtiness in it: but also something
more. The ode has a frigid Akensidish grace; but there is too much
about axes and orbits therein: and it is to be feared that this, rather
than the poetry, attracted the philosophe critic.
 682. His Academic Discours de Réception (Aug. 25, 1753). It is
easily accessible—for instance in the Didot Œuvres Choisies, i. 19-
25.
683. It is generally quoted “Le style c’est l’homme.” There is a
further dispute whether it ought to be “de l’homme même.” For what
is probably the nearest anticipation of it, v. sup., p. 336.
684. So again in the remark, not made formally, but often thrown in
his face, that certain verses were “as fine as fine prose.” But this
heresy, as readers of this volume will know, is only that of Fénelon
and La Motte revived.
685. His literary work has only one small section to itself, the
Réflexions Critiques sur quelques Poètes; but some of it appears in
the Fragments, the Dialogues, and elsewhere. All is in Gilbert’s
excellent edition of the Œuvres, (2 vols., Paris, 1857), some in that
volume of the Didot Collection which gives Vauvenargues’ Maxims
with those of La Rochefoucauld and Montesquieu.
686. Les Beaux Arts réduits à un même principe, Paris, 1746;
Cours de Belles-Lettres, 4 vols., Paris, 1750; Traité de la
Construction Oratoire, Paris, 1764.
687. 5 vols., Paris, 1764. This is the edition I have used; later ones
seem to be in 6 vols., but without addition so far as I know.
688. 2 vols., Paris, 1771.
689. It is perhaps right to warn the reader that this is not, I believe,
the general opinion.
690. See on Rollin, sup., p. 509.
691. Op. cit., i. 60.
692. He, with Condorcet and M. J. Chénier, is sometimes spoken
of as showing a classical reaction against the eighteenth-century
toleration of English and other vagaries which we shall see in
Marmontel. I think “reaction” is rather too strong a word, though
“recrudescence” might do. Condorcet was only a critic par interim, if
even that, nor need we occupy ourselves with him: justice shall be
done (Fortune permitting) in the next volume to the person who had
the honour to be brother to André Chénier.
693. Œuvres Complètes, 7 vols., Paris 1819; Éléments de
Littérature by themselves, 3 vols. in the Didot Collection.
694. El. de Litt., article Poésie.
 695. Ibid., art. Anacréontique.
696. The enemy will perhaps say, parodying Hegel: “With this
historian of criticism, anybody is a critic who does not believe in
Boileau.” 'A will have a little galled me: but not seriously.
697. I use this word not as synonymous with “methodical,” but as
contrasting the book with fragmentary commentaries like those of La
Monnoye and Le Duchat.
698. These will be found in vol. vii. of ed. cit.
699. M. Texte must have forgotten these remarkable passages, or
perhaps not have known them, when in M. Petit de Julleville’s large
History (vi. 754) he wrote that La Place’s version could only confirm
readers in the idea that Shakespeare was a chaos of monstrosity
and triviality. Evidently it had quite a different effect on Marmontel.
700. Under the head Marotique.
701. L’emphatique Thomas, as he is duly called in that traditional
distribution of epithets which is so dear to the French mind, and
which helps to explain why it is always, in its depths, neo-classic.
702. 18 vols. (Paris, 1825 sq.)
703. La Harpe here anticipated the Malay chief whom Mr Wallace
met in the farthest isles of the Bird of Paradise, and who chased him
therefrom with contumely when he said he came from a place called
“England.” “Unglung,” said the chief, was not a word that a man
could pronounce. And therefore—this is La Harpe all over—there
could be no such place, and Mr Wallace was a liar.
704. There is not, I think, even yet any complete edition of Rivarol,
though M. de Lescure some years ago devoted much attention to
him. All the work referred to below will be found in the older Œuvres
de Rivarol (published by Delahays, Paris, 1857), with a useful
selection of criticisms. The present writer contributed to the
Fortnightly Review for January 1879 an essay on Rivarol and
Chamfort, which will be found reprinted in Miscellaneous Essays
(2nd ed., London, 1895). Chamfort himself can only be mentioned
here as showing, in his Éloges on Molière and La Fontaine, how
insignificant such things, written even by such a man, can be.
705. Ed. cit., p. 277 sq.
706. This is neo-classic criticism in its quintessence of corruption.
What fit reader wants, or could endure, an episode between Per me
si va and riveder le stelle? You might as well demand “half an hour’s
interval for refreshments.” But your Epic must have your Episode. It
is like “Where is your brown tree?”
707. Ed. cit., p. 79 sq.
708. This, however, is not in the Essay, but in a separate “Maxim.”
709. Cf., for instance, Batteux, quite a reasonable person on the
whole. He has no doubt (i. 80, 81) of the excellence, the almost
perfection, at which French taste has arrived; he only fears that it
may be impossible to guard against falling from so high an estate.
This extraordinary self-complacency is a little less noticeable in
England, but only a little. When we thought that Mr Pope had
improved even upon Mr Dryden, and was in a sort of Upper House of
Literature as compared with Shakespeare and Chaucer, we could
not throw many stones at those who considered Voltaire a better
poet than Ronsard.
710. The corresponding chapter to this in that “History of Critical
Ana,” which we must not write, would be particularly rich. Every
branch of French literature at the time is full of such things; the most
amusing of all, perhaps, being Crébillon’s malicious eulogy-satire on
Marivaudage at the end of the 2nd book of L’Ecumoire, where Tanzäi
condemns, and Néadarné is charmed with, the juxtaposition of
words “that never met before, and thought they could not possibly
get on together,” and the depicting “not merely of what everybody
has done and said and thought, but of what they would like to have
thought but did not!”
 CHAPTER III.

CLASSICISM IN THE OTHER NATIONS.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS—TEMPORARY REVIVAL OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—
GRAVINA—MURATORI: HIS ‘DELLA PERFETTA POESIA’—CRESCIMBENI
—QUADRIO—THE EMERGENCE OF LITERARY HISTORY—FURTHER
DECADENCE OF ITALIAN CRITICISM—METASTASIO—NEO-CLASSICISM
TRIUMPHS IN SPAIN—THE ABSURDITIES OF ARTIGA—LUZÁN—THE
REST UNINERESTING—FEYJÓO, ISLA, AND OTHERS—RISE AT LAST OF
GERMAN CRITICISM—ITS SCHOOL TIME—CLASSICISM AT BAY
ALMOST FROM THE FIRST: GOTTSCHED—THE ‘VERSUCH EINER
CRITISCHEN DICHTKUNST’—ITS CHIEF IDEA—SPECIMEN DETAILS—
GELLERT: HE TRANSACTS.

It would be scarcely more than one of those sweeping

generalisations which attract a certain class of readers, if one were
to say that, during the eighteenth century, England and France
exercised a reciprocal influence over one another in literature, the
results of which the remaining nations did little but imitate. It is
Preliminary certainly true that, as regards the special subject of
remarks. this particular Book—the criticism of orthodox neo-
classicism in the eighteenth century—Germany, Italy, and Spain play
a part to which justice can be very briefly done, while the rest may
well be silence. Nor will Spain and Italy at least have much more to
give us when, and if, in the next volume, we turn from the setting to
the rising sun. But it will be very different with Germany, where
almost the entire interest lies in the restless struggles and obstinate
questioning which lead to Romanticism, and which practically show
themselves from the very moment when the Swiss School aroused
German criticism from its long sleep after Opitz. What has to be said
of the Gottscheds and Gellerts of the Northern Country had better be
said last, so as to bring the matter into closer juxtaposition with the
account of the Romantic Revolt itself. Italy (which has some interest
in at least the beginning of the century) and Spain, which has very
little in any part of it, must be taken first.
 For some reason, or for none, the closing years of the seventeenth
century, and the opening of the eighteenth, in Italy saw a very
considerable revival of that critical spirit which, as we know, had died
away so strangely, after its vigorous flourishing a hundred years
Temporary earlier. It is true that this new Italian criticism is of a
revival of rather tell-tale kind—that it is, in great part at least,
Italian criticism of erudition and of retrospect. But Gravina,
Criticism.
Muratori, Crescimbeni, and even Quadrio, form a
group of no small interest. The first is a real critic of great, if not
always well-directed, ability; the second, something of a real critic
too, with amazing erudition; the third, the author of the first really
literary history of a national literature; and the fourth, the first pioneer
—no Lynceus, certainly, but still a pioneer-guide—in the ways of
general and comparative literary study.
Gianvincenzo Gravina is one of those persons who particularly
invite the student to idle ægri somnia as to what they might have
Gravina. been in other times and circumstances. A lawyer, a
littérateur, the adoptive father of Metastasio, the
joint founder of the Arcadian Academy, a critic of remarkable
shrewdness, who wrote excellent things on tragedy, and thought his
own bad tragedies excellent—he tempts one strangely. His most
famous and most often quoted critical work is Della Ragion Poetica,
[711]
but it is necessary, in order to appreciate his criticism, to go to his
Works[712] and read also the Della Tragedia and the Discorso delle
Favole. The total effect is, as with most other eighteenth-century
critics, a conclusion that the writer has not “found his way”: though
he is nearer to it than some others writing later. The Della Ragion
Poetica is a most interesting labyrinth of cross-purposes. The
strongly scholastic character of Italian serious thought, which we
have noticed in Rinaldini only a few years earlier,[713] betrays itself in
Gravina’s opening del vero e del falso; del reale e del finto; and in an
episodic discussion of the origin of Idolatry, which may seem
absolutely preposterous at first sight, but which works itself into the
consideration of Fable not so ill. The admirable description of Homer
as “the potentest of mages and the wisest of enchanters, in that he
makes use of words not so much for the complacency of the ear as
for the advantage of the imagination,”[714] is balanced, at a page or
two’s distance, by a fling at the perniciosa turba de' Romanzi. The
utility of poetry is gravely insisted on, and we are invited as usual to
the study of the Kinds; but section xiv., on “Popular Judgment,” is
instinct with that Italian common-sense which had shown itself in
various ways during the sixteenth century, through mouths so
different as those of Castelvetro and Cinthio Giraldi, a sense almost
epigrammatically concentrated in the phrase ne con solo popolo ne
senza il popolo. In these passages of Gravina’s there is to be found,
put not indeed quite clearly, but unmistakably on fair allowance, a
doctrine which hardly any critic of any day has sufficiently digested—
that there is something in poetry corresponding, in measure and
degree, to a poetical sentiment which only needs waking in all but
the exceptions of mankind. What libraries of vain or positively
mischievous disquisition should we have been spared, what
unintelligent laudation of Burns when the intelligent is so easy, what
unintelligent depreciation of Béranger when the abstinence from it is
surely not so difficult, what idle and obstinate questionings about
Donne or Whitman, Macaulay or Moore, and a hundred others of the
most opposite kinds, if people would only have remembered our
author’s sound and sober law[715] that "in all men there gleams
through [traspare] I know not what discernment of the Good "to
which poets, if they know how, can appeal!
A large part of Gravina’s work in the Ragion consists of an actual
historical survey of poets and poetry in the spirit which, as we have
seen and shall see, was so prevalent in his day; and his judgments,
if a little traditional, are almost always sound, whether he is dealing
with the classics or with the great Renaissance group of Italian-Latin
poets.[716] Nor should he lack due meed for the word of praise he
gives to Folengo, a writer little likely to appeal to the ordinary
eighteenth-century spirit. When one thinks of the extreme
inadequacy of French judgments of Rabelais himself at this time, it is
no small merit in Gravina to have said, of one of not the least of
Rabelais’ creditors, that “he wanted only will, not strength, to write a
noble poem,” and actually possessed learning, invention, and fancy.
The first book of the Della Ragion Poetica ends thus with an author
who must have seemed, to the usual eighteenth-century critic, nearly
as sad and bad and mad as Rabelais and Shakespeare,[717] and in
whom it is not now difficult to see much Rabelaisian and even some
Shakespearian quality. The second deals with the Italian vernacular.
Gravina duly admires Dante; but his elaborate apology for rhyme is
noteworthy and amusing. It was the way of the eighteenth century to
apologise for all sorts of things—from the Bible downwards—that
were not in the least need of it. He is a little less shamefaced on the
question of the vulgar tongue; and says excellent things about the
De Vulgari itself—that “discourse so subtle and so true.” Indeed he
conducts his whole discussion on the Vernacular, which is long, in
accordance with the principles of the tractate, and gives to Dante in
all nearly fifty pages, or more than half of the book, announcing his
deliberate intention giudicare spediatamente of the rest from Boiardo
and Ariosto downwards. The whole forms a very interesting survey
of Italian poetry, though perhaps the most interesting of Gravina’s
separate critical utterances is to be found, not in it but, in his short
Latin Letter De Poesi to Maffei, in which he speaks of La Casa as qui
alter potest haberi a Petrarca Lyricorum princeps. It is a bold saying,
but not hard to justify, concerning the author of Errai gran tempo and
O sonno, o de la queta.
The monumental work of Muratori in history and antiquities has
overshadowed his accomplishment in literature; and some
respectable books of reference hardly mention this; but it is in fact
Muratori: his considerable. We have already had occasion to
Della Perfetta refer to the service that he did in editing the
Poesia. miscellaneous critical papers of Castelvetro, and he
also did important work on the Italian Theatre; but his Della Perfetta
Poesia Italiana[718] is a more original title-deed. There is no doubt that
it had great influence: some have even thought that Luzán (v. infra,
p. 548) was indebted to it for the impulse which enabled him finally to
overcome the remnants of Romantic resistance in Spain, and to seat
Neo-classicism at last triumphant in the country of Don Quixote. But
it does not need this doubtful and reflected honour. The book is,
given its lights and its time, a very good book. It accepts, without
much or any demur, that notion of Good Taste which the seventeenth
century excogitated and the eighteenth almost universally accepted,
postponing inquiry whether it were the false Florimel or the true. But
Muratori is both a historian and a philosopher; and he makes good
use of both his qualifications. He contrasts, effectively enough, the
supposed infallibility of Petrarch in Taste, the variety (without
deserting this) of the sixteenth century, and the pessimo gusto of that
which had just closed when he wrote. He will have it that Poetry is “a
daughter and servant of Moral Philosophy”—in which case it must be
sadly admitted that the mother is too often not justified of the
daughter, and that the service is not seldom unprofitable. But he
comes (perhaps inspired by Tasso) nearer to universal acceptance
when he tells us that Poetic Beauty is “a new and marvellously
delightful Truth,” and he is specially copious on the Fancy—so much
so that one imagines it not impossible that Addison may have seen
the treatise, more particularly as there is much about “True and
False Wit” in the Second Book of the Perfetta Poesia. He is, in his
Third Book, liberal on the question of Useful or Delightful—the latter
will do very well if it is healthy delight[719]—and he discusses the
defects of poets, and the various parts of poetry, with sense and
discrimination. All this is of course still too much “in the air”; it makes
the old mistake of taking for granted that poesis can be in some way
strained off, or distilled from, poeta and poema. But this defect is to
some extent repaired in the sequel, and the whole is a book far from
despicable. The chief defect of it (a defect which extends also to
Gravina) is the absence of comparative criticism—of the attempt, at
least, to study literature as a whole.
The two historians, especially Quadrio, are freer from this defect,
though by no means free from it; but they compensate for this
advantage by a much weaker dose of really critical spirit.
Crescimbeni. Crescimbeni is not an unimportant figure in the
History of his own literature, to which he contributed,
after writing in 1700 on La Bellezza del Volgar Poesia, a regular
work[720] on the whole subject as far as poetry is concerned. Part,
and the best part, of this is made up of a refashioning of the
Bellezza. Its contents, which are not contemptible, though too like
much that we have already gone through to require minute attention,
are almost indicated by its title—an enumeration of poetical beauties,
cautions against defects and mistakes in the application of them, and
the usual analysis of Kinds. The rest of the book is a really valuable
literary encyclopædia, with extracts, commentaries, lists, indices,
&c., “all very capital” in their own way, but somewhat out of ours.
If Quadrio seems to invite more attention, it is partly because of his
goodly bulk which fills the eye, and partly because of the oddity of
some of his judgments, but partly also (in a third part) because he
really intends to be critical, and because he extends his view far
Quadrio. beyond Italian. The Della Storia e della Ragione
d’Ogni Poesia[721] is a sufficiently ambitious attempt;
and I do not think I know anything of the kind, by a single man, which
is at any rate more voluminous. Seven big quartos, tightly packed,
give Quadrio ample room and verge enough for proceedings alike
methodical and far-ranging in their method; and his Distinzioni—the
sub-divisions of his Books—leave few things unattempted. He is able
to include both branches of Patrizzi’s old division, Disputata and
Istoriale, and he extends the purview of the latter as widely as he
can, if not as happily. The good faith, and the less than doubtful
judgment, of some of his excursions will be sufficiently, and here
most interestingly, demonstrated by some instances from his English
notes. After devoting great space to the usual general questions of
the nature, origin, position, &c., of poetry, he has a proportionately
large distribution of Kinds, extending not merely into Acrostic-land
but into Cento and Macaronic. He deals further with Poetic Art and
Poetic Fury, and, in successive Distinzioni, with Plot and Manners,
Erudition, Verse in general, Italian verse, &c. Then he attacks the
actual contents of his subject, and devotes the whole of a volume of
800 pages to “Melic” or Lyric poetry. It cannot but be interesting to
the reader to note who represented English Lyric poetry to the eyes
of a learned and laborious Italian Jesuit in the second quarter of the
eighteenth century; but it is pretty safe to say that not one of a
hundred guessers would name the trio in a hundred guesses each.
They are Gower, “Arthur Kelton,” and “Wicherley.”[722]
He proceeds through all the divisions in the same way. His notice
of Shakespeare is obviously a recollection of the milder view of
Voltaire, who was a friend of Quadrio’s. Dryden wrote a “tragedy”
entitled King Arthur; Addison is treated at length, and with evident
sympathy, as well as with at least more direct knowledge than that
shown of “Il Benjanson” (sic). There is a whole chapter on Milton, in
which Rapin and the Chevalier Ramsay[723] are quoted. The critic is
aware of (let us hope he had not read) Glover’s Leonidas; and he is
naturally copious on Pope, though his section on The Rape of the
Lock shades itself off in the oddest manner into a Discourse on Hair,
with references to Apuleius and the obliging Fotis, to Dion
Chrysostom, and to Firenzuola. But Chaucer and Spenser are not
(unless I have missed them) discussed by the citer of Arthur Kelton.
Of course there is no need to laugh at Quadrio; and if we do it
must be done only in the most good-humoured and politest way
possible. Doubtless we all make mistakes in dealing with foreign
Literatures; and those of us who have dealt most with them have
doubtless sinned most. But what is important to notice here about
the Historian of All Poetry is—first, that he has shrewdly seen and
manfully accepted, if not the necessity, at least the immense
advantage, of comparative literary study; and secondly, that while
emancipating himself to this extent, he is still under the domination of
Kinds. If he had gone to A. Kelton himself, and had examined that
worthy’s works—not to range him under Melic or Epic or anything
quod exit in ’ic, but—to see whether he wrote good or bad poetry, he
would at least have been in a fairer way of escape. But the mania for
Kind- and Subject-division, instead of studying poetic treatment, can
hardly be better illustrated than in Quadrio, whose schedule of
narrative poetry, for instance, is as complicated and as meticulous as
a Government return.
Yet the value of his attempt, and in a less degree of Crescimbeni’s,
is very great: and it perhaps exceeds in general critical importance
the results of the exercise of the superior talent of Muratori and
The Gravina. These latter said more noteworthy things
emergence of than the others: but they said them in a kind of
literary criticism which, to speak our best for it, had already
history.
done all the good that was in it to do. Nay, their
method of handling was likely to stand in the way of real critical
advance or recovery, not to help it. Crescimbeni and Quadrio,
especially the latter, recognised indeed, if they did not themselves
quite understand, or lay down in so many words for the instruction of
others, the great fact that before all things, and for some time at any
rate instead of all things, it was time for criticism to “take stock”—that
instead of theorising at large, and controlling the theory at best by a
partial study of the classics and a very limited and arbitrary selection
of the literature of the student’s own country, it was time for him to
take the whole of that literature, to compare it with the whole of the
classics, and, so far as he possibly could, with the whole of foreign
modern literature as a third standard. That is practically what we
have been doing for nearly two hundred years past, more or less—
for more than a hundred years past, pretty steadily and with a will. It
is not done yet; and it never can be done wholly, because every
generation and every country adds, in its varying measure and
degree, fresh supplies of matter which cannot be digested all at
once, but which must sooner or later be added to the rest, and may
affect conclusions drawn from that rest, as vitally as did the work of
Dante or that of Shakespeare. But it has been done, and is being
done, after a fashion in which, before the time of these two Italian
historians, it had hardly been done by anybody.
The promise, however, of this group—the elder of whose members
almost belong to the seventeenth century, while the youngest does
not come below the middle of the eighteenth—was not fulfilled.
Further Hardly a single person among the other (and chiefly
decadence of later) Italian critics of the time has achieved, or, so
Italian far as I have been able to inform myself, has
Criticism.
deserved to achieve, any great reputation.
Tiraboschi indeed continued the merely historical part of
Crescimbeni’s labour with an industry probably unparalleled in any
Metastasio. other country. Metastasio, in his later days, occupied
himself a good deal with criticism, and at an earlier
time his Estratto dell' Arte Poetica d’Aristotile[724] would have
deserved a good deal of attention from us. At his own date
Metastasio is partly an eminent example of that halting between two
opinions which has been so often mentioned, partly an inheritor of
others’ thoughts. He is in hardly any sense a Romantic; yet he
observes, against the Dacierian extension and hardening of
Aristotle’s definition of poetry, that if this be so “it will be very difficult
to find any writer who is not a poet”, and a little farther he has
excogitated, or borrowed from the æestheticians, the all-important
doctrine that the object of the sculptor is “not the illusion of the
spectator but his own victory over the marble.” But these things are
late, transitional, and, perhaps, as has been hinted, borrowed. The
earlier critical work of the polygraphic, polyglottic, and polypragmatic
Marquis Scipione Maffei has no distinction: and the very names[725] of
Palesi, Salio, Denina, Zanotti are unknown to all but special students
of Italian literature, and probably to not a few of these. We must
come to quite modern times—to times indeed so near our own that
the rule of silence as to living contemporaries may often come into
operation—before we can find any heirs to the glory of Castelvetro
and Patrizzi, if we can find them then.

The singularity which in so many ways besets Spanish literature

shows itself, perhaps not least, in the fact that the establishment of
the neo-classic creed in Spain does not take place till that creed is
beginning to be, in one way or another, deserted or undermined in
Neo- other countries. It must be admitted that there was
classicism some excuse for Don Ignacio de Luzán Claramunt
triumphs in de Suelves y Gurrea, whose Poética in 1737 argued
Spain.
Spain’s poetry away, far more actually than
Cervantes had ever laughed away her chivalry. It has been usual to
represent Luzán as a mere populariser of Boileau in Spain: but this
is not just. Any one who has followed the course of reading which
this book represents will see that it was the antiqua mater of Spanish
criticism, Italy, which really started Luzán’s inquiries—that Muratori,
and perhaps Gravina, rather than Boileau and the French
schoolmen, were his masters. Indeed it seems that he had actually
sketched, in Italian and in Italy (or at least Sicily), certain
Ragionamenti sopra la Poesia, nearly a decade before his Spanish
book appeared.
There was, it has been said, some excuse for him. We have seen
The in the last Book that, though isolated expressions
absurdities of and aperçus of remarkable promise and acuteness
Artiga. appear in Spanish criticism of the seventeenth
century, it was always impar sibi, and was constantly aiming at the
establishment of a kind of illegitimate compromise between the
national drama, which the critics would not give up, and the general
theories of literature which they did not dare—perhaps did not wish
—to impugn. In fact, this state of compromise, by yet another of the
anomalies above referred to, anticipates the similar things which we
see in England and in France, in Italy and in Germany, much later. At
the same time, Spain had been a special victim, with Gongorism and
Culteranism and Conceptism, of those contortions of the Romantic
agony which, all over Europe, invited the tyranny of neo-classicism.
Also its great creative period had closed for some considerable time.
Lastly, there had survived in Spain a kind of childishly scholastic
rhetoric, which the rest of Europe, with some slight exceptions in
Italy, had long outgrown. Ticknor, the most amiable of Historians
(when Protestantism is not in point), calls by the name of “a really
ridiculous book” the Epitome de la Eloquencia Española of Don
Francisco José Artiga or Artieda, to which he gives the date of 1725,
but of which the British Museum copy bears a date more than thirty
years earlier.[726] People are apt to be so unkind to technical
Rhetorics and Poetics that I own I had a faint hope, before I actually
read this book, of being able to remonstrate with the Ticknorian
judgment: but no puede ser. The work is dedicated to Francesco
Borgia, Duke of Gandia—the tragic elder associations of the name
serving, to those who are susceptible to such things, as a sort of
heightening of the farce. It consists of verse-dialogues, in
octosyllabic quatrain, between a Hijo and a Padre by way of question
and answer. Eloquence is angelic, celestial, ethereal, elementary,
mixed, dumb, and several other things. Receipts and formulas are
given for all sorts of compositions down to visiting cards: and the
style of exposition may perhaps best be appreciated from an extract
of two quatrains—
P. La Imágen o Icon se haze,
bosquejando una pintúra
de algúnas cosas con otras
con propriedád y hermosúra.
And a little later the Hijo says—
H. En entrambos ejempláres
resplandecen las figúras:
mostradme, si [la Apostrofe] la Adversion
encierra tanta hermosúra.
One is too apt to forget, in censuring eighteenth-century flippancy
and superficiality in regard to the past, that all over Europe, more or
less, this kind of childish stuff was still actually taught.
Luzán is at least not childish, though he betrays the insufficient
historical examination and the hasty generalising which beset the
Luzán. whole school. He devotes the principal attention of
his folio,[727] after generalities avowedly taken from
Muratori, to Epic and Tragedy, and while using complimentary words
to Lope and Calderon, indicates, without doubt or hesitation, that his
heart is with Corneille and Racine. It is true that he is himself—as all
these Eighteenth-century “classics” are without exception, save the
mere school dogmatists or the obstinate reactionaries like La Harpe
—inconsistent. Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly[728] goes so far as to say that
there is hardly a proposition in his book which is not contradicted
elsewhere in it. But that he at least meant to be a neo-classic, a
Unitarian, a Nicolaitan, there can be no doubt, nor any that he met
with no markworthy or effectual resistance.
The rest of the Spanish criticism of the eighteenth century has,
save for special students of Spanish literature, and perhaps even for
The rest them, very little interest; and it is noticeable that,
uninteresting. from this point, even the accomplished and
indefatigable historian of the subject[729] practically breaks away from
Spain itself, and gives a history of æsthetic ideas, not as they arose,
and developed, and changed, and fell there, but rather as they went
through these phases in Europe at large. The better known names of
Spanish authors of the time, such as Isla and Feyjóo, have a certain
right to figure here, but their literary critical work is only a part, and
not a very important or interesting part, of the extension of the
Aufklärung, especially in the forms which it assumed in France, to
the most bigoted and conservative (except its sister Portugal) of
European countries. This process, though perhaps necessary, is not
in any department, political, religious, or other, particularly grateful to
study; for Spain lost venerable and fascinating illusions—if illusions
they were—to gain a very shallow, dubious, and second-rate
civilisation and enlightenment. And this was almost more the case in
literature than anywhere else.
 Feyjóo’s Teátro Crίtico, a series of Essays published between
1726 and 1738, and his Letters, which after a short interval he began
in 1742, and continued at intervals for eighteen years more, are
more philosophical and “moral,” in the French sense, than literary.
The rest But the “Spanish Hotel de Rambouillet”—the
uninteresting. “Academy of good taste” which met about the
middle of the century at the house of the Countess de Lemos—
included not only Luzán, but another littérateur of high rank, Luis
José Velasquez, Marquis of Valdeflores, with Nasarre y Ferriz, and
others. The whole school was rather anti-national, but Gregorio
Mayáns y Siscar, their contemporary, did great service to Spanish
literature by publishing the Origins, to which we have been indebted
above,[730] and some by compiling a Rhetoric, traditional enough, but
not specially “Gallo”-Classic. The famous Father Isla not only
attacked the remnants of extravagant style, which had sought refuge
in the Spanish pulpit, in Fray Gerundio, the one Spanish book of this
time, which became a European possession, but left unpublished
other critical work, especially in his poem of Ciceron, much of which
is satirically critical of literature. Isla was probably more of a patriot
than of a critic in his well-known attempt to claim Gil Blas for Spain,
not merely in suggestion but in direct original. Nor should we omit to
mention with honour, as members of that invaluable class of
restorers of ancient literature which arose in almost all countries in
the latter half of the century, Sedano of the Spanish Parnassus,
Sanchez of the Poesias Anteriores al Siglo XV, and Sarmiento, the
first general Historian of Old Spanish Poetry. Their work was, if a
somewhat slow, a sure and certain antidote to the Gallicism of
Moratin (Luzán’s chief successor) and others of the later time.[731]

Despite some exceptions (which only prove the rule rather more
than is usual), and despite the immense dead-lift which at one time
they gave, or helped to give, to criticism, the Germans have never
Rise at last of been very good critics. There has always been too
German much in them of the girl in the fable who jumped on
Criticism. the floor to hunt mice, instead of attending to the
more important business and pleasure of the occasion. And though
that dead-lift which has been referred to began extremely early in the
eighteenth century, its history belongs to our next volume. It is,
indeed, less easy to effect the separation which our plan demands
here than anywhere else; for hardly had German vernacular criticism
begun to exert itself once more, after its long inertia since Opitz, than
the double current of abstract æstheticism, and of study of Romantic
literature, began to appear. But it would be impossible to omit from a
gallery or panorama of Neo-classicism such a typical specimen of
the perruque as Gottsched, such an eminent example of the “man
who looks over his shoulder” as Gellert. And though we must leave
substantive dealings with Bodmer, Breitinger, and their fellows and
followers to that early division of the next volume in which, with leave
of Nemesis, Germany will be compensated for the little pride of place
she has hitherto enjoyed, it will be very proper here at least to
mention the singular and interesting process of novitiate by which
the Germans vindicated their character as the good boys of technical
education; and, by sheer hard study and omnivorous reading, put the
national abilities into a condition to turn out a Lessing and a Goethe.
The means—sufficiently obvious, but not often resorted to save by
those nations which have not “decayed through pride”—were those
of abundant translation from the more forward vernaculars, as well
Its school as from the classics. The German Sammlungen of
time. the first half of the eighteenth century[732] are very
interesting things. From French, from English, from the Latin writings
of the previous century, they selected, and batched together, critical
tractates which they thought might do them good, taking these to
heart with Aristotle and Horace, with Boileau and Vida. That the
assemblage had sometimes something of a “Groves of Blarney”
character—that people like Camusat[733] find themselves jostling
Pope and Addison among writers of Belles-Lettres, and Vossius and
Casaubon among scholars, mattered not so very much. Manure,
seed, patterns (to take various lines of metaphor) were what the
German mind wanted; and it received them in plenty, and certainly
not without good result.
There are some very good authorities[734] who do not see much
difference between Gottsched and his adversaries of the Swiss
school, Bodmer and Breitinger. I am not able to agree with them.
Classicism at That there are characteristics in common nobody
bay almost can deny,—that Gottsched is of the evening and
from the first: Bodmer and Breitinger of the morning of the same
Gottsched.
day on the older arrangement, I do most sincerely
think. And “the German Johnson”—so echt-deutsch and so little
Johnsonian—is much too characteristic and agreeable a figure not to
have some substantive place here. It is interesting no doubt—and it
would give an excellent subject for one of the many not-to-be-written
excursus of this history—that he, the analogue, to some extent, in
Germany, of Johnson himself in England and of La Harpe in France,
comes far earlier than these representatives of the neo-classicism
which “makes an end” in countries far more accomplished in
literature. But this is natural. The seventeenth century in Germany
had but been one long fallow, producing nothing but not
unfascinating weeds, like Lohenstein and Hoffmanswaldau, or
wildings like Grimmelshausen. But, as in other cases of fallow, the
rains of heaven had descended, and the winds had blown, and the
worms had done their work of breaking up, and the soil, if technically
“foul,” was also fertile. Its production was necessarily mixed; but it
was at any rate not subject to the desperate hook of the preceptist
weeder, or to the traditional courses of the orthodox agriculturist. The
German man of letters of 1700-1750 had the “Y” before him as few
men of letters have had.
Gottsched took the classical branch of the letter unflinchingly, and
quarrelled with others, like a good party man, as he realised that
The Versuch they were taking the Romantic. His Versuch einer
einer Critischen Dichtkunst[735] is frontispieced with a
Critischen striking picture of Apollo, and the Muses, and
Dichtkunst.
Pegasus looking benignly at Bellerophon(?), whom
he is just pitching off, and Mercury, probably flying, but in
appearance rather tumbling, down the Holy Hill, with a copy of
Horace in his hand, and a group of critics and poets and personified
Kinds of poetry waiting to receive it in ecstatic attitudes at the
bottom. It has three separate dedication-pages, in the largest print,
to three fair ladies of the same family,—the high-born Countess and
Lady, Lady Ernestine Wilhelmine, widowed Baroness von Plotho,
born Reichsgräfinn von Manteufel, “my especially gracious Countess